Seely, Part 3

A serialized short story by W. McCrae.

Guest posts by

W. McCrae

continue this week while I’m on summer break. This is Part 3 of her original short story; you can find Part 1 here, and Part 2 here.

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“I wanna visit Seely,” Howie pressed on the way home after school the next day. Charles told him no, but after depositing his brother at Mrs. Schneider’s house next door, he went down to the quarry on his own anyway.

Seely had said she’d be there when he returned—he was pretty sure she’d said that—but she didn’t show up till near dark, after the air had started to cool and the early stars shivered above the limestone cliff. Charles, who had half a sandwich in his bag and nowhere better to be, lingered by the sloshing pond until he could no longer read the book six inches in front of his nose. 

He was about to pack it in and go home when he finally caught a familiar grunt from over his shoulder. “Hey.” There stood Seely in the grass, with The Elfstones of Shannara tucked under her arm. He hadn’t heard her approach around the shore. “Whatcha reading?”

“Why, you gonna steal it from me?” he shot back. She pulled her mouth sidelong, either peeved or impressed by his attitude. “Here—” Charles zipped open his backpack, which the fat brick of The Song of Shannara had kept tumescent all day. “Now gimme back my book.”

“It’s the library’s book.” But true to her word, Seely exchanged the second Shannara volume for the first. She eagerly began flipping through it. Charles secured the hostage tome safely in his backpack before pausing to watch her; it seemed as though she were making a real attempt to scan the pages in complete darkness. Why she couldn’t wait until she got home was beyond him, until he reflected on why he himself had put off going home for so long.

“It’s a really good book,” he commented after a moment. “And then you can put the sequel on hold, and check it out after I return it.” Seely didn’t respond to that, so he brought a little more heat to draw her attention: “Don’t damage it. Don’t wrinkle the jacket, okay? It’s a limited printing, it cost me thirteen dollars—”

“Jeez, I’m not gonna rip up your stupid book.”

Stupid was an adjective Charles had heard applied to his favorite things often enough that it shouldn’t have still hurt. He swallowed, and doggedly continued, “Well, it’s a collector’s item, so if anything happens to it you owe me.” 

“I take good care of stuff.”

“Sure.” 

He cast his eyes skyward at precisely the moment that the leading edge of the gibbous moon broke out from behind the quarry wall. White light like water flooded the basin, and Charles stood dazzled by the change of view. A wedge of shadow beneath the cliff was pitch-black, but the grass and the gravel and the breathing pond shone clear as invert-day, down to the detail. When Charles spread his hands in the moonlight, he could see his own fingerprints in relief.

Seely watched the page illuminate before her eyes, and her shoulders fell in satisfaction. She turned back to the beginning, and began to read.

That was on Thursday night. Charles didn’t return to the quarry until the following Monday, which was the day after Easter. He arrived just past sunset to find Seely already standing on the shore, tearing up sedge by the handful and tossing it into the water.

“Why are you doing that?” he asked when he was close enough to see.

“Why not?” she shrugged. “So anyway, I’m almost finished with your stupid book already.” 

This time, her casual dismissal of his ‘stupid book’ hit harder. No, Charles shouldn’t have let it get to him, but he was already near to the end of his rope tonight: not only was Mom still stormy at home from the pressures of the holiday, but Reggie had dumped Gatorade on his sneakers between fifth and sixth period, and Charles suspected it had not been an accident. In a fit of temper he grabbed his backpack from its setting atop the boulder and started to march away.

“Hey!” Seely called at his back. The sound of rustling grass cut across his footsteps, and then she grabbed his arm to spin him around, looking piqued. “What’s your problem?”

“Why are you such an asshole?” Charles shot back at her. Seely straightened up. “If you thought the book was so stupid, why did you ask to read it? Fine, so just give it back and I’ll leave you alone. At least Reggie only jerked me around for like an hour.” He wrenched his arm away from her and turned to leave.

Seely started to say, “Charles…”

He waited, but she didn’t speak again for a long time. He hadn’t realized she even remembered his name. When he turned back around, she was holding her head like she’d spoken too soon and couldn’t think of how to finish.

“I’m sorry,” she finally said, but into her hand, barely loud enough for him to hear. “There. Are you happy?”

“No,” Charles said. He stood several paces up an incline, so that for the first time, he was taller than her. “I didn’t ask you to say sorry, I asked why you’re an asshole for no reason. Why are you?”

She held her arms pin-straight and her chin up high. He gave her another moment. “It’s not really a stupid book,” she said.

He repeated his question. “Why?”

She cleared her throat. “I don’t know.” 

“I thought we had something in common. Guess that was pretty stupid of me.”

Seely looked away from him. Her voice sounded hoarse. “It wasn’t. Look, I’m sorry, okay? I don’t think it’s stupid. We can talk about it. If you want. The book, I mean.” 

In spite of his anger, he decided to accept her overture—but not without letting her sweat for a moment before answering. “Alright, fine,” he said at length. She looked up in surprise as he swung his backpack off his shoulder again. “My favorite character is Menion Leah. What’s yours?” If that question sounded like a test, he didn’t mind.

“Panamon Creel,” she responded, redeeming herself. She teetered backward in the grass to plop down on the boulder. “But I like Menion too. He’s cool.”

She’d gotten through almost seven hundred pages in four days, and not damaged the book jacket either. She was a pretty good reader, after all. 

Seely returned the novel to him when he visited on Wednesday night, and they sat in the dark for a while commiserating about Hendel’s death. The next evening, Charles brought the library copy of The Elfstones of Shannara back to the quarry: “I renewed it, so you must have never put it on hold,” he mentioned, dropping the volume into her lap like a football. “Anyway, I guess you take pretty good care of books, so it’s probably okay... You don’t have a library card, do you?”

“I used to,” Seely said, explaining nothing in favor of running satisfied hands down the book’s spine.

“Well, they’re free. You should get another one.” 

“Why bother when I can just use yours?” Even though she smirked, it wasn’t clear that she was joking. “I mean, you owe me your life and all.” Charles made a derisive sound which was not outright refusal. “By the way. Where’d your brother go? He was cute. What was his name, Hugo?”

“Howie. My mom’ll kill me if I keep him out this late again.” Seely looked a little disappointed to hear him say so, and didn’t bring it back up.

Every night the two of them met up—on Friday, and on Saturday, and on Wednesday and then Friday again—presented further opportunity for Charles to share some of his favorite things with another person. When they ran out of Shannara to discuss (the final book in the trilogy was in stores now, but he couldn’t afford it yet), he brought her Dragonflight, and also A Wizard of Earthsea for good measure. He attempted to branch out by asking about her favorite movies and TV shows as well—but Seely was evasive. She acted as though she’d never laid eyes on a screen in her life.

“You’ve never seen Star Wars? That’s impossible. Do you like any sci-fi? Ghostbusters? What about Superman comics?”

“Come on. Everyone likes Superman.”

“Do you live around here?”

“Ha!” By her silhouette against the moony water, he saw her run a hand through her hair. Her clothes were always dirty, but her hair stayed fluffy and clean. “Are you serious? No, I live here, on this stupid rock. Don’t you get it?” 

If she didn’t want to tell him, then whatever. Charles gave her as steely a look as the darkness would allow and asked, “Why do you only come here at night?” A real hard-hitting question. Seely threw her head to the side, as though by the force of a mighty eye-roll.

“Why did you try to swim across the pond?” she asked him back, and then didn’t wait for him to say anything. “Because kids are stupid. Does that answer your question?” 

Charles walked home that evening with trouble in his stomach that he couldn’t quite put a name to. Dad was still awake when he got there, watching the late-night Star Trek reruns at low volume so as not to wake Mom. He didn’t ask Charles where he’d been. Together, they scooted the couch across the living room—silently, bravely—and in unspoken understanding father and son huddled closer around the cold blue screen.

Although his parents seemed not to care when he stayed out late, his brother did. Often enough Charles would make it into the house unnoticed, only to slip into his room and wake up Howie, who had crawled into bed to wait for him there. The best way to stem the little boy’s whispered stream of questions and get him settled again was to tell him a story. Lately, Howie was enchanted with tales about Seely. It was unclear if he remembered her as an actual person, and not a character from a dream; either way, she had captured his imagination.

Of course, the real Seely was mostly a pain in the ass, and didn’t make for very good stories. So for his brother’s benefit Charles reinvented her whole-cloth: He told Howie that Seely was homeschooled. He said she lived on a ranch outside town, with horses and cows. She could never hang out with friends until the farm chores were finally done. That’s why he only saw her at night.

“I love her,” Howie told Charles dreamily from his huddle at the end of the mattress. The moon sat perfect and round in the sky beyond the ironwood tree, like a concha at Cinco de Mayo. “She could walk on the pond.”

“Sure. Why not give her magic powers too?” Charles watched his brother trot a couple of sleepy fingers down the duvet. “And one of the ranch-horses is a unicorn, and the cows jump over the moon…” 

“No,” Howie insisted, almost forcefully enough to rouse himself. “Like when she went to save you. She can go on top of the water…” The little boy was too tired to be coherent. Charles shushed him down and turned off the lights, laying in bed with his knees crooked up. It wasn’t really comfortable. Sleep came in fits and starts. 

At the shallowest edge of sleep, memories turned into dreams: of swimming, and sinking, of opening his eyes on the shore. Seely was crouched above him with a vicious frown. As her hair brushed his face, a stray memory flitted across his awareness, and Charles’s eyes snapped wide-open again: Her hair, he thought, barely half-rational in the spinning black. She’d swum fifty feet out to rescue him from the pond, but her hair and clothes were dry on the bank. They had been, hadn’t they? Now he wasn’t sure. 

And she only showed up after sunset. And she said she lived in the quarry? And she never wore shoes, and she didn’t go to school, and she’d never seen Star Wars, and she didn’t have a library card, but she used to…

Charles almost rose then and there, drawn toward the night by an impossible thought. Only his brother’s warm weight atop his toes held him in place, blinking away stars and fumbling cognitive dissonance in the dark.