Guest posts by W. McCrae continue this week. This is Part 5 of her original short story. You can find the previous installments here: Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4.
In June, the school year ended with a balmy sigh. Its last days petered off in a series of exams and educational movie-reels and free periods on the field, until the bell rang one last time and set them all free on the wide bright months ahead. Charles had his own way of celebrating. He went to see Seely that evening, and he brought a gift.
“The Wishsong of Shannara,” she read aloud from the book’s cover, squinting in the last light.
“I bought it with some of my birthday money,” he confessed. He’d picked up both the second and third volumes of the trilogy for a slight discount. It had actually cost him a fair bit more than his grandmother’s gift alone, but he considered it an investment well-made. “It’s totally new, just came out a few weeks ago—I haven’t actually read it yet. I thought you could go first, this time.
Seely looked unsure of her response. “Thanks,” she uttered, and then shot him a hard look. “Wait, it’s your birthday?” The week before, he told her. “How old are you?”
“Fifteen.”
She seemed perturbed, but asked no more questions. The next time Charles came to see her, on the late-late evening of the summer solstice, she casually mentioned that she had something to give him. When he opened his hand to receive it, she placed a walnut-sized opal in his palm.
“You can find them around here, if you know where to look,” Seely explained while he gawped at the stone’s twilight glint. “That’s probably the best one. Happy birthday and all.”
She had never done anything so kind before. Instead of asking why, Charles whispered, “Thank you,” and put the gem in his pocket, where it seemed to seep warmth through the denim.
“I’ve got lots. No big deal,” she said. Her cheeks looked pinkish, but that could have been the dusk. “And I’m almost done with the last Shannara book, so you know. It’s really good. You’ll like it.”
He could hardly wait.
Throughout June and July, Charles’s time spent at the quarry increased, and grew increasingly nocturnal. Most nights he and Seely spent poring over books and comics together. Sometimes they ran hand after hand of gin rummy, for hours on end; another time, he stuffed the entire Game of Life into his backpack, and the two of them played in the glow of his dad’s camp lantern until a bullfrog landed in the middle of the board and all their tiny pink children were scattered and lost. They dimmed the light, and looked up to watch the stars instead.
“Cassieopeia,” Seely said, pointing. The queen lay in repose across the firmament, wearing Perseid jewels. “That’s Aquila and—Scorpio is behind the cliff…”
Charles had never spent much time looking at the stars before. He was more prone to stay indoors and read. “How do you know so many?”
She answered, “My brother taught them to me,” hastening to add, “That was a long time ago,” as if it explained anything at all.
“You have a brother?” he asked.
“Yeah.” Seely looked back up. “And he liked the same kinds of sci-fi stuff you do. He’s your age, even. Or he was back then.” Charles held his tongue, and pressed no further.
She never really talked about herself, not any more than that. Sometimes she asked after Howie, and Charles might spend a while spinning a happier fantasy about their daylight lives; but beyond that she extended him the reciprocal courtesy of not prying. She never said a word about his bruises, so he didn’t feel like he had to wear sleeves on those long hot nights.
Seely was only intermittently thoughtful, always temperamental, and never polite. Charles didn’t always like her, but he was coming to appreciate her nonetheless, like coffee without sugar, or the smell of cigarettes. All that really concerned her were made-up things, and she devoured fiction with an appetite to match his own.
Every morning, he left before sunrise. Down deserted streets he’d shamble home to sleep through the hottest part of the day, rise as late as three in the afternoon, and leave for the quarry again in the evening with eyes already accustomed to darkness. His parents never questioned how he spent his time anymore; he wondered if they were glad to see so little of him.
Howie spent most days playing with Mrs. Schneider’s grandchildren down the street, but every couple of weeks Charles would catch him before bedtime, and tell him small stories about long nights spent at Seely’s farm. She was, as he told it, a self-taught astronomer who knew the names of every single star. She also had a little brother. He was even Howie’s same age.
Just as a routine began to establish itself—as Charles’s feeling of perpetual exhaustion ebbed, and the season on reflection turned to a reel of stars twisting across the indigo sky—summer was over again, and Charles found himself blinking and bewildered in the light of midmorning hours he’d not seen in months. The first week of school was an ongoing battle to stay awake.
“I think I have to stop coming for a while,” he told Seely on a late Saturday night. “I have to sleep or I’m gonna die. I got you this.” From his backpack he drew copies of The Two Towers and The Return of the King, which together had cost him some pocket change at a secondhand shop. “So you have something to do while I’m gone.”
Seely sat with her knees pulled to her chest and the autumn breeze stirring her bangs. “As if I wasn’t getting along fine before you showed up.”
“Just take them.” He tossed the books at her feet, and she grinned.
The following weeks were very busy ones. Sophomores were technically allowed to try out for the marching band, and although Charles didn’t make the cut, woodwind section leader Delaney Morrison still tracked him down after tryouts. He said Charles was really good, and he was invited to join his group of friends at Goldman’s Market for bagels after school. A few days following that, Charles was invited over to senior Vinnie Eckert’s place to play Dungeons & Dragons. There was a whole group of people at his very own school who played Dungeons & Dragons, and he hadn’t ever been told. When he saw Seely next, he nearly gushed.
“...gave me my own copy of the Monster Manual! I already owned a Player’s Handbook because I always wanted to play, but I didn’t know anyone who could run the game…” Seely looked bemusedly at Charles as he sat down on the boulder, exhausted by excitement. Black clouds imposed above the mountains to the east. “Hey, maybe you and I could play sometime? It’s better with more people, but two is still good.”
She picked at the grit under her nails. “Yeah, that could be cool.”
“I’ll bring my books down.” But he forgot them the next time he came, and the time after that, until he just stopped making that promise.
In November, the days grew shorter in quick bursts. Howie was six now, and attending kindergarten at the grade school right around the corner, which meant he could walk himself home or to Mrs. Schneider’s house in the afternoons. Suddenly unburdened by childcare duties, Charles’s options for what to do with himself in the evenings seemed limitless—which was good, because Dad had taken on more hours at work lately, and whenever he wasn’t home Charles didn’t want to be either. Anyway, Mom liked it better when it was just her and Howie together. She loved him.
Reggie and Nate and Tyler ignored Charles entirely now, maybe because he was so often found in the company of upperclassmen. Clarisa Martinez, another woodwind phenom adopted by the older band kids, was the only member of Delaney’s group who never talked to Charles and wouldn’t meet his eye at lunch. Charles asked Tristan Kimball one day why she didn’t seem to like him, but Tristan only laughed.
One week before Christmas, Delaney began to circulate an invitation among the whole marching band and its satellite students: his parents were leaving town on Friday, and he was going to throw a party. At the wet bar in the Morrisons’ basement, Charles quickly learned how to hide the taste of Smirnoff under Sprite; before sunrise the next morning, he woke up shivering and retching by the pool with no recollection of how he’d gotten outside in the first place. Although it was petrifying to have to call home at an hour like this, the prospect of still being present when everyone else woke sounded even worse.
Dad’s truck pulled up in front of Delaney’s house just before six-thirty. Charles was not reprimanded as they drove away, not for drinking or for being gone all night; his father gave the impression of having hardly slept, and now of moving through a dream. Nearly ten minutes of exhausted silence passed between them before Dad finally opened his mouth. He said that he wanted his eldest son to hear it first, that he’d leased an apartment in Maricopa the week before. He and Mom would not be living together anymore.
Charles listened to the news, and did not break. He asked a few questions, and said he understood. Before leaving for work, Dad dropped him at home with a ruffled head and the murmured assurance that he was a good kid. Charles made as if to go inside, but when the truck disappeared down the end of the street he turned and started walking instead, a quick and rigid shamble which found every irregularity in the pavement.
Saguaros and fire hydrants and garden gates sank into gravity wells as Charles passed them by, quicker and quicker, trying not to look back. When he first woke, the hangover had suspended him in a queasy wash, but everything was crashing back down now, and the whole earth could not handle such an impact. If he didn’t move fast enough, he knew he would fall and be suffocated inside a planet collapsing on itself. Neighborhood roads narrowed and turned to bare scrub-lanes. Charles slip-sprinted down Lime Slope toward the bronze horizon, with a heaving stomach and lungs full of fire. Around the turn at the bottom of the hill he threw himself against the quarry fence and vomited acid bile in the grass, clinging to the chain-link and trying to see the pond’s far shore through his tears.
The winter morning was ending its twilight hour, and Seely was nowhere to be seen. The only movement was from a great blue heron stalking between the reeds on the near bank. Its feathers were the color of the sky over the cliffs. Charles dropped to his knees. Before him curled the break in the fence, tangled up with stems of indigo and chamomile.
He did not part the shoots and crawl through, but he imagined doing so. He imagined walking up to the water, braced for that freezing-hot touch against his toes again—at his waist, at his chin. The cold would only be painful for a moment. He imagined walking down the shelf of the pond with stony shoes, and taking a perfectly-timed breath. There would be nails and knives in his throat and chest; he would swallow them whole and suffer.
And he wouldn’t feel afraid. He would sink into the green and let the dark wash him away, and finally open his eyes to reemerge into an evening colored by southwestern sun. The stars would be coming out by then, and the night’s chill would not touch him. Seely would already be there, seated in the long grass with a pile of books, a pile of all the stories she loved most—and she would crook a finger in invitation for him to join her, to sit and read and talk, and hunt for opals by moonlight, and later to walk out across the water together and draw the constellations. Existence would be small and satisfying and nothing would hurt. All would be well.
No one would miss him.
The time that Charles sat entranced was lost to him, until the heron unfurled from a serpentine curve and soared away over the bluff. He startled and realized that the sun had risen while he was absent. At the edge of the water, his shadow was waiting for him.
His mouth tasted like sand, and he felt all at once flushed and chilly and still nauseous, from spirits or from an idea too big and too tantalizing to look in the eyes again. He shook his fingers out from the fence and stumbled away. By the time he made it back home, the dawn was all the way up, and Howie was eating cereal alone at the breakfast bar. Charles sloughed off his stinking clothes in the hamper and crawled into bed, seeping vodka-sweat and a listless flow of tears.
He slept through the day, unnoticed and unquestioned through his quiet fever. At some point in the hazy afternoon he heard a shuffle, and opened his eyes to find that a handful of dandelions had been slipped under the door. Charles smiled to himself and then turned ugly sobs away into his pillow. Against the wall, low sun and ironwood-shadow knotted and shimmered like reflections off still water.
Look for Part 6, coming soon.
 | A guest post by
|
Poor Charlie. Again, you capture the joy and pain of adolescence so well. Looking forward to future installments.