“But what was it like?”
This was understandable. Charlie had never set foot in a real school.
“It was like school. I went to class and listened to the teacher and did the work.”
“And there were other kids there?”
“Yes, Charlie, there are lots of other kids there. It’s a school.”
“Did they discriminate against you because you’re new?”
Discriminate. There it was. Charlie’s Word of the Week. Every week, Charlie had a word that she used whenever she could fit it in. This week it was discriminate. Last week it was usurp. The week before that was defenestrate, compliments of me. Just thinking about Charlie whipping that one out of her vocabulary utility belt in front of our mother made me smile.
“Has Mom been letting you watch the Disney Channel again?” I opened my closet to look for my pajamas.
“So . . . they don’t sing at lunch?”
“Nope.”
“Oh.” The blanket fell away from her head, revealing her straight, ketchup-red hair and big blue eyes. She pulled a black chess piece from her pocket and jammed it into her mouth. She’d been chewing on things since she was four years old. “Did you meet anyone cool?”
“Define cool.”
“You know. Cool.”
“Not really. I met nice people and stupid people and complete jerks, but I didn’t really meet any cool people.”
Charlie gasped, her eyes became the size of plates, and the chess piece fell out of her mouth. “Did you meet your soul mate? That always happens on the first day of school, right?”
“Oh God, Charlie, she’s letting you read again! You went straight to the paranormal section, didn’t you?”
Charlie huffed and crossed her arms. “No. But the TV doesn’t do high school very well.”
“The TV doesn’t do anything very well, Charlie.”
She looked glum after that, and I felt sorry that I’d crushed her hopes. She’d never go to high school. The only reason our mother had stopped homeschooling me was because my therapist said I’d do better around people my age. That led to my involvement in the Hillpark Gym Graffiti Incident and my senior year condemnation at East Shoal.
A familiar pang of guilt poked at my stomach whenever I looked at Charlie. I was the big sister. I was supposed to set an example and lead the way so people would say, “Hey, you’re Alex’s sister, aren’t you? You two look exactly alike!” instead of “Hey, you’re Alex’s sister, aren’t you? Are you crazy, too?”
The only example I was ever going to set for her was to always check her food before she ate it.
Relief washed over me. Relief that she wasn’t old enough yet to understand why she should hate me.
“Get out of my room. I need to change.”
Charlie whined and pouted but grabbed the chess piece, scrambled off the bed, and hurried out the door. I changed into my pajamas and slipped under the covers.
I looked around the room at all my pictures and artifacts.
The pictures had no rhyme or reason. I realized a few years back that sometimes I’d look at an old picture and something would be different in it. Something would be missing. I reached into my bag and pulled out my camera, then flipped through the pictures I’d taken today. The first one from this morning, the one of the squirrels—it was already different. It looked like I’d just taken a picture of the neighbor’s lawn. The squirrels were gone.
It wasn’t always so easy. Some things took longer to disappear than others. But this technique helped me figure out what was a hallucination and what wasn’t. I had albums full of pictures, too, but the albums were for things I knew were real, like my parents. Charlie had a whole album to herself. More than once I’d caught her in my room, looking through it.
My artifacts came from my dad. First and foremost, Dad was an archaeologist. I didn’t blame him. If I could do nothing but play in the dirt all day, I’d be an archaeologist, too. My mother used to travel with him, but then they had me and they took too long trying to decide if they wanted to take me to the digs. By that time, my mother had ended up homeschooling me and didn’t want to take me anywhere, and then Charlie was born and they didn’t have the money to take both of us. So my mother stayed home all the time and Dad was always gone.
Whenever he came home, he brought stuff: most of the things we owned, our furniture, and even some of our clothes. My mother crammed every available corner with Dad’s stuff, and the house didn’t feel so empty.
I tried not to think about the fact that shipping things like that across the ocean must cost a lot of money.
I remembered a few times, before I was diagnosed, when I’d lay in bed and my artifacts would talk to me or to one another and I would listen to them until I fell asleep.
My artifacts didn’t talk to me anymore. At least not when the medicine was working.
I turned off my light and rolled over onto my side, pulling my sheet with me. The little boy at the lobster tank was losing his definition—until I reminded myself that even if he was real, which he wasn’t, he and Miles were not necessarily the same person.
That was ten years ago. Ten years, and I hadn’t seen him since. It would take some ridiculous odds to bring us full circle like that.
I didn’t fall asleep. I couldn’t. I waited until I heard Mom walk down the hall and close her door (Charlie had shut herself in her room half an hour ago), then slipped out from under the covers, put on a jacket and an old pair of sneakers, and grabbed the aluminum baseball bat I kept under my bed. I popped the screen out of the window and set it carefully against the wall.
I didn’t often ride my bike in the dark, but I walked. Baseball bat clinking against the heels of my Converse, nighttime breeze brushing against my legs, I trekked through my backyard and into the woods of Hannibal’s Rest. The creek whispered up ahead. I took the last bend in the road and stood face-to-face with Red Witch Bridge.
I didn’t feel the need to do a perimeter check, because this was where the worlds met. Everyone thought they saw or heard strange things here, and I didn’t have to hide the fact that I really did.
I laughed when I remembered Tucker bringing up the bridge earlier. The Red Witch? The one who gutted travelers, coated herself in their blood, and screamed like a banshee? No, I wasn’t scared of her. The nighttime might have made everything upside down, inside out, scary as hell, but not to me.
The baseball bat clink-clink-clinked as I walked toward Red Witch Bridge.