I smile lamely at the floor. There’s something grounding about having a gym teacher straight from central casting screaming about dodgeball, the purest form of Darwinian selection in any high school. Shane Cuthbert, slouched on a bleacher until now, rises on loose legs and strolls over. He wears the required sweats and a ratty T-shirt with a smiley face, its eyes Xs, its tongue hanging out. Some girls think Shane is hot, with his inky hair and unnaturally blue, Siberian husky eyes, but never me.
He stands behind Liv, thumbs jammed deep in his pockets. He’s always had a creepy thing for her. I glare at him above her shoulder.
Liv’s eyes flicker all over my face.
“A-hem,” Shane says, his nasal pitch cartoony.
Liv spins and he catches her wrist in the air, grinning, his eyes popping white.
“What do you want, Shane?” I say his name like a swear.
“Nothing you can give me, nutters. Weren’t you heading to the nurse?”
I check Ms. Dean’s coordinates. She’s already heading back toward us, overdeveloped forearms pumping.
“Whatever you’ve got, it better not be contagious. I don’t want my girl here catching it,” he says, snaking his hand around Liv’s waist.
I wait for Liv to twist away. Instead, she giggles.
My girl?
“Liv?” I rasp.
Shane’s lank hair brushes Liv’s cheek as he whispers something in her ear. She pulls away with a sour look, which he catches. She smooths it over with a quick smile. “You have a filthy mind,” she says, swatting his chest with a fist. He explodes in a pratfall, sharp knees and elbows, a bug on its back. He grabs her ankle. She squeals and tries to shake him off, like it’s the funniest thing in the world, so funny to get grabbed, but he’ll let go before the ankle snaps, because it’s Shane Cuthbert and not Donald Jessup and the panic lacing round my throat can stop now.
I’ve known Shane since kindergarten. He lives on the other side of Shiverton, where the walkways to tidy houses are lined with pansies in the summer and chrysanthemums in the fall. Every so often, you pass by one where the windows are glazed yellow and a car sits on the lawn. Donald Jessup lived in one of those houses. His mother still does. Shane’s house is pretty nice, and by all accounts he’s lucky to have it, because he was adopted from a Russian orphanage where prostitutes dump their unwanted babies. His real name was Alexei, but his parents renamed him Shane. In elementary school, Alexei-Shane couldn’t sit still, so by seventh grade doctors put him on a rainbow of pills. When he missed half of sophomore year, everyone said he’d been sent to McLean Psychiatric Hospital, and got thrown out when he stabbed an orderly in the hand with a jackknife.
Shane clambers up, shaking hair from his eyes. He laughs, at me or at nothing, and his lips peel above a tooth lodged high on his gum. His hand settles on the small of Liv’s back, steering her away. I cry, “Wait,” but it’s barely a whisper.
Slowly, his hand moves to his left pocket, so much bigger than the right, to a rectangular bulge, so much like a folded knife. My throat tightens.
“Liv!”
They turn, his smile in profile with that one misgrown tooth.
Her eyes are worried. Is she afraid of what I’m going to say? Or that I’m remembering again?
“What is it?” Liv says.
What is it? What?
“I’ll see you after school,” I say. “I’ll come over. We’ll do … statistics.”
She cocks her head and squints like I’m daft. Then she laughs, not a real laugh, but like she knows other kids are watching. “Awesome. You can help me with independent and dependent events.” As they turn back around, Shane slaps her hard on the butt.
Her shoulders clench. They stay. They do not fall.
I squeeze my elbows and hustle to the nurse’s office. The nurse is missing, and this is good, because I’m learning the memories might surge fast, but they also cool and crust. It’s best to record them fresh. Except my notebook is in my locker.
I look around the sterile exam room wildly. Stealing a pen from the nurse’s desk, I tear a sheaf off the roll of exam table paper, and write: Things I Know About Donald Jessup:
- Dopehead
- Losing his game
- Not what he expected (me)
THREE
Later
Lamplight burns the side of my face. I close my stats book and flatten my cheek against the cool nubs of Liv’s white crocheted bedspread.
“They’re hard to explain. I think of them as nightmares, only during the day,” I say.
“A daymare,” Liv says.
“Right. And it’s not like watching a movie. I smell what I smelled. Sweet smoke and leaves. Alive and dead things underneath the leaves; that’s a musty smell. The rain smelled like metal. I taste things, too. The beef jerky he gave me. Blood.”
Liv winces. “What were you remembering in the gym?”
“That first night. The night he and I were together. The night I escaped. The next day and night I spent being hunted…”
Liv exhales loudly.
“Right. Sorry,” I say, trying my best to “move forward and all.” “It was after we stopped. We couldn’t go farther because it got dark, and he was tired of dragging me. I could barely walk. And he wanted to smoke a joint.”