Another Little Piece (12 page)

“I put foam edges on all the hard surfaces,” Dex said, pointing toward the desk and metal cabinets. “And I found some foam mats for the floor too. I just thought, well, everyone can use a soft edge when they fall.”

“Did you fall?” I asked.

He shrugged. “No, but I might in the future, and having my head cracked open like an egg on this cement floor is not the way I want to go.”

It seemed so much like the mom, worrying about every little thing that might happen and trying to prevent it and everything else from happening. Except Dex wasn’t like that at all. Even talking about his head smashing, he was smiling and seemingly carefree.

As this all worked its way through my mind, Dex had taken a half step closer, and then he held my hand in his, tracing along the edges of my fingers. “You have lots of edges too. Before—when you were Annaliese—you were all rounded corners, but now, you call yourself Anna and have all these sharp jagged parts.”

I knew that he wasn’t merely talking about the weight loss or a name change, that he realized the changes in Annaliese—in me—went deeper than that. But if he knew exactly how deep, I doubted his mouth would still be smiling.

“If you asked my mom, she’d probably say I should be baby-proofed,” I said with a soft laugh, hoping to draw Dex away from the true depths of my secrets.

“Hmmm,” he said as his hand left mine to travel up my arm, past my wristbone, elbow, and shoulder. Trailing his fingers lightly across my neck, he left goose bumps in his wake, until he cupped my cheek. Here comes the kiss, I thought.

I was wrong.

Tenderly his thumb found the scar on my forehead and brushed against it. Once. Twice. Three times. Each time so tender. As if he were wiping some faint smudge away. If he pressed a little harder, he would feel the way the bone beneath the skin cratered in too. One of the doctors had shown me on an X-ray where a chunk of brain matter was missing. Something had quite literally put a hole in my head, and yet Dex’s touch made me believe he could wipe it away. That he could make it all go away. I could simply be Annaliese.

His fingers drifted down, skimming over my eyelashes, and brushing my lips, as he leaned in for a kiss that I had quite possibly been waiting my entire life and several others for when—

Ba-beep. Ba-beep.

I cursed myself for setting that stupid alarm. How was it possible that thirty minutes had gone by so fast? Then Dex pulled out a cell of his own and his eyes scanned the small screen. Flipping the phone closed, he returned it to his back pocket. Then he looked at me. It wasn’t a “now where were we?” kind of look. He was studying me. No, assessing. Later, I realized he was deciding if he wanted to let me in. If he could trust me.

“It’s a text from my mom. She says the house is open. Want to come inside while I prep dinner?”

I checked my phone. Fifteen minutes until the alarm went off. It would’ve been smarter to head home. Instead I said, “Sure.”

Dex’s hand found mine, and he pulled me up the stairs. Strangely, the door into the house had a lock. Three, actually. Dex took care of them quickly, flipping through a series of different keys for each one without letting go of my hand once.

It was dark inside the house. Darker than the basement, and when Dex flipped a switch on the wall, I saw why. All the windows were covered with thick curtains that looked as if they’d been stolen from a theater. They were thick and red, and blocked out every last bit of light, making it permanent midnight.

I gripped Dex’s hand tighter as we moved through the house. Layoutwise it was a duplicate of the mom and dad’s, but it felt different. Smaller and hollow. Most of the rooms were empty, with only a scattering of chairs, or a few random stacked boxes to give any hint of occupancy.

“We’ve lived here almost four years now,” Dex said, as if he knew I’d been wondering. “An old friend of my dad’s helped us find this place.”

There were no further explanations, and then we were in the kitchen. Next door, the mom’s kitchen had a round table at its center. Here there was only a single metal folding chair with a cross-stitched cushion. I leaned in closer to read the words
God Bless This Happy Home
.

“Hungry?” Dex asked, releasing my hand. He pitched his voice softer than normal. Not whispering but muted, like he didn’t want the sound to carry. It made me nervous, and I looked around, wondering who exactly he didn’t want overhearing him.

“I’m good,” I said, keeping my voice low too.

“Probably a good choice, because I’m not much of a chef,” Dex said, swinging open the pantry door.

Peering over his shoulder, I saw a selection similar to the mom’s basement emergency supply of nonperishables. Dex reached for two cans of Chef Boyardee ravioli. Then another of green beans. Sliding these across the counter, he went back once more for a handful of vanilla wafers.

Next he reached into the fridge and pulled out a bottle of water, a Pepsi, and a Diet Pepsi. I couldn’t help but think of the nutritious dinner the mom would prepare for me later that night.

She knew I liked mashed potatoes, so she’d been making them almost every night. Not the instant kind either. Russet potatoes, peeled and boiled, and then mashed with lots of butter and cream. There would also be roasted chicken or broiled steaks, as well as some other vegetable to round things out. I guess the mom figured we’d have plenty of time to eat Chef Boyardee when the end of the world came.

“My dad ran out when I was a kid,” Dex said, interrupting my thoughts. “So, it’s been me and my mom since then.”

He’d opened all three of the cans and was now dividing the contents between two plates. “Moneywise, things were hard growing up. Stupid little things really, like my sneakers were Walmart brand instead of Nike. Around the holidays my mom always worked overtime, so I could get the new Xbox system or whatever. At the time I didn’t think about how hard that was for her, how exhausted she must’ve been. I was just so happy to have that Xbox, you know? Then around the end of seventh grade, everything changed.”

Taking a glass from the cupboard, Dex poured the contents of the Diet Pepsi into it. “The doctors thought she had a nervous breakdown or was manic depressive, or some other type of crazy that could be treated with medicine and therapy. And money.” Dex stopped and looked up at me.

Every time my eyes met his, it was a shock, but this time the anger crackling in them made my breath catch.

“Lots and lots of money. And the whole time I knew what the problem was, and it wasn’t that she was crazy. She was dealing in her own way, and if that meant shutting herself away from the world, away from everything, including sunlight, and air, and me, well then, I would help her do it.”

Okay, now this dark, empty house made a strange kind of sense. Except for one thing. “You don’t see your mom?” I asked softly.

Dex shook his head. “Haven’t since we moved here. We have a routine. She texts me with the all clear, and I get meals ready for both of us. She doesn’t like to do the cooking, because she doesn’t want to see the labels on the food. There are too many pictures and names.”

“You said you moved here four years ago,” I said, and then hesitated. I wanted to know more about what Logan had told me but didn’t want to ask directly. So I tiptoed around it instead. “Is that when you left school too?”

Dex gave me a crooked smile. “It’s okay, Anna, you can ask questions.”

I could feel myself blushing. “I heard you had some kind of breakdown. And that you had a friend who . . .” Logan had said it was a suicide, but I couldn’t make myself say the word.

“Tim killed himself.” Another smile, but this one was pained. “Everyone thinks he’s why I left. Except for the people who knew something was wrong with my mom, and they thought she was the reason. And they were connected, but . . .” As Dex turned to open another cupboard, he left the unfinished thought hanging in the air. Taking his time, he pulled out a plastic lid and snapped it onto the second plate.

“But?” I prodded gently.

He didn’t answer me, didn’t even acknowledge the question. Instead, he swept the empty cans into the trash can beneath the sink, and then washed his hands, rubbing them together beneath the running water for such a long time that I wondered what exactly he was trying to rinse away.

When he turned back toward me, though, he didn’t look like someone with a guilty conscience. In fact, for someone who had just finished relating his somewhat tragic history, while preparing an equally depressing dinner, Dex looked pretty happy.

“But,” he said, taking one slow deliberate step and then another in my direction. “We all make our own choices, Anna. Every single day—no, every moment—we get to decide how to live our lives. I could’ve killed myself. Or locked myself away. I didn’t. I found other ways to deal.” Dex stood directly in front of me. Reaching out, he touched the tip of his finger to the tip of my nose.

“Actually, you’ve shown me other ways.”

And then, at last, he kissed me. A soft, flitting, there-and-then-gone hummingbird of a kiss. It seemed like it wouldn’t be possible to savor something so temporary and fleeting. But I closed my eyes, letting that brief brush of lips reverberate and ricochet through me.

Opening my eyes again, I saw Dex watching me. Worried. And hopeful. Always hopeful. My heart fluttered, as if that hummingbird kiss had become trapped inside me. I leaned toward Dex, wanting another kiss. And another. And another. A whole flock of hummingbird wings beating away inside me.

The alarm on my cell phone chirped instead, and we jumped apart.

“I have to go,” I said, my voice breathy and foreign.

Dex nodded. Taking my hand, he led me to the back door. Like the basement door, it had multiple locks, although these were all on our side, so Dex only had to flip them. Then he slid the door open, but instead of releasing my hand, he tugged me closer once more.

“I was going to tell you why my friend died, and why my mom is like this, and why I record life more than I live it, but I decided to kiss you instead. I’ll tell you some other day, okay?”

I nodded, but inside something was opening up. I was afraid to have his secrets, but mostly I was amazed that he would give them to me so easily. That he saw something in me worth not just kissing but truly trusting as well.

Impulsively, I stretched up and kissed his cheek. And then I ran out the door of his empty house, so giddy I was almost skipping.

Home again. Home again. Jiggity jig. I came bounding down the storm door stairs, and almost crashed into the shelf. Wiping the big stupid smile off my face, I ducked down to wiggle through the little hole I’d created.

That was when I saw them lining the back of the top shelf. A row of spitballs.

I’d actually forgotten Annaliese for a few moments there. Forgotten that my joy was at her expense.

I couldn’t bring myself to read them. Not with the memory of Dex’s lips still making mine tingle. But I couldn’t leave them behind either. I gathered them, squeezing them into a tight ball at the center of my fist.

If I had been floating before, I’d returned to earth. Hard. No more skipping. Through the basement and all the way until I reached my room, it was more like trudging through six feet of shit.

Until now, some part of me had thought Annaliese was a stupid girl to make a terrible deal just to get a boy, the way she had. She’d given herself away.

But that one kiss had changed things.

As guilty as I felt, and as horrific as it was to remember . . . I could almost do it all over again.

For that hummingbird kiss, I would let Annaliese eat her heart out once more.

KNOWING

FIRST KISS

First kiss

or first kiss that counts

that didn’t come from a

spinning bottle

pointing at me

and someone making a face

’cause their lips will have to

meet mine.

First kiss

or first kiss that

wasn’t just a scene

that I dreamed

writing the word

love

into your mouth

moments before it

touched mine.

First kiss

or first kiss that

was nothing like I

thought it would be.

wetter and warmer

worse and better

with your hands everywhere

and mine hanging by my side

and then your tongue

licking mine.

First kiss

or first kiss that

after a slow start

and some uncertainty

made me realize

why this is something

people do.

And why it is so much more

than simply your lips

on mine.

—ARG

MISSING GIRLS

I know immediately. I am somewhere strange. This bed isn’t my own. The blanket is scratchy, and the pillow has a strange sour smell.

Dim light leaks through a crack in the curtained windows, enough for me to see another bed lined up with mine and a night table between them. On the opposite wall sits a small television with rabbit ears.

A motel room. There’s no relief in identifying it.

Something terrible has happened, but I can’t quite remember what. Or I don’t want to remember.

Oh God, someone please help me
.

Silent tears slide down my cheeks.

Oh God, someone please help me.

I open the drawer of the bedside table, and pull out the Bible that I knew I’d find there. I am torn. Should I read, search for some passage that will explain or provide some comfort? Or just have the immediate release and small satisfaction of tearing out the damn pages one by one.

Still undecided, I flip it open.

Words blur before my eyes.

Love is patient. Love is kind.

I throw the book across the room, hitting the door just as it is opening.

A young man walks in. I know him. And I think I remember why I am here. Except I thought that was only a nightmare.

Oh God, please let it be a nightmare.

“Look what you’ve done,” he says, throwing a newspaper at me.

Dully, I let it hit me and then flop down to the dingy bedspread. The large capital letters of the headline seem to scream at me.

FOUL PLAY NOW SUSPECTED IN CASE OF TWO MISSING GIRLS

The smaller words below the headline refuse to come into focus. But I can’t avoid the big picture. A girl smiles at me. It’s her school picture. The smile was forced and didn’t reach her eyes. Most people wouldn’t know that, and wouldn’t notice. Pretty girl, they would think.

“That’s me,” I say, touching a finger to the inked image of Anna Martin.

“No, that’s Anna,” he sneers, snatching the paper away with one hand and grabbing hold of my arm with the other. He drags me across the room and into the bathroom. I blink against the too-bright fluorescent lights as he pushes me in front of the mirror. “
That’s you.
Katie Campbell.”

A girl winces back at me. Pale and terrified, she looks nothing like the girl in the picture. The young man was right. This is not Anna. I recognize her, though. She’d been my brother’s girlfriend. She’d been my friend too. She’d been Katie Campbell, but now I was Katie and she was . . .

The girl in the mirror shakes her head, warning me not to think of that. To think of anything else but that.

“You
were
the missing girl,” the horrible boy says. “And now you’re the other missing girl. The one who is also the suspect.”

BLURT

Another night. Another dream. Another memory.

Before bed I found a few more of Annaliese’s spitball poems, along with some notes hidden in the toe of an old shoe. I shouldn’t have gone looking for them, but I couldn’t stop myself. I always found at least one during my hunts, as if some part of me remembered where they’d been hidden. As usual the poems left me unsettled. It was no surprise that when I finally fell asleep, I dreamed.

It was one of those where you think you are sleeping, so when you wake in the dream, it tricks you into believing you are waking into real life. Except in the dream I was Anna.

Anna. Annaliese. Anna. Annaliese.

The two names echoed in my head for the rest of my sleepless night, a puzzle that I was still determined to solve. When the sky began to lighten it was a relief to put the mystery aside and face the more straightforward trial of getting through another day of school. At this point, the distraction of avoiding both Logan and the redheaded boy was better than waiting for the next memory.

Of course, since I wanted distractions, I went through the whole day without seeing either boy. Not a single person talked to me either, and hardly anyone even stared anymore. The next day—more of the same. It was starting to seem like I would’ve been better off staying in Annaliese’s bedroom, staring at the walls and sucking on breath strips, when Gwen grabbed hold of my arm. She dragged me into an empty classroom and shut the door behind us.

As she flicked the light on, I saw it wasn’t a classroom at all, but instead a room not much bigger than a closet with a piano shoved into a corner.

“Please sit,” Gwen said, gesturing to the piano bench.

I was supposed to be in class. I sat.

“What is this?” I waved my hand, indicating the room.

Gwen looked around too, as if surprised to find herself there. “It’s a practice room. For band, or chorus, or, I don’t know, musicky people. Who cares. The real question is, Why are we here? And the answer is: I owe you an apology. A big one. I was talking to my . . . well, a friend that I met while you were—”

Flustered, Gwen stopped. She quickly regrouped. “You know what, it doesn’t matter who I was talking to. What matters is she made me realize that it wasn’t fair to be mad at you, because you are not Annaliese.”

My heart and stomach clenched together. Fearful. Hopeful. I’d been found out. Finally.

But then Gwen kept talking. “I mean, you are Annaliese but not the same Annaliese. I can’t be mad at you for something you don’t even remember. That’s nuts. And if you hadn’t been taken away and lost your memory, I think we would’ve worked things out eventually. I mean, I want to believe we would’ve. I have to believe it, so I can be friends with you—the new Annaliese.”

“What if I’m not the new Annaliese? What if I’m not Annaliese at all?”

It wasn’t what I’d meant to say. But once it was out, I didn’t want to take it back.

“What do you mean?” Gwen asked, looking confused but also intrigued. She perched on the bench beside me and took my hand.

That was all the invitation I needed. Don’t blurt it out, I thought. And then I did exactly that. I told her everything. Everything I knew. Everything I suspected. The words tumbled from my mouth, pushing and shoving at one another, eager to get into the open.

Except once they were out, they were less substantial. Less believable.

Everything I knew was actually nothing. It was all suspicion. Somewhere along the line, as I’d turned my half-formed theories over and over in my mind, they had gathered weight. Enough weight for them to—without my ever noticing—slip over the line from good guess to hard fact.

I knew the redheaded boy from another time, from before. And I thought he was someone else. Had been someone else. Like me.

I had been many girls. I stole their bodies somehow. Maybe with a weird ritual that involved making them cut out my heart. Then I was them. Or controlling them. A puppet master of sorts, except I was inside the puppet. And there were no strings.

And Logan. Some sort of lust spell had been cast on him. To make him fall for Annaliese.

Then there were the Spanish witches on the beach, taking care of me.

And the witches’ brother. Some guy everyone called the Physician. Somehow he was behind all this, making things happen.

It sounded absurd. Or worse, crazy.

And the thing that it was all built upon, that had made it oh-so-easy for me to believe it, was my feeling that I was NOT Annaliese. My feeling that I was a girl named Anna.

I stopped talking midsentence. Feeling foolish.

Gwen was surprisingly silent. For several long moments she gazed at me with an expression of polite interest. I recognized this from my short stay in the hospital as a classic shrink look. By the time she was ready to speak, I had a good idea of what she would say.

And I was right.

I only half listened as she spoke of the intense emotional trauma of my abduction and whatever had happened during the time I was missing. Perhaps my mind had created those other personalities as a way of coping. My current feeling of no longer being Annaliese was completely understandable as well. After such an ordeal, it was totally normal to feel divorced from the person I had been before. Honestly, I would make a fascinating case study, and in a few years when Gwen was doing her thesis, if I felt up to it, if I would consider putting some of this on paper for her, that would be really great. No need to make any promises now, of course, just something to think about.

By that point I couldn’t even look at her. I was embarrassed, yes. But that didn’t explain the tears pressing against the backs of my eyes. Or the disappointment crushing my chest.

Gwen kept talking, offering to recommend someone to help me work through this. I let my fingers run along the piano keys in front of me, and then without even thinking about it, I began playing. The music flowed effortlessly from my fingertips, while every other part of me wrestled with the question of whether Gwen was right.

It would be a relief to simply be crazy. Or traumatized, as Gwen would have it.

“Annaliese!” Gwen’s hand covered mine, bringing the music to a crashing halt.

I stopped. I was being rude. After all, Gwen had listened and she was trying to help.

I turned toward her, preparing to apologize, when I saw her face. Gone was the look of complacent concern, and in its place . . . what I had expected to see from the beginning.

Horror.

“Annaliese,” she said once more, the name trembling from her lips. “You don’t play piano.”

“I . . . oh,” I answered, looking down at my hands still poised over the keys, ready to begin playing once more.

The color washed away, making the whole world the same black-and-white as the piano keys, and then the memory carried me away.

THE INSTRUMENT

My fingers—once Evie’s fingers—stumble across the keys, clumsy and uncertain.

Her first piano teacher always said Evie had a love/hate relationship with this instrument. She told her to find another that she felt less ambivalent about.

But the teacher—her mother—didn’t really mean it.

Evie’s mother played piano. Her grandmother too. It is more than tradition. It is destiny. Evie will play piano as well.

And love it . . . even if she also sometimes hates it.

Except these stupid hands can no longer play, and her daughter is no longer here, not truly.

The instrument didn’t seem so important when I first chose Evie. Now, though, it is the key to making everything finally fall apart.

I lift my stupid hands and confess. “I don’t know how to play.”

Evie’s mother slams the lid down—I barely jerk my fingers away in time. “Then you will learn again. Because no matter what tricks you try, Evangeline, you are my daughter and you will play piano.”

What if I am not your daughter?
The question goes unasked. As always. It is the one thing I can never bring myself to say.

But I wonder. Are teenage daughters that interchangeable, or simply so foreign that one can easily be swapped out for another?

It is another question I avoid.

SUSPECT

Gwen’s white face was pressed close to mine and her hands grabbed hold of my shoulders. “Annaliese, what did you just see? Do you remember something from your kidnapping? Did the person force you to learn piano?”

I blinked at her, confused by our different versions of the truth. Then I took out my breath strips and placed one on my tongue before answering. “I—”

Gwen cut me off before I could get any further. Probably for the best—I had no idea what to say.

“Now, go slowly, Annaliese. Absorb every detail you can remember; even the smallest thing might lead us to the person who did this horrible thing to you.”

I almost laughed at that. Did Gwen truly believe someone had taken me away to torture me with enforced piano lessons? If only that was the nightmare I had to live with. A smirk escaped me, and Gwen leaped on it.

“Annaliese, you’re not protecting this person, are you? I mean, you’ve heard of Stockholm syndrome, right? Feeling a kind of bond with your kidnapper is nothing to be ashamed of, or to hide, or—”

I cut Gwen off. “I don’t know what happened to me. Really.” I opened my eyes wide, trying to look like someone innocent, sincere, and honest. “If I remembered being taken, or the person involved, I would tell someone.”

I stood. “If I miss class completely, Mr. Booker might send a note to the principal, and he and my mom are real chummy lately, sooo . . .”

“But Annaliese,” Gwen gasped, looking more certain than ever that I was hiding something. Ironic, given that she was the one person whom I had told everything.

And that, I now saw, was why I had chosen her. I’d known she wouldn’t believe me, but I had needed to say it all out loud. “Thanks for listening,” I said, pulling the door open. “You’re a good friend.”

This last bit quieted Gwen. Giving her a final wave, I quickly took off down the hall.