I will him to open them and look at me.
If this were a movie he’d open his eyes and look at me. But he doesn’t, he just goes on sleeping.
Sitting back down in the chair, I take his hand in mine. His knuckles are taped up too. At least he got in one good punch.
“I love you,” I whisper, fighting back another round of tears. “You didn’t do anything wrong, okay? No matter what anyone says, you didn’t bring this on yourself.”
I open the drawer on the tray table thing next to his bed and scrounge around for a piece of paper and a pen. I write down something I think will mean the most to him and fold the paper, tucking it into his hand.
The door opens behind me and the privacy curtain is pushed all the way to the side. An attractive, blond middle-aged woman in a pants suit strides over to the bed. She’s followed by a tall brunette man and a teenage girl who looks a hell of a lot like Liam dressed as Lee.
“Hi, I’m Dani. You must be Liam’s family,” I say, trying to wheel myself out of the way quickly to give them better access to the bed. I’m in no way skilled at using a wheelchair and I end up turning in a circle and clipping Liam’s dad in the shin.
“Here, let me help you,” he says, taking hold of the chair arms and pushing me to the foot of the bed. He holds out his hand to me while Liam’s mom and sister hover over Liam. “Dan Garrett. It’s a shame we’re meeting under such unfortunate circumstances.”
Liam’s mom snorts and shoots me a searing look. “Was he defending you? I don’t understand why anyone would do this to him. He certainly never had trouble like this when he was with Ariana.”
Liam’s sister turns her face to me, her eyes wide, and slightly shakes her head.
Shit. She never said a word. Liam’s parents don’t know anything about anything.
“Yeah, he was defending me. We were walking home from a rehearsal and—”
“Rehearsal? For what?” his mom says, looking from her daughter to her husband. “He wasn’t involved in all that silly costuming stuff again?”
“No,” I say, getting the feeling that maybe everyone knows everything, but they’re just in denial. “He and I have the leads in a play. Like I said, we were walking home—”
“Whose home?” Liam’s mom puts her hands on her hips and outright glares at me.
“Jesus, Mom, lay off and let her finish the story!” Liam’s sister holds her hand out to me. “I’m Brynn, by the way.”
“Hey.” I shake her hand quickly and continue on before Mrs. Garrett tries to interrupt me again. “Liam moved in with me about a month ago. He was spending all of his time at my house and I live closer to his job…it just seemed like a good idea. Anyway, this group of drunk guys approached us and said some, uh, rude things about me and Liam stuck up for me and punched one of the guys. I tried to intervene and help him, but the other guys in the group grabbed me and held me back while the main guy beat Liam up. Long story short, we ended up here.”
“Have you given a statement to the police?” Dan asks.
I nod. “Yeah, early this morning. The instigator’s name is Gary and I got a pretty good look at him and one of the other guys in the group. They are probably students. Otherwise there was no real reason for them to be walking across campus.”
Liam’s mom sighs and reaches out, gingerly running her fingertips across his brow. “He was such a beautiful boy.”
“He’s not dead, Mom,” Brynn says.
“The nurse said he’ll be okay, but that he—”
“We’ll wait to hear the doctor’s opinion.” She moves her hand from his forehead to the hand I slipped the note into.
Shit.
The realization hits me at the same instant she is pulling the folded paper from his fist. I watch, silent, while she unscrunches it and reads it.
“Nothing a little lipstick can’t fix?” She looks at me, her eyes questioning. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“It’s an inside joke. It’s nothing.”
“What kind of perverted stuff do you have my son involved in?”
“Kathleen!” Mr. Garrett chides, finally revealing the she-wolf’s name.
“Listen,” I say, trying to move the wheelchair backward to no avail. “You’re probably tired and worried sick about Liam and having me here obviously isn’t helping.” Fuck this stupid chair! I push myself up to standing and start shuffling toward the door. “I’ll come back later.”
“You’ll do no such thing! As soon as Liam can be transferred home where he belongs, we’ll be going. Dan will come by to collect his things.”
I stumble and catch myself by putting my hand out on the door jamb of the bathroom. “I’d like to at least say goodbye to him…he loves me and I love him, y’know.”
“Nonsense. He loves Ariana. Liam goes through phases, and that’s all that you are.”
I manage to make it out into the hall before a sob rips my body open.
Chase looks up at me from the asphalt and opens his mouth to tell me to run. I’m frozen, my legs wanting to move, but unable to. I look down to find bodyless hands clawing at my legs, pulling at me. A finger slips underneath the strap of my garter and rips it loose, my stocking sliding, rolling down my leg, turning into blood. It oozes over and between the fingers of the hands.
My eyes shoot back to Chase, still lying there, bodyless feet jumping up and down on his back. “Run, run, run, run, run,” he chants. I finally get my mouth to work, feel my tongue moving, but it’s not really my tongue, it’s a tube of Perfect Red, writing Call Me in the air in front of me. The lipstick turns, loops back around and comes straight for my face, crashing into my nose.
Liam appears before me, dressed as Lee, Chase’s disembodied face staring blankly at me from over Liam’s lavender sweater clad shoulder. “Hey, beautiful,” Liam says, his jaw cracking into puzzle pieces and breaking off from his face, blowing away in the wind.
As far as recurring nightmares go, I’d say I got saddled with a doozy.
I swipe the tears away from my cheeks with my fingertips, careful to avoid my nose even though the bruising is gone. I get up and grab my robe from the hook on the back of the door, lowering my face to inhale Liam’s fading scent from the collar. Or it might not even smell like him anymore and I just continue to imagine that it does.
I shower, brush my teeth and comb my hair, never bothering to wipe the steam from the mirror. There’s no point in looking at my reflection because there’s no one I care to look good for, not even myself.
In the kitchen, I take one of the mugs down, fill it up halfway with yesterday’s cold coffee and then dump the liquid caffeine down my throat. It’s Saturday and Elizabeth is gone for the weekend.
Heading toward campus, I force myself to walk in the direction of the theatre building. I haven’t been here in two months and wouldn’t be here now if I hadn’t felt obligated to show up for the playwriting seminar that David and Rebecca had both recommended me for. Without Liam around, I lost my thirst for the theatre and now at the start of spring term, I’m back on the high school English teacher track. My parents are happy about it. Again, probably because it is a better alternative than turning to meth.
I walk slowly up the concrete steps of Villard and go through the double doors, anticipating all the questions that will be asked of me, and how I’m going to answer. There truly isn’t that much to say.
No, I haven’t talked to Liam.
Yes, every e-mail, letter, text, phone call, and carrier pigeon I’ve sent has been ignored.
I don’t know how he is and every day since he left has been hell. I’m just trying to get through today and make it to tomorrow. What I’m most angry about is that I’ll survive this, just like I survived Chase.
Walking down the hall to the Little Theatre, there is a slim hope on the tip of my brain that Liam will come crashing through the door and slam into me, nearly breaking my nose again. It would hurt, but it would be worth it to see him, to feel something. No one opens the door for me and I go in by myself. Rebecca waves me over and I sit in the seat she’s saved for me.
“Hey, lady.” She chucks me on the arm and then pulls me into a gruff hug. “It’s so good to see your beautiful face,” she says into my hair.
“It’s good to see you, too,” I lie, the words catching in my throat.
She smiles. “You look scared shitless. I’m proud of you for showing up today. Take back your power, sister. Fuck those drunk bigots and their community service.”
“So, you know then,” I say, looking down at my hands.
Liam’s family chose not to press charges and Gary turned out to be the son of a wealthy alumnus, so my word was basically shit. Gary got one hundred hours of community service and the guys that held me back, Grant and Justin, got twenty each. They weren’t to come within fifty feet of me, which wasn’t difficult because I never left my house except to go to class and they were all business majors with classes in another part of campus. Still, I avoided going anywhere by myself at night, sure they could get out of whatever they did to me if they retaliated.
“Yeah, I know.” Rebecca puts one of her small hands over mine. “Everyone in the department knows and they’re sick about it. You and Liam are family, Dani. And Theatre people don’t like it when our family gets the shit beaten out of them. We all understand being different and that’s why we stick together.”
“Unless your biological family sucks and makes you move back to Boise,” I snort.
She sighs. “Shit. Did you at least get to say goodbye?”
I bite the inside of my lip, hard. “No, I got to get all of his things together while his dad stood there looking at me nervously like I was the whore of Babylon. I didn’t know what to do with half of Liam’s clothes, ’cause
you know
, so I just shoved everything into black garbage bags and prayed his parents either wouldn’t go through them or would burn everything Lee that was in them.”
The seminar attendees quiet down as Professor Damian Straub takes the stage. He’s nothing like you think a playwrighting prof would look like, no white silk scarves and black berets. This guy is wearing New Balance kicks, dark jeans, and a burgundy fleece. He’s got a full head of wavy gray hair and a tan.
“Welcome.” He smiles warmly. “I’d like to start off by thanking David Fox for inviting me here this weekend. I lose perspective with all of that L.A. sunshine and find the Oregon gloom always gives me a proper dose of melancholy and angst.”
There is polite laughing and several people mouth “awwwengst” to each other, making fun.
He clasps his hands together. “This weekend we’re going to work on monologue and voice, using our own personal experiences to create characters that are us, but not us. Another self.”
“Write what you know,” a student chimes in.
Professor Straub nods. “Or as I like to say, ‘write what you think you know and then embellish the hell out of it.’”
That gets him some genuine laughs.
X
“…
I never realized how much I liked the way I looked, until a drunk guy’s knee rearranged my face. I never realized how much love I’d held in my heart, until the sight of watching Liam fade away drained it dry.”
No one says anything, the theatre is silent and I curse myself for getting into this again. For my drive, for believing I have anything important to say at twenty that any of these people hasn’t heard before. I should’ve gone earlier in the day, but my stomach was roiling from the vegan breakfast burrito Rebecca forced on me and I’d thought I would finally die if I threw up in front of everyone.
I start to walk off stage, when the sound of forty plastic seats flipping up and the low hum of a collective “Ohhhh” stops me.
Professor Straub comes forward, takes me by the shoulders, and turns me toward the audience.
“Well done, Danielle. Your monologue is the most powerful we’ve heard today. It appears we’ve saved the best for last.”
“That’s so cliché,” I joke, letting myself smile.
He pushes me gently. “Take a bow so I can get on with my seminar, Gloryhog.”
I bow quickly, feeling like a tool, and then rush up the stairs to my seat next to Rebecca.
She practically jumps in my lap, she’s so amped. “One. Woman. Show. You’re ditching those pretentious Lit fucks and putting on a piece of art. You’ll write, I’ll direct. Done deal.”
I open my mouth to say no, but find that I don’t want to. I haven’t felt this awake in months. My heart is beating again. I am happy for a moment even though I was reenacting something horrible.
“Cathartic, isn’t it?” Rebecca says, nodding. “Writing helped me get through my divorce from Sage’s dad.”
“He didn’t call you a biiiiiiiiitch by any chance?” I ask, the words stinging my lips.
She laughs. “He did, and you can bet your ass I did more than karate-waltz with him.”
I’m walking home from rehearsal, sunshine on my back, furiously texting myself all the notes that pop into my head the instant I’m not sitting somewhere convenient to write them down, when I walk past my own front door.
“Dani?”A female voice calls to me.
I look up, realize I’m halfway in front of the neighbor’s house, and turn back toward the voice.
It’s Liam’s sister, Brynn, sitting on our front steps.
“Hey, what’s up?” I manage to say, even though I feel like the wind has been knocked out of me. “Is everything okay with Liam?”
She stands and walks toward me. “He’s fine,” she says quickly. “Physically. Emotionally, he’s a hot mess.”
I shrug in slo-mo. I don’t have a clue what to say…and I also have seven billion questions. I freeze.
“I’m here for a swim meet,” she offers.
I notice for the first time that her hair is damp and she’s wearing flip flops and a gigantic sweatshirt emblazoned with a Jefferson High School Ravens logo.
“You want to go inside? Your toes must be chilly.”
She nods and follows me into the ’plex. I dump my stuff off on the chair and point at Liam’s couch, the couch his dad had muttered at me to keep. “You want something to drink? We have coffee and, uh, probably iced coffee.”
Brynn kicks off her shoes, just like her brother does. “Coffee, hot, would be great.”
She sits down and I flip the coffee maker back on, going through the motions of making a fresh pot.