Fragmented (9 page)

Raleigh was mostly silent throughout the house, and with her back toward me, I couldn’t tell if she was having any fun. For myself, I was simply trying to hold it together until we got to the end of the haunted house without embarrassing myself too much.

We continued to follow the line in front of us into the next room. The doorway was dark and it felt like hundreds of fingers passing over the outsides of my arms. Raleigh made a noise that resembled a giggle. I swallowed down my own reaction. I could have sworn someone whispered my name, but I was sure I’d imagined it. The high stress scenario had me on edge and ready to believe that my surroundings were real instead of the fabricated talents of some local theater program.

In the next room, a manic clown—complete with a rainbow-colored, puffy wig and oversized red nose—stood over a bloody hospital bed. His face was painted in a permanent grin, which made the giant butcher knife he held in one hand even more out of place. He stabbed the hospital bed where a mannequin lay. Every time the knife struck, a woman’s scream pierced over a hidden stereo system.

“Jesus,” Raleigh shuttered. “That’s not right.”

Zombies and giant dolls I could handle, but not this. I spotted the exit nearby and I pushed Raleigh’s wheelchair faster than I had been before. Luckily there was no one in front of us or I might have mowed him or her down. Raleigh must have felt the increase in speed because her hands clutched the arms of the chair to keep from tumbling out.

“I’m sorry,” I breathed out when we finally reached the exit. “I had to get out of there. Hospitals wig me out.”

“It’s okay. I’m not a fan either. Too much time in them lately,” she noted, punching lightly at her legs.

“Oh, right.” I hadn’t even thought of that. I’d only been thinking about my mother and the numerous facilities she’d been in and out of over the years.

“Now that I’ve sufficiently terrified you, do you think we could carve a pumpkin?” Raleigh asked hopefully. “Or do you think that’s just for kids?”

I removed my hands from my jacket pockets and tightened my fingers around the handles of her wheelchair. “Oh, I’m positive there’s a pumpkin in there waiting for you.”

A large banquet-style tent had been erected in a harvested field. Fold-up chairs and long tables were set up with pumpkins of various sizes and decorating supplies on the tables. The ground was relatively flat like the rest of the festival grounds, but deep tilling ridges made my help necessary for Raleigh’s chair to navigate the uneven terrain.

I parked Raleigh’s chair at a vacant table and sat in a seat beside her. She immediately grabbed a squat, round pumpkin and thin bristled paintbrush. In lieu of letting children handle knives, paint and markers were laid out on each table rather than more traditional pumpkin carving supplies. Following her lead, I chose my own pumpkin—a tall, skinny gourd with a long, curved stem.

We sat silently as we set to the task of painting our respective pumpkins. Thinking of the clown from the haunted house, I concentrated on a bright red nose and wide, curving mouth.

“One need not be a chamber to be haunted/One need not be a house/The brain has corridors surpassing/Material place.” Raleigh’s words were a quiet murmur as though she didn’t realize she was speaking aloud.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Emily Dickinson.”

“You and Kelley should hang out. She loves stuff like that.”

Raleigh’s hazel eyes remained focused on her pumpkin. “Maybe I like hanging out with you.”

My lips twitched. “I didn’t mean it like that,” I quickly corrected. “I like hanging out with you, too.” It wasn’t a lie; I was having fun, even the haunted house hadn’t been that bad.

Although I focused on my pumpkin, I couldn’t help my periodic glances at Raleigh much like I did in the classes we shared. Her hazel eyes were trained on her own handiwork and the tip of her pink tongue peeked out from between equally pink lips in a look of concentration and determinedness. She was in her own world, oblivious to the pointed stares of others—mostly curious children who didn’t know not to gawk.

“How do you handle everyone staring all the time?”

“It took some getting used to,” she said. “But I’ve learned that the more at ease I appear with being in my chair, the more it puts others at ease about the chair, too. It’s nice when people start looking at me first and only realize I’m different afterwards.”

Her words brought to mind the first day of school when I’d met Raleigh and how uncomfortable I’d felt because of the elevated lab tables.

I painted the finishing touches on my clownish pumpkin. I scrutinized the finished product with the same critical eye I seemed to use with everything I did. The blue paint around the pumpkin’s painted eyes made the face look more melancholy than I’d intended.

“I’ll show you mine if you show me yours,” Raleigh rasped.

I frowned at my pumpkin. I was talented at a number of things, but art was not one of them. “Mine’s not very good,” I qualified.

“It’s not a contest,” she reassured me.

“Okay,” came my reluctant affirmation. “On three.”

We counted down together: “One ... two ... three.” I spun the still-wet face of my pumpkin in Raleigh’s direction, and she mirrored my actions.

While I had gone for a whimsical theme, Raleigh had stayed traditionally Halloween. But instead of a scary face, she’d gone for an intricate spider web that sprawled across one whole side of the pumpkin. The brushstrokes were impossibly straight, coming together to form a complicated geometric pattern.

“Wow,” I openly admired. “That’s really cool.”

Raleigh laughed. “Thanks. Yours is terrifying.”

“Hey! I didn’t want to go for scary,” I defended my art.

Raleigh’s smile was nearly as wide as the painted clown grin. “Then you succeeded.”

My phone continued to jump and jerk in my purse, buzzing with a number of incoming messages. I dug my phone out of my bag and skimmed through the new texts. I had messages from Kelley, Maia, and Jenn, each message questioning my whereabouts. Jenn had suggested we hang out over the weekend, but we’d made no concrete plans that I was consciously ditching. I had a third text from Damien, echoing his earlier message that I call him.

“Sorry,” I apologized, fingers already dancing over the text keyboard. “I should probably respond or they’ll never leave me alone.”

I typed out the words
I’ll call you later
before sending the duplicate message to Jenn, Damien, and my friends.

“We don’t have to stay if you have someplace you’d rather be.”

I looked up from my phone screen. Raleigh was chewing on her lower lip.

“Huh?”

“It's okay if you have to go or something,” she repeated.

I turned off the vibrating feature on my phone and shoved the annoying device back in my purse. “Everything is fine,” I said with a reassuring smile. I slapped my hands on top of my thighs to shake off the unexpected guilt that had settled in my stomach. “Where to next?”
 

We spent another hour at the festival with me guiding Raleigh’s wheelchair from one corner of the pumpkin patch to the other, stopping at craft booths to browse and looking at the jack-o-lantern display. Conversation was easy and light, and for a few moments, I was able to ignore the constant surveillance of the other festival attendees. Raleigh might have been used to all of those eyeballs, but I was acutely aware of how people stared at us.

When we’d eaten our share of Indian fry bread and caramel apples, I steered Raleigh back to my parked car. I waited patiently while she transferred from her wheelchair to the front passenger seat. I smiled at the families who walked by us on their way back to their own cars. Quite a few children openly stared as Raleigh carefully hefted her body from chair to car, but at least their parents had some sense of decorum and tugged harder on their arms to hurry them along or hissed at them under their breath to stop staring in our direction. But Raleigh appeared unconcerned about all the attention, so I tried to put myself at ease as well.

When I stored her wheelchair in the trunk, a flash of red paint drew my attention. “I’ll be right back,” I announced.

Parked a few cars away was a candy red muscle car. It looked like the same body style as the car Jenn had yelled at, but I couldn’t be sure. The antique vehicle was coated with a thin layer of dust like the other cars in the lot. My own car had gotten dirty as well from driving down the gravel road that led to the cornfields. I touched my palm to the hood. The dirt was gritty and the metal felt cool to the touch. The car had been parked there for a while.

Before I could further investigate, I heard Raleigh calling to me from the car. “Harper! Are you ready? It’s getting a little cold.”

I stared for a moment longer at the antique car before hustling back to my own vehicle and my waiting passenger. “Sorry to keep you waiting,” I apologized, sliding behind the steering wheel.

“Are you into old cars?”

“Huh?”

“That red car back there?” she clarified.

“Oh yeah.” I shook my head. “My dad had a car just like it.” I didn’t know why I lied, and especially why I had created that specific lie. I had no idea what kind of car my father drove.

Raleigh’s aunt’s house was only a few miles from the county festival. We sat in my idling car in front of the ranch home. A single porch light illuminated the otherwise dark driveway.

Raleigh twisted at the waist and unbundled her seatbelt. “This was really nice, Harper. Thank you for pushing me around.”

“Thank you for inviting me,” I countered. “I didn’t realize how much I missed doing things like that.”

Raleigh’s eyes were trained on the tops of her legs. “And thanks … thanks for being my friend.”

I swallowed down the lump that had appeared in my throat. “I know it’s not easy transitioning to a new city and a new school. Do you miss your friends and family out East?”

“Sometimes,” she admitted, with a bob of her head. Twin hazel eyes blinked back at me from beneath heavy eyelashes. The moonlight cast peculiar shadows and shapes on her beautiful face. “But Chicago isn’t turning out to be so bad.”

CHAPTER SiX

I wiped away the fog that had already accumulated on the bathroom mirror and gazed at my reflection. I pulled down on my cheeks, distorting my face like Edvard Munch’s silent scream painting. It was part of my morning ritual. Before stepping into the shower, I would stare at myself for a few solid minutes to see if anything had changed from the day before as if I could visibly see the first signs of my hereditary madness creeping in. It was like assembling my battle armor before I stepped outside my apartment each day.

A wide mouth, narrow nose, and dark eyes stared back at me. I was tall, but not a giant. Slender, but not too skinny. I was attractive, but not a model. I swept my eyes down my reflection from the arch of my neck to the gently sloping shoulders to the ribcage barely visible beneath the flesh. My waist cinched and expanded to proportionate hips, tapering off with my long legs, which I thought were my best physical feature.

There was nothing remarkable or unique in my face or figure. Strangers often asked if we’d met before or told me I reminded them of someone they knew. I had that quality about me, like a blank canvas of a person. And I preferred it that way. The less I drew attention to myself or stuck out in a crowd, the better.

I pulled up a playlist on my laptop, which balanced precariously on the top of the toilet tank. I wished I owned a record player because this was music meant to be played on vinyl. Forget high definition or stereo sound, there was something just so right about listening to Muddy Waters in mono with crackling distortion enveloping the twang and buzz of a hollow-body Les Gibson. The gravelly vocals and bold brass sections reminded me of an earlier time—a simpler time. Having grown up in Memphis, the music transported me back to my childhood. It made me ache for fried green tomatoes and the buttery texture of boiled lima beans.

I tested the water in the shower once again before stepping under the stream. I tilted my head back and let the warm spray wash over me. With nothing pressing to occupy my thoughts, my mind drifted to the dream I had had the previous night. I have the awkward misfortune of having sex dreams about people I spend a lot of time with. Last night’s dream hadn’t been very detailed—none of my sex dreams usually were—but in the dream, Raleigh and I were in her bedroom at her aunt’s house. I’d only been in her room once, briefly, but the details had apparently been burned into my subconscious. In the dream we were both reading, but when she asked me to brush her hair, things got a lot more interesting.

We were sitting on her bed with her back facing me, as I carefully brushed through her golden hair. After a moment, she stopped me and took the brush away. I asked if everything was all right. In the dream I was worried that maybe I wasn’t doing it correctly. I didn’t have any sisters, just the one brother, and I hadn’t had many close female friends growing up, so typical sleepover activities were foreign to me.