“My hand,” I said, holding it out.
“Whoa.” Her eyes grew wide. “What happened to it?”
“It went like this in Calculus, and I couldn’t control it.”
“It went like that and Mr. G didn’t send you home?”
“He didn’t see it,” I explained, “but I can’t go to English like this.”
“No, you can’t.”
“Any ideas?”
“Um, let’s see. How about this?” Emma said. “I’ll go tell Mrs. Baxter my mom wants your help on the production crew like last year. Then we sneak to the auditorium and hide you backstage until school gets out.”
“I think that would work. Oh, Em, thank you,” I said, throwing my arms around her.
“Hey, it’s nothing. You’ve rescued me lots of times,” she mumbled into my shoulder.
I looked down, saw my ghost hand pressed against her back, and pulled away, stumbling against the toilet.
“What?” Emma asked, staring at me.
“I need you to promise me something, okay?” I said, putting my hand behind me. “If my hand starts going weird, you have to get away from me. Don’t stay. Don’t argue. Don’t wait to see what happens. Just run.”
“What in the world happened in Calc? Hey, I heard Passion Wainwright fainted and—Oh my God! Did your hand have something to do with
that
?”
“Just promise me,” I demanded.
“Fine. I promise. But only if you promise to tell me everything.”
“I’ll tell you,” I said. “Just get me out of English.”
“No problem,” she said, opening the stall door.
I shut and latched it behind her. Then I sat back down, relief washing over me. Emma was an amazing best friend. I didn’t have a clique or a group like most people. I was more of a loner like my dad, who had been a self-proclaimed introvert and artist. Not a wealthy or well-known artist, but a good one with a little studio gallery in our back yard and the occasional big city exhibition. He had actually been one of my best friends and understood me in a way my mother never would. And he had been a buffer between the two of us.
But not anymore.
He’d died of cancer four years ago.
Four years for my relationship with my mom to become what she referred to as “strained”, but that was just psycho-babble for the sad fact that we couldn’t stand each other. Our relationship had never been peachy, but after my dad died, it had gotten much worse.
Don’t get me wrong. I love my mom. But despite the fact that she has a PhD in psychology, she doesn’t understand me at all, and that drives her crazy. And then there’s the issue of my ghost hand. My dad had always been fascinated by it, but my mother has never been able to hide her disappointment. My parents never came right out and told me, but I know the reason I’m an only child is that my mother didn’t want to risk having another baby with PSS.
The restroom door banged opened, and Emma’s voice chimed, “It’s me. Mrs. Baxter was a piece of cake.”
“Thank God.” I pulled my backpack over my shoulder and exited the stall. My hand looked almost back to normal if you didn’t look too closely.
The halls were pretty empty, and Emma and I made it to the auditorium without any trouble. When we got back stage to the prop room, I collapsed into a ratty, overstuffed chair, while Emma rummaged through a giant chest overflowing with bad wigs, weird hats, and feather boas.
“Here,” she said, holding out a long, black, satiny opera glove. “For camouflage, just in case.”
“Thanks.” I took it and slipped it on, flexing my PSS inside the satin, testing its obedience, molding it to the shape of the glove. My hand seemed completely back to normal. Still, I rested it on my knee where I could keep an eye on it. In the new glove, it looked like someone else’s hand, like some villainous overdressed imposter.
“Now,” Emma said, flopping into a beanbag, “tell me everything.”
TELLING EMMA
I was just telling Emma how Marcus had stared at my hand and it had gone all warm, when Mrs. Campbell stuck her head in the prop room door.
“Girls,” she said, “I’m desperate for backdrop painters. Come help.”
We couldn’t exactly refuse, since helping her was sort of my whole cover story. Of course, we weren’t the only ones painting, so I couldn’t tell Emma anything then. I thought someone might comment on my opera glove, or Mrs. Campbell might ask me to take it off to paint, but everyone was way too occupied speculating about Passion Wainwright to notice anything else. The paint crew had all kinds of theories about why she had fainted. She was pregnant or mentally ill (Thanks Leah and Brittany). She was anemic. She was a vampire. Her dad sexually abused her. She was a lesbian. She was sleeping with Mr. G. (not sure why any of those last four would make someone faint). And the final theory of the day, she was a cutter. I knew Mr. G would blame me for that one, even though I hadn’t told a soul. Maybe when he heard he was sleeping with her, he’d understand the true irrepressible nature of the high school rumor mill and cut me some slack.
Anyway, Mrs. Campbell finally figured out what everyone was talking about and put a stop to it.
Usually, I was a pretty good painter. I got that from my dad. But when the final bell rang and Mrs. Campbell came over to take a look at what I’d done, she stared at it in surprise and said, “Olivia, are you all right?”
No, I was not all right. I couldn’t stop worrying about Passion. I was terrified my hand was going to impale someone else. I was paranoid about getting caught at school with a backpack full of razor blades. And now I sucked at painting. But I couldn’t tell Emma’s mom any of that, so I just said, “I’m a little tired.”
The rest of the paint crew left to go home, but Emma’s mom was our ride, so the three of us stayed and finished repainting my lame backdrop together.
After that, Mrs. Campbell locked up the auditorium, we piled in her mini-van, and she dropped me and Emma off at their place on her way to pick up Mr. Campbell from work. It was their monthly date night, and I always slept over at Emma’s on date night. Finally, Emma and I would be totally alone. Even Grant, Emma’s older brother, wouldn’t be home. He’d recently left to start his freshman year at Indianapolis University.
Emma opened the back door, tossed her backpack on a kitchen chair, and crossed to the fridge. “Let’s get you some food. You’re looking kind of pale. And then you can tell me what happened in Calc.”
I closed the Campbells’ back door and started to toss my backpack too, but then I remembered the blades. I needed to get rid of them, but I couldn’t just throw them in Emma’s kitchen trash. Someone might see them. I needed someplace no one would find them; maybe I could bury them or something.
“Coke and Cheetos, or Fanta and Funyuns?” Emma asked, her head in the fridge.
“Fanta and Funyuns? That’s disgusting.” My stomach roiled at the thought. I sat down at the Campbells’ kitchen table and set my backpack at my feet.
“Coke and Cheetos it is then,” she said, emerging from fridge with two Cokes clutched in one hand. She snagged a large bag of Cheetos out of the cupboard with the other, kicked the fridge door closed, and sat down next to me. “You okay?” she asked handing me a soda.
“Not really,” I said. This was our Friday ritual. Emma’s house. Plenty of junk food. Talking about anything and everything that crossed our minds. And it always made me feel better, no matter how bad the week had been, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t going to help this time. If I had been in shock, like Marcus had said, it was wearing off and whatever came after it felt an awful lot like needing to cry and hyperventilate at the same time.
“So tell me,” Emma said gently, just as a muffled ringing rose from my bag.
We both stared down at it.
“Your phone,” Emma said, looking at me expectantly.
It rang again, but I didn’t move. What had I been thinking when I’d put my phone in with the blades? That was just the problem; I hadn’t been thinking.
The phone rang a third time, insistent, unrelenting.
“Are you going to answer it?” Emma asked.
I reached down and unzipped the bag a little.
Thankfully, my phone was resting on top of the blades, so I pulled it out quickly and answered, “Hello?”
“Where are you?” snapped my mother. “I expected you home half an hour ago.”
“What? Why? I’m at Emma’s. You know I always spend the night at Emma’s on the Campbells’ date night.”
“Yes, I do,” she said, “which is why I reminded you three times this morning that I needed you home by four tonight.”
“Well, I guess I forgot. Why do you need me home?”
“I want to talk to you,” my mother said, her voice backed by a strange, low buzzing.
“Um, okay. Aren’t we talking now?” The buzzing was getting louder. I pulled the phone away from my face and looked at it. The battery was almost completely dead. I was losing the connection. “Mom, my phone’s about to die,” I said, but my mother was talking over me.
“This is not something to discuss over the phone. It’s important.” My mother’s lectures were always important. To my mother. I glanced at Emma, rolling my eyes, but Emma wasn’t looking at me. She was staring at my backpack.
“Do you hear that?” she asked, leaning forward and looking down into it.
“Oh, shit!” I said. The buzzing wasn’t coming from my phone. It was coming from the blades.
“What did you just say?” my mother demanded.
“Shoot, I said ‘shoot’” I lied.
Emma was staring wide-eyed at the blades, now buzzing like a hornet’s nest. “What is that?” she asked, looking up at me.
I shook my head, leaned over, tried to zip up the backpack with one hand, and dropped my phone.
“Just a sec—my mom—the phone,” I said, picking the phone back up only to find it had hung up.
The blades buzzed, vibrating against my legs through the leather bag.
Emma reached into my pack, grabbed the top of the baggie, and tried to pull it out. It resisted, the zipper of the pack not quite open enough, and then it came away with a tearing sound, razor blades cascading into the depths of my backpack in an avalanche of sharp metallic whispers.
“Sorry,” Emma said, the shredded, plastic baggy hanging limply in her hand.
My phone rang again.
“Mom, I dropped my phone,” I answered, having to talk loudly over the noise the blades were still making. “And it’s almost dead. Can’t we talk tomorrow?”
“I have clients tomorrow,” she said, her voice clipped and cold. “I expect to see you home in half an hour or there will be consequences.”
“But that’s not fair. I—”
The phone gave a little chirp, flashed a low battery message, and shut itself off.
I looked over at Emma.
“What are those things in your bag?” she demanded, shaking the torn baggy at me. “And why are they making that noise?”
“They’re razor blades,” I said.
“Razor blades?” I could see the wheels spinning behind her eyes, making connections, jumping to conclusions.
“They’re not mine,” I said. “I think my hand pulled them out of Passion. And I have no idea why they’re making that noise.”
THE DARK MAN
“Em, I’m sorry, I really have to go.” I was standing under the glow of the Campbells’ front porch light. I’d told Emma what I could—a very condensed version of what had happened with my hand and Passion and Marcus and the blades. Of course, she had a lot of questions. Questions I didn’t have time or answers for. In the end, she’d offered to keep the blades hidden at her house until we could figure out what to do with them. But as much as they scared me, the thought of leaving them with Emma scared me even more. I didn’t know what they were, or why I had them, but I knew I couldn’t just dump them in my best friend’s lap. And while we talked, they’d grown quiet in the bottom of my pack as if they were listening, as if they were aware and didn’t want to be given away.
“You
will
call me,” Emma said, “First thing tomorrow we’ll get together and figure this out. Are you sure you don’t want me to walk you home?”
“Nah. Then you’d just have to walk back by yourself. And my mom is going to be pissed when I get there.”
“Okay,” she said. “But be careful, and don’t do anything stupid.” She hugged me and I hugged her back, still careful to keep my ghost hand far away from her.
I stepped off the porch and walked down the Campbells’ front walk, looking back at Emma twice and waving.
As I rounded the first corner, the street lights of Greenfield were just flickering on. The wind was whipping up swirls of fallen leaves on the grey, shadowed sidewalks. I loved fall, especially at night. The sharp, crisp tingle in the air made me feel better, somehow hopeful, despite the nightmarish events of the day.
I set off down Vine Street. My house was on the other side of town from Emma’s, but in Greenfield that was only a fifteen minute walk. The dark wasn’t an issue. I’d been walking between my house and Emma’s since third grade, day and night.
At the end of Vine, I turned onto Locust Street. At the end of Locust, I veered off the obvious street-course home and headed up Sunset Hill Drive toward the cemetery, the huge oaks that lined it burying me in their darker-than-night shadows. I often cut through the cemetery during the day when the gates were left open for visitors. They were usually locked at dusk, but it was worth a try.
Emma thought the cemetery was creepy, but it was one of my favorite places. Before my dad had died, we’d spent a lot of time there together. He’d liked to take etchings of the tombstones, or sketch stone angels, or tell me bizarre stories of death and woe to match the names and dates on the tombstones. Once, we’d even had a picnic on the top of an old sarcophagus and watched the sunset. And now that my dad was in the cemetery, how could I be afraid of it? Dead people weren’t scary. They were just people; mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, wives and husbands. People someone loved and missed. Emma didn’t get that. She’d never lost anyone she loved.
Halfway up Sunset Hill, a car approached, bathing me in the beam of its headlights. I waved as it went by, and the driver waved back. Everyone in Greenfield waved.
At the top of the hill I came to the gates of the Sunset Cemetery, huge, wrought-iron and locked up tight with a chain and hefty padlock. I gripped the bars and rattled them a little. My dad would have known what to do about my hand.