I kick the door with my good leg and try to shut it. Myles looks surprised and turns his head toward my face. He’s too close and I feel like I’m going to throw up, but I try to ignore it the best I can. “What about Stevie and Jade?”
He looks like he’s ignoring me for a minute as he continues to open the door. “They’re asleep,” he says.
The rest of the way up the stairs is silent. It’s fine that way. What do you say to someone who knows too much about you and is now helping you cover up whatever you’ve done?
“Put me down,” I say when we’re at the door to the front of the house again. I hadn’t noticed I let him carry me too far.
Without a word he lets me stand. I land on my right leg and lean against the wall where my jacket and sunglasses are. I manage to put them on more or less painlessly. Then I go to grab my keys, but Myles beats me to them and now has them in his hand. “You’re not driving,” he says.
I try to resist the urge to roll my eyes like a preteen. “It’s my car.”
“I’m driving,” he says.
I feel completely helpless letting him, but after thinking about it for a minute, I don’t think I’d be able to drive anyway. My arms are all shaky, I feel dizzy, and like to blowing chunks on top of that. Operating machinery isn’t a very good idea right now.
I sigh and wave him toward the door.
We don’t talk most of the way. I’m okay with that. If he pretends I’m invisible and that nothing happened and hell, that we don’t even know each other from now on, that’s fine with me.
But of course he breaks the silence. “So that day at the mall, you did the same thing,” he says it more like it’s a fact he’s confirming rather than a question. “I felt a stinging in my back.” he doesn’t take his eyes off the road.
I nod.
This conversation is making me uncomfortable. It would make anyone uncomfortable. Myles is treating it like he’s asking me how to bake a cake.
“You don’t like talking about this do you?” he says.
“Not really. I mean, I never have because no one knows. It’s weird talking about it like it’s nothing with you, of all people.”
Myles seems to be thinking about something as we get onto the high way. “Why do you do it?” he asks quietly.
I try to think of a way to word it, but I can’t. “I don’t know,” I say, but it’s not good enough. “It’s just something…I’m used to,” I say. “I’ve always done it. I guess I don’t know anything else.”
“Well, would you promise me something?” he asks.
My eyes turn their attention from the cloudy day outside when the instinct that this is some kind of a trap springs up in my mind. “Depends what it is,” I say to his face, but he’s concentrating on the road.
“Next time you feel like doing something like that, will you call me, talk to me?”
“Why?”
“I think it would help.”
I don’t see how it would, but I guess it couldn’t hurt. “Okay. I’ll try that.”
“Good.”
Then we’re quiet until we pull into Myles’ driveway. I’ve never been inside Myles’ house, and I definitely don’t know what his mother thinks of his friend coming over for stitches. “What did you tell your mom?” I ask as Myles is getting out of the car.
“Nothing,” he says simply. “I told her not to ask, just if she would do it.”
That’s kind of weird, Myles’ mom just listening to him, no questions asked. But my mom isn’t exactly normal either, so who am I to call anyone else’s weird.
“C’mon.” He extends his hand to me.
I need help getting up but I don’t want to hold his hand, so I grab onto his arm instead. Rather than taking a hint and letting me walk by myself, he wraps his arm around my waist and makes me lean against him. If I didn’t feel so sick right now, I would be freaking out. He opens the door and we walk in.
His is small, but not in a claustrophobic way. Everything is in browns and greens. Most of the furniture looks new, like they bought it especially for the move. There are two really comfy looking, deep brown couches. One of them blocks off the kitchen so it’s more separate from the attached living room.
“Sit down,” he says as he lets go of me close enough to the sofa I can sit by myself. Myles walks off through the kitchen down a hallway, and comes back with who I can only guess is his mom. She has thick, curly brown hair in a ponytail on top of her head. She’s wearing a blue nurse’s uniform with Whinny The Pooh all over it.
She smiles at me. “You must be Sophie,” Myles’ mom says as she walks toward me. We shake hands, and I smile weakly at her.
“My name is Phyllis,” she says. “Where are you hurt?”
Before I can answer, Myles is answering for me. “Left thigh.”
Phyllis glares at Myles like she wants to kill him. Now that’s weird.
Then she turns her attention back to me, smiling sweetly. “Well, let’s go into the bathroom then.” She’s already helping me up.
I follow her through the kitchen and down the hallway to a door on the right. I sit on the toilet lid, and we manage to roll my baggy sweatpants up far enough so I don’t have to take them off, thank God.
Myles leaves and comes back with a white plastic box.
Phyllis kneels down in front of me and opens it. I choose not to look inside purposefully, because I don’t want to know what’s in there.
She snaps on pink rubber gloves, and smiles at me. “Okay,” she kind of says to herself.
Myles stands half in the bathroom and half in the hallway, not sure what to do.
I’ve got my own problems.
Myles’ mom starts unwinding the red and brown gauze from my leg. When she finally gets to the skin, I don’t think it looks that bad. It’s kind of pink and raw looking all around the jagged gash. I realize that this is the first time I’ve ever looked at it. It starts trickling blood.
Phyllis grabs some cotton thing out of the box and presses it against the wound. “Hold this here,” she instructs, and I do. Then she takes out a bottle with this weird nozzle-looking thing on it, and she moves my hand away and sprays it all over my leg.
The tiny bathroom starts to smell like disinfectant, and it hurts like all holy hell.
I see Myles twitch out of the corner of my eye, and I wonder if his mom knows about this strange ability he has going on.
She stops and starts fiddling with something else in the box. I’m too busy staring at the gash to see what it is. “Have you ever gotten stitches before?” she asks me.
I look at her and notice she’s holding a rather large needle and sticking into a vile, filling it with liquid. I nod.
She’s all done filling up the needle now, and she looks at me for a minute. “These kind of burn when they go in, you want to hold Myles’ hand?”
I fight the urge to snort. She’s obviously gotten the wrong idea about us. “No, I’ll be fine.”
And she doesn’t say anything else, poking it through my leg in different places. It hurts, and burns like she said it would, but I try to think of other things, like puppies and rainbows. Not really. The pain’s pretty much the only thing I can think of. I stare at Phyllis’ face as she concentrates. She looks kind of young to be a mom. Maybe her late thirties or something. And she's a lot more tan than Myles is. But my mom is a lot darker than I am too.
When she’s done she says, “We’ll be right back,” she gets up, grabs Myles’ arm, and starts to walk with him out of the room. “That needs a few minutes to get numb,” she explains.
They walk out, and I’m left alone with my leg.
I hope she’s not asking him what happened. Through the door I can hear what cannot be mistaken for anything else but arguing. Even if it is whispered arguing. She’s probably mad that he hasn’t been coming home and junk, and it’s none of my business anyway.
They both come back a short while after. “Is your leg numb?” Phyllis asks. I try to move it, and succeed without feeling anything.
I nod.
Myles leans against the wall in the hallway with his hands behind his back, staring at the floor. He seems pissed off. I turn my attention to the floor tiles until Myles’ mom is done stitching up my leg.
“There, all done,” she says after what seems like forever. She digs some more things out of the box; two prescription bottles. “These are antibiotics,” she says as she hands me a blank orange prescription bottle. She fills up a Dixie cup with water and makes sure I take one before she continues. “The stitches will dissolve in two to three weeks. You should be able to walk on it normally in a few days.” She takes off her gloves.
I figure she has these lying around from some free drug trial things from where she works. Doctors hand them out like candy, don’t they?
I get up and roll my sweatpants back down and stand on my leg because it doesn’t hurt.
“You take good care of her, Myles,” Phyllis is saying as he comes in to grab hold of me again, this time I put my hands in front of me to stop him.
“I’m okay,” I say.
As we’re leaving I hear his mom say, “I’ll see you when I get home from work.”
Myles sighs.
We get back into the car and we’re silent.
“Is your mom mad at you?” I ask as he starts the car.
“No, just concerned,” he says quietly.
And we’re silent again for a long time, which leaves my mind to wander. I think about how different Myles’ mom is from mine. Then I start thinking of how he’s never mentioned his father.
“Myles, where’s your dad?” I ask because it’s the only topic I can come up with that doesn’t involve what happened last night right now.
“I don’t have one,” he says simply as we get back onto the highway to go home.
“You mean you’ve never met him?”
“No, I’m adopted. Phyllis is all I have,” he says in the same tone.
I’m slightly shocked. I don’t know how long someone can go without telling someone they’re adopted. I guess it doesn’t matter so much to him.
“Do you ever wish you had one?” I need to know, because sometimes I do, and I don’t even know why.
“Not really. I don’t need one. Phyllis is all I really need as far as parents go. She’s accepted me for who I am. I know there are a lot of people who care about me. That’s enough.”
He glances at me before returning his eyes to the road. “What about you? You never mention your father.”
I shrug. “I never knew him. Adam was my dad until a few days ago.”
“I’ve always believed that family doesn’t have to be people who are related to you. Sometimes all you need are people who care.” He smiles at the road. “And Adam definitely cares. They all do.”
“Thanks Myles,” I say. I mean thanks for more than just this comment and I think he knows that.
“You’re welcome.” That little dimple near his lip shows itself for a moment.
“And thank your mom for me,” I say, remembering suddenly why we’re in a car driving and talking to begin with.
“I will.”
It’s starting to rain outside. “Good, I can take this stupid thing off.” I shed the jacket and take off my glasses.
“Is that why you went to the hospital, to try and cure it?” I’m beginning to wonder why everything with Myles is like playing twenty questions, but I’m happy to change the subject.
“No, my mom wanted them to fix whatever’s wrong with me, but personally, I don’t mind most of the time. It just gets old after a while, constantly worrying about it.”
“Oh.”
“Was it the same for you? You know, covering up and stuff?”
He tenses up like he’s uncomfortable.
“If you don’t want to talk about it, that’s fine.” I really want to know. I mean, how many people can I talk about this with?
“The sun used to bother me a lot,” he starts. “Every time I went outside, I felt like I’d been set on fire.”
That’s accurate. “And then what? You were just fine one day?”
He shrugs. “Time passed. It hurt less and less, and it eventually went away.”
“You grew out of it.” I try not to sound bitter.
He nods. “For what it’s worth,” Myles says after a few minutes. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with you.” He glances at me to smile.
And a smile of my own plays on my lips for half a second when his eyes are back on the road. It almost feels real.
Chapter 11
Houdini
“Y
ou don't see me at all”-A Perfect Circle
It’s about time I have a week off from school anyway.
Monday, I sit in bed for most of the day. I find some miscellaneous painkillers left over from a previous sun incident, and I pop them like tic tacs because if I don’t, the pain is unbearable. Boo and Trei call, want to know why I wasn’t in school. I fake cough and tell Boo I’m sick. He actually believes me. Stevie and Jade mostly work during the day, but I tell them I’m sick too.
It’s easy to lie to them.
Sometimes, I have to go into the bathroom.
It doesn’t look any different. Like nothing happened. I can’t stop my mind from re-playing the whole night again. I know my door was locked. The pills help me not to think about it.
I’m sitting on the couch watching TV when Myles comes over about eight at night. “How are you?” he asks.
Other than being tired I feel fine. “Good. How was school?”
“It was boring,” he says after a minute. “You didn’t miss much.”
“Cool.” We’re not looking at each other as we’re talking. It’s like the uncomfortable factor has finally kicked in. “You can sit down if you want.” I grab my pillowcase of Halloween candy from the coffee table and set it in the middle of the couch.
He looks at my leg, the one with stitches that’s closest to him, probably not even meaning to, when he sits down. “What are you watching?”
I unwrap a piece of candy as I continue flipping through the channels. “Can’t find anything.”
We’re quiet. I can’t help it—if he’s not going to say anything, I’ll start. “So.” I don’t want this to be a big deal; I just want to know what happened. His eyes are a pretty bright blue in the light of my living room. “I was thinking,” I continue, trying to ignore how the color reminds me of robin's eggs.
Like he knows what I’m about to ask, he says, “Sophie,” like he means to say,
Oh, c’mon, not now.
“Just listen, you don’t have to answer.” I try to find words to make the question sound not so accusing. “I know I locked my door.” So much for that.
His lean body gets tense under his sweatshirt. He sets his piece of candy down on the coffee table, sighs. “I know,” it’s almost too quiet for me to hear.
I have to blink a few times to make sure I’m not dreaming. “You know?”
“Yes.”
“Did you have a key?” I think of any other way he could have gotten in.
“No, I broke the lock.” He’s not looking at me.
I shut off the TV. “You’re lying.” I realize out loud.
He glances at me, then back to the black screen. “You can’t know that.”
“But I do. And it’s pissing me off.”
No response.
I sigh and turn the TV back on, throwing the remote over to him. It grazes his knee and I really wish I had chucked it harder.
“You’re frustrated,” he observes.
“Yeah,” I spit.
“Almost as frustrated as I am.”
“You?” What do you have to be frustrated about?”
“Well, I don’t understand why I can feel your emotions and pain but I have never gotten a single image or thought from you.” He shrugs.
I honestly didn’t think about it before now. How could I be so careless? He could have known about Jack this whole time. “You can’t?”
He shakes his head. “People know how to block me, but most of the time I know how to get around it. Then there’s people like you who automatically do it. I can’t get in.”
“People can block you? What does that mean?”
He sighs. “It means that people have trained themselves to know when I’m in their heads, and they can lock me out.”
“Oh,” is all I can think to say.
“But some peoples’ minds, like yours, are always like that.”
“So?”
“So, it means you’re hiding something. Maybe not from me specifically, maybe everyone. You have a lot of secrets.” He shrugs.
I ease up on him after he says this. He’s got stuff he doesn’t want to tell me, and I’ve got a hell of a lot of stuff I don’t want anyone to know.
After about an hour or two more of us watching TV, I tell Myles that I want to go to bed. He seems impressed when I walk him to the door without being in pain.
“Sophie?” he asks as I’m shutting the door behind him.
“Yeah?”
“Sometimes things need to reveal themselves on their own,” he says.
Can’t he just tell me what’s going on? I’m too tired to say anything other than, “What?”
“Good night.” He smiles, and then he leaves.
I don’t see or hear from Myles for the rest of the week. My leg feels awesome if I don’t run, or go up or down stairs too fast. So it’s easy to act like I’m fine when really I’m obsessing over if anyone suspects anything. I meet up with Trei at Pizza Hut where Boo is working. Trei helps me with the stuff I missed at school in between us goofing on Boo trying to remember peoples’ orders.
“So what are we going to do tonight?” he asks as he clears a table not too far from ours.
I shrug as I answer questions in my text book.
“Hey, we haven’t had a movie night in a while,” Trei says.
I pretend I’m concentrating on my homework, but I can’t stop thinking about where Myles is. I mean, one minute he’s up my ass, telling me all these secrets…or not, and then the next he disappears. That gets me thinking about what he said about “things revealing themselves.” What does that even mean Did he just say it because he thought if he did I would just let it drop?
Boo nudges me, causing me to mess up what I’m writing. “What?” I ask.
“Movie night or what?”
“Oh. Yeah, sure.”
Boo takes the used glasses and junk from the table he’s clearing to wherever people take them when they’re dirty.
“You okay?” Trei asks me as I return to what I’m writing.
“Yeah. I’m just tired.” I flip a page of my textbook.
“Yeah, okay,” Boo says out of nowhere with a tray of food he brings over to another table nearby. I ignore him as I scribble some answers down. “We can’t get in touch with you all last weekend because you’re
sick,
then it just so happens Myles isn’t in school all week either.”
I try not to look surprised. I thought he was just avoiding me, not everyone. “Just what are you implying, Boo?” I look him in the eye.
“Nothing.” He raises his hands in defense like he was making a joke. “Maybe he was sick too.” He wiggles his eyebrows. God, I want to kill him.
“Boo, shut up.” Trei slaps his arm. “You’re acting like you don’t even know Sophie.”
Boo laughs as he walks into the kitchen again. I continue with my homework.
“You probably just got him sick.” Trei’s conclusion would make sense if acting like an idiot were contagious.
“Yeah, probably.”
So after Boo gets off of work, we go to my house to watch movies. We’re only about half way through
The Big Lebowski
when the phone rings. I get up to answer without hitting pause.
All I can hear is heavy breathing on the other end. I know it sounds ridiculous, but I’m so anxious to hear from Myles that I think for a split second it might be him. “Hello?” I repeat. Their breathing begins to sound short and strained, like someone who has the flu. Then they hang up. I try instant call back but the number is private.
I grab a soda from the fridge and make my way back into the living room.
“Who was that?” Trei asks.
I shrug. “Wrong number?” I sit back down between them.
Boo hits the pause button just as John Goodman’s character is shouting,
over the line!
“Are you going to invite Myles?”
“Sure.” I ignore the fact that Boo suggests
I
be the one to call. “I have his number on my cell.” He gave it to me after we had that whole, “call me next time” talk.
Of course I left my phone in my car again, so I have to walk outside to call him. If he’ll actually pick up this time, what would I say? If I could just talk to him for two minutes, I would know that he was okay and I wouldn’t have to worry if he was hurt or in a ditch somewhere.
What if he left because I freaked him out and I didn’t have the chance to explain?
Sitting in the driver’s seat of my car, I call. It rings. And rings.
Someone finally picks up. “Hello?” A familiar voice answers.
“Alex?”
“Yes?”
“Uh…it’s Sophie,” I’m so thrown off that I’m stuttering. I haven’t talked to her since Halloween.
“Oh! Hey, Sophie. I haven’t talked to you in a while.” She sounds kind of fake, like she’s trying to hide something.
“Uhm, I’m sorry, I thought this was Myles’ phone.” And I’m sure it is.
“It is. He’s just sleeping right now.”
“Oh.” At the least, I’m confused.
“I could take a message for you,” she suggests.
“No, that’s okay. Maybe you could help me.”
She’s quiet for a second. “What’s on your mind?”
“Well, no one has heard from Myles all week and the last time I saw him was Monday. I was just wondering…what was going on?”
There’s a pause, then she speaks again. “Myles has been staying with us.”
Immediately I think back to the day at the park when he showed me those horrible marks. Myles told me that he’d been staying with friends because of what happened. I hope that’s not the reason he’s there now. “Is he okay?” I try to keep my voice even.
“Well, yeah. Just tired.”
I want to ask her if she knows what happened; had that person come back to hurt him again? I stop and put myself in Myles’ shoes and realize that he doesn’t want anyone knowing about it. “I guess just tell him that I called. Boo and Trei have been worried about him.”
“And you too, huh?” I swear I can almost hear her smiling.
“Yeah.” I try to sound casual.
“Okay. I’ll tell him.”
“Thanks.”
“You’re welcome, Sophie. Don’t worry, I’m sure he’ll be fine.”
We both hang up and I shove my phone into my pocket. I’m not sure how to react. Alex was more than nice and said that Myles was alright, but I can’t shake the feeling that something is going on.
I get out of my car to go back inside when something catches my eye.
There’s a big white dog in the middle of the street. It looks kind of like a husky, but without the black parts. It’s not too far away from me, and it doesn’t look like it has rabies or anything, so I call it over.
“Hey.” It perks its ears up, wags its tail, and trots over slowly. He seems friendly enough, and he has a black leather collar on. I carefully lean down to pet him, searching for any tags that could tell me where this lost dog lives. But there aren’t any.
I pet it for a few minutes longer as it pants happily and squints his eyes. They’re blue. A lot like Myles’. I let my hand drop and sigh. Just when I thought I was getting my mind off of things.
“You should go home,” I say. Dogs are smart. They can remember where they live. And there’s not much more I can do at this point due to its lack of ID. “And stay out of the street, you don’t want to be road kill,” I warn, knowing just how ridiculous I must look talking to a dog.
But it seems to understand me, because for a minute it stops wagging its tail and stares out into the road from where it came from. Then it looks back at me and barks. It seems like it’s barking at something behind me, so I turn around to see what it is.
No surprise there’s nothing there.
I turn back to the dog, and it’s gone. I wasn’t facing away from him for that long. I should be able to see it walking away. Unless I imagined the whole thing, which I wouldn’t put it past myself to do at this point.