Haunted Page 21

  I can feel his eyes on me, waiting for me to say something. Anything.

  I slide the book out and turn slightly toward him. “What’s this doing in here?” I ask.

  He shrugs nonchalantly.

  “Some light reading between patients?” I jest.

  A smile inches across his face. “Something like that.”

  “No, really,” I pursue. “Why do you have this?”

  “I like Shakespeare.”

  “You could have helped me with my project,” I quip.

  “Well, that’s not really my job, is it?” Dr. Wheeler says. The finger isn’t perched alongside his mouth this time. He actually seems less therapist-like. More…human.

  I finally take my seat on the couch, but I don’t immediately reach for the security of the fringe pillow. I sit on the edge of my seat, leaning toward him this time instead of away. “So you’ve read Hamlet?” I ask.

  “Sure. Who hasn’t?”

  “Can I ask you a question about it then?”

  His eyes move to the clock for a flicker of a second. Something I would have missed with a blink of the eye. “I suppose.”

  “Do you think Hamlet loved Ophelia?” My hand slowly steals across the fabric of the couch in search of the pillow. I merely finger the edge of it.

  Finger to mouth. Contemplation, though Dr. Wheeler’s eyes remain on me, trying to ferret out some hidden meaning in my question. I wonder if he’ll find it.

  “Hamlet was consumed with grief and mourning, constantly being tested. Testing himself. Is it possible to love someone when you’re in a state of self-preservation and self blame? I don’t know. He definitely sent mixed signals to her, and she was clearly confused. I suppose it depends on how you define love. Hamlet didn’t give himself completely to Ophelia. Couldn’t, not without letting go of his…baggage.” Dr. Wheeler eyes me, suspecting I am Hamlet. “So yes. And no. Either way, the life of Hamlet isn’t one I would choose to live. It’s an incomplete kind of love. An unfair kind of love. Does that answer your question?”

  Incomplete. Unfair. I ponder the idea for a moment while Dr. Wheeler waits patiently for me.

  I now know how to write my paper. More importantly, I realize what I have to do. I’m just not sure I have the courage to do it. Maybe I have too much Hamlet inside of me.

  Jeremy

  I watch Rae from a distance as she smoothes back the hair at the crown of the boy’s head whenever she gets the chance. He rushes around the cemetery as the wind breathes against the blades of his pinwheel. He tries to make it go faster. When he smiles, she smiles. Occasionally, he lands in her lap and wraps his arms around Rae’s neck. Maybe he’s making up for the mother he never got to know. Rae would make a wonderful mother someday—if there was a someday for her. There’s not.

  Rae reaches down to gather a handful of snow. Her wavy brown hair falls around the contours of her face as she forms the mass into a snowball, completely unaffected by the cold and the fact that she no longer needs gloves or mittens. She pushes the hair back behind her ear, and I cannot help but study her profile. I never noticed the high cheekbones and the long lashes shading her eyes. How gentle she is with the boy. With me. Until now, I never bothered to take notice of how beautiful she is. For so long, I’ve only noticed Hailey. The two of us being apart has made me aware of other things—other people—outside of us.

  Rae feels my stare and turns to look at me. Our eyes meet across the vastness of the gravestones, fake flowers, and drifts of snow. Warmth seizes me as I look at her, and I smile. I’m beyond grateful she hasn’t deserted me here, left me alone with the boy who is waiting for something, too. Someone to finally release him. I don’t know when the time will be for him or for me.

  Rae smiles back. Even across the way, I can see the crinkle at the corners of her eyes. She lifts her fingers in a wave, and all I can think is how much I want her hand touching mine again, giving me the comfort I crave. How much I want her near me, warming me, sharing this bleak place with me. Who knows if what we have will last. Once we cross over to the other side, walk through the veil, we may travel down separate paths. I don’t want that to happen. I’ve already lost my mom, my sister, and Hailey. I don’t want to lose Rae, too.

  Eli

  I sit in front of the piano keys in the semi-darkness of the room—a place where I’ve discovered I can come and escape from everything else, save the thoughts and fantasies I’ve held about Hailey. I had worked on the song, but it still lacks so much of what I feel. The notes pale in comparison to my actual emotions, to how she really affects me. And music is the only way I can speak to her since she wants nothing to do with me.

  I lift the sheet music from the stand and stare at the letter tucked behind it: An application for Berklee College of Music in Boston. A prestigious institution of higher education; a phenomenal place to hone my craft. My fingers touch the paper instead of the piano keys. It’s what I’ve always wanted, but I haven’t told a soul. Not my mom, not Nate, not Conner. No one. I should be over-the-top happy, celebrating my senior year and the opportunity of college with…someone. I push the papers behind the musical notes I’ve written, attempting to forget—at least for the moment—it’s even there.

  My fingers dance over the ivories, along the contours of the sharps and flats, letting the music curl around the room. An homage. I’ve played this tune before in clubs, plucking out the notes on my guitar. But it seems most right on the piano with its almost music-box effect.

  Then a sound in the back of the room yanks me by the collar out of my reverie. I turn toward it, and Hailey stands just inside the door, propped against the frame. She immediately straightens when I spy her. My heart pumps hard at the sight of her.

  “Sorry,” she says.

  “It’s all right.” I push the bench back from the piano and it screeches against the wood-planked floor in sharp contrast to the sounds I was trying to evoke earlier. “I was just leaving,” I say even though I wasn’t. Don’t want to.

  “Oh,” she says. I sense disappointment in her tone, so I don’t go anywhere. Not yet.

  “I come in here to…” she hesitates, “dance. Sometimes. But I don’t want to interrupt.”

  “You’re not,” I say even though she is. But it’s an interruption I can live with. For sure.

  “I’m sorry about last time,” she says.

  “It’s okay,” I tell her.

  “It really is beautiful,” Hailey says, gesturing toward the piano as if it contains the song—the music really living inside my heart, making itself known through my emotions. Her eyes meet mine, and she somehow seems different.

  “What?” I ask.

  Hailey steps across the room toward me, then stops.

  A choke gets caught in my throat because the song is for her. I want to tell her, but I can’t. What will she think? That I’m stalking her? Having fantasies about the two of us?

  Hailey inches toward me, glancing at the sheet music. Before I realize it, she’s beside me on the piano bench. We sit shoulder-to-shoulder, face-to-face, like the symmetry of an open book.

  I place my fingers on the keys. Gently, as though I lay them on her. And, in my mind, I do. I try to keep my hands from acting all jittery. Her nearness makes me nervous, and I even manage to hit a wrong key. She doesn’t seem to notice. Instead, I feel her watching me, so I close my eyes and lose myself in the moment. A calm descends on me as I continue to sink each and every emotion into the song. But then her hand suddenly rests on top of mine, and I stop. I pivot and meet her stare, waiting for something. She takes hold of my hands, stands up, and leads me out to the middle of the room.

  “Do you dance?” she asks.

  “No. Besides, there’s no music.” I shrug.

  “There is,” she says, touching my chest. “In here.” I follow her hand to where it rests on my heart. “Can’t you feel it?”

  I can. The music and so much more.

  I lift my eyes to meet hers. She guides my hand to her waist. She slides
her fingers along my arm, lingers at my infinity tattoo—her fingers like a flutter of kisses over it. I close my eyes for a fraction of a second and inhale. Her touch does something to me. There is electricity between us when I open my eyes to hers.

  “Like this,” she says, dancing slowly enough so I can follow her lead. But I can’t move. I am in complete awe of her; she is music in motion. Hailey brings movement, texture, and physical presence to each note I jotted onto the scales and struck on the piano.

  “Are you just going to stand there?” Hailey asks.

  “No.” But I remain completely immobile.

  Hailey holds my arms, then stops dancing. Her word is a whisper. “No?”

  “No.” I grab hold of her wrist and pull her to me until we stand face to face. “I thought you hated me,” I say to her.

  “I don’t hate you,” she says, her words barely audible.

  “You don’t?” I ask, moving closer to her until I feel her shallow breaths on my face, smell the hint of mint across the small space between us.

  “No.” She looks as nervous as I feel.

  “I want to kiss you,” I say.

  “I want you to kiss me.”

  We continue to look at each other. And just when I think she’s going to pull away and run out of the room, her hand finds the back of my neck, and her fingers are in my hair. And the desire to touch her lips on mine is filled with urgency, passion, and lust—everything that’s built inside of me from the first moment I saw her. The hand on her waist pulls her closer, the other sweeps up the side to her face, her hair, and her neck. She’s the instrument I’ve been longing to play, and I lose myself completely to her like a forgotten song I had always hoped to remember.

  “I want you,” Hailey says between breaths, which I can feel on my mouth.

  “You have me,” I whisper as we become entwined with one another in the middle of an almost-vacant, high school practice room.

  But just as our lips are ready to meet, the door cranks violently open.

  “What’s going on in here?”

  We both go rigid, severing all contact with each other.

  Mr. Windsor, the custodian. He’s jostled, stomped on, and scrambled all the good things I was feeling with Hailey by his mere presence in the doorway and the boom of his five words.

  “Shouldn’t you two be in class?” He eyes us suspiciously.

  We’re one walkie-talkie call away from being in the principal’s office.

  Hailey barely glances at me as she heads for the door and is gone like a ghost. I rush to collect my music, pages falling to the floor. One of the sheets flutters beneath the bench seat: the application from Berklee. I stuff it in with my things, head for the door, nod to Mr. Windsor, and find myself in the hallways as if just exiting a dream.

  Hailey

  Wow! Just wow! I think as I collect my books at my locker. I barely concentrate on what I’m doing as I continue to reel from what almost went down in the music room. Things were so intense, magical even. Layla was right—there’s no denying my feelings for Eli anymore.

  I close my locker and hug my books to myself—hoping they’re the right ones, but not really caring—and replaying the almost-kiss.

  “He’ll dump you just like he dumped me.” A voice creeps up on me. I turn and stare into the face of Madeline. She stands there, straight posture, arms crossed in front of her chest, defiant. If it weren’t for the red hair and the bitchy part, I would say she and I could be mistaken for each other in a number of ways. “It’s his MO: love them and leave them.”

  “There’s nothing going on between Eli and me,” I say, hugging my books tightly against my body like a security blanket. I’m afraid she’ll ferret out the lie on my face.

  “I see the way he looks at you,” she says. The words make my insides soar. “And the way you look at him,” she continues, clipping my wings.

  “I don’t see how any of this is your business,” I say as students brush by and lockers slam.

  “Just trying to help a kindred soul from getting hurt.” She’s smug, clearly lording an upper hand with the pregnancy ticket in her back pocket.

  “Really?” My tone is short. The last thing she and I are to each other is kindred souls.

  Madeline nods, all arrogant and self-righteous. “Word to the wise,” Madeline says, her chin and nose held high, “make sure he uses a condom this time. Pregnancy is a sure buzz kill for him.” She pivots on her heels and marches away.

  All the courage I had to stand up to her immediately fizzles away. I deflate, leaning back into the locker, hands trembling. Clearly, she still has a thing for Eli or she wouldn’t spend so much time trying to destroy him. But hearing the words from her mouth—condom, pregnancy—serves as a reminder of their history together. Now all I can feel is jealous.

  “Hey,” Stella approaches all cheerful. “Nate, Eli, and I are going skiing at Purg this weekend. Wanna come?”

  “Sure,” I say, distracted, still watching Madeline glide down the hallway.

  “Great!” She bounces in the other direction, leaving me alone with the bell, the emptying halls, and my jealousy.

  Eli

  I’m only at my locker for one minute. One minute, and she’s suddenly right there. In my space.

  “Can I talk to you?” Madeline. My absolute high from the practice room deflates.

  “Isn’t that what you’re doing now?” I ask, sarcasm omnipresent in my voice. I don’t even bother to look at her.

  “It’ll only take a minute,” she says, running a finger over the tattoo at my wrist, the spot Hailey just traced moments before with her own touch. I move my arm out of her reach.

  “You used to let me touch so much more than that.”

  I slam my locker and turn to face her. “What do you want?”

  “Can we go outside? To talk?”

  “No.” My arms cross defiantly in front of me.

  “Then how about the cafeteria?”

  “How about here?” I say.

  She glances around at the sea of people moving left and right. “It’s about the baby.”

  “There is no baby.” I can feel the sternness of my expression, the deep need to get away from her.

  “Eli, there is,” she says. “In the cemetery.”

  “What are you talking about?” Suddenly I feel all the freak-outedness about the cemetery flood toward me. Beyond the creepiness of the place and the dead bodies buried beneath your feet, there’s also a part of me—and Madeline—inside its gates too? The thought terrorizes me.

  “I had him buried there,” she whispers, her voice an attempt to soothe me. But it’s not working. I’m totally freaking out. The whole scenario with Madeline right now stands in direct contradiction to what just happened with Hailey.

  “You what?”

  She nods.

  “Why?” I ask. My voice is cold.

  “Why not?” she says. “He was a part of me. A part of you.” Her hand rests on my forearm. I’m too stunned to remove it.

  “Will you come with me sometime? To visit him?” Her fingers try to stroke a response from me. “Please,” she breathes.

  “I…” Suddenly I notice Hailey. Her eyes on me. Her whole body seems wracked with betrayal. I know what it must look like: Madeline’s hands all over me as she leans in closer and closer to coax an answer from me, to possibly even win me back.

  “I’ve got to go.” I wrench myself free from Madeline and chase Hailey down the hall. “Hailey, stop!” I yell. “It’s not what you think.” But I doubt she can hear me through the noise of the hallway. Then the bell sounds, and she cuts into her classroom, not even looking back.

  I lean against a nearby locker, letting my head slam into it, the metal ringing out as the halls clear.

  Jeremy

  Rae and I rarely leave the cemetery anymore. It’s almost as though we’re afraid of returning to find the other gone.

  The winter wind rattles everything that’s loose on the grounds: the cheap aluminu
m flower vases and the metal gate near the entrance. It whips the naked branches of the aspens and whistles through the needles of the Douglas fir and ponderosa pines. Rotting cones litter the ground.

  The boy stands at the entrance gate, peering out. Waiting. I want to tell him his dad’s not coming. That he’s waiting on forever.

  I walk over to Rae who holds and turns the snow globe as though it’s a time travel device, able to take her to all the places she never got to go. I glance down, and the Eifel Tower is shrouded in fake snow.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I say.

  “Where are we going?” she asks, her hands finally allowing the particles inside the miniaturized version of Paris to settle.

  “Unfortunately not Paris.”

  “I never expected to get there anyway,” she laments.

  I hold out my hand to her, and she takes it and stands.

  “But it’s someplace just as nice.” Our eyes meet as we come face to face. “I promise.”

  She nods. “Let me get Charlie.”

  I take hold of Rae’s wrist to stop her. “Is that his name?” I ask.

  “Yeah. It’s on his gravestone.”

  I guess I was too self-involved, too filled with self-pity, to ever look.

  “No Charlie,” I say. “Just you and me.”

  Her eyes trail over to the boy as if she’s afraid to leave him all alone. But his fear has already been realized; he’s dead. Nothing more can harm him now. Charlie stands there, unnoticing of us. He’s too focused on the hope that his dad will visit him at least one time.

  “But—”

  “Please,” I say, still holding her hand in my own.