Page 6 of Seasonal Fears

The hand remains locked over her mouth as her assailant pushes her toward the couch, not letting up, even when he pauses to close the door behind them. There’s a surprising delicacy to the gesture, like he doesn’t want to worry anyone who hears a slam. It could be fear of discovery, but Pamela can sense a certain gentleness to the way he’s holding her. That might sound like a panicked mind making excuses: it probably isn’t. She understands human nature, and she understands malice, and she isn’t picking any up from him. He’s doing what he thinks he has to do.

“There are two candidates in this city,” he says, pushing her harder toward the couch as he shrugs his backpack off his shoulder and crouches to pull the biggest pocket open without taking the cloth from her mouth and nose. She still hasn’t seen his face. “You know that. Nod if you know that.”

Pamela, struggling to breathe, manages to nod. It’s a very small motion. If he weren’t standing so close, he probably wouldn’t see it. But he does, and he sighs, relaxing slightly. She recognizes him now, the sound of his voice, the feel of his hands. She trained the boy, and this betrayal … it burns. Oh, how it burns.

“Yes,” he says. “You understand.” He reaches into his backpack, pulling the cloth away from her face as he removes a small, silenced handgun. “Our Lady of Flowers is awake, and she intends to end the farce her reign has become. The coronation is about to begin, and there are two candidates. One of them is yours, and one of them is mine. But I don’t like my candidate, and I know you’ve never been able to find yours—you probably thought they’d died when they were a baby. They didn’t. So I’m going to take yours away from you, and leave mine without a guide. Yours will win, if that’s any consolation. With me as a guide, they’ll win.”

Pamela stares at him. She still can’t breathe properly. She should be unconscious, but she’s been here for too long; if it weren’t still so close to winter, he would never have been able to catch her unawares. She would have known he was coming long before he got close enough to drug her. She should have felt the Lady wake, should have felt the coronation drawing near.

“Not…” she manages to croak. “How this … works. Assigned but up to … them.”

“Maybe so,” he says. “But my girl will have the odds on her side here. I’m sorry, I really am. I wouldn’t do this if there were any other way.”

Then he pulls the trigger. The gun speaks once, soft as rain and loud as thunder, and Pamela is done. She stops trying to breathe. She stops breathing at all. She’s finished, and what comes next will not involve her.

After more than a hundred years, Pamela Covington is finally free.

The young man who killed her, Trevor Worth, looks at her body for a long and silent moment, staring at her as if he still expects her to do something. When she doesn’t move, he drops the gun back into his bag, slides it over his shoulder, and walks away.

Things are going to begin happening very quickly, very soon.

He wants to be there when they do.

Football

CALENDAR SEASON: FEBRUARY 11TH, 2017: WINTER, UNDER THE WORM MOON.

The full moon is fading from the sky, leaving only murmur and memory behind. It will return tomorrow night before slipping away for a month, returning transformed and redefined as the fish moon, or possibly the pink moon, depending on who’s doing the defining. So many things operate that way. But here and now, it is a beautiful February morning, unseasonably warm, the day of the Valentine’s Dance, and the world has never been brighter or more beautiful.

The football season is over, but the team still swarms the field in their practice gear, purple and yellow like the heralds of the coming spring. Their coach blows his whistle, shrill and high and bright as the last gasps of winter wind, and this scene has played out before, and this scene is perfect in every possible way. Melanie Cosgrove wouldn’t change a single thing about it as she walks onto the field, pom-poms in hands and heart beating far too loudly in her chest.

She hates the sound of it, hates the fact that she can feel it shudder through her skeleton, a drumbeat clasped and kept within her ribcage. She’s been under medical supervision since she was born, doctor after doctor coming to study the poor child with the dead mother and the impossibly broken heart. She missed the last game of the season, missed her chance to yell and jump and shake her pom-poms with the other girls. They sent her letters in the hospital, sent their apologies, told her how much they missed her, but none of them came to see her, fearing, as her peers have done since they were old enough to understand that she was somehow intrinsically fragile, that if they got too close, that fragility would transfer onto them, and they would be tainted by it.

It doesn’t work that way. It has never, not once, worked that way, but they fear it all the same, and in fearing it, they fear her. So when she collapsed during the homecoming game, her friends watched the ambulance take her away, blue-lipped and gasping, and the student body gave her the homecoming crown in a ceremonial gesture that cost them nothing but gave her absolutely everything. She still has it on the nightstand next to her bed, the curve of its base circling the medications she takes every day to keep her traitorous heart beating. She hates them and she loves them and she supposes, sometimes, that she knows how it feels to be an addict, because she’s well and truly addicted: she’s addicted to staying alive, to the little pills, some hard-coated and some crumbling and bitter, that she slips between her lips four times a day to keep everything doing what comes naturally for most people.

But none of that matters here, or now, or today. Here and now, today, she’s an ordinary girl, and she’s here to cheer for her boyfriend, for the ordinary boy who’s going to go to college in a few months and never look back at the girl he’s left behind. But he loves her now, and Melanie has had seventeen years to learn the value of now, the importance of putting her focus on the moment she’s living in. Especially when that moment comes with an absence of pain, comes with breathing easy and living in a body that remembers it’s supposed to love her, not destroy her.

Although she supposes those things have always gone hand in hand. What loves you is the best positioned to hurt you, because you let it in. You invite it through the front door, you drop your shields and bare your throat and tell it to feed if it hungers, because you love it, because you want it to be happy.

She loves Harry. She wants him to be happy. She sometimes supposes she wants that more than she wants anything else; more than she wants her heart to miraculously heal, more than she wants her name to come up on the transplant list, more than she wants a future of her own. She wants him to be happy and healthy and have a good long life filled with wonderful things, and she can want all that and refuse to even consider the thought of him with another girl, or eventually with another woman, someone who can help him be happy when she’s gone.

She’ll be gone very soon now. She knows it like she knows the long bones of her legs, like she knows the burn that settles in her muscles after cheer practice, on the rare occasions when she’s allowed to attend. She can feel it in the way her heart beats, even medicated past feeling anything. The doctors say she’s doing well, that if she stays stable for another six months, she’ll be out of the woods her most recent incident thrust her into, but she knows her body from the inside out, and she knows something they don’t.

She knows they’re wrong.

So she walks onto the field with her pom-poms, a purple-and-yellow checked scarf knotted in her hair like a conqueror’s flag, and she ignores the way the other cheerleaders stare and mutter behind their hands, judging every inch of her. The cold February air is a welcome friend; it bites the exposed skin of her legs, nipping harmlessly at the creamy stretch between the tops of her thigh-high socks and the hem of her thigh-high skirt. Somehow, even though both garments officially end at the same point, there’s at least four inches between them. A conspiracy, probably one set in motion by the same person who decided bouncing teenage girls in skimpy outfits were somehow integral to the sport of football. She loves cheerleading, loves the freedom and the spectacle and the iconic Americana of it all (and if that sounds a little overtly self-aware, well, she’s been a girl with a heart condition living in football country for her entire life. She’s watched a lot of movies, and her eye for media theory is better developed than most critics’. She’s allowed to be a little overtly self-aware if it makes her happy). She even loves the other cheerleaders, casually cruel as so many of them are, vicious as they can be when cornered. They’ve always treated her as a combination pity project and deadly rival, the mysterious beauty who could drop dead at any moment, who’s simultaneously the virginal bride on the beautiful burial mound and the heartless harpy here to drag all their boyfriends down to hell with her.

They’ve never had anything to worry about, not really. Parts of her story are horrifically novel, the sort of thing that would never make a good movie, not even one of those John Green tearjerkers about the kids with cancer who die beautifully and leave each other alone. But she’s come to think that every life is allowed one flawless cliché, and this is hers: she met Harry when they were both in preschool, chubby little balls of sweater and snow pants, their arms starfished out by the tension of their down jackets. He was the boy next door, and she loved him before she fully understood that other people existed distinct from herself.

And wonderful truth, beautiful lie, he loved her almost as quickly, and absolutely as well. They’ve been inseparable since they were four, hand in hand, weathering illnesses and disagreements and their own inexorably growing senses of self, which haven’t always meshed as well as they would have liked. She’s pretty sure they didn’t even like each other for a whole year when they were eleven, and it didn’t matter, because they loved each other enough to make it through. They always have and they always will.

She’s only ever told him one lie: Harry still thinks he’s going to marry her, still thinks he’s going to spend the rest of his life rolling over to find her sleeping next to him, black hair spilled across her pillow like ink, maybe drooling in her sleep, but his, and beautiful despite everything, because she’s his. Because he loves her.

Because for him, that’s always been enough.

She hasn’t told him yet how hard it’s getting to breathe in the mornings, or how often her pulse oximeter shows her with a blood oxygen level verging into the danger zone. She hasn’t told him how she feels like she’s winding down, like the beating of her heart, while still clinically stable, is coming to a close. Maybe the transplant list will save her.

She doesn’t think so, though. It doesn’t feel right, doesn’t feel like part of the cliché. She’s going to be his lost Lenore, and he’s going to be happy without her, and that’s okay, because it’s inevitable.