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Let me go.
Leave me to the water.
I’d rather slip into its frigid depths than believe my parents wanted this for me…
I gasped awake, shivering under a cold sweat, kicking and thrashing at a smothering weight.
“Let me go…”
The Alaskan wilderness faded and my bedroom in the guesthouse materialized around me, my breath wheezing in and out of my lungs. A slant of gold light fell across the wood floors.
“I’m here. Not there. Here.”
My hands made fists in the bedsheets, anchoring myself to the room, to the house. When my heart slowed its panicked pounding, I climbed out of bed and staggered to the bathroom. I made the shower as hot as I could stand, turning my face up to the spray so that my tears were lost in the searing water.
After, I wiped away the fog on the bathroom mirror and my reflection stared back. Hollow and haunted with shining, red-rimmed eyes. Thoughts and memories raced through my head, whispering. Sinister.
They sent you there on purpose. They knew, and they sent you anyway…
The reflection burst into a spiderweb of cracks and I pulled my fist from the center of it. Three knuckles on my left hand dripped red into the white porcelain sink. But that pain was sharp and alive and awake. Not a dream. It was real and it was mine.
My breathing calmed, and I tilted my chin up and set my jaw. The reflection that glared back at me was now hard. Cold. I held my bloody fist up like a promise.
“Never again…”
After dressing in black slacks, black turtleneck, and my thickest long gray coat, I strode out of the guesthouse, past the pool, and to the main house. Mags and Reg were at breakfast, Beatriz in the kitchen at her customary spot at the counter, humming.
“Ah, Holden!” Uncle Reginald said. “Good morning. Just in time for breakfast. Would you like—?”
“The mirror in my bathroom needs to be replaced,” I stated.
“Oh?” Aunt Mags touched her neck. Her gaze dropped to the bandages I’d wrapped around my left hand. “What happened?”
“My fist had an impromptu meeting with the mirror. Seven years bad luck. Or was it seventeen? I can never remember. Não, obrigado,” I said, waving off Beatriz’s sack lunch. I patted my flask in my coat pocket. “I’m on a liquid diet. Ciao.”
I left without looking at Beatriz’s soft, confused gaze or else I’d crumble. I couldn’t look at any of them with their eager, hopeful, “Let’s be a family” expressions.
They didn’t save me then. They can’t save me now.
Outside, I reached for my flask. The first taste burned some of the memory-dream out of me. A second gulp, and I felt confident enough to talk to James without him suspecting I’d been on the verge of falling apart a few short moments ago.
“Mr. Parish,” he said, opening the back door of the sedan for me. “Are you ready, sir?”
“Do I have a choice?” I leaned back against the seat and closed my eyes. “Another day at the circus.”
My first class of the day was AP English. Ms. Watkins, a thin, mousy-looking woman with puffy brown hair and glasses welcomed us in by reading a passage from Naked by David Sedaris that had the class howling with laughter.
“For this unit,” Ms. Watkins said, “we will be studying the craft of memoir. You will be reading some of the great
memoirists—Sedaris, James Baldwin, Ernest Hemingway, Maya Angelou, Joan Didion—and we will be synthesizing the mechanics of writing with the particular artform of the autobiography.”
I sat up a little straighter.
Fine. So there’s one class I might actually survive without gouging out my eyes with a pencil for boredom.
“Your writing assignments will be a mix of essays on the writers we will be studying, and you will have the chance to tell some of your own stories.” Ms. Watkins had a warm smile. “There is no such thing as an ordinary life.”
No matter how much we may want one.
