Charm & Strange Read online

  “Hey, you,” I whispered. I hoped my sister would smile or squeal the way she always did when I got too close. She didn’t. Instead my father warned, “Drew!” and I slunk off to the far side of the room, where my stomach growled and hot beads of resentment welled up inside my chest.

  Cruising the back wall like a lowrider, I stared at the wildlife photography hanging above me. There was a bobcat. Birds of prey. A family of raccoons. A big-eared thing I thought was a rat until I read the sign informing me it was a fennec fox. Then I came to the wolves. Such ugly beasts. All scary eyes and open mouths and lolling tongues. What was so cool about them? Sure, I’d absorbed their gothic draw from books I read. Movies I watched. Wolves were meant to be fearsome, wild, the darkness untamed. I’d met the lone wolf. The big bad wolf. The wolf at the door. I’d cried wolf, wolfed down my food, and thrown others to the wolves when at all possible.

  I stared harder.

  The longer I stood there, the more their predatory gaze felt familiar, chillingly so.

  I thought of the look in Soren’s eyes before I hit him. My father’s words on empathy.

  My head swam.

  What was I? Hunter or hunted?

  My stomach growled again.

  When the talk ended, we got to tour the property. The animals kept here couldn’t be returned to the wild for some reason or another. As I stepped down into the preserve, the first thing I noticed was the stench. Everything everywhere smelled strongly of animal waste. A wooden placard told us that the first enclosure we came upon housed a herd of miniature goats and a donkey. Siobhan waggled her fingers and stuffed blades of grass through the fence into the waiting mouth of a speckled kid.

  I wandered off on my own. Kept going until my family was out of sight. I passed the little fox and the raptors until I reached the wolf habitat. The animals all lounged in the dirt, lazy. Staring at them, I felt disappointed, romance swallowed up by reality. They weren’t even big. More like exotic dogs. I remembered the guide telling us the current pack consisted of a young male, his mate, and an older female whose mate died over the summer. That made me sad. Wolves mated forever, he’d said, so that meant the older wolf would be alone until she died. I wondered if she knew. I thought I understood how she might feel.

  I turned and kept walking.

  Above me, the sun struggled to break through the thick cover of tree branches and I shivered in my unlined jacket. With a twist of my head, I caught a faint view of the surrounding mountain range and the wide swath of river chewing through the land below. My heart pounded from the quiet beauty. I wanted it to take me. I wanted it to fill me up, this cool flush of green and brown forest sanctuary.

  Heading deeper and deeper into the West Virginia woods, I realized I was not alone. The older wolf had followed me, pushing through the underbrush not three feet from the path where I walked. I swiveled to look at her. Amber eyes bored straight into mine. Her ears flattened. She was a ratty beast, with patches of thinning fur and protruding bones.

  Her presence pleased me, but I couldn’t have said why. Maybe she was drawn to our joint loneliness. I walked to a cutout in the cyclone fencing meant for cameras and fished one of Pilot’s dog treats from my pocket. Then I thrust my hand through the chain-link barrier.

  “Come here, girl,” I crooned. I made a kissing sound with my lips.

  The wolf took one step forward, then squatted to pee in the soil. She didn’t take her eyes off me. A dozen more steps and we stood facing each other, separated by mere inches. Her coat was a dull swirl of brown, silver, and white. I wanted desperately to touch her and reached out farther with the hand that held the small piece of liver. It happened in an instant. She whirled and slashed with her sharp teeth and I flinched, dropping the treat in the process. The wolf snapped it up, then vanished. My cheeks burned. I pulled my arm back and glanced around.

  No one else had seen a thing.

  Later, we ate lunch at a roadhouse across the highway from the preserve. It was a giant wooden structure full of dusty nooks and crannies and a sparsely populated bar. My father drank quietly while NASCAR played on about eight different television screens. I was starving. My mother admonished me not to eat too much, but I ate my entire burger and finished Siobhan’s, too, when she passed it to me under the table. Afterward, Keith and I slipped away and snuck up a rickety staircase to the second floor, where we discovered an air hockey table and an old jukebox. The only song I recognized was Don Ho’s “Tiny Bubbles.”

  The Phenergan didn’t work on the ride back. My sleep was fitful and in my dreams I saw the old wolf, her yellow gaze and the points of her teeth. Even she hated me. I was worthless. My eyes flew open when we were about halfway home and I vomited suddenly with a groan and a rush. Siobhan screamed and held her nose. I started to cry. We pulled over at the next gas station and Keith helped me change my shirt and tried to comfort me.

  “It’s okay, Drew,” he said, and tousled my hair. I kept sobbing and hiccuping. I could feel my father’s disapproval, my mother’s disdain. I knew I could only be falling short in their eyes.

  “I hate myself.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “I want to die.”

  Keith put an arm around me. “No, no, you don’t. Okay, kid? Just believe me when I say, someday life is going to get a lot better. I promise.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I just know. Soon you’ll know, too.”

  chapter

  seven

  matter

  While everyone else is busy bitching or gossiping or spilling fake tears over the dead townie, I slip from the chapel into muggy morning air that’s way too warm for this time of year. It feels like autumn’s missed its stop or had to reschedule because I’m already sweating bullets.

  In the slowly dispersing crowd of three hundred or so other students, I can’t see where the dark-haired girl has gone. I don’t go out of my way to find her, but it kind of bothers me that she was staring like that.

  What was she looking for?

  And more important, what did she see?

  I trot beneath a line of weary birch trees over to Hudson House, the third-year dorm. My dorm. Once inside, I make a beeline for the communal bathroom. It’s deserted, so after I use the toilet and wash my hands, I peer at myself in the mirror for a long time, examining things like the size of my eyes and the size of my teeth and the way my ribs show through my skin. I’m looking for answers, I guess, but I don’t find them. I do find I need a haircut. My hair falls across my eyes in a way that’s rakish when I squint but sloppy when I don’t. Once, when I was a freshman, a senior girl called me cute, but people usually say I look intense. A lot of times they ask why I don’t smile, which I hate. No one wants to answer that question.

  Ever.

  Trust me on that.

  Leaving the bathroom, I run smack into Donnie Lipman. I literally run into him. Good thing I’m tall or I’d have a face full of chest hair and polo shirt. Instead it’s shoulder against shoulder, like two bucks in rut, and Donnie and I jump back at the same time. He’s got the single next to mine, and he listens to dubstep and trance music all day and all night, which means I do, too. Donnie doesn’t like me. The feeling’s mutual, of course, but I stop him anyway.

  “Hey, what’s the name of that new girl?” I ask. “The junior transfer.”

  I get a tight nod in return as Donnie pointedly avoids eye contact. “That the chick Channer’s trying to bang?”

  Blake Channer plays goalie for the ice hockey team, which can’t be right, so I shake my head.

  He shrugs. “That’s the only junior transfer I know. Redhead. Cute ass, kind of a butterface.”

  Definitely not her. I turn and walk away from Donnie, straight down the hall, straight into my room. I’m lucky. I have a corner single with lots of windows. It should feel like an aerie in the trees, but today I’m reminded of gallows. Today I’m reminded of impending doom. My hands shake as I close the door.

  Breathe, I tell myself,
but it’s not that easy. I’m filled too tight with this sharp sting-stab of guilt.

  Or is it shame?

  I don’t always know the difference.

  The thin white curtains are pulled wide open. I spy other students walking on the path below. They are out there. I am in here. Even though it’s what I wanted, it feels wrong not having a roommate this year. I’m used to having a second nervous system in my living space. Something to distract me when my mind rockets off on a tangent like it is now. Someone to keep me grounded.

  Inhale through the nose, I tell myself. Exhale through the mouth.

  As usual, I don’t want to think about Lex or why I live alone these days, and I really don’t want to think about her, so I pace the hardwood floor once, twice. I pass a bed, a desk, a chair, a dresser, a shelf full of books, a pile of dirty clothes, a pile of clean ones. It takes eighteen steps a lap. It takes 4.2 seconds. I think I could die in 4.2 seconds if I jumped from the proper height or used the proper weapon.

  In fact, I know I could.

  Damn. I turn and fumble for my backpack. I need to get out of here. Like now. This breathing thing is going nowhere fast, like world peace and those predictions of the Rapture. Besides, I’ve got things to do. Information to find.

  I need to understand what’s happening to my own body.

  And it’s not like I’ve got all the time in the world.

  *

  I move with newfound purpose. I’m heading to the school’s science library, located in the biology lab. There are books there I can check out. Ones that might help. And now’s a good time to go—morning classes have been canceled so students can “jointly process the emotional impact of the tragedy.” But as I hustle across campus toward the tight cluster of academic buildings, it’s clear this has been interpreted as a euphemism for “smoking weed together behind the gym.” Whatever. I just keep walking.

  Maybe the callousness of using someone’s death as an excuse to get high should shock me, but it doesn’t. We’re reading A Clockwork Orange right now in English, and just last week Mrs. Villanova told us about the “moral holiday” period in adolescent brain development. I guess it’s the time nature sets aside for us to raise holy hell and not give a crap about anyone else. Only I’m not buying it, because I don’t think it’s a phase. Except maybe the holiday part, and that’s more about being too stupid to cover your tracks than true values. From what I can tell, morality is a word. Nothing more. There’re the things people do when others are watching and the things we do when they aren’t. I’d like to believe Anthony Burgess knew that, but then that dumb last chapter of his book went and ruined the whole thing. That made me mad, and so I think the movie version got it right: people don’t change. Their nature, that is. There are other kinds of change, of course.

  Like physical change.

  Stepping into the science building, I catch sight of Mr. Byles, the chemistry teacher, standing in the hallway. He’s talking to another student, but I know he sees me by the way he squares his shoulders, military sharp. Over the summer I grew taller than him, and apparently I’m not the only one who’s noticed.

  “Win,” he says as the other student scampers off. “How are you doing?”

  I’m not a great scholar by any stretch, but I excel in those subjects I find relevant and worthy of my consideration. Science, I devour. History, I have no use for. But I like Mr. Byles and I’ve done well in his class, so these are the reasons I hope his inquiry is merely an everyday how are you doing. Or an obligatory there’s-been-a-tragedy-in-our-midst how are you doing. Or even an I’m-not-comfortable-with-death-and-I-want-you-to-reassure-me how are you doing. But I absolutely do not want that honeyed hint of concern and condescension in his voice to be personal. I do not want it to be about me.

  “I’m fine,” I say evenly.

  “There are counselors available all day. You know, if you want to talk to someone.”

  I’m sweating again. Why is he saying it like that, all hushed and serious? And why is he staring? He’s never looked at me like that before. Last year he practically worshipped the ground I walked on. Last year I was the best student he’d ever taught. The only thing I saw in his eyes back then was envy.

  “I don’t need to talk to a counselor,” I say, a little louder than I intend. My head begins to buzz the way it does when I get overexcited. It’s not good for me to get upset.

  “Okay,” he says.

  I hate this. The buzzing grows louder. I am a living hive of dread. The memories, those images I don’t want, are swarming around inside me, looking for a way, any way, to get out.…

  “I need to go,” I mumble. “To the biology lab.”

  “You ever read that article I sent you? About—”

  “Sea quarks,” I manage feebly. “Yeah, thanks for that.”

  I know he wants me to stay and talk because that’s what we did last year. We talked. Not about my grief or my anger or my guilt over how my siblings died like martyrs cast against my wicked ways. Those are the things I never talk about. No, we talked about matter—most notably quarks, those tiniest possible components of everything. They come in six flavors, you know: up, down, top, bottom, charm, and strange. I’ll admit those talks helped me, and when I read about the sea quarks, I understood why. They contain particles of matter and antimatter, and where the two touch exists this constant stream of creation and annihilation. Scientists call this place “the sea,” and it’s what pitches inside of me as I hurry away from Mr. Byles, ignoring his furrowed brow, his worried frown.

  I am of the sea.

  I am of instability.

  I am of harsh, choppy waves roiling with all the up-ness, down-ness, top-ness, bottom-ness contained within my being.

  I am of charm and strange.

  Annihilation.

  Creation.

  Annihilation.

  chapter

  eight

  antimatter

  With April came my tenth birthday, and in May Keith turned fourteen. School ended and we all watched Keith graduate from middle school. The small private academy we attended had its own high school right next door, so the transition was more symbolic than anything else. Just another beat in the dark rhythm of our family.

  Summer vacation stretched before me. Ten weeks I planned to fill with tennis and the sweet rush of victory. I had no more qualms about playing again. The previous summer’s drama with Soren only added to my toolbox of mental strengths; I was scary. This fact filled me with a crawling sort of anticipation, both thrilling and repulsive. I’d run into Soren only once since breaking his jaw. This occurred during a spring clinic at my own club when he’d shown up with his coach. I took one look at the jittery hitch in his serve, the way he bit at his lower lip until it bled, the way he missed every single ball because he was so freaking nervous to run into me, and I promptly dropped my racket.

  I marched right home, up to my room, and stayed there. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t sleep. My mind drifted, teased with morbid images I knew better than to tell anyone about. On the third day, when the sun rose to the sound of chickadees tapping at my window, my dark mood had miraculously vanished. My voice returned.

  My killer instinct was back.

  But my season of triumph wasn’t meant to be. The day after graduation, my parents broke the news: Keith and I were being shipped off, on a train, no less, to spend eight weeks in Concord, Massachusetts—home to Emerson, Thoreau, and my father’s parents. Siobhan was too young, so she would stay behind.

  I was understandably anxious. My impression of my grandparents was blurry and undefined. I hardly knew them. Plus traveling was a huge deal; I was informed that one wasn’t allowed to eat or drink in my grandfather’s leather-trimmed Audi, much less barf in it. Tennis was another issue. The fall season was the most competitive, and if I didn’t play every day, I would be in no position to maintain my number one ranking. But my biggest concern was homesickness. I couldn’t imagine not sleeping in my own bed, with Pilot curled at my fee
t. I couldn’t imagine not being home with Siobhan, who made me feel brave because she so wasn’t. Keith understood, though. He’d gone last summer and went out of his way to tell me how much fun we were going to have.

  “Why do I have to go?” I sniffled.

  “Because Dad’ll be gone at that fellowship all summer in New York, and Mom … can’t.”

  “Why not?” I asked, although even I knew our mother was prone to her own bouts of blackness, ones where she struggled to eat. Or get out of bed. Or open her eyes.

  “She’ll have her hands full taking care of Siobhan,” Keith said.

  “I can take care of myself!”

  “You need to get out of here,” he said firmly. “We both do, okay? It’ll be good for us. A real adventure. Swimming, hiking … cousins.” Our cousins, we’d see them, too. They lived in nearby Lexington, three of them. All girls.

  I appreciated Keith’s attitude but remained distraught. Still, there was nothing to be done about it, so on June 24, starved and drugged close to comatose, I boarded an Amtrak heading north with my brother.

  From the platform, Siobhan waved and blew kisses at us as we pulled away.

  I lifted my head and waved back.

  chapter

  nine

  matter

  Common trust. It’s the school’s one rule.

  The only one necessary.

  It’s the reason there are no locks on the dorm room doors.

  It’s the reason there are no lockers for our crap.

  It’s the reason we can borrow books from the library on our own.

  It’s the reason I can enter the deserted biology lab on a Tuesday morning in October and not feel like a criminal.

  I keep the lights off as I go in. The windows are huge, and plenty of sun leaks in to pool around the bookshelves that line the far wall. I pass the massive steel refrigerator that hums and shakes. It holds the fetal pigs from our most recent class, and I’m tempted to peek at mine. The AP section is small enough and the science budget is large enough that we don’t have to partner up, so I’ve got my very own piglet. It’s pink and black. I guess I should say she’s pink and black, since the first thing we did was record the gender. Then I opened the abdominal cavity, but I still haven’t finished with the mouth and neck or removed the heart, so that’ll have to happen tomorrow. Thank God for preservatives.