"MARISOL? Marisol, can you hear me?"
Marisol didn't realize right away that her eyes were open. Her eyelids fluttered as she inhaled the sterile scent of the hospital. Her pupils shrank and expanded in quick succession, sucking up the room's fluorescent light, struggling to focus on the face in front of her.
Mid-forties. White. Female. Underfed. Overtired.
The face frowned and Marisol heard the stuffy click of a pen.
"Reflexes intact," the face intoned. The scritch-scritch-scritch of note taking grated on Marisol's ears.
Another woman swept toward Marisol and the doctor. Approaching retirement. Also white. Overfed and over-caffeinated. "She's okay?"
"We'll have to monitor her for signs of a concussion," the doctor said. "And I'll send a resident to stitch up that laceration by her eyebrow."
The woman breathed an exaggerated sigh of relief. "Oh, thank god." She leaned toward Marisol with a freshly-bleached smile on her face. "Hello, sweetie. Do you have a wittle headache?"
The hospital's antiseptic tang was replaced by the stench of coffee breath. Marisol's empty stomach turned. "Who the fuck are you? And why are you talking to me like I'm a toddler?"
The woman bristled, her face puckering with shock. At this moment, Marisol realized she knew only three simple facts about herself. My name is Marisol. I'm fifteen years old. I was in a car accident. She blinked away fresh memories of glass shattering into the night.
The woman turned to the doctor. "Are you sure she's okay? She doesn't recognize me and she's acting?odd."
The doctor pursed her lips. "A degree of memory loss is common with mild head trauma. It's rarely permanent, though it can be very disorienting."
The woman leaned toward the gurney again, plastering that toothy smile back on her face and filing Marisol's nose with her godawful breath. "You really don't remember me? Do you remember the accident?"
More glass shattering into jagged pebbles. The squeal of tires. A man's shrill, unearthly scream. "I'm not answering any questions until you tell me who you are."
The woman retained her smile, but the worry-lines deepened on her face. "I'm Lorna. Your social worker."
"Social worker? What am I, some kind of charity case? Where are my parents?"
Lorna's lips, shellacked in cheap drugstore pink, twisted into the corner of her mouth.
No parents. At least, not any that matter.
Marisol's chest tightened and her heart pumped jittery adrenaline through her limbs. The pain dulled by the shock of waking up in a strange place with a mind like Swiss cheese finally blossomed in her skull. Her left temple throbbed, sending a wave of nausea into her parched throat. The gurney felt like a starched coffin, demanding she lie still.
Her vision blurred as she forced her head upward. Pain streaked across the left side of her face, down into her neck, almost knocking the wind out of her lungs. Both Lorna and the sleep-deprived doctor tried to stop her, but she fought them off. She couldn't remember standing up, but suddenly found herself bolting down the hall, shielding her eyes from the florescent lights.
Someone screamed her name, but it wasn't Lorna or the doctor. The sound filled Marisol's throbbing left ear with dread, dredging up more snippets of the accident. The same man whose unearthly shriek had pierced the quiet hum of tires a nanosecond before the car swerved left and tumbled over the guardrail? He was trying to get her attention. She stumbled toward his voice, vaguely aware he'd been driving the car.
"Are you okay? Please tell me you're okay." The man's bloodshot eyes brimmed with desperation. Marisol gazed at the IV pumping clear fluid into his arm and another wave of nausea rolled through her.
The man grabbed her arm, his hands smooth against her dark skin. A pencil-pusher. Late-twenties. High-strung. Allergic to everything.
"Mari," he breathed. "You saw him, right? You must have. I'm not crazy, am I?"
Marisol shook her head in a futile attempt to clear the fog. The high-strung young professional took her gesture as a no and his neatly trimmed nails dug into her skin. She took two steps back, trying to pull away, but he held fast and followed her, groaning and turning ashen as he pushed himself up off the gurney.
"I'm not crazy," he repeated. His pupils dilated, but Marisol couldn't tell if it was from fear, anger, or painkillers. "Tell me you saw him." His voice cracked and he wobbled on his feet, leaning into Marisol for support.
"Saw who?"
"The boy," he croaked. "He came out of nowhere, like he teleported into the middle of the goddamn road. I thought for sure we were going to hit him. But he just?grinned. Then he was gone. Poof."
Marisol didn't remember the boy and she didn't like this young professional's vice grip on her arm. Her eyes lost focus again and she tasted blood on her teeth. Someone screamed for help. It wasn't until two nurses and a doctor were pulling the man away that she realized the call for help had come from her own mouth. His frantic screams and protests filled her ears as her knees gave way and she collapsed in a heap on the linoleum.
? ? ?
SHE spotted him on a Tuesday afternoon, two weeks after the accident, scanning shelves of biographies at the library. Not the high-strung young professional who turned out to be her lawyer, nor the mysterious boy he'd rambled about. At least, Marisol didn't think so.
No, this twenty-something manchild worked at the home.
Patches of her childhood and early teens had returned but Marisol remembered almost nothing about the home aside from brief snapshots. Plastic utensils. Beds with scratchy sheets. Broken crayons. Pills in a cup. And even those hazy fragments surfaced only after her lawyer informed her that she'd lived at the home for almost four years.
"Four years?" she'd asked as she sat dumbfounded in his office. "Why?"
He cleared his throat and adjusted his tie with his right hand. His left arm was still in a sling, propped on top of his desk like a gentle but persistent reminder of the accident. Instead of telling the police he'd swerved to avoid hitting a mysterious boy, he told them a deer had bolted into the road.
"Your guardian has asked that I not go into detail about that at this point. It would be counterproductive to your, um, treatment."
"Fucking Lorna."
The lawyer cracked a sidelong grin. "Technically, the state is your guardian. But, yes, Lorna is the social worker in charge of your case."
"She can't do that," Marisol argued. "I'm nineteen years old." As disturbed as she'd been to learn that the past four years had been all but obliterated from her brain, she figured she wasn't missing out on much. Those years had been spent with a bunch of loonies and screw-ups.
"Yes, you're an adult. But when you turned eighteen, a judge determined you weren't capable of taking care of yourself. You don't have any relatives capable of caring for you, so the state was appointed as your guardian."
"But I am capable of taking care of myself. I've been at the motel for almost a week. No one there is babysitting me."
"Talking Lorna into that arrangement was no easy feat," the lawyer reminded her. "You could be living in a temporary foster home right now instead of enjoying the comforts of basic cable and scratchy towels."
Marisol glared at him. "Gee. Thanks for doing your job. And don't change the subject. Your Jedi lawyer tricks won't work on me."
He grinned again. "I don't know how, but I missed that attitude of yours. And I've already initiated proceedings to have the guardianship removed, but these things take time, Mari."
"Ugh. This so dumb. And it's not right."
The lawyer sighed and leaned back in his chair. "Mari, it's my job to advocate for what you want. But I will say this. Lorna has been your social worker for a very long time and she cares about you. Really cares. I'm pretty sure she loves you as much as she loves her own kids."
"Then why won't she tell me what I want to know?"
He studied Marisol's face. "Has it occurred to you that she might be protecting you from something you might not want to know? I'm not really a
spiritual person, but maybe the accident was a gift. It's given you a blank slate. A chance to start fresh."
She crossed her arms. "Can't really appreciate that if I don't know what I'm starting fresh from, you know?"
"'Kay." He tapped his fingers along the edge of his desk. "That's fine. We'll work on lifting the guardianship and then you can do whatever you want with your file."
Marisol knew it might be months until the court got its ass in gear and just the thought of sitting around, twiddling her thumbs with a memory full of holes made her limbs twitch. But now, in the library, a chance to bypass all the bureaucratic bullshit was standing right in front of her, wearing skinny jeans and a T-shirt that read #vegan.
Over-privileged. Under-experienced. Probably used to wet the bed.
"Hey," she barked at him. "I can't remember your name but I know you."
"Huh?" he shot her a quick glance, like he wasn't sure whether she was really talking to him. Then he did a double take. "Oh. You. Holy shit."
"Yeah," she said, realizing she needed to play it cool. She twirled a strand of her dark hair around her finger. "So, what's up?"
"Um?you know?nothing." He blinked at her as he tried to shove his hands into the tight pockets of his skinny jeans.
"I still don't know your name."
"Oh?right." He tapped his skull. "The accident. It's Brent."
"Brent. I like that. It's crisp. Like the first bite of a granny smith." She took a step forward, hoping he wouldn't shrink away. By some miracle, he stayed put. "It's so weird running into you here. Do you want to get coffee or something?"
He smiled at her, revealing a row of perfectly straight teeth. "Um?I would but, you know, ethics and stuff."
"It's just coffee, man."
"Right." He glanced over his shoulder, like he expected to find someone watching him. "Yeah, I guess. Sure. Why not?"
? ? ?
MARISOL sat on the second-hand couch in Brent's apartment, staring at a poster for some band she'd never heard of. She figured a hand job would be enough to make him crack. If it took a blowie, she'd just have to suck it up.
He flashed those perfectly-straight teeth and handed her a beer as he sat down next to her. "You like IPAs?"
"What? I mean, yeah. Sure. Who doesn't?"
She took a sip from the bottle and had to will her face not to pucker. Screw this. Let's get to it.
She put the beer on the coffee table and nuzzled her face into Brent's neck. To her surprise, he smelled nice, like fresh laundry, and his smooth skin felt warm against her lips. He sighed softly and buried a hand in her hair. She pulled his lips to hers and licked those perfectly straight teeth. He stiffened and pulled away.
"I'm sorry," he said as he shook his head. "I just?I can't. I thought I could, but I can't. It's too weird."
Ugh. "Why? Because I was at the home?"
"No. Well, sorta. You were?"
Maybe she could still salvage this. "I was what? A total psycho? A monster?"
He blinked at her. "No. Jesus, not at all. You were so sweet, like a little kid. That's why this is so weird."
His words made her skin crawl. "A little kid? What, did I play with dolls and jump rope and watch cartoons?"
He shook his head again. "We shouldn't even be having this conversation."
"Dammit, Brent." She got up off the couch and planted herself on the coffee table. If the sneaky-sexy route wouldn't work, maybe the direct one would. "Imagine waking up knowing next to nothing about yourself and finding out you'd spent the last four years living in a loony bin. Only you can't remember anything about the loony bin or why you were there."
"Yeah, that would suck."
She gritted her teeth and resisted the urge to backhand him.
"Yes, Brent. It does suck. I want to move on with my life but I can't until I find out what I'm moving on from. If I you were in my position and I was in yours, I'd help you out," she said, though she knew it was a lie.
Brent raked his hands through his ash blonde hair. "I'm going to get fired for this," he moaned. "I just know it. What do you want to know?"
"You said I was like a little kid. I want details, man."
"It's hard to describe. You were like?" His hand flew to his back pocket. "Wait, I can show you." He pulled out his phone and fiddled around with it while Marisol tapped her sneakers on the floor.
She heard the video before she saw it. A sing-songy little voice so precious it could rot your teeth chanted, "I want juice! I want juice!" When Brent handed her the phone, her stomach caved in on itself. That voice, suitable only for a toddler or a Muppet, was unmistakably coming from her mouth as she playfully pounded her fists on a tabletop.
"What do you want?" someone asked from behind the camera.
"Juice, juice, juice!" the Marisol on the screen shouted.
Someone giggled in the background and an arm appeared on screen, handing her a sippy cup. "Yay, juice!" she shouted.
Everything about the girl on the screen was wrong. Her voice. Her uncombed hair. Her sunshine yellow T-shirt and hot pink Crocs. Her wiggly kindergartener posture. The sight of her squeezed the air out of Marisol's lungs. She flung the phone at Brent and pulled her knees up to her chest.
"Jesus H. Fuck. Is that shit for real?"
He didn't respond, just gawked at her.
"Say something, man. Was I like that all the time?"
"Pretty much. I mean, every once in a while you'd seem like a typical angry teenager. Like, you'd spend half a day stomping around in a quiet room, trying to punch holes in the walls. But all the kids do that. After a while, you'd go right back to?you know?that." He pointed at the phone.
A fat knot of dread tightened in Marisol's ribcage. "I don't feel right." She sucked in deep breaths, but no amount of oxygen seemed like enough. She wanted to run, to hide somewhere deep and dark, to bury herself. "I think I'm having a heart attack or something."
"What? Oh!" Brent sprung up off the couch. "No, I know what to do. It's a panic attack. Lay down on your side." He handed her a pillow. "Squeeze this."
She shoved her face into the pillow and felt the warmth of her own breath on her cheeks. Her heart pounded against her ribcage, on the verge of exploding. Eventually, the pillow took the edge off the world and her heart rate slowly eased back to baseline. She got up and paced across Brent's living room.
"Why was I like that?"
"I don't know."
"You don't know or you won't tell me?"
"Honestly, I don't know. Your therapist told us it was due to some kind of trauma. You know, something bad that happened when you were a kid. But it's not like I have access to your file. File access is strictly need-to-know, you know?"
Marisol whisked back to the couch and reclaimed her perch on the coffee table, her knees almost touching Brent's. "You have to get me that file."
"What? No. Definitely, no. I can't. I would be fired in a millisecond."
"I would do it for you."
"Bullshit you would." He crossed his arms against his scrawny chest. "You should probably go."
Marisol's eyes narrowed. "Would you rather be fired for stealing my file, or fired for filming a resident with your phone and then taking her back to your apartment with the intention of screwing her?"
His nostrils flared. "They can't fire me if there's no proof. I'll just delete the video."
What a dumbass. Marisol flew at him. His hands shot up, blocking her. He was stronger than she thought. She pressed against his arms, almost groaning with the strain. Then, in one swift movement, she dug two fingers into the skin just above his collarbone. Brent yelped and sank into the couch, allowing her to snatch the phone from his pocket.
"I'm taking this hostage."
Brent rubbed his face with his hands. "Jesus. I should've just said no to coffee."
? ? ?
MARISOL tossed and turned in her bed at the motel. The light from the neon sign outside pierced the room's flimsy blinds, illuminating her walls in salmon pink. The inc
essant buzzing threatened to drive her mad. Something about the afternoon with Brent had put her off. She should've been upset about the video or the fact that Brent had taken her home despite the fact that the last time he'd seen her she'd been toddling around like the world was her own personal romper room. Some people are seriously sick fucks.
But it wasn't the video or Brent's questionable moral compass or even the fact that she'd blackmailed him without a second thought. It was the way she'd taken him down with two fingers slipping beneath his collarbone. Where did I pick that up?
The TV yap-yap-yapped from the corner, the late night host bidding his audience goodnight.
"Screw it," Marisol said. She sprang out of bed, padded to the bathroom, and swallowed two Tylenol PM.
Sleep hit her like a dark wave and pulled her into the motel bed's scratchy sheets. A dream materialized in her mind, trapping her in a smaller body. How old am I? She gazed at her tiny hands, with pink polish flaking off nails bitten down to the quick. Just a rugrat. Maybe five or six.
She was on a bus. Another girl sat next to her and trees flew by outside the window. The bus pulled off the highway onto a dirt road, and a crop of rustic buildings appeared on the horizon.
"Welcome to Camp Fresh Air," a smiley young woman said when Marisol stepped off the bus. "You're going to have so much fun."
Other smiley-faced twenty-somethings herded the kids from the bus into a hall with sky-high ceilings and miles of long tables. Marisol felt miniscule. She skipped over to a table of boys playing cards.
"Go fish," one of the boys said.
"I know that game," Marisol squeaked. "Can I play?"
"No chubby churros allowed," another boy barked. Dick.
The first boy glared at him and set his cards on the table. "That's not nice." Then the boy did exactly what Marisol had done to Brent. He dug his fingers right into that dick's collarbone.
"Ow!"
The boy laughed and so did Marisol, though something deep in the pit of her stomach told her she shouldn't have.
"This game is dumb anyway," the boy said. "Come 'ere." He grabbed Marisol's hand. "I want to show you something."
Marisol followed the boy to a row of cubbies, where he pulled out a shoebox. He knelt down on the floor and she followed suit, staying quiet when he put a finger to his lips, though she doubted anyone would have noticed them among the hundreds of kids running amok.
"Don't scream," he whispered before lifting the lid to reveal a menagerie of creepy crawlies.
"Awesome," Marisol breathed. "I like bugs, too. But you gotta be careful with that one." She pointed to a dragonfly with a half-crushed wing buzzing along the bottom of the box. "They're pretty but they bite."
"It can't hurt me if I hurt it first," the boy said. He pinned the dragonfly down with his thumb and plucked one wing off, and then the other. The boy grinned as the maimed dragonfly flailed around the box.
Next, he squeezed a fat Japanese beetle between two fingers. "Wait 'till you see what I do to this one."
The squeal of the hotel phone jolted Marisol from the dream. The scratchy sheets were soaked with sweat and the fast food she'd eaten for dinner churned in her stomach.
Images of tortured bugs danced in her mind. And even uglier things rose to the forefront. A flayed squirrel left to rot under a bunk bed. A chipmunk with a stump for a tail nailed to a tree. Despite the horrors flickering behind her eyes, she forced her mouth to form a socially acceptable greeting.
"Hello?"
"Hello, sweetie! Are you all right? You sound panicked."
Lorna. "You're the one calling me in the middle of the night," she barked.
A few seconds ticked by. "Marisol, it's nine a.m."
She jumped out of bed and yanked the curtain aside, only to be blinded by daylight. "Oh. You're right. Sorry."
"Are you sure you're all right?"
"Yeah. Yes, I'm fine. I just overslept." An odd little melody, like a tune hummed by a happy little kid, found its way into her ear.
"Your therapist told me you missed your appointment."
Shit.
"Sorry. I just forgot. Maybe if I was allowed to be in charge of my own life I'd remember that kinda thing."
Lorna sighed into the phone. "Forgetting your appointments isn't helping your case."
"Fine. I'll call her to reschedule. Hey, next time I meet with her, can I look at my file?" The hummed melody intensified. She wanted to swat it away like a fly buzzing too close to her ear, but she couldn't hang up until she had an answer from Lorna. "Hello?"
"Yes, I'm still here. Marisol, I'll be honest, I just don't think that's a good idea at this point. You're still recovering from the accident. I know it must seem like I'm keeping you in the dark, but I can promise you that everything I do is in your best interest, sweetie. I care about you more than you know."
"Ugh. You're killing me with the saccharine bullshit, Lorna." The humming became almost deafening, threatening to swallow the world. "Call me back when you realize I'm just a case and not your kid."
She slammed the receiver down, expecting sweet relief from that humming. But it droned on, forcing her to turn and face the TV. Instead of morning talk shows, Marisol found herself staring at an image of a little boy humming to himself while he carved up a sparrow with a pocket knife. His hands were slicked with deep red blood and dotted with tufts of downy feather. He'd already hacked one wing off and was working on the second. The sparrow's dead black eyes stared at Marisol.
She jammed her finger against the power button but the image never flickered. The boy's lighthearted humming turned her stomach. She gave up on the power button and ripped the plug out of the wall.
The humming ceased and Marisol breathed a sigh of relief. But she didn't have time to dwell on creepy shit that most definitely shouldn't be on TV at 9:00 a.m., when little kids could be flipping through the channels looking for cartoons.
She dug Brent's phone out of her purse, called the home, and asked for Brent.
"Hello?"
"It's me calling from your phone."
"Jesus." Marisol heard him fumbling with the receiver. "You can't call me here. The other staffers might recognize your voice."
"Doubtful. You get my file yet?"
"Working on it. I'll call you tonight. Don't call here again."
? ? ?
SOMETHING'S missing.
Marisol had met up with Brent at an all night diner and spent the last twenty minutes combing through a printout of her file.
"No wonder you were so fucked up," Brent said. "You saw a kid drown."
With sketches of six different foster homes and euphemisms like "urban" and "street-smart," the file fleshed out the drips and drabs of memory that returned after the accident. Like many of the other latchkey and foster kids in the Bronx, she spent nearly every summer at a camp for "underprivileged kids"-whatever that was supposed to mean-in rural New Hampshire. She became friends with a boy her age and, when they were fourteen, he and Marisol snuck away from their counselors, found a canoe, and paddled out to the middle of a deep lake. The boy fell overboard and, after a three-day search, was presumed dead.
According to the file, a year after the accident, Marisol suddenly went catatonic for three weeks. When she finally spoke again, she earned herself a textbook diagnosis of childhood disintegrative disorder. In their notes, countless shrinks and therapists had theorized that she'd regressed back to a time before she knew the boy.
Rather than sadness or self-pity, she was struck by the overwhelming feeling that a massive piece was still missing from the puzzle. The words in her file smirked at her, daring her to dig deeper, to get lost in the great white void between the lines of text.
"I just can't imagine," Brent said as he doused his tofu scramble with hot sauce. "It's so tragic."
"But why did it take me almost a whole year to lose my marbles?" she asked. "If I was going to turn into a full-on nut job, how come it didn't happen right away?"
Brent shrugge
d. "If there's one thing I've learned from working with crazy kids, it's people can become unhinged in a thousand different ways."
A sapphire sky with a few golden clouds rose to the surface of her mind. The image undulated, as if reflected in water. The scents of sunscreen and mid-summer trees hung in the air. She could hear the gentle lapping of paddles dipping into a lake.
"You got a car, right?" she asked Brent.
He shook his head. "No. No way. New Hampshire is, like, a five-hour drive."
Marisol dug his phone out of her purse and taunted him with it. "I'll buy you a soy latte so you can stay awake."
? ? ?
WHEN they crossed the Vermont border into New Hampshire, the sun was still hiding behind the rolling green hills to the east.
"In one mile, take the exit," the phone's emotionless voice told them.
Marisol was half-asleep, her head resting against the glass of the passenger-side window. As Brent's car glided down the off-ramp, something jolted her awake.
"What?" Brent asked.
"I don't know. I feel weird."
"Does this place look familiar?"
She looked from left to right, gazing at the trees and cracked asphalt. Even the bottom of the off-ramp had the strange air of an abandoned place-a heady mix of serene silence and indefinable dread.
She nodded. "Take a left."
They sped past miles of unmowed grass and decaying signs for Camp Fresh Air. Marisol's heart almost seized up when Brent turned onto the dirt road and the camp came into view. But the once rustic and friendly crop of buildings now looked dilapidated. The vaulted roof of the main lodge had caved in, leaving a few long tables exposed to the elements like the ribs of a rotting corpse. The cabins wore a thick crust of hastily sprayed graffiti tags and the din of buzzing grasshoppers made her head swim. The camp had become suitable only for vandals and teenagers looking for semi-private places to get drunk and hook-up.
Brent parked in the main lot, forcing the two of them to walk past the boarded up buildings. Marisol froze halfway through and doubled over.
"Oh my god," she wheezed. "I don't know if I can do this."
"I don't have any pillows to offer you," Brent said. "But I sure as hell didn't just drive five hours so you could have a panic attack and leave before we even see the lake." He grabbed her hand and dragged her forward, past the bathhouse, until they stood on the beach.
Brent inhaled the fresh air and slipped off his shoes. "It's actually pretty here."
"No, don't!" Marisol shrieked just before he dipped his feet into the water.
"What? Why?"
"I don't know exactly. Just don't."
"'Kay. How about that canoe?"
She didn't know how she could have missed it. Though the rest of the camp had seen better days, a shiny green canoe with a fresh coat of paint lay by one of the dunes, waiting for her. She let Brent help her drag it to the water.
"Just me," she said when he tried to get in. "Maybe you should go back to the car?"
"You're joking, right?"
"Actually, no."
Brent threw up his hands. "You can find your own goddam ride back to New York." He stomped back toward the parking lot, though Marisol had a feeling he'd be waiting for her when she got back to shore. If she got back to shore.
She shoved off and paddled into open water. The sun was nearly up, illuminating a few fluffy clouds in the sky and turning the lake a warm gold. The sight took the edge off her nerves, almost setting her at ease. She smiled and dipped one hand into the cool water as she stared down into the depths of the lake.
That's when the humming started. The same melody she'd heard from the TV in her motel room. The notes thrummed in her veins and her arms sprouted with goosebumps. She couldn't bring herself to look up.
"Hi," said an impish little voice. "You didn't really forget me, did you?"
A boy sat at the opposite end of the canoe, smiling at her. The boy from the TV, except a few years older. The same boy who'd caused her lawyer to flip his car.
"You," she growled.
Buried memories flooded through her. Wingless bugs and birds. Flayed squirrels. Dismembered chipmunks. And then there were stray cats caught in nets, dissected, disemboweled. The camp director's dog howling in pain as the boy shoved a sharpened stick into its eye.
Even at fourteen, Marisol knew what was coming. She'd asked one of the junior counselors about it.
"The world broke him," the older girl had said. "Someday, he's gonna kill someone. And there ain't a damn thing any of us can do about it."
But Marisol had done something. She'd woken the boy up at dawn by tapping softly on the window by his bunk bed. They'd canoed out into the lake, and, under a sapphire blue sky, she smacked him over the head with a paddle. The early-morning sun had glinted off the blood flowing down his face. He'd led out a single cry just before she whacked him again with the paddle, knocking him into the water.
The most disturbing piece of this flood of memories wasn't the horrors she'd witnessed summer after summer, but her own calm and calculated response to what she'd done. She'd paddled back to shore, cried a few crocodile tears, and told a counselor the boy had fallen in.
"We weren't wearing lifejackets," she recalled saying. "He sank so fast. There was nothing I could do."
And, at last, the missing piece of the puzzle flashed before her eyes. It wasn't the act of killing that had driven her over the edge, it was something that happened on her fifteenth birthday. A big quinceanera had been out of the question, but her foster mother let a few friends sleep over and the girls gorged themselves on slasher flicks and cookie dough. Around midnight, Marisol got up to pee. The shower curtain had rustled behind her as she washed her hands.
"Don't be lame," she'd said, assuming it was one of her friends trying to scare her.
In the bathroom mirror's reflection, she'd watched as the curtain swished slowly to the side and a pale foot streaked with tar-black mud stepped onto the bath mat. She'd turned and caught just a quick glimpse of the grin on his face before he grabbed her and slammed her head against the wall. When she came to, her foster mother was shaking her. She'd tried to tell her what she'd seen, but couldn't get her bloodied mouth to form words.
"You don't have to be afraid anymore," the boy said, snapping her back to the present. He leaned back and slung one bare foot over the side of the canoe, dipping a toe into the water. "I've forgiven you."
"This isn't real," she whispered to herself.
He laughed. "Did you know this lake used to be a granite quarry? You wouldn't believe how deep it goes."
"No! You're not real," she screamed. Her voice echoed across the water.
"It hasn't been easy," the boy said, "but I've gotten by. I've got quite a collection down there. It's not just stray cats and dogs. Now I've got a few wayward kids and unhappy campers. Even a drunk guy who wandered a little too far from his campsite. But I get lonely because there's no one down there like me. That's why I had to knock the truth back into you."
"I'm not like you."
He grinned. "Are you sure?"
She wanted to run but there was nowhere to go. She was trapped in a canoe with something that was either a very vivid hallucination or a monster she'd helped create.
"I'm not going down there," she said. The boy didn't react, just sat eerily still while he stared at her. She could swear he was still sitting there, motionless, when she felt his hands around her throat, squeezing the life out of her.
She tried to shove him away, but his strength was beyond human. Her muscular arms felt like useless twigs. She thrashed but the boy held fast, tightening his grasp. Her vision blurred as her lungs screamed for air.
Maybe it's better this way. I'm a killer, after all. But she couldn't stand the thought of becoming one of the horrors at the bottom of that lake. She shifted all of her weight to the left. The boy followed, tipping the canoe and sending them both into the water. He wrapped his arms around her neck and shoved her under.
Below the lake's sparkling golden surface there was nothing but endless blackness. She could hear dogs howling, cats mewling, birds screeching. And, in the distance, children wailing.
Marisol's nose filled with water and she came up coughing before he shoved her back under.
"Just give up," the boy said.
She threw her elbow as hard as she should, nailing him square in the chest. He grunted and released his grasp. She kicked away from him and felt his strong fingers grazing her ankles. Then there was something else. Something soft brushed against her arm just before a searing pain knocked the wind out of her. A cloud of blood blossomed against the lake's golden surface.
Marisol screamed as an orange tabby missing an ear and a tail tore into her shoulder. Something below snagged her thigh, dug its incisors in and pulled her under.
More barking, mewling, and sobbing filled her ears. She kicked harder. Even as she felt herself sinking, she surged forward. She swam until she wore herself out and the euphoria of oxygen deprivation took hold.
Oh well. I tried.
But she hit the bottom sooner than expected. Instead of muck filled with God only knows, her hands caught fistfuls of sand and pebbles. With all the strength she had left, she pushed off the bottom and sucked in a breath of air. The boy's humming, growing louder by the second, pushed her forward. She could still hear the determined splashing of a canoe paddle as she dragged herself onto the beach, her arm a ragged, bloody mess.
She hacked up strings of mucus, then retched and vomited on the moist sand. Blood from her arm pooled on the beach while the lake's tiny waves hungrily lapped it up. When Marisol rolled over, she saw a sapphire sky with a few golden clouds reflected in water, still as a mirror, and a single, unoccupied canoe floating by the shore. She winced as she hoisted herself up and limped back toward the parking lot.
"Jesus, what happened?" Brent asked when she plunked down in the passenger's seat.
"Just drive, man. And don't ever let me come back here."
4. CLOWN
Tom Rimer, United States