Undercurrent (7 page)

“You know, I’m really not that hungry,” I say. “Can I just go up to my room for a while?”

“Sure,” Mom says. “But promise to tell us if you feel off or anything.”

Off? I almost laugh. Instead I nod.

“Just leave your plate, dear. Go on upstairs.”

“Thanks,” I say, heading out of the room.

At the top of the stairs, I pause. I look at the half-open door to the guest room. I can hear that machine inside, chugging away, keeping Cole alive.

I can’t help myself—I pull the door shut.

I stop for a moment before opening the door directly across the hall. I look into the room that supposedly no one ever moved into.

The feeling of horror is so strong, I actually find myself shuddering. I tear my eyes away and shut the door behind me. I lurch down the hall to my own room.

Sitting on my bed, I try to calm down and convince myself this is normal. I’ve just suffered a traumatic experience, and it’s confusing me. Mom said the doctor suggested sedatives if I’m still feeling anxious.

But no. I don’t want any drugs—I don’t want to feel any fuzzier than I already do. I need to be ready. For anything.

I look up again at the glossy poster of the sexy girl in her swimsuit. What the hell is that doing there? It still makes no sense to me. If Cole didn’t put it there as a joke, then who did?

The woman doesn’t care. She just wants to crawl across the sand, straight out of the picture, to tear off my clothes.

My body responds to her desire.

But after a moment, the feeling goes away. Because she doesn’t like me. It’s all pretend, for the camera.

I surprise myself by suddenly leaping up. With one swipe, I tear down the poster, leaving only a couple of loops of tape behind. The poster falls, torn, to the floor.

I begin thinking about Ivy Johansen now, about her kissing and groping me in my hospital bed. Was she faking it, too, I wonder? I honestly don’t think so. Why would she?

And now I can’t get her off my mind. The feeling of her long, athletic body stretched out on top of mine, my hands trapped under her taut stomach . . .

I have to feel that again before I die, I decide.

But then I remember Willow. She was here, on my bed, just the other day. Sitting on the edge, listening to me play a new song I wrote—a lame, stupid song I could hardly get through.

She clapped and said it was good, though. And I just sat there, flushed, wondering if she was faking it.

I wonder what would she think about one of the best-looking girls in school climbing all over me. Ivy was touching me and kissing me. Kissing me! I suddenly feel awful about it.

But why should I feel bad? It’s not like Willow and I are really going out. And this is Ivy Johansen we’re talking about—the entire male student body at Crystal Falls High would probably give me a medal if they knew about it. So why feel guilty?

Because I’m in love with Willow, I realize.

I’m uncomfortable even thinking it. After all, we’ve only just become friends this last year. I haven’t even kissed her yet. But I’m in love with her, I know. Why else would I have a collection of her lost bobby pins in my desk drawer—the ones she uses to keep her bangs out of her eyes and that I always find on my bed and on the sofa?

I can almost hear Cole’s voice:
Because you’re an effing weirdo.

Probably, but I don’t really care. I reach for the desk drawer but stop myself. Playing with secret keepsakes isn’t enough. I really need to talk to Willow now. But I’m scared to phone her. What’s wrong? Why didn’t she come to visit me?

There’s only one way to find out.

I know Willow’s telephone number by heart. I pick up the phone in my bedroom and dial. It rings on and on. Just as I’m about to hang up, Elaine answers.

“Hello?” she says, all out of breath.

Elaine is Willow’s mother. She hates being called anything else, especially Mrs. Hathaway, I found out the first time I met her.

“Save me the missus, sport—there’s no Mr. Hathaway,” she told me sternly.

I felt pretty embarrassed. But it didn’t last, because Elaine is otherwise fairly easygoing. Yeah, she’s got weird fashion sense, wearing pointy boots and patterned dresses that make her look a bit too hippie-witchy for my taste. But I like Elaine. And she likes me, Willow says. Which is the most important thing.

“Hi, it’s Callum,” I say, feeling nervous. “Is Willow there?”

Fortunately the woman isn’t in a chatty mood. “One minute, please,” she answers. I can hear her clamp a hand over the receiver and call her daughter.

There’s only one phone in their whole house, so usually I have to wait a while. For some reason Elaine doesn’t approve of phones, cells especially. To be honest, sometimes I wonder if it’s just so she can keep Willow’s private business out in the open. Although she’s fairly cool, Elaine is still overprotective when it comes to her daughter.

“Who is it?” I finally hear a faint voice say.

“I don’t know,” Elaine whispers back.

Okay, that’s weird. Elaine knows my voice, and I even said my name. Already I’m feeling more unsteady than ever.

“Hello?”

Willow’s voice makes me feel better. In fact, it’s the best voice of any girl I’ve met and makes me feel strangely sleepy, sort of the same way lying on a sofa in the sun does. If Cole heard that, he’d call me an even bigger weirdo. Not that he seems to be able to call me anything anymore.

I’m starting to wish my cell phone were working. Then I could have made this call outside, from inside the red hatchback, where something else would at least feel normal to me. But I’m stuck in my strangely unfamiliar room, hovering over the crumpled poster, a single eye staring up at me from the floor.

“Hi, Willow,” I say. “It’s me, Callum.”

There’s a pause. “Who?”

“Callum,” I repeat. The receiver is now shaking so badly, I’m worried I might drop it. “I just got home. But I’m not feeling too good, to be honest. I don’t know. Maybe it was hitting my head or something, but things have gotten really weird. . . .”

As I keep talking, I start to feel hurt again that Willow didn’t visit me. But she can be shy sometimes and doesn’t like to intrude on family stuff. Maybe it’s my fault. I confided a lot of things about my family that weren’t that great. She’s probably afraid of walking in on some fight, like the ones her own mother and father must have had before he left years ago.

“Wait, is this Cal Harris?” she asks. “From school?”

What kind of question is that?
From school?

“Yeah, it’s me,” I say, rocking uncomfortably on the side of my bed. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, I guess,” she says in a flat tone. “Listen, I’m sorry about your accident and everything, but if this is about homework, I’ve been off with the flu all week and have no idea what’s due. . . .”

I can’t believe what I’m hearing. “Willow,” I say, my voice cracking, “it’s me, Callum. . . .”

“Uh-huh, I heard you,” she replies.

“Willow,” I plead. Tears fill my eyes. “Please. Why are you acting like this? I’m in trouble. I need your help!”

“My help?” she answers, sounding surprised. “Why
my
help?”

“Because it’s me!” I answer, losing my temper. “Don’t you want to help me?”

“Oh, help yourself,” she says, and then hangs up.

Willow. She hangs up!

I sit there for a while, listening to the dead line. I’ve never felt so disconnected. Finally I hang up.

This is wrong—too wrong. Maybe I should go to the hospital, but one in another town or in the city even. I wonder if I can convince my parents. If that’s the only way I’ll agree to go to see someone, they won’t have any choice.

I open my door. I can hear the clatter of dishes in the sink and my parents talking. They’re using their unhappy voices—the ones I remember from back when Dad still lived here, which I heard long into the night after they thought Cole and I were asleep.

God, I hate those voices.

I get up and walk over to my desk. I pull out an old swivel chair that Cole and I used to have these crazy endurance tests in, spinning each other to the very limits of our stomachs. I sit down and feel its wooden edge poking through the flattened foam into the backs of my legs. This chair hasn’t changed. This chair is the same.

I swivel and pull open the middle desk drawer. As always, inside sits a neatly stacked pile of old school notebooks, underneath which should lie my secret shoe box where I keep Willow’s bobby pins, among other keepsakes.

I remove the notebooks and put them on the desk. The box, to my relief, is still there. I lift off the lid and place it on top of the notebooks.

Without the overhead light on, the interior of the box is in shadow, so I have to lean over and peer inside.

I quickly discover that nothing familiar is in there. Instead the shoe box now contains two things, neither of which I have ever seen before.

The first is a roll of bills, tightly wrapped in a rubber band.

The other is a gun.

CHAPTER 8

I’ve never considered blowing my brains out before, but that’s
what I think about doing when I pick up the heavy automatic pistol. It’s real, that much I can tell immediately. Whether or not it has any bullets in it, I have no idea.

I guess I could pull the trigger and find out.

I don’t. Like I said, I’m not the type. But I still have no idea what it’s doing in my desk. The weapon looks old, not like some gangster’s Glock but like a soldier’s sidearm. My grandfather’s maybe? Actually that makes sense. His uniform, his medals, his helmet; all that stuff is up in the attic somewhere—why not his .45?

If so, I’ve never seen it before.

And neither have I ever seen this $625 before, which is the exact amount I count out after removing the rubber band. But here it is, in my bedroom, ready to be spent. Sitting on my desk in piles, the bills are practically begging me. And who would stop me?

I hear a noise. I quickly put the pistol and the cash back where I found them in the shoe box, then replace the notebooks and close the drawer. I listen. No one is coming.

I begin to wonder what my mother would say if she found this little stash of mine. As far as I know, she’s never gone through my things before. She’s never had a reason.

Well, she does now
.

I look around my room some more, this time studying every detail for further clues. Who lives here? I confirm again that my favorite books are missing from the shelves, mostly replaced with ridiculous sports trophies.

Wait a second—where is my guitar? And my amp? They’re both missing from the room; in their place is a laundry hamper. The skateboard I use to travel into town during the warmer months is also gone from the windowsill where it usually hangs from its trucks.

I look again at the trumpet case sitting on the shelf. You know, I actually wish I could play it, because then I would be in music class with Willow. As it stands, this year we have only two classes together, which is a bummer. But I suppose even in music, we wouldn’t get to sit together, because she plays flute in the band, and of course everyone is grouped by instruments.

Then again I shouldn’t complain. Last year we had only one class together.

It was biology. That’s where we first became friends, after being partnered on an assignment. When I think of the chances of just randomly being handed an excuse to talk to her, to have our heads pressed together over a microscope, I have to consider that maybe there is some force in the universe looking out for me.

Or it’s all just chaos and infinite randomness, and I just got really, really lucky.

The class was fun. Our teacher was Mr. Schroeder, a famous character around Crystal Falls High. Normally he taught physics, but he could probably teach any subject—except maybe gym, because of his limp. He looked like a mad scientist and would pace up and down the room, telling strange stories about the mysteries of science.

Mr. Schroeder also has a twin brother, I found out while getting groceries with my mother one time.

“Hey, Mr. Schroeder,” I’d called to the person who looked absolutely identical to my biology teacher, even in the way he dressed. When I ran into him, he was crouched, examining the label on an orange-juice carton.

The man looked up at me in surprise. “Do I know you?” he asked irritably.

I immediately turned red. My own teacher didn’t remember me? That was a new low. “I’m Callum Harris. From biology class?”

“Ah,” the man said, frowning. “You have mistaken me for my brother. He is the one who teaches at the high school, not I.”

“Oh, sorry.”

But the man had already ended our conversation and returned to reading the orange-juice carton.

Luckily our Mr. Schroeder was a lot friendlier than his brother and could crack up the whole class with his bizarre jokes, sometimes disrupting the lesson for minutes at a time. So it was even more of a blow when the principal came in one day with an announcement:

“I’m afraid that Mr. Schroeder has left the staff indefinitely. Miss Fielding will be here momentarily to fill in for today. But starting Monday you will have a replacement teacher.”

The whole room was in shock. “Why?” we demanded to know. “Where did he go?”

“That’s none of your concern,” the principal told us sternly. But seeing our alarmed faces, he softened a little. “Guys, Mr. Schroeder is fine. He has taken a leave of absence for personal reasons. Hopefully he’ll be back at some point. But I can’t say that for certain.”

He never did come back. And we never found out the story behind his leaving. A rumor started that he’d gone crazy. A few students claimed to have seen him hanging around the bridge above the falls and gazing down for hours.

And then one day Bryce and I spotted him at Electronica Veronica, riffling through the wall of old electrical components and muttering to himself. At least we thought it was him, assuming his twin would have less of an interest in such things.

“Diodes, diodes, diodes,” he was saying. “Where are you hiding, my pesky little friends?”

One glimpse of the wild expression on his face and we got the hell out of there before he saw us.

Meanwhile, back at school, we got a new teacher, and the class became mostly boring again. Which meant I could turn my attention to Willow, who turned her attention to inking pretend tattoos on my hand during class until we were finally yelled at. Then we started passing notes and drawings and managed to never get caught again.

I think more about Willow and about the strange phone call. It was like she didn’t know me at all. I decide to look for her messages, which she sends on the computer most days after school. We tried video chatting once, but the PC I inherited from my father is all old and screwed up and useless for anything but homework at this point. Dad promised to buy me a new one, but then I let down my part of the bargain by not coming through with the grades.

I press the Power button and sit back as the machine slowly chugs to life, making its cranky noises and flashing its little lights. When it’s finally finished starting up, I type out my password and press Enter.

The password is rejected.

Hmm. Thinking I must have typed it wrong, I try again. Once again it’s rejected. I press Caps Lock. No luck. I try an older password. And then another. And another. I try every combination of passwords I can remember using during my entire life. Each time I’m locked out.

I slap the side of the monitor in frustration. How am I going to get into this stupid thing?

I decide to pound out the most disgusting word I can think of on the keyboard, something I call Cole when I’m really mad.

And that’s it—I’m in.

I’m still feeling weirded out when the desktop finally appears. There’s another picture of a hot girl on it. This time she’s posing on a red couch and wearing a ridiculous number of black pearl necklaces and not much else. It’s the same girl who is up on the wall, I think, but it’s hard to tell from the heavy makeup and wig she’s got on.

I think I might recognize her—she’s an actress, though I’ve never seen any of the movies she’s in. Chick flicks, mostly, that even Willow won’t watch.

I decide to snoop around the computer. I recognize folder names organized the way I’ve always done it. I look back at the homework and remember some of the topics from last year. But reading them, I don’t remember working on any of these assignments.

Most of them seem hurried, which is my style, all right. Only I like using bigger words to help disguise my laziness, while this stuff is sparse and misspelled. A few recent assignments look like they took quite a lot of work, though, something I can’t imagine doing.

I launch a web browser. Most of my bookmarks are missing. But even stranger, there are sites in my history that I’m not interested in at all. There’s a bunch of links related to sports, and football in particular—which like the collection of trophies makes no sense to me. I’m just not a sports guy. As far as I know, I stopped pretending to like football when Cole quit playing it.

Even back when I did go to games with Mom and Dad, I never knew much about the rules. Whistles would blow, and flags would get thrown, and I would groan or cheer along with the people around me. When Cole was off the field, I just looked at the cheerleaders, to be honest.

So why would I be visiting sports pages, which my browsing history shows someone compulsively doing on this computer? It scares me to admit: Maybe my memory is really fried.

I log in to check my messages, happy I don’t need to enter a password. When they finally load, I can’t believe the sheer number of them. The majority are from people at school. Most of them I don’t know very well, and some of them I can’t stand. But here they are, calling me
bro
and
dude
, writing on my wall and firing off private messages.

The weirdest thing of all is the number from Ivy. Why she would be messaging me is only slightly less mysterious than why she would be making out with me. But whatever the reason, she’s messaged me ten times in the past couple of days alone. I quickly check out what she has to say. She’s worried about me, is losing sleep, and is hoping I’ll call her as soon as possible.

I surprise myself by clicking Reply. I type:

Don’t worry about it. I’m home now. :-) Feeling weird still. Callum.

I send the message.

Most of the rest of the posts and messages are boring. Guys making jokes and swearing in all caps. None of what they’re saying is funny or makes any sense to me.

A chat message pops up—a reply from Ivy. She’s online.

Aww poor baby. Well, let me know if you’re up for a house call. <3

The suggestion is exciting. I start replying but stop myself, deleting what I’ve entered. I’m not ready to start playing games. Dangerous ones. I need to figure out what’s going on.

I decide not to answer.

Reading the rest of my messages, I try to make sense of things. Suddenly one sends a jolt through me. It’s dated the day before I went over the falls.

And it’s from Neil Parson.

Hey, Cal.

Listen, sorry, but I don’t think I can help you out anymore. That was really too close with Mr. Phillips & I’m worried we’re gonna get caught. I will give you your money back, including what you gave me for last week. OK? I’m really, really sorry. I hope you won’t be mad. —Neil

Am I really seeing this? A message from a guy I just told the sheriff I have absolutely nothing to do with, who has since disappeared off the face of the earth?

I’m really, really sorry. I hope you won’t be mad.

I scare myself with how fast I delete the message.

Outside my door I hear Jess coming upstairs. With all the weirdness, I completely forgot about her. Normally she stays pretty close beside me at the dinner table, hoping I’ll toss her something I don’t like. Maybe she was there tonight and I just didn’t notice her.

I could use her affection right now—the comfort of an old friend who never asks questions. I open the bedroom door just as she’s trotting by, on her way to the foot of my mother’s bed, no doubt.

“Hey, Jess,” I call.

I’m shocked as the dog bolts away from me, her ears back.

“Jess!” I shout after her angrily. “Come!”

But she ignores me. I can’t believe it. I trained that dog myself and can usually stop her dead in her tracks with a single command.

I should give her a whack on the snout for it. Because she can’t disobey me like that, living near a busy road where cars blow by at sixty miles per hour. If she runs after one chipmunk, she could be killed. But there is something in her look that stops me from doing it. She seems terrified of me. And that is just wrong.

I close the door again. I’ve had enough. I shut down the computer and get into bed, still wearing my clothes. At least my flannel sheets are the same. They have moose on them and pine trees. They’re so stupid, they’re cool. And they feel very cozy.

I pull up the covers around my neck and eventually fall asleep.

The next morning I wake up to a knock. My mother pokes her head through the doorway.

“Are you feeling up to eating something?” she asks.

Actually I’m starving. I feel like I haven’t eaten in days, and my Harris nose smells bacon frying downstairs.

“Yeah,” I say, salivating. “I’ll be down in a minute.”

Feeling gross and overheated, I throw back the covers. It was a mistake not undressing last night before getting into bed. But at least I don’t have to bother putting on any clothes now.

I get up. I feel a bit better, even in my strange bedroom. But then, the brain is an amazing organ. I remember hearing in class once how they did an experiment where people wore these special glasses that turned everything upside down. They walked around completely disoriented. Then, after a few days, their brains simply turned the world right side up again.

The problem was, when the subjects removed the glasses, everything went back to being upside down. I remember at the time thinking that was funny, but now I can really relate to how scared they must have felt. Luckily for them, the effect wasn’t permanent.

In my case I have no idea what’s going on.

I head to the bathroom. There I find my toothbrush, which is the same color and always the most deformed one in the house, thanks to my hardcore brushing technique. I load up on the toothpaste and work at getting the terrible taste out of my mouth.

While brushing, I notice there are another three toothbrushes instead of the usual two, which is odd.

Finished in the bathroom, I head downstairs. Jess crosses my path at the bottom of the stairs. She stops and backs up to let me go by.

“Good morning, girl,” I say cheerfully. “Come here. . . .”

But the dog won’t budge. Her ears go back again. This is ridiculous. I want to try to make her come, maybe scratch her neck for a while. But the smell of breakfast pulls me away.

Arriving in the kitchen, I get a surprise. Dad is still here. He’s sitting at the table reading the newspaper. Just like old times, only I haven’t seen this sight in two years now. And even more unexpected is the fact that he’s in pajamas.