White Space (5 page)

Then a real memory—what a weird way to think about it—floated from the fog of her thoughts. “If we go back, won’t your parents make you do that dogsled thing for wannabe warrior-women?” Emma asked.

“Yeah, but compared to this?” Lily grunted. “Dog shit looks pretty good.”

WHEN EMMA WOKE
up yesterday morning, life had still been pretty normal. Well, as normal as it got for a kid with a head full of metal, killer headaches, visions that appeared more or less at random, chunks of lost time, and nowhere to go over Christmas break.

Heading north hadn’t been the plan. The stroke over a year ago turned Jasper into a zucchini—on June 9, to be exact: her birthday, and Jasper’s, too. They always had two cakes: ginger cake with buttercream frosting for him, dark chocolate with velvety chocolate ganache for her. She’d been jamming candles into Jasper’s cake—try fitting fifty-eight candles so
you didn’t get a bonfire—when, all of a sudden, something right over her head
banged
so hard the cottage’s windows rattled. Racing upstairs, she’d found Jasper, out cold, sprawled in a loose-limbed jumble like a broken, discarded doll. These days, Jasper languished in a dark room, his head turned to a white sliver of window hemmed by coal-black shutters. He wore diapers. He was mute. The entire left side of his face looked artificial, like a waxen mask melting under too much heat. His left lower eyelid drooped, the eye itself the color of milky glass, and his mouth hung so wide she could see the ruin of his teeth and the bloated dead worm of his tongue. The last time Emma ventured in to read aloud—she and Jasper used to make a game of trying to finish
Edwin Drood
—Sal, the lizard-eyed, pipe-puffing live-in, shooed her away. When Jasper had been boss, Sal behaved. Now, with the old bat out of the attic, Emma felt about as welcome as a case of head lice.

Best to stay in Madison. The Holten folks had paired Emma, on full scholarship (which translated to
smart and weird but poor
), with Mariane, a Jewish exchange student from London who was big into decorative art. Seeing as how Emma worked glass, that was all good. So she and Mariane would eat Chinese and see a movie, which, apparently, Jewish people all over the world did on Christmas. Maybe chill with a couple Beta boys at the university, drink beer, eat Christmas brats. Binge on
X-Files
and
Lost
and watch the Badgers get slaughtered in the Rose Bowl. All-American, Wisconsin stuff like that.

She could use the time to throttle back, too. Head over to the hot shop and work a pendant design she’d mulled over for months: a galaxy sculpted in miniature from glass, encased in glass, yet small and light enough to wear around her neck.
When she mentioned her idea, the gaffer cracked,
Maybe we’ll start calling you Orion, like that cat
. She’d laughed along with him and the other glassblowers, but
Men in Black
and that cat’s amulet
had
given her the idea in the first place. Not everything had to stay make-believe.

So that was the plan, anyway—until that asshole Kramer called her to his office, shut the door, and said, “
Ms. Lindsay, we need to

HAVE A LITTLE
chat about that last assignment.”

“Okay,” Emma says. She watches Kramer withdraw a mug of steaming Mighty Leaf green tea from his microwave. A little alarm is
ding-ding-dinging
in her head. He hasn’t offered her any. Not that she minds: green tea tastes like old gym socks, and the Mighty Mouse brand, no matter how swank, probably does, too. For him not to offer, though, she must be in
deep
doo-doo. “Is something wrong, Professor Kramer?”

“Is … something … 
wrong
?” Kramer gives his tea bag a vicious squish between his fingers. He sets, he chucks; Mighty Mouse goes
ker-splat
against the far wall. On a corner of Kramer’s desk, a radio mutters about
the continuing investigation into a young girl’s gruesome discovery of eight …

“ ’Orrible
murders and ghastly crimes,” Kramer grates in an angry, exaggerated cockney, and stabs the radio to silence. “These screaming twenty-four-hour news cycles are as bad as Victorian tabloids.” He fires a glare through prissy Lennon specs. “Well, yes, you might say there’s something
wrong
, Ms.
Lindsay. I’m trying to decide if I should merely flunk you out of this course, or get you booted out of Holten, despite your circumstances. Just what kind of game do you think you’re playing?”

She’s so flabbergasted her jaw unhinges. “P-Professor Kramer, wh-what did I
do
?”

In answer, Kramer jerks open his desk drawer hard enough to make the pens chatter and yanks out a sheaf of paper-clipped pages, which he tosses onto his desk. “You might have gotten away with this … this
rubbish
if I was any other instructor, but I’m writing a
book
on the man, for God’s sake. No one except researchers is allowed access to this material. What, did you think I’d simply ignore this? Time to wake up, Ms. Lindsay. I’m not the headmaster, I don’t care about your sad little history, and I’m sure as hell not your bloody psychiatrist. Now I want to know where you got it.”

She has no idea what he’s talking about. Her eyes fall to the first page:

“Got it?” She swallows. “I
wrote
it.”

Kramer’s ears flare Coke-can red. “You’ve got balls, I’ll give you that. Where did you get this? Did you download it from a pirate site?”

She’s getting a very bad feeling about this.
Oh boy, is that
possible? No, don’t be silly. The guy’s dead
. “I-I don’t know what you’re t-talking about, sir.”

“You want to play it that way? Fine.” Kramer tweezes out a single sheet. “Take a good, hard look at
this
and then convince me why you shouldn’t be expelled.”

This is not happening; this is a nightmare
. Tears threaten.
Shit, don’t cry
. She does what Kramer wants—and as her burning eyes trip over the watery letters and spaces of one word, then jump over white space to the next word and the next and the next, it’s as if an invisible fist has wrapped around her throat and begun to squeeze.

A wave of unreality washes over Emma. A sudden headache spikes right where it always does, under that lacy cranial plate the doctors screwed into place between her eyes so her brain wouldn’t bubble out. (When the doctors had first shown her the
plate, she’d thought,
Great, the perfect accessory for every occasion
.) The pain is blinding, and she shuts her eyes against the sudden tilt as the world seems to slump and run like superheated glass.

“Right. Wasn’t that interesting, Emma? I thought it was. And now let’s listen to
yours
, shall we? You’ve no objection if I read while you follow along?” Kramer asks, but it’s one of those rhetorical questions a person knows better than to answer. As Kramer drones, she stares at words and sentences that, up to five seconds ago, she thought were hers alone.

“Other than your substitution of Wisconsin for Wyoming?” Kramer drills her with a look. “You see my problem.”

Emma just shakes her head. She is so mortified she wants to melt into the linoleum. God, maybe she really should be better about taking those damn pills. Better to be a zombie than feel this.

“I said,
write
in the style of Frank McDermott,” Kramer seethes. “I didn’t say
steal
.”

THE SEMINAR WAS
a mistake.

She’d had an open slot for a junior-year elective. Any class coy enough to be called “Out of Their Minds: Madness and the Creative Process” made her nervous. Her adviser was more direct:
Are you sure about this?
The admin people at Holten Prep knew her … ah … shall we say,
unusual
circumstances. But since the only other alternative was animal husbandry, which was a Wisconsin thing and included a unit on neutering piglets, it was kind of a no-brainer.

What she hadn’t realized was that Kramer meant for them to write the occasional story in the style of
fill-in-the-blank
. This was a problem. Creative writing already weirded her out, and now she had to crawl around the heads of these guys, too? Seriously? Most of these writers ended up killing themselves. But there was no way she was getting sucked into making little Wilbur squeal.

The Bell Jar
had been on this past summer’s reading list, and she’d decided to get a jump on it, starting right after finals and a couple days before her seventeenth birthday. Well … 
big
mistake. The book completely freaked her out. Somehow she got … she became
lost
, slipping into the story the way
she might slide into a tight pair of skinny jeans, and then into Esther’s head. Started looking at the world differently, too, as if staring through a bizarre set of lenses that showed her phantoms no one else could see. And once or twice, swear to God, she heard someone call her name, only to turn and find no one there.

Yet that feeling was … 
familiar
, somehow. Like,
I know this. This once happened. At some point, I was really and truly nuts
. As if by reading all about Esther Greenwood, Plath’s stand-in for herself, she was remembering what it was like to go slowly insane; to be trussed in a straitjacket and forced to gag back too-sweet medicines and then locked away beneath a bell jar to rave. Which was crazy.

The Bell Jar
was bad: an infection, a fever raging through her body, burning her up. It got so awful she spent a couple hours studying a wickedly jagged razor of clear glass, filched from the discards bucket at the hot shop, and thinking,
What if? Go on, do it, you coward. You know you want to; you know this is the best way, the only way to pass through into …

Through? Into
what?
What she’d found down in Jasper’s cellar years ago? (And nope, no way she was thinking about
that
, nosirreebob.) And go where? Who the hell knew?

She hadn’t sliced and diced—obviously—but the temptation to cut, to filet herself, really hack those arteries and watch the blood bubble, still occasionally slithered into her mind like the black tangle of a nightmare she just couldn’t shake.

Honestly, after that whole
Bell Jar
mess, the prospect of studying the work of insane writers, slipping into their skins, made lopping off Wilbur’s balls almost attractive. But she was stuck.

THE CLASS HAD
started with science fiction, which was okay, although Kramer was in love with the sound of his I’m-from-Cambridge-and-you’re-not voice:
To paraphrase the incomparable though deeply disturbed Philip K. Dick, whoever manipulates words manipulates the existential texture of reality, as we blahdiddy-blahdiddy-blah-blah
. But when Kramer began bloviating about quantum foam and Schrödinger’s cat and dark matter and more
blahdiddy-blahdiddy-blah-blah
, and everyone else was
oh, awesome, that’s like, dude, so
Star Trek … she just couldn’t help herself. Dark matter could only be inferred. In the case of Schrödinger’s kitty, collapsing probabilities through observation had
nothing
to do with massless particles popping out of quantum foam. And quantum effects
could
be observed on the macroscopic level at near absolute zero within the energy sink of a Bose-Einstein condensate, which therefore proved Hardy’s Paradox regarding the interaction of quantum and anti-quantum particles that might actually coexist in related timelines and alternative universes …

A single death glare from Kramer, though, and she clammed up. Fine. Be ignorant. Mangle science. See what she cared.

After that, the class drifted to horror, specifically Wisconsin’s Most Famous Crazy Dead Writer, Frank McDermott, who was originally from somewhere in Wyoming and lived in England a good long time, but who was keeping score? Besides writing a bazillion mega-bestsellers, McDermott’s claim to fame was getting blown to smithereens by his equally wacko nutjob
of a wife. (Ed Gein, Jeffrey Dahmer, Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin murders, McDermott—Wisconsin was full of ’em. Had to be something in the water.) With his
new! important! biography!
Kramer hoped to solve the BIG MYSTERY: where was Waldo … er, Frank? Because, after the explosion, not one scrap of McDermott remained, not even his teeth. Which was a little strange.