“Paxton Shaw…that’s me, right? Yeah,” I mutter to myself, huffing as I walk
down the street with my hands stuffed into my pockets, my breath white in the
freezing air. Snow swirls vaguely in the
wind, tiny flakes sticking to the ice on the lank grass and melting on the
street and the sidewalk, leaving them a wet, slippery mess of cracked concrete.
I haven’t heard a human voice all
morning. Everyone is gone, and there’s
no one to talk to but me. Am I going to
disappear too? I don’t want to forget
me. “I’m Paxton Shaw. My parents are Daniel and Colin Shaw. I have a sister, Ainsley, and she’s six years
old. My best friends are Rachel Bishop
and Stefan Faulk. Oh…damn it…”
Stefan.
I stop moving, scanning the empty houses in
front of me. I haven’t even made it to the end of the street.
How could I have forgotten about Stefan? He stayed with us last night, climbed in
through the window and crawled into bed right between Rachel and me. So he’s gone too, then.
No, they’re not gone. I don’t know where they are, but I will find
them. I can’t help but see Ainsley’s face, though, her hazel eyes round and
wet, her chubby cheeks bright with spots of red like they always are when she’s
scared. Is she with Papa or is she
just…alone?
“Pax!”
Stefan…
I whip around but there’s no one there, no
sound but silence and the wind soughing through the trees that rise up behind
the houses. Our neighborhood is nothing
but a swath of clearing cut into an old forest. That was Stefan’s voice. I’ve been hearing that voice since before I
could walk, back when he was a chubby toddler pretending he was big enough to
push me in the baby swings.
“Stefan?”
No answer.
“Stefan!”
Nothing but the wind rustling and the sudden
flash of snow blowing into my eyes, snow from a cloudless purple sky. I turn to the side, shading my eyes, and I see
the house on the corner up ahead, a two-story red brick house, with vines
creeping up the sides, clinging to the windows. Stefan’s house.
I run, my chest tight and heavy. I’ve walked up to every house I’ve passed,
peering through the blind-less windows and hoping to see Mr. Calgary reading
the newspaper at the kitchen table or getting his horde of children ready for
school, but no matter which window I’m pressed against, inside there’s always
the same thing—empty walls, little or no furniture and the kind of scraps of
trash on the floor that get left behind when people move, before the realtor
has a chance to come in and clean.
Maybe Stefan’s house is different. Maybe he didn’t
want to wake me this morning and went home early before…whatever…happened. Let there be something different there, I
think before breaking into a run. I’m
tall and bony, all elbows, knees and gangly lines, with few of the curves other
girls seem to be growing and even less in the way of breasts. They’re more like beestings than anything
else. It’s good though. Long legs and a lean body helps me run faster,
helps me sprint the long yards to the corner house in moments. Running feels good, exhilarating. Running makes me feel like I’m actually doing
something. It always has.
I stop in the yard, my feet pressed together
on a thick granite stepping stone, now overgrown and cracked in half. That door hasn’t opened for me in a year, not
since Stefan came out to his parents and his mother decided my dads were a bad
influence on him. Now I only see him at
school and at night when he sneaks in through my window, leaving again before
the sun rises.
Well, it’s open now.
It hangs crookedly on
rusted hinges, vines grown wild across the surface of the brick, so thick the
brick can’t even be seen in most places.
I push the door wider and squeeze through the
crack, but hope falls flat just over the threshold. Stefan’s house is no better than the others. The wallpaper’s yellowed and peeling from the
walls, the tile floor cracked and left bare after the gutting of all the
furniture. So far my house is the only
one I’ve seen with any furnishings left at all, like my family left in more of
a rush than the others.
Such a rush that they forgot to take me with
them. Swallowing hard, I duck my head and spit out a curse that would make Dad
smack me a good one. They didn’t leave
me. They wouldn’t.
I head for the stairs,
stepping lightly on wood that is probably rotten.
Wait.
There’s a handprint on
the wall near the top, a bright blue one that stands out starkly against the dusty
white of the flaking plaster. Be
something, I think. Tell me something. I touch me finger to the print, and the very
tip pulls away, cold and blue. Paint.
There’s wet paint on the wall.
“Come
on, Superboy!” I yell, sounding a lot calmer than I actually am. Anyone could be in the rooms up here, or gone
already. All I know is someone with
hands bigger than Ainsley’s has been here in the last hour. “Tell me you’re up here trying to work out
the new super-symbol you’ll use every time you interrupt a mugging or pull a
squirrel out of traffic.”
Still no answer, but why
should I be surprised? Whether it’s a
dream or the start of a new living nightmare, silence is my new reality. I study the handprint, my fingers tracing
just outside its edges, my feet poised on the top two steps. It’s small enough that I know it wasn’t a
person Papa’s size, or even Dad’s, which means it was probably a woman or a
teenager, someone closer to my size. It’s
smeared too, with long finger-streaks of blue trailing away from the fingers of
the print and down the hall. I follow
them around until they trail into nothingness at Stefan’s door.
“Stefan?” I call, stepping inside.
Fear freezes my muscles and leaves me hollow
because Stefan’s room isn’t empty like all the others. Stefan’s room is like it always was, except
it’s very, very wrong. Everything is
frantically tumbled—dressers drawers pulled wide, clothes strewn across the
floor, posters pulled from the walls and ripped apart. Slashes cut through sheets and pillows, glass
shattered on the floor, crunching under my feet even just two steps inside the
door.
What
were they looking for? Did they find it?
Or
him?
Did
someone hurt Stefan?
I
can’t move. I mean, what am I supposed
to hope for here? Did they take
something I need, someone I love? Or was
it someone I love who was here, doing this?
If so, did they find what they were looking for, and will it help me
find them? And is it okay for me to just
be relieved, even exhilarated that the paint is wet, that the room still looks
like Stefan’s no matter what’s been done to it?
Is it okay to be happy that someone,
whoever and wherever they are, is still alive?
I’m not alone.
I’m not alone, and for
the first time today, I’m smiling.
Blue paint is splattered over the pale gray
walls, words scrawled in frantic fury: I’m not what I seem.
I turn around, catching sight of the open
window and blowing curtains, and the words Find
it in dripping paint beside the window, childish finger-paintings of what
look like waves or maybe just squiggles dabbled beneath and beside it.
The white closet doors are so splattered with blue
it looks like someone dropped a bucket from the ceiling and left the mess
behind. I pull the doors open,
half-expecting to find Stefan gagged on the closet floor, but it’s just
empty. Everything that belongs in his
room is in it, as far as I can see, even the half-eaten box of peanut butter cereal
that could always be found on his floor.
The closet, though, had been completely stripped. I can’t remember what used to be in it, but I
know it was never empty.
No, no it’s not
completely empty.
I kneel and reach into the back corner,
tugging a crumpled piece of paper from its place, half-stuffed under the
baseboard and then forgotten. Flattening
it out as best I can, I squint at the small, cramped writing on the top half of
the page.
Shadow on the wall and I spin toward the
window, shoving the paper in my pocket as I run to clutch at the splintered
sill, scanning the street and ignoring the eerie, injured sky.
A girl.
Her skin is darker than my own light brown. It’s that beautiful kind of brown I’ve always
wished I had, the brown so dark it’s almost black, so dark it gleams with light
even on an unreal day like this, with unnatural skies and snow that falls from
clouds that just aren’t there. She clutches
her arms, shivering in a pink tank top and pajama shorts, her bare feet
stumbling over cracks in the sidewalk.
My heart seizes in my chest and I lean so far
out the window as I watch her hesitate in front of the house that I practically
leap from the roof. “Ray!” I yell, my voice frantic, like there’s a chance she
won’t hear me from fifty feet away. “Ray, I’m up here!”
She looks up, relief evident on her face for a
moment, but then her eyes stretch wide and all her muscles tighten with fear.
“Ray?” I call again, looking around for the
source of her fear. “Ray, what’s wrong?”
She shakes her head, backs away. Stumbles and falls, chokes out a sobbing
scream and takes off around the corner, heading west on Redwood Gates.
I really do scramble out onto the porch roof
now, easing my feet across dying shingles and taking Stefan’s long-proven
pathway down to the yard. Even with the
vines it’s a short, easy drop from the sloping porch roof to the metal toolshed
on the side of the house, and then to the ground. I don’t even stop to work the landing ache
from my legs before I take off after Ray.
Two blocks on and the road splits in a way I
don’t remember. Instead of a straight path
ahead and a short street to the right, there’s no street at all ahead. It’s a dead end, with one street branching
left and the other right. There are no
houses that I can see. Nothing known,
nothing familiar, only woods to the left and bare hills to the right, topped
with what looks like ice, or maybe sand.
“Okay.” There’s that word again, but what else is
there to say? It’s one thing for people
to move, for furnishings, cars and clothes to disappear because it
happens. People leave, right? They
move, and they start new lives.
Sometimes they even leave people behind.
But entire streets vanishing and others popping up out of nowhere? I’ve lived in this neighborhood for as long
as I can remember, and there’s never been a street to the left here, just a
little cul-de-sac on the right and Regency Gates, which continues winding
forward until it hits the highway. Of
course, I’ve also never seen it snow here in September, and yesterday afternoon
Ray and I were playing volleyball in Mr. Calgary’s huge impeccable and not even
slightly overgrown backyard. A lot can
change in a day, more than I thought possible.
Did Ray go left or right here? Forest or beach?
Closing my eyes, I just breathe, thinking. Where is she? Where would I go if I were running from
something and had no idea what I was running toward? Where did you go, Ray? Don’t run from me…
I open my eyes and feel the splatter of
something wet.
Paint…
Paint is falling like snow from the sky, leaving
wet droplets at my feet and on my skin, splotches of bright blue on the
concrete sidewalk, trickling down onto the street itself and tapping a pattern
of drops toward the street on the right, more falling with each gust of wind.
I hesitate, step left. Hesitate again and head to the right, running
on a thin black path through sand dunes topped with cracked shells of ice.
A scream far ahead and I stumble.
That’s Ray’s voice. Ray is screaming, a
wordless blast of anger and fear.
“I’m
coming,” I whisper, my throat too tight with panic to yell. I’ve found her. I’ve found her, and something’s trying to
take her from me. Hold on, Ray. I’m coming.
Just hide somewhere, okay? Hide
until I can help you.
I scramble for a weapon, any weapon, and pull
a half-buried tree limb from the sand of a dune, gripping it like a club as I
run.
The road ends and there’s only sand and hills
and wind blowing grit into my eyes.
The sound of snapping teeth and a cold snarl.
I climb a dune and see figures moving in the
distance, up against the next sand monolith.
Ray.
She’s stuffed herself back into some kind of
hole in the hillside, a tiny cavern of ice crafted from water that trickled
down through the sand and froze there, leaving just enough space for a bent
body.
Two dogs snap at her, snarling and trying
desperately to shove their heads into the opening of the cave.
“Get out of here!” I yell, running for
her. Not close enough. It’s way too far. “Leave her alone!”
The dogs snap again and
I see her hands reach past the edge of the cave, shoving at the huge white
head.
Oh, God…
Finally close enough, I
swing my club and keep running, struggling to hit something, anything but Ray.
The white dog leaps at me, its black tongue
hanging from its mouth and its teeth closing on my arm, but I swing again and
catch it in the hind leg, clip the other one on the chin and it yips, calling
to its partner as it takes off, heading for the distant woods that are now
behind me. The white one growls and shakes its head, torn
between the fight and having to fight alone. I swing again and miss, but the dog drops my arm
and slinks away, tail between its legs, whimpering a sad little whuff as it
darts back into the blowing sand.
I drop to my knees and shove my head into the
little cave, blinking in the glitter of the ice walls. “Ray?”
All I see is movement and a shadow, and then
her foot slams into my face.
Nothing but white and pain and the crackle of
my nose breaking, hot taste of blood as it drips into my open mouth.
I cough, spit, stagger backward. “Shit.” I cough again and spit blood, blinking to
clear the white light from my eyes. “Holy
flaming tarballs, Ray, what the hell did you do that for? I’m trying to help!”
Silence from the cave.
Then a sniffle, then the hopeful shift of
limbs on ice and sand. Then—soft,
tentative—Ray’s voice. “Pax?”
