“Tell me a story.”
Grandma smiled through a nest of wrinkles and brushed a lock of wavy blonde hair off my brow. “Another? Three books weren’t enough?”
“Not a book story. One of your stories.”
“It’s late…”
Downstairs, my parents’ voices rose as they argued about Daddy’s job. Again. Grandma sat back down on the edge of the bed. The quilt was one she had stitched herself, with pink and red flowers. My favorite colors.
“How can I resist?” She touched a finger to the dimple in my left cheek. “Just a short one.”
I beamed and settled deeper into my pillow.
“Once upon a time, there was a Little Light. She was born on the wick of a tall white candle and lived among a thousand other flames. Her world was filled with gold and warmth and good things. The Light danced and flickered, practiced stretching herself tall. And she was happy…”
“Until?”
Grandma’s stories always had an ‘until.’ The problem that messed everything up but showed the characters what they needed or wanted most.
“Until,” Grandma said, “a fierce wind gusted and blew out all the other candles. Alone in the dark, Little Light clung to her wick and survived.”
“I don’t know if I like this story,” I said, pulling the covers up to my chin. “I don’t like being alone in the dark.”
“The Little Light was scared, too. But she learned to grow tall again and shine.”
“Alone? She was alone in the dark forever?”
“Not forever. But long enough.”
“Long enough for what?”
“To discover that she may have been one light among many, but she had her own fire.”
“I don’t understand. She was happier with the other lights.”
“Yes. But among them, she couldn’t see herself, nor know how brightly she shone. She had to be cast into darkness in order to see her own brilliance.”
I frowned, only a glimmer of understanding touching my eight-year-old awareness.
Grandma cupped my cheek. Her hand was strong. It hadn’t yet begun to wither under the pall of cancer that would take her a year later.
“Someday, Willow, you might find yourself cast into darkness too. I hope that day never comes. If it does, it will be scary at first. But you will see your own brilliance. Your own strength. And you will shine.”
I asked Grandma for Little Light’s story many times. She said it was a folktale from her childhood in Ireland. Years later, I tried to look it up at the library. I searched book after book of Celtic legend and lore, but I couldn’t find the tale of Little Light.
Instead, the dark found me.
Two weeks after my seventeenth birthday.
A cell phone photo I never should have sent. A party at my house. A dance with a boy. A spiked drink.
The dark was thick and suffocating as the boy, Xavier Wilkinson, made my own bed a prison. A mouth relentless on mine, stealing my air. A hand around my throat. His body crushing me. Smothering. Snuffing me out.
Alone in the dark, Little Light clung to her wick and survived.
I clung, too. In the morning, my mind remembered only slivers while my soul knew everything. I opened my eyes and even in the bright, searing sunshine, I was in the dark. Like feeling alone in a crowded room. A stranger in a new city. Forever detached and cast adrift from all that I was and all that I had hoped to be.
I saw no light. Not a day later. Or a week. Weeks that piled up into months.
Maybe not ever.
“We’re moving,” my father declared over his rare prime rib. His mashed potatoes were pink with blood.
“Moving?” I asked, pushing my own plate away.
“Yes, to Indiana,” my mother said.
The tight anger in her voice told me she hated the idea of leaving New York City. I should’ve been pissed off too. A normal girl would be outraged. You don’t move in December of your senior year of high school. Leave your friends you’ve spent twelve years making, and everything you know.
I wasn’t normal.
“Why there?” I asked. Why not India, or Timbuktu, or the fucking moon? It was all the same to me.
My parents exchanged a look before my mother said, “Your father’s been reassigned.”
“Mr. Wilkinson wants me to head up Wexx’s Midwest operations. They need me to sort out some of their more delinquent franchise owners. Reorganize and rejuvenate. It’s a very lucrative promotion…”
His words faded out as the name stabbed me with a phantom pain, ripping through my midsection. A torrent of words—more than I’d spoke in a month—poured out in a current of irrational rage.
“Oh really? Mr. Wilkinson decided you should up and leave the city? Just like that? Around Christmas?”
My mother covered her eyes with a bejeweled hand. “Willow…”
“And of course, you said yes,” I said. “No questions asked.” I gave a mock salute. “Yes, sir, Mr. Wilkinson, sir.”
“He’s my boss,” Dad said, his voice turning hard, the first sign that his short fuse was lit. “He’s the reason you have food on the table and a roof over your head. It shouldn’t matter where that roof is.” He looked at my mother. “You should be grateful.”
“Grateful.” I scoffed.
“Since when do you have so much hatred for Mr. Wilkinson?” Dad demanded. “What’s he ever done to you?”
Not him, I thought. His son.
“How about how he doesn’t care that I’m being uprooted in the middle of the school year?” I said.
“Does it matter?” my mother asked, waving her spoon in the air, as if hoping to conjure the answer. “Since August, you’ve completely changed. You don’t talk to your friends anymore. You’ve stopped wearing makeup, you don’t care about your hair or clothes…”
I rolled my eyes, while inwardly I winced. Putting on makeup and caring about clothes both required looking in a mirror, something I didn’t do much of anymore. And my blonde hair was probably too long—almost down to my waist—but it made a good shield to avoid eye contact. Like now.
I turned my head and let my hair fall, a wall between my mother and me.
She huffed loudly in her typical dramatic fashion. “What’s going on with you? I’m so tired of asking this question and getting no answer. You used to be a straight-A student. You had your sights set on an Ivy League college, and now I feel as if you couldn’t care less about anything.”
I ignored her. “Where in Indiana?” I asked my father.
“Indianapolis,” Dad said. “I’ll be working in the city, but there’s a little town called Harmony, just a few miles south. Your mother’s right. You’ve changed, and the only thing we can surmise is that you’ve fallen in with a bad crowd. Moving you out of Manhattan to a small town seems the best thing to do, which is why I said yes to this opportunity.”
Bullshit.
We were moving because Mr. Wilkinson told my dad he had to move. It had nothing to do with me. My parents loved me the way you’d love a piece of art: an object to keep in the house and admire with the hopes it will someday be valuable. Ever since the night of the party—a party I’d thrown without their knowledge—I’d become an eyesore to them.
The truth was without this job, my father would be sunk. He’d been at Wexx Oil & Gas for three decades. He was far too embedded to start over at another company. In his house, my father was strict and demanding, taking out his lack of control at his job on us. Because at Wexx, when Ross Wilkinson said, “Jump,” my father jumped. This time, all the way to Indiana.
“And you, Willow Anne Holloway,” Dad said, waving his fork like a tyrannical king with a scepter, “are going to find some extracurricular activities. And that’s non-negotiable. Your college applications are a disgrace.”
I didn’t reply. He was right, but I just didn’t give a shit.
“It’ll be a nice change all around,” he declared. “Instead of this townhouse, we’ll have a huge house on a few acres of land. Lots of space. More than you can even imagine. And fresh country air instead of city smog…”
He kept talking but I tuned him out. Words had become so meaningless to me. I had to keep my most important ones locked behind my teeth. The time to tell what happened to me with Xavier Wilkinson had long passed. As soon as I washed my sheets and burned my clothes, it became too late. If I let the truth out now, it’d swirl into a violent storm that would raze my father’s career and destroy my mother’s lifestyle.
If they believed me at all.
“Are the Wilkinsons moving to Indiana also?” I asked.
“Of course not,” Dad said. “Headquarters is still here. I’ll be running their Midwest branch. And since Xavier is still at Amherst—”
“Can I be excused?”
Without waiting for an answer, I picked up my plate of hardly-touched food and carried it to the kitchen. I dumped it in the sink, then hurried through the living room. It was decorated for Christmas, complete with a glittering, elegantly decorated, completely fake tree. When she was alive, my grandmother insisted we get a live tree to fill the room with green scents and warmth. Garlands of popcorn and clay ornaments I’d made in grade school. But she was gone, and our townhouse looked less like a home and more like a department store decorated for the holidays.
I ran upstairs, the name Xavier Wilkinson chasing me.
I tried not to let myself think of him. He didn’t even have a name in my reckoning. He didn’t deserve one. Names are for humans.
X. That’s what he was. An X. X marks the spot. If I were to draw myself, he would still be on me: five-foot-four with long thick wavy blonde hair, blue eyes, a dimple in my left cheek my grandma had loved, and a big black X scratched over the entirety of me. X marks the spot, on me, on the mattress, like a pirate’s map. What was plundered. Pillaged. Ra—
(we don’t think that word)
I locked my door and hauled the covers off the bed, onto the floor. I hadn’t slept in my bed since the night of the party. There was a black X on it too. I didn’t sleep much on the floor either. Horrifying night terrors assaulted me on the regular, and I’d wake up paralyzed, unable to breathe; the ghostly pressure of a mouth on mine, hands around my throat, and a body, pressing me down, crushing me, until I felt like I was being buried alive.
Bundled up on the hardwood floor in a plain gray comforter—X had ruined my grandmother’s beautiful quilt—I lay on my side, staring at the stacks of books piled on the floor, the shelves, the windowsill. When I needed to escape, I ran into their pages. In them, I could be someone else for a little while. To live a life other than this one.
Maybe this move won’t be so bad after all, I thought, my finger tracing the spines. A new story.
My sleeve pulled back a little when I reached to touch my books. I tugged it back further and examined the little black X’s that marched in a wavy line from the crook of my elbow to my wrist. Like insects. I reached for the black Sharpie I kept hidden under my pillow and added a few more.
X marks the spot.
My hope that Harmony would give me something better died. So long as I was the main character, my horrible story would remain the same.
Until.