Chapter Three
Voices blared inside my head like a trumpet, singing off-key and out of sync. Flailing my arms, I bolted upright. My heart beat too fast. When I tried to swallow, my throat was on fire. The room spun, and my head felt too heavy for my neck to hold.
“Make it stop.” Elizabeth’s muffled voice came from somewhere beside me.
When my head cleared, I remembered I was in Elizabeth’s bedroom. Taking in the familiar walls covered with movie posters and photographs, my pulse returned to a normal rate. Nervous laughter sprang from my lips thinking how scared I’d been when I first woke up. Music still blasted from somewhere across the room.
“Make it stop,” Elizabeth repeated, burying her face deeper into her feather pillow.
I fumbled with the heavy drapes surrounding her bed. When I finally found an opening, I tumbled to the floor with a thud. My feet sunk into the plush carpeting as I limped toward the noise. My foot ached, and the bandages were stiff with dried blood.
“Practice,” I called to Elizabeth. She was still laying in bed and moaning.
“Let’s skip,” came her muffled reply.
“I can’t,” I said, already heading to her closet to scrounge up workout clothes. “Remember, I’m the captain.”
I was honored when Coach Peters chose me to be captain of Westwood High’s Varsity Women’s lacrosse team. But the responsibility that came with leadership sucked. Every girl on the team could opt out of three Saturday practices per season, except for me. As captain, my presence was mandatory.
“Well, el cap-i-tan,” Elizabeth drawled each syllable from her sanctuary. “I’m exercising my right to miss today’s practice.”
“You can’t,” I countered. “Devon already called dibs on bailing, and I need a ride.”
Our first game was the next Friday, and this would be Devon’s third missed practice. Coach Peters would be furious. Part of me thought she had made me captain in the hope that I would keep Devon in line.
Like me, Devon made varsity as a freshman. Without a doubt, she was the better player of the two of us. Devon was a natural at everything: academics, sports, popularity. She wasn’t used to losing. While Devon assured me that she was happy I’d been selected for captain, I knew it secretly bothered her. She was irresponsible and lacked focus—Coach Peters’ words, not mine—and had therefore been passed over for the position.
“Fiiiiiiiiine.” Elizabeth gave an exaggerated sigh. “Pick out some clothes for me, I’ll take a cold shower and wake my brain.” With that, Liz disappeared into her bathroom. After a minute, I heard running water.
Plodding down the hallway, I used the guest bathroom to get cleaned up. The cut on my foot looked better, though still puffy and red. As I showered, I tried to recall the dream that startled me awake. Other than water, I couldn’t remember anything. Not that I normally remembered my dreams after waking up; the only one that always stuck with me was recurring from my childhood and starred a green-faced witch that chased me into a cage. Yeah, I loved the Wizard of Oz. Still, my inability to recall the details of this one bothered me. Remembering felt somehow important, like it mattered in the grand scheme of life.
Since time was short, I skipped washing my hair even though the stench of lake water clung to the strands. When I tried to brush out the tangles, the bristles snagged at the base of my skull. Frustrated, I switched to using my fingers to comb through the matted pieces. Something sharp sliced my skin. It felt like a paper cut. On the tip of my finger, one small drop of blood welled. Feeling around the lump in my head, I discovered that several sharp pieces of something were stuck in my hair. My anxiety spiked as I worked them free. Dread settled in my bones when I finlly saw . My nervous thoughts were confirmed when I examined the small slivers. They weren’t glass. Instead, each shard was identical to the blue-green one that had been lodged into my foot.
I swallowed thickly, closed my eyes. Counting to ten, I fought to calm my racing heart.
They’re just shards of rock, I told myself. Just like I’d told Devon the night before. Once I felt more in control, I opened my eyes and stared at my reflection over the porcelain sink basin.
“There was nothing in the water,” I said aloud. “Your mind was playing tricks on you. Mermaids are not real.”
My jaw clenched, the muscles around my mouth twitching noticeably.
****
Twenty minutes later, Elizabeth pulled her BMW into Westwood High’s jock lot. The school was so big, it needed five parking areas for all the students, teachers, and staff. The ‘jock lot’ was the one closest to the locker rooms. The j.v. and varsity girls were already congregated nearby, stretching on the practice field.
Elizabeth and I grabbed our sticks from the trunk and dashed across the grass to join them.
“You’re late, Andrews,” Coach Peters called as I took my place in the center of the circle. Next to me was the JV captain, a sophomore named Anna Beth Walters.
“Sorry,” I apologized. Dropping my stick to the grass, I mimicked Anna Beth.
“You and Bowers owe me suicides on the hill,” Coach said pointedly. She gestured to the steep, grassy slope behind the practice field.
I caught Elizabeth’s gaze across the circle.
“I’m so sorry,” she mouthed. I shook my head to let her know it was fine.
Frequently relying on Devon for rides to practice meant that I was often late. It wasn’t the first time that Coach punished my tardiness by making me run that hill. And it definitely wouldn’t be my last.
Practice went as well as I could’ve hoped on four hours of nightmarish sleep. During the warm-up drills, I was sluggish and dropped several easy passes. Most of my shots on goal went wide. Since I normally played defense, that wasn’t unusual.
Elizabeth didn’t fare much better. She was normally one of our leading scorers, but Liz missed every shot she attempted. Each time the ball sailed over the goalie’s head, Coach Peters’ jaw clenched tighter. She was definitely keeping a mental tally of our respective screw-ups to assign a corresponding number of suicides. Sighing, I dreaded the lecture that was undoubtedly coming.
“Sorry I missed your party last night, Eel. Want to do a birthday lunch?” Anna Beth called.
Coach had just dismissed both teams. Even though Anna Beth was two years younger, we’d grown close since our captain duties often brought us together. She’d evidently decided to be responsible the previous night and declined the invitation to my surprise party.
“Andrews owes me sprints,” Coach Peters growled with a malicious glint in her eyes.
She totally gets off on watching us suffer, I thought.
“Maybe next week,” I called back. Anna Beth shot me a sympathetic smile before scurrying after her teammates.
As I walked dejectedly towards Elizabeth and Coach Peters, I noticed that our assistant coach was placing bright orange cones at intervals on the grassy slope. Elizabeth stared at her cleats while Peters lectured her on the merits of punctuality.
“It’s my fault, Coach,” I said, sidling up to them. “We stayed up a little late while celebrating my birthday.” I added the last part hoping to elicit sympathy from our tough-as-nails leader. She didn’t bat an eyelash at my excuse. Instead, the silver whistle dangling from a lanyard around her neck moved to her lips. A shrill peal mingled with the sounds of our teammates’ departing cars.
“Go!” she shouted. Like she needed to drive home the message after her whistle response.
Elizabeth and I sprinted for the first orange cone on the hill. The grass was slick with residual dew. Even with our cleats, we both slid when making the turn. Though my foot throbbed with every impact, I finished my first suicide a full thirty seconds before Elizabeth. Doubled over, I barely caught my breath before Coach Peters’ whistle punctured the air again.
Ten suicides later, my lungs ached from all the panting. My glutes burned, and my left sock was soaked. The cut had obviously started bleeding again. I squatted and tried to catch my breath, my palms on my thighs and my head dangling between my knees. Elizabeth collapsed on the ground next to me. Her face had a sickly green hue to it, and her chest rose and fell too fast.
Coach Peters brought her whistle to her lips one last time and blew.
“Don’t be late again,” she said. The coach’s tone hit me like a bucket of ice. She turned on her heel and left the practice field, her assistant close behind.
“I think I’m going to be sick,” Elizabeth moaned, rolling onto her stomach.
I grabbed her long ponytail just in time to save it from the mess projected from her mouth. As I rubbed her back, I held my breath to avoid joining Liz’s vomit party. Watching the spew, I vowed never to be late again.
With Elizabeth still queasy, I drove her car back to the Bowers’ house. Luckily, Devon and Mandy were still there to drive me home.
“How’s your history paper coming?” Devon asked as she pulled the Chevy out of Elizabeth’s development. “Mine totally sucks.”
I rolled my eyes. Nothing Devon ever did sucked. She liked to downplay her brains in favor of her looks, but Dev couldn’t hide the fact she was a near-genius.
“I have a bunch of words written. I’m just not sure they make any sense,” I told her.
Devon snorted. “I hear ya.” She glanced in my direction, taking her eyes off the road for a heartbeat.
The air inside of the car grew heavy, a thick fog suddenly filling the small space. Devon’s next words echoed like she was standing at the opposite end of a very long tunnel.
“Want me to come over later? We can work on them together.”
An eerie feeling crawled over my skin, and I shivered. The fog began to swirl, churning faster and making my head spin. A picture formed in my mind: our car barreling through a stop sign at the same time an SUV shot through the intersection. My breath hitched in my throat. I’d been in this situation before, I could feel it. It wasn’t just because Devon was a bad driver, which she was. It was more than that. I’d experienced this very moment before, I just couldn’t remember when or where. Blood roared in my ears and I reached for the door to steady myself.
“Stop sign! Stop sign! Stop sign!” I screamed. Squeezing my eyes shut, I braced for the impact.
Devon swore loudly, a string of expletives that would have made a sailor proud. The Chevy’s tires screeched against the pavement. My body jerked forward. The seat belt locked, forcing me back into my seat with bruising force. I opened my eyes just in time to see a blue SUV dart through the intersection in front of us.
Shakily, I glanced at Devon. She panted harder than she had after the earlier suicides. What the hell had just happened?
“Sorry about that,” Devon said sheepishly. She was barely fazed by our close call. Then again, Devon wasn’t the one who’d known the Bronco was coming.
I didn’t respond. Blinking rapidly, I faced forward and tried to process. We rode the next ten minutes in near silence, only the morning show playing quietly on the Chevy’s radio.
“So, I’ll come by later with pizza?” Devon asked when she stopped in front of my big brick house. My mother’s car was noticeably absent from the open garage bay.
“Yeah, cool,” I responded automatically, not entirely sure what I’d just agreed to. All I could think about was the near-miss with the Bronco. What was it called when something happened, and you thought you’d experienced it before?
“You okay?” Devon asked, pulling me from my thoughts.
I forced a smile. “Of course. Just tired. Practice was rough.”
My legs shook as I climbed from the passenger seat and hurried up the walkway to my front door.
“See you in a little bit,” Devon called after me.
Agreeing to let Devon help with my history paper was a poor decision; no research or writing would get done. But when I walked into my empty house and found a note from my mother saying she would be at the office late again, I was relieved I’d made the concession.
The home I shared with my mother wasn’t as large or luxurious as Elizabeth’s. It was in the nicer section of town and expertly, if not impersonally, decorated by a professional. We did have a housekeeper who came in twice a week, since my mother was too busy to take care of trivial things like cleaning. Unfortunately, Mom didn’t put as much stock in eating, so she refused to hire a cook, which meant I was forced to fend for myself at mealtimes. Luckily, the Holloways took pity on me and made sure I wasn’t malnourished or resigned to eating fast food every day.
The morning’s torturous practice had driven all thoughts of the previous night from my mind. Once alone, I had nothing to distract me from the incident at the lake. Had it been real? Did I see something, someone, in the water? And what the hell had just happened with the car running that stop sign? In the last twenty-four hours, my mundane life had taken a turn towards the surreal.
The mark on my cheek tingled, a physical reminder of the boy who’d saved my life. Hurrying to the downstairs powder room, I checked my reflection in the mirror. The red patch was still there but fainter than earlier. The small circle of skin was warmer than the rest of my face.
I leaned closer to the mirror and examined the mark from every angle. Devon was right; it did resemble a burn.
“Weird,” I muttered to my reflection.
Returning to the kitchen, I hit the blinking light on the house’s voicemail. I crossed my fingers that my father’s voice would come, even though the odds of him leaving a message were slimmer than lottery odds. Mom would freak if he called the house. In fact, she’d forbidden it.
Mom, not Dad, spoke on the message. She wanted me to call her at work immediately. Sighing, I picked up the house phone and wandered into the living room.
“Evelyn Andrews,” my mother answered on the third ring.
“It’s your daughter,” I told her.
“Good, you’re home. I left some money for dinner on the counter. It looks like I will be stuck here for a while. I’ll call and update you periodically.”
“Update” was Mom’s code for making sure I was at home.
“I’ll be here,” I said into the phone. Reaching for my laptop on the coffee table, I hit the power button.
“Get your homework done—” my mother started to lecture.
“I’m already on it,” I said, cutting her off. After a long pause, I asked the question I knew I shouldn’t. “Um, Mom? Were there any hang-ups on the voicemail yesterday?”
I held my breath, waiting for her answer. Even if my father had called, my mother wasn’t likely to tell me. She was the reason he no longer took an active role in my life.
“No, Endora, your father didn’t call,” my mother replied with a sigh. “Which is a good thing, since he isn’t allowed to contact you.”
“Okay, right, sure,” I said in a hurry. “I’m going to work on my paper. Bye.”
I hung up quickly, before I could remind my mother the ban on contact only extended until my eighteenth birthday. As of today, my father was legally free to call and see me as much as he liked.
My parents’ marriage had never been a happy one. They’d fought constantly about everything. Mostly about me, though. Even back then, Mom was overprotective. Dad had always thought she was smothering me. After a particularly epic battle of wills that lasted well into the night, my father had finally moved out.
I was twelve then.
Two days later, he’d picked me up from school and said we were going on vacation. Apparently, Mom never received the memo. She’d called in every favor saved up over the years, and my father was arrested for kidnapping.
A bitter divorce came next, complete with a nasty custody battle that my mother won. Initially, my father had been awarded limited visitation. That didn’t last long. My mother was still a US Attorney then, and she’d convinced a judge that it was in my best interest to sever all ties with my father. By the time I was thirteen, my mother had quit her job, and we’d moved from our home on the edge of D.C. to the suburbs of rural Maryland.
The laptop hummed to life in front of me. I considered searching for my father online and finding a way to contact him. But I’d tried that numerous times over the past five years without success. After the judge had stripped him of his parental rights, my father became a ghost. He risked my mother’s wrath once a year to call and wish me happy birthday. It was always to my cell from a blocked number, and Dad had refused to give me a way to reach him.
My cell phone, I thought, brightening a little.
Even though I couldn’t turn it on, I could still check my messages. I picked up the house phone again and dialed my own number.
“You have one new message and five saved messages,” the mechanical voice informed me.
“Please be Dad, please be Dad,” I chanted.
“Hey, Eel. Happy birthday, sweetheart. I’m sorry I missed you, but I hope you did something fun for your eighteenth.” A fist tightened around my heart at the sound of his voice. I clutched the phone harder, like I might otherwise miss a word. “Listen, Eel. I really need to talk to you as soon as possible. Keep your phone nearby, I’ll try to reach you again tomorrow.”
The strained quality in my father’s voice gave me pause. Something was wrong. Unfortunately, my phone didn’t work so he couldn’t call back. I swore under my breath. I really wanted to talk to my dad. Not only because it had been a year since our last catch-up session, though. He sounded almost scared in his message. Maybe he was in some kind of trouble?
Hanging up, I dialed my phone number again. This time, I chose the option to change my outgoing message. After the beep, I spoke in a slow, deliberate tone and changed the greeting.
“You have reached Endora. My phone is not working, so it is safe to call me at 410-545-9189 until further notice.” Hopefully my father would understand that giving him the house number and telling him it was safe to call meant my mother wasn’t home.
Two hours later, I had yet to work on my history paper. I also still hadn’t received a phone call from my father, stopped obsessing over the lake monster I’d imagined and the boy who’d pulled me from the water, or figured out how I knew the SUV would run the stop sign. Instead, I sat on my bed dissecting every moment of the past twenty-four hours like it was the fetal pig in my anatomy lab.
Deciding my fixation was reaching an unhealthy point, I grabbed the antique-style phone on my bedside table. When I was younger, I’d been enamored with all things turn of the century. When my mother had finally decided I was responsible enough to have a telephone in my room, she purchased the 1890s replica. Luckily, Devon’s number was one of the very few I knew from memory. After dialing, I cradled the headset between my ear and shoulder and counted the rings.
“Eel?” my best friend answered on the fourth ring.
“Yup, it’s me,” I replied.
“What’s up?”
“Want to come over now? My mom is at work and….” I let my voice trail off. Devon knew I hated all the alone time my mother’s extended work hours created. Not that my mother was great company when she was home, but at least the house didn’t feel so empty.
“Sure,” she replied brightly. “You ready for pizza now?”
“Nah, we’ll get delivery later.”
“Be there soon,” Devon said into the phone. Her voice became muffled. “Rick, stop, I’m trying to talk to Eel.” She giggled, and I heard a soft thud followed by Rick’s deep laughter.
“Are you at Rick’s?” I asked.
Rick had an apartment he shared with his friend Bill Thompson in town. Devon’s parents had forbidden her to go there, but it went in one ear and out the other.
“Yup, we were just…watching a movie?” she said it like it was a question.
“Oh well, why don’t you finish, um…watching your movie?” I suggested.
“Don’t worry, Eel, it’s over,” Rick yelled over the line. I wondered if Devon had me on speaker phone, or if the volume on her cell was just up that high.
“I’ll be right over, Eel,” Devon said, and then she hung up.
“Right over” in Devon time turned out to be two hours ― her movie must’ve been intriguing. When she finally barged through my front door, full of apologies and carrying an extra-large pizza, I waved off her excuses.
Pulling up the newest high school comedy on tv, we settled in for a girls’ night. Even though we rarely watched the movies, it was our routine. We favored gossiping through entire films. Devon’s father often marveled at our ability to spend so much time together and still always have so much to say to one another. While chowing down on greasy slices of pizza, we caught each other up on every detail the other had missed in the hours we’d spent apart.
“You should’ve come in the hot tub last night,” Devon mumbled in between bites of pizza. “Mandy was so drunk that she let Kevin go to third base in the water,” she punctuated each word with a smack on the couch to drive home her point.
Of course, Devon had done much worse with Greg Crenshaw in that same hot tub after one of Elizabeth’s parties the year before. She and Rick had been on a “break” after she’d caught him with a girl who working at the bowling alley. Since she was my best friend, I didn’t point out the obvious double-standard. Instead, I widened my eyes to mirror her look of horror, like it was the most shocking news I’d heard all day.
“I’m pretty sure they went all the way,” Devon continued. “Although that isn’t exactly something to brag about.” She tapped her pointer finger against her chin, leaving a greasy fingerprint.
“Be nice,” I scolded her. “Mandy is sweet, and she means well. She just wants people to like her. It sucks being the new girl. If you hadn’t come to my rescue and deigned to be my friend, I’d be just like her.”
It was true. If I hadn’t met Devon in the eighth grade, I’d probably be a loser with no social life. She’d introduced me to most of the friends I had. And it was her parents who’d convinced my mother that Westwood was safe enough to let me go places without a chaperone.
“No way. You would never do it in a hot tub,” she teased. Devon meant it as a joke, but it stung a little. Not that I would do it in a hot tub. I definitely wouldn’t. Still, her comment was a reminder that I was the only virgin among our friends.
I wasn’t exactly a newbie to the dating scene; I’d had my first boyfriend when I was six. His name was Nate Shin, and he’d chased me through our first-grade classroom until I agreed to hold his hand. In the second grade, he gave me a paper flower for Valentine’s Day with a note that read “Be my girlfriend? Check yes or no.” I checked “yes”, and we officially became an item.
For my birthday that year, Nate gave me a stuffed teddy bear holding a heart. In return, I gave him the chicken pox. Then, his family won nine million in the state lottery and moved to Canada. I still wasn’t sure if the two events were actually related, but that had been the end of my first relationship.
During my third- and fourth-grade years, I fell into a dating slump. In the fifth-grade, my chest had developed enough to need a training bra. Overnight, I’d become the object of affection for swarms of boys. My popularity faded just as quickly when other girls began to develop.
In the sixth grade, I played my first game of Spin the Bottle. His name was Brent Phizer, and he had braces. Brent’s mouth jewelry cut my bottom lip, which caused me to cry. The blood and tears that followed – both mine – had been humiliating. By the time I was twelve, I’d sworn off men altogether.
When high school rolled around, between sports and my mother’s refusal to let me date, I didn’t have much experience with the opposite sex. The day after my eighteenth birthday, I still had yet to share a meaningful kiss with a boy that I was actually dating. Given the dating pool at our school, I’d long since decided that college would be when I finally found my soulmate.
My fingers involuntarily went to the burn on my cheek. Devon’s gaze followed my hand, and her blue eyes turned stormy.
“What really happened last night, Eel?” she pressed. “When we found you with that kid, you were acting weird. The two of you were…I don’t know how to explain it. When I brought him up last night, you got all flustered.”
A nervous laughter that was unnatural and forced sputtered from me. “What do you mean? I told you what happened. And I did not get flustered.”
Had I?
“What did you talk about?” Devon prompted.
“What did I talk about with who?”
“Come on, Eel. Don’t play stupid. What did you and the kid talk about before we got there?”
Another snort of uncomfortable laughter bubbled in my throat, and I averted my eyes from Devon’s inquisitive gaze. “There wasn’t a lot of time for conversation, I was busy throwing up lake water.”
With effort, I met Devon’s gaze. My best friend pursed her lips like she wanted to say more but wasn’t sure she should.
“What? Just say it,” I insisted.
“What aren’t you telling me?” Her voice was soft and kind, but still probing. She would make a great trial attorney.
I shook my head and drew my bottom lip between my teeth. Telling Devon, or anyone else for that matter, about the lake creature would be absurd. It wasn’t real. It couldn’t have been real.
“You can tell me anything,” Devon insisted.
Sighing, I scrunched my eyes shut. Maybe if I couldn’t see her face, the words would be easier to say. “I think I saw something in the water. Like a person. But not. It grabbed my foot, that’s how I got hurt.” The words flew out of my mouth in one breath.
When Devon remained silent for several seconds, I cracked one eye open and peered at her through a small slit. My best friend’s eyes were wide, and her lips were parted in surprise.
“I know it was a hallucination,” I added quickly. Even as the words came from my mouth, the statement felt like a lie. The creature’s orb-like eyes were burned into my mind. I could feel its fingers around my neck, cutting off the air supply. My breathing became quick and shallow, and the previous night’s panic returned.
Devon took my hand in hers.
“In times of extreme stress, people often think they see things that aren’t there,” she said quietly. “It’s totally normal.”
I nodded my head. “I know. It just felt so real.”
“Remember when Liz hit me in the head with that eight-meter shot in the game against South Westwood last year? And I had that horrible concussion? When the trainer asked me my name, I kept telling him it was Aurora, like the Disney princess. Hitting your head that hard really screws with your brain. Maybe my mom should check you out.”
I laughed for real this time. “You never told me that.”
Devon shrugged. “Seriously, who thinks they are Sleeping Beauty? Sounds ridiculous, right?”
“No more ridiculous than seeing a mermaid in Caswell Lake. I think I have you beat there.”
Devon giggled. “My point is that you probably have a concussion. I’m not surprised you think you saw something down there.” She paused, looking thoughtful. “Then again, who knows? Maybe you did see a mermaid. That chick that went missing last year was last seen at the lake with her boyfriend. Maybe she just wanted some company.” Devon’s eyes sparkled mischievously.
Great, I thought. A dead girl tried to strangle me.
I preferred the version of the story where an imaginary mermaid attacked me instead.