In Harmony(2)

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.”