In Harmony(3)

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.





Isaac



I woke up shivering, wrapped tight in my blanket that wasn’t nearly thick enough. Icy light fell across my bed, offering no warmth.

Goddamn trailer. Like living in a cracked eggshell.

I kicked off the covers and padded through the double-wide to the living area. Pops was passed out on the couch, instead of in his room behind the kitchen. A fifth of Old Crow—empty—stood tall amid the beer cans on the rickety, stained coffee table. An ashtray overflowing with butts still smoldered.

One day I was going to get the heat I craved in the form of a fire from one of Pops’ smokes.

His snores filled the trailer as I crossed to the heater. We had to be careful about the thermostat—I made sure we kept it at sixty-five degrees—but the trailer had shitty insulation and no underpinning. I waved my hand in front of the vents. The heater was on and working, pissing our money away for all the good it did. A cold January wind whistled beneath us. I could feel it through the floor.

Outside the front window, the scrapyard lay under a cloak of white. Our Wexx-brand gas station at the far end, closed up today. Not that we had any customers. It was silent and still out there. The acre of rusted old cars were white mounds, pure and pristine over the tangles of metal. A graveyard.

All of Harmony felt like a graveyard to me, a place that buried you. But tourists loved it. In summer, they came from all over to step out of time and into USA circa 1950. Downtown Harmony was six square blocks of Victorian-era architecture, colorful storefronts, one ice cream and burger joint with a jukebox and posters of Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis on the walls. A single traffic light hung over Main Street, and we had a five-and-dime that sold Civil War-era souvenirs. Some big battle had been fought in the rolling green fields between Harmony and the next real outpost of civilization, Braxton. The tourists came for the history and a milkshake and then left. Escaped.

I looked at Pops. Fifty-three years old and he’d been out of Harmony maybe twice. Once to the hospital in Indianapolis when I was born, and to that same hospital when my mother died eleven years ago.