The Waking Moon

Chapter Ten

When I got to school the next morning, everything seemed unreal. As I waded through the crowd of backpacks and ski jackets, I felt as confused as someone abducted by aliens and then returned to earth as if nothing had happened. The muddy slush up and down the halls. The hand-painted pep rally posters. The shouts and screeches of the students. Everything was so normal, it was weird.

Rhodes was standing with his back against my locker, waiting. He was wearing old-fashioned baggy trousers, suspenders, a white button-up shirt, his 1940s fedora, and holding a cane. When he saw me coming down the hall, he pressed the back of his hand to his forehead and slid all the way down the locker until his legs were sprawled on the floor.

“Every day,” he said, as I worked the combination of my locker, “every single day I’ve stood here waiting for you, Paulette. Look…” He grabbed a stack of Polaroid pictures from his top shelf and handed them to me. In each one, Rhodes was standing in front of my locker, the camera held at arm’s length, with a different over-the-top expression of frustration on his face. “I demand an explanation.”

I didn’t want Rhodes to know about the hospital, or anything else for that matter, especially since I was in denial myself. I shrugged.

“What’s the big deal?” I said, handing back the pictures. “I was sick.”

“Meningitis?” he asked, pretending to be frantically worried. “Is it hepatitis? Do you need a kidney? Can I give you a kidney? Paulette, I’m here for you!”

I laughed. “I was gone for a couple days, you head case.”

“Which is as long as you were here!” He closed his locker and gave me a fake-angry look. “I’m carrying your books to class, or else I’m never speaking to you again.”

As we walked together through the crowd, I noticed a bunch of dead roses taped to the outside of a locker. Someone had blown up a photograph and taped it to the door as well. I stopped short, dumbstruck.  It was the Goth girl. 

“Chapel’s locker,” Rhodes said in a low voice. “I call it ‘Chapel’s chapel.’”

“Chapel?”

“Chapel Bale,” he said impatiently. “The girl who offed herself. Hello?”

“That’s the girl?” I stared at the picture in disbelief.

“It is hard to go there,” Rhodes said. “She’s here, well, in her own special way, and then suddenly she’s gone. It doesn’t seem possible, does it?”

No, I thought, remembering that night in the Ruins. It definitely does not. What in the hell was going on?

My first class was Algebra, which began badly when the teacher didn’t say my name at roll call. Everyone turned to stare as I raised my hand and explained that I hadn’t dropped out, but had just gotten sick two days after starting. The teacher muttered irritably and erased the line drawn through my name. Throughout the class, three girls in the back of the room whispered and stifled giggles. After a while, I got the feeling they were talking about me. When the dismissal bell rang I jumped up so fast my books scattered on the floor. The girls burst into laughter. The last girl, a short blond with a blunt cut and milky, perfect skin, shook her head.

“Oops,” she said with a mean smirk.

As I kneeled on the ground to collect my things, no one stopped to help me. I left the classroom and slipped into the anonymous current of bodies that flowed out to the stairwell and down to the main hall. As I approached my locker, I noticed that several people’s eyes darted my way. And then I saw it.

The Polaroid Rhodes had taken of me on that first morning was now stuck to the outside of the door with the words Bad Blood scrawled across it. Below the photo in permanent marker, someone had written: MY MOM IS A MURDERER!

I gazed at it in horror, my face on fire. “Fuck all of you!” I yelled at the ogling faces around me. “You can all go to hell!” I ripped the picture off the door.

A loud voice rose above the chatter. “Scatter, you roaches! Go!”

I turned to see Rhodes swinging his cane through the crowd like a stodgy old man. When he looked over my shoulder at the graffiti, his usual wry expression dissolved into shock. Then he saw the picture in my hand. He cursed under his breath and slammed a fist into his locker door.

The next thing I knew, I was pushing through the crowd. The voices and faces around me blurred. When I finally reached the front doors I burst out into the cold, not caring that I’d left my coat in the locker and my books on the floor. My feet sailed over the snow and ice, tears freezing on my face. I didn’t think about where I was running to. I just wanted to get away. Away. Away. Away. Away.

When I finally ran out of breath, I was at the duck pond in Monument Valley Park. All but a little pool of water had frozen over, and a miserable-looking group of ducks paddled around it in circles. As I made my way down the hill to the pond, I was startled to hear footsteps thudding behind me. I turned around to see Rhodes.

“Hey…hey…” he panted before collapsing dramatically to the ground and letting himself roll down the snowy hill. He lay there on the frozen bank, arms sprawled out to the sides like a dead man. I sat on a snow-covered bench for a few minutes, crushing the photo with the heel of my shoe, waiting for him to get up. But he didn’t move.

“I’m not going over there,” I called. No response. A curious duck waddled across the surface of the ice to peck at his shoe. Nothing.

Finally, I got up and walked over to where he lay. His eyes were closed, and there were frozen crystals matted into the front of his hair. I stared down at him, waiting to see the twitch of a smile, but his jaw was slack and his face motionless.

“Rhodes?” I nudged him with the toe of my boot. His body seemed strangely heavy. Panicked, I kneeled down beside him and put my hands on his shoulders. “Hey! Rhodes! This isn’t funny!”

Without even opening his eyes, he grabbed my arms and flipped me over in the snow. Then he swung one leg over my body and sat on my stomach.

“Dammit!” I yelled, punching him hard in the leg. “You jerk!”

But Rhodes didn’t smile. “You listen to me, Paulette,” he said, looking down at me with urgent eyes. “I had nothing to do with that. They got into my locker… They…I would never…”

The wind tussled his loose blond curls, and I realized that it was the first time I’d seen him without a hat. His sculpted features looked more intense than usual. My body shivered and the snow felt like heat under my bare neck.

“Look, Paulette,” he said, his voice softening. “You don’t know me very well, okay, I realize that. You were here and then you were gone, and I…I mean, I don’t know what’s going on with you…with your family, but…”

He stopped and pressed his lips together, uncertainty creasing his brow. It was the first time I’d seen him at a loss for words. He took a deep breath.

“I know you feel like crap right now. Feel it. That’s cool. They don’t deserve it, but whatever. The thing is, you are so much better than any of them, and you don’t even know it. I mean, you are actually…interesting, and, and, and…”

His words petered out as he gazed down at me, unblinking. We sat like that for a weirdly long time, sending quick puffs of vapor into the air as we caught our breath.

“I’m cold,” I said at last, my lips quivering. I squirmed against his weight.

“Sorry.”

He rolled off and helped me to my feet. My clothes were damp from the snow, and my hair was a mess. He slipped off his tweed coat and wrapped it tightly around me. It was warm and dewy with sweat, and smelled of Old Spice.

“Come on,” he said, picking dried grass from my hair.

“I don’t want to go back there.”

Rhodes gave me a playful shove and rolled his eyes. “A little credit, please.”