The next morning all my romantic notions of what love might taste like were forgotten, and I was once more a prisoner in the house of Wood. The idea I had conjured up that my parents would let me off the hook because I was a stellar child was nothing more than a fantasy; instead they did the opposite—they hooked up a nanny cam. Not literally, but they said they’d be watching me over the security cameras from their tablets while at work. It was just the most humiliating thing that could happen to someone like me.
“Sorry about this, Lala, but you gave us no choice,” my mom said on her way out the door.
“Don’t call me that! And oh my god, I won’t ever do it again!”
She bit down on the inside of her cheek while raising her left brow. She didn’t believe me.
An hour later, I’d finally calmed down and was starting to begin my rounds of walking senselessly around the house, when our house phone rang.
“Hello?”
“Girl, you straight up crazy. I got in so much shit cause a you. My dad seriously thought you were on drugs.”
“Cee-Cee?”
She laughed. “Yeah girl, your number’s on our fridge. Neighborhood connection or some shit like that. Anyway, you coming over to watch the second season today? Jeremy’s on his way.”
“My parents have me on lock down. I’m sorry, I want to.” I really did want to. I liked Jeremy and Cee-Cee. It felt surprisingly nice to be around kids my own age, and we’d clicked so well.
“Aw, that’s all right. Well call me when you get out of jail. We’ll wait to watch the second season till you can come over.”
“Really? You’d, like, wait for me?”
“Course we would. All right, we gonna go get some coffee. My head hurts from that nasty wine.”
“Yeah, it was gross,” I lied. I toyed with the idea of having her bring me some more, but quickly decided against it. “I’ll call you later, I guess.”
“Later,” she said, hanging up.
An hour later the doorbell rang, and when I answered it there was no one there; but when I looked down there was an iced coffee drink with whip cream on top and a note scribbled on the cup in black marker: To Makayla Wood, future lawyer extraordinaire. From your new besties, Anastacia Montgomery and Jeremy Love. Don’t worry, if they don’t let you out soon, we will bust you out!
I smiled as I bent down and picked it up. I’d only known those two for a day, but it felt like we’d been friends for most of our lives. People usually liked me because they were paid to—employees, assistants—it was kind of nice to have Jeremy and Cee-Cee like me just because.
My mom didn’t get home as early as she’d wanted, and because I was mad at them and knew they were watching me, I pulled out all my secret notepads and sorted them out on the kitchen table. As I started each new day of the week, color coded of course, I stared up at the camera hiding inside one of the paintings.
“Let’s see,” I said very loudly. “Tuesday. Hm, well, normally I would list Fabric Meeting at 10 because we always have a fabric meeting at 10 but seeing as I’m a prisoner in my own home, away from the business I helped create—I guess I’ll be ironing my socks at ten on Tuesday.”
By three o’clock that afternoon I had my entire boring week mapped out, and by the time my mom got home at five, I had managed to clean my room three times over. I’d found three extra notebooks in the process.
“Makayla!” my mother yelled as she entered the house. “Where are you?”
“Up here!” I shouted back. “Still doing nothing!”
“Can you come down here, please!”
Setting down a sketch I’d been working on for a new backpack line for Sewn Back Together (I’d been leafing through my mother’s fashion magazines and had gotten some ideas for new designs), I scoffed as I marched out of my room and down the stairs. When I got down there, I was displeased to find both my parents standing side by side, that was until I noticed a very thin letter in my father’s hands. Thin as a recently sharpened filet knife.
“What is that?” I asked.
He looked at my mother and whispered, “I really don’t think this is a good idea right now.”
“Don’t you think we’ve kept enough from her already,” she stammered back. Then, returning her attention to me, she said, “Baby, I think you should sit down.”
“What is that?”
She looked at my dad and took a deep breath. I squinted so I could see the Harvard emblem staring back at me from the corner of the envelope. Suddenly I couldn’t wait another second.
With my heart pounding, I lunged for the letter and snagged it from my dad, escaping with it into the living room. I stood in the middle of the floor, tearing it open as though I was starved and it was the last food ration left on Earth. All the while my mom was holding my dad back from following me and yanking it from my hands, as if she already knew I would bark and snap like a rabid beast if anyone dared come near me.
“There’s still a chance,” I said, pieces of envelope falling to the floor. “There’s still a chance that they took me. I’m a child prodigy. I mean, I was practically born from the Harvard mold.” I was panting by the time I got the letter out, and my hands were shaking as I held it in front of me as though I’d just located the last golden ticket. But it was, it was the last golden ticket. There would never be another Harvard . . . ever. Sure, I’d said Yale was better, but I still wanted Harvard more than anything in the world.
As soon as I got past, “Dear Ms. Wood,” though, I knew that this was not a letter of acceptance, but a death sentence.
“Honey, Lala, what’s it say?”
My mom’s voice was but a blur in the background as I stood still as stone.
Dear Ms. Wood,
We regret to inform you that after careful consideration we have had to deny you admittance to Harvard. We were very impressed by your tremendous accomplishments
achieved at such a young age, but we must admit that after your interview we were a bit frazzled.
As I am sure you are aware, the ability to work well under pressure is a vital strategy that we expect our students to adhere by. We are afraid that after your strange interview with Ms. Armstrong we cannot possibly allow you into our program. Please do understand this is nothing against you, your collection of knitted snail hats, or your ability to relay the alphabet forwards and backwards in five different languages. We are simply thinking of your mental health.
Here is to hoping you are well,
Dean of Admissions,
Becky Rutabaga
“That name is just the worst,” I whispered.
My fate had just been handed to me by a vegetable that half of the human race didn’t even know about.
The house was too quiet. I could hear my dad breathing, my mom silently stepping forward and then back again. They already knew the answer, I mean—they knew as soon as my dad received that phone call from Lucy Armstrong—they knew my dreams were shattered.
“Lala?”
My cheeks burning, my hands shaking, I turned my head very slowly towards my mother. Mental health. They had actually mentioned my mental health in my Harvard letter. No, no it couldn’t be real. I’d worked far too hard all my life to ensure that the letter I received from this particular esteemed institution was an acceptance letter. Every morning as soon as I opened my eyes, ever since I was a child, I’d imagined checking off ‘Get into Harvard,’ into one of my notebooks. No, this couldn’t be happening.
“Please say something,” my dad said.
I just stared at him, and as I did, I felt something snap.
“It’s a bit turbulent in here, isn’t it?” I said in a British accent.
My mom’s face fell and my father’s hand met his forehead. It was happening again.
Too mentally exhausted to fight it off, I simply followed the static humming in my ears. Looking around at the ceiling and surrounding walls, I continued to vomit out nonsense. “I think we have cactuses growing in the walls again.”
“Lala—”
And then I felt it. A fist inside my chest, reaching over the madness. It grabbed at my heart and yanked down, pulling away all the fluff. My insides wretched, and I screamed at my mother, “QUIT CALLING ME THAT! MY NAME IS MAKAYLA!!!!!!”
And then something very awful happened. Worse, even, than the hurt look on my mom’s face. The room started shaking, or at least it appeared to be.
The letter in my hand dropped to the ground, and as I stared from the walls back to my parents’ faces, I realized all the sound had turned off, except for the buzzing going on inside my head. I could see their mouths moving, but I couldn’t hear anything they were saying.
“What’s going on?” I said, hearing my own muffled voice echo against the buzz.
I closed my eyes and reached my hands over my ears, trying to make everything stop, but the sensation of shaking just grew more violent. When I reopened my eyes, I saw my parents backing away, and a strange whiteness filling in around me. Not like a cloud, but like strips of white light circling my body.
“Mom? Dad?” But they weren’t helping me. They looked—they looked afraid.
I stretched my arms out to the sides, feeling the white strips of light; they were thick, electric. I lifted my gaze to meet that of my parents. “What’s happening to me?”
And then I was pulled against the wall.
All I heard for the next five minutes was wood smashing and glass shattering. Family pictures, the giant green and yellow antique fan my mother and I had brought back from Japan, a tower of CDs, the slender bookshelf that held a bunch of books none of us ever read, the coffee table—all of it smashed, broken, torn to pieces as my back and shoulders hit against every surface, including the ceiling and floor for what felt like eternity.
There was shouting from my parents, my dad telling my mom to get away while reaching for me—but I was like some sort of bouncy ball, springing violently from one surface to the other.
“HEL—P—ME! WH—AT’S—HAP—PEN—ING—TO—-ME!” I shouted as I bounced from floor to wall.
“It’s okay, baby!” my mom yelled from where she stood in the other room, her hands cupped around her mouth. “It’s going to be okay!”
“Makayla! Stop, drop, and roll!” My father was cranking his arm through the air in a circular motion, hollering at me as though he were my coach.
“THA—T’S—FIRE—STU—PID!” I yelled back—the breath knocked out of me as my back came down against the floor.
As my chest tried like mad to rise against the invisible set of bricks lying on top of it, I glimpsed a chair that had fallen on its side. Before I was pulled back up only to be smashed into the corner again, I grabbed for the edge of it and held on with all my might. And even though something was pulling me backwards, like a pair of giant hands attached to my shoulder blades, I crammed my eyes shut and started counting backwards from ten, visualizing a paper bag attached to my mouth.
“. . . 3,2,1,” I said, reopening my eyes to find that I was still clinging to the chair.
The whirlwind had stopped.
Slowly, confused and terrified, I gingerly let go of the chair and looked up at my parents. The look on their faces was unexplainable.
I took a moment to catch my breath, then uttered, “I will ask you one more time, what is going on?”
“Baby,” my mom said, treading carefully as she took very small steps back into the now destroyed family room. “Now, I don’t want you to freak out—”
“Makayla,” my dad said, standing still, his hands out in front of him as though he were blocking my wrath.
I touched my forehead and brought it down to see blood trickling down from my fingertips.
“God, what is with you guys,” I said, holding out my arm for balance while trying to push up to standing. “I mean, shouldn’t you be, like, calling 911—” And that’s when I stopped, but not because of the horrific looks coloring their faces. I stopped because coming to my feet wasn’t as easy as it should’ve been; something was pulling me backwards, affecting my balance.
I fell back down onto my knees, and something soft fell over my shoulders. It was then that I felt something inside shift. An ‘aha’ moment, if you will.
Scooping up what looked like an enormous sheer, sparkling blue and purple butterfly wing from where it was draped over my shoulder and onto the ground, I stared from my mother to my father.
“Okay, explain.”
My mom, looking like a child who had just soiled her pants, mumbled quietly under breath, “I’ll go make the mud cakes.”