I DID NOT REACH the printer that night. That much I remember.
My nightmare jarred me awake into a pitch-black night.
The first thing I noticed was the strange, chalky smell. I started shaking, and it had little to do with the freezing temperature. Panic was stealing heat from my body, sending pinpricks of ice through me. I could not see the river, but I could hear it, maybe two feet away. I had been lying next to the … the what? The body? The hide? I didn’t know how to think of it.
I bolted to my feet. I did not look back as I ran blindly away from the Wampanoag River.
The rest is fragments, flashes of memory. I’ve forgotten the physical part of my trip home — as if my mind had separated from the rest of my body, floating outside it, letting my legs stumble over the ground. Thoughts spat themselves into my consciousness, and my brain tried frantically to digest them.
It wasn’t until I’d arrived home that I realized my pants were muddy and wet. I ran straight into the bathroom, stripped, and turned on the shower.
“David!” my mother shouted through the closed door. “Where were you?”
What was I supposed to tell her? Nothing, Ma. Just a quiet evening in the Ramble, spying on some taboo behavior, then having a nap next to a hollowed-out human. Oh, and by the way, I need to wash my pants out.
Uh-huh. Right.
I wished my dad were alive. He would have believed every word, and insisted on going back with me. Then he would have talked about it for months, embellishing the story each time.
“Proofreading the yearbook!” I replied. “Remember I called you?”
“Until one in the morning?”
“Sorry. I lost track.”
Don’t get me wrong. Mom is cool. But she has this proper, old-fashioned streak. Her parents immigrated to Wetherby from Greece. She was not allowed to wear pants to school, or marry a non-Greek, or work for a living. That last part changed when my dad died of a heart attack. For the last seven years, she’s been working at a paper-tubing factory.
Mom had all kinds of names for dad. When he got into his frequent story-telling moods, he was Homer, after the ancient Greek narrator. When he dressed up, he was Adonis, the handsomest Greek god. When he sang, he was Apollo, the god of music (although he sounded like Jerry Lewis on a bad day). When he was mad, he became Zeus.
Too bad she wasn’t right. If he were a god, he could come down and explain what I had seen in the Ramble.
I threw my pants in the sink. Then I turned the shower up to full blast and hopped in.
The water sent red rivulets down my calves, cleaning out a bruised crosshatch of cuts and scrapes on my legs.
The shower water was soothing. The harsh bathroom light flooded my mind with rationality: The body wasn’t real. Couldn’t have been. It was a mannequin, a latex dummy. Stolen from a store window as a prank. That was it.
Simple.
But there were a few problems. Mannequins didn’t have skin. And fingernails and eyes. They were not squishy and caved in. The one in the river wouldn’t have sold too many clothes.
It was real.
I had seen a dead body. A dead, filleted body.
I knew I was different now. Changed forever. All because of this one event. And it wasn’t just what I had seen. Something had gotten inside me; I could feel it. Something cold and sticky and slightly nauseating. Could fear itself take root in a person’s body, like a virus?
At that moment, I hated Ariana. Hated her for making me want her so much. That was the reason I had joined the yearbook in the first place. If I hadn’t done that, I’d never have gotten stuck with proofreading, never seen the body. I’d be the same happy but screwed-up kid I’d always been.
Which brings me to the beginning of this whole fiasco. The day I met Ariana.
The day of the Great Wetherby Earthquake.