Mind over Monsters, page 6
Lena decided against trying to cook the icky feather in the microwave, which was her first idea. Instead, she placed it on a sunny windowsill and waited half an hour. It was still cold. She ran it under hot water. It got wet, which made it that much more bedraggled, but it stayed cold. She dried it with the blow-dryer (still cold) and finally put it in the jar with the broken glass. They could hang out in there and be cold together while she tried to figure out why.
And now she had time to think about something she didn’t want to think about. Which was Regina going to Ralph’s with her new friends. Ralph’s was where the two of them always went to celebrate, and sometimes to distract Lena from a stubborn worry. And sometimes just for the ice cream.
Every time they went, Lena got chocolate chip and Regina got something new. Regina’s goal was to try every flavor at Ralph’s, starting at the top of the menu and working her way down, even through the frozen yogurts and tofu-based items at the bottom. She wasn’t looking forward to the end of the menu, but she insisted it was her destiny.
As far as Lena could recall, Regina was somewhere in the fruit sorbets. Maybe papaya. She texted, What flavor did you try?
Half an hour later, Regina texted back. Coffee fudge. Too embarrassed to explain papaya!!!
CHAPTER 15
Hey,” said Sofie when everyone had set out their mats Wednesday morning. “Before we start, can we make a pact?”
“I’m not sure how I feel about pacts,” said Sam. “Don’t they usually end poorly for pirates and bank robbers?”
“A pact, not a conspiracy,” Sofie clarified. “Yesterday only Lena used an actual fear. How about today we all agree to do that? We aren’t testing this program if we avoid the hard parts, right?” She looked at Tom in particular.
He bit. “That’s true,” he said. “We can’t provide accurate feedback if we aren’t using the app as intended.”
“But that doesn’t mean we have to go all in on our worst fears, does it?” said Catherine. “Asking for a friend.”
“Not at all,” said Sofie. “Just a real fear instead of a fake one. It can be a minor fear. Agreed?”
“Agreed,” said Sam. “But it’s not a pact; it’s an agreement. We agreed; we didn’t pact.”
“ ‘Pact’ isn’t a verb,” said Sofie. “And it is too a pact.”
Lena meant to use a mild fear, like mimes, she really did. But an actual fear was occupying her mind like an earwig in the bathtub, and she couldn’t ignore it. So when the voice told her to envision her fear, despite her best efforts to see a shameless person pretending to be caught in a high wind, she saw Regina. Regina holding hands with her new best friend, Jared Kent. They didn’t come after Lena in the woods. They were too busy squealing and laughing. They didn’t notice her at all.
Lena was full-on sweating, but the voice wasn’t quite done with her. Look beyond your fear, deeper into the wood, it said. Because there are other fears. You catch glimpses of them—behind the trees, moving in and out of the shadows. They will lurk there until you draw them out. But for now, they wait….
And that was the end of session 3. Lena kept her earbuds in for a moment longer, hoping for something more soothing as a conclusion. But no. There wasn’t even a tiny gong sound. “For now, they wait” was it. A nice, menacing cliff-hanger to start her day.
She sat up. Ava was watching her.
“You don’t look so hot,” said Ava. “I have water if you need it.”
Lena’s right hand was clamped around the bracelet on her left wrist. She unclamped the hand and placed it firmly on the mat beside her. “ ‘But for now, they wait’?” she said.
Ava shook her head. “They can wait alxl they want,” she said. “I’m not drawing anything out. They can stay where they are.”
“Is this really supposed to be helping us?” said Sofie. “Because I don’t feel helped. I was totally chill until we started all this fear-facing, and now I’m starting to tense up.”
Sam cough-mumbled, “Always tense.”
Lena pressed her hand into the mat to keep it out of her hair. She felt something beneath it. A sticker or label of some kind. She started picking at the edge of it.
“That was not a great session for a pact,” said Sam grumpily. “I used an actual fear, and then I was traumatized by the idea that there are plenty more lurking around in there, waiting to attack while I’m still dealing with the first one. And could we not at least have gotten a stinking deep breath at the end?”
“You can take a deep breath whenever you want,” Sofie pointed out. “Like now. Now might be a good time.”
“Said the pact suggester,” Sam grouched.
Lena picked harder at the label on her mat. Finally it peeled off whole. She looked down at it, expecting it to say something like FLIMSY YOGA MAT CORPORATION, but it wasn’t a label. It was one of those HELLO, MY NAME IS stickers you got at events where no one knew your name. Which wasn’t that strange. Stickers came off people’s shirts all the time and fell and got stuck on other things. Even yoga mats.
What was strange was the neat black handwriting on the sticker. In fact, it was so disturbing in the wake of Lena’s fear that she dropped the sticker immediately.
Under the sticker’s generic introduction was a name, handwritten in Sharpie. The complete text of the sticker read
HELLO, MY NAME IS
LISA
“Did anyone else hear the voices this time?” Sam asked the group. “They were louder. I could almost catch what they were saying. When I wasn’t picturing the giant sponge coming at me.”
“You’re afraid of sponges?” said Catherine.
“It’s called trypophobia,” Sam said. “A fear of small holes clustered together. Like on a sponge. It’s a cool fear to have. Kind of niche.”
“Wow,” said Ava. “That’s so… specific.”
“It gets me out of doing the dishes,” said Sam.
“Couldn’t you use a scrub brush?” Sofie offered.
“No—and don’t suggest that to my parents. The other good thing about trypophobia is it’s fairly easy to avoid stuff with small holes.”
“If you don’t look at the ceiling,” said Sofie.
“What?” said Sam.
Sofie was right—the ceiling in here and most other parts of Cranberry Bog Middle School consisted of large tiles with small indents all over them. Lena sometimes tried to count the indents when she was bored.
“I’ve never noticed that before!” said Sam. “Thanks a lot, Sofie. Now I can’t look up at school.”
“It’s best you keep your eyes on your work anyway,” said Sofie.
Tom had rolled up his mat and was moving past Lena when a scrap of paper landed next to her foot. Another piece of trash floating around in the small gym. Lena was starting to think the custodians swept the refuse from all over the school into this room and left it. Maybe the small gym doubled as the school dustpan.
The scrap was folded in half, which made it look like a note. The kind of note you would pass in class. This naturally made Lena pick it up to see if there was anything interesting written on it. Her heart sank when she read it. No wonder some poor kid had dropped it. The paper contained two words, written in a stern, teacherly hand in red ink. It said:
SEE ME
The dreaded “See me”—every student’s nightmare. Worse even than an outright F. At least with an F you could crawl away without confrontation. The “See me” was a demand for confrontation. This small square of paper was like the Fortune Cookie Slip of Despair. Lena shuddered.
As a member of Climate Change Club, though, she felt a duty to throw both this scrap and the “Lisa” sticker in a recycling bin. She picked up the sticker and was about to put both in her pocket when she noticed how cold they were.
Not this again. Was there something about small-gym trash that made it cold? The small gym wasn’t well heated—by design, she was sure: No one wanted a bunch of middle schoolers exercising in a confined, well-heated space. But it wasn’t subzero cold. So why was its trash cold? Or was the stuff she’d been collecting here not your average trash?
Broken glass
A ratty feather
A sticker with the name “Lisa” on it
A scrap of paper that said “See me”
All found in the small gym after a meditation session. All weirdly cold. She put the two pieces of paper in the front pocket of her backpack. She wasn’t going to recycle them. She was going to add them to the jar at home. And she was going to study them until they gave up their secrets.
CHAPTER 16
Lena and Regina had Climate Change Club that afternoon, as usual. But suddenly Climate Change Club, which never had more than half a dozen members, bustled with activity. The room was crowded when the two arrived. Crowded with boys who wouldn’t know a carbon footprint if it kicked them in the seat of the pants.
“Wow!” said Regina when they’d crammed inside. “Look at all the new help. This is amazing!”
Lena searched over the tops of the carefully tended floppy haircuts and located Hope, who, tall as she was, looked as if she were drowning in a rising sea of boys. She made a What the what? face at Lena, and Lena shrugged.
Lena wormed her way through the boys and across the room to Hope. “What’s going on?” she asked.
“I was going to ask you the same question,” said Hope. “They all showed up today saying they wanted to join. Has there been an environmental catastrophe I don’t know about?”
“I don’t think so,” said Lena.
Hope frowned. “I spent an hour in the main hall literally begging kids to join a few weeks ago, and no one was interested. Oh, they ate my homemade sea turtle cupcakes, but would they sign up? No. I put up posters, and they stuck gum on them. But now—”
Regina was beside them. “I told Jared he should join, and look what happened!” she said breathlessly.
“Yes,” said Hope as Jared, at the center of the swarm, let out a honking laugh. “Look what happened when you asked.”
“Isn’t this great?” Regina said. “What can they do to help?”
Hope eyed the group. She smiled slowly, like a tiger noticing a herd of raucous antelope blundering into her territory. “I think, since they’re new, they can start off in the cafeteria,” she said. “With the wet recycling.”
* * *
“Stay back!” Jared said to Regina when Climate Change Club ended. “I stink! Wet recycling is, like, one step up from garbage. I gotta go home and shower.” He and the other wet recyclers sprinted for the door, leaving a distinct odor behind them.
“Thanks for your help!” Regina called as Lena and Hope exchanged satisfied glances.
So wet recycling, which was in fact zero steps up from garbage, was the reason Lena and Regina finally got to spend some time alone together.
“Meditation is amazing, isn’t it?” Regina said as they headed home. “I feel like a pool of melted butter when I’m done.”
“Me too!”
“But what’s up with gently opening your eyes? Is there a way to forcefully open your eyes? Have we been opening our eyes wrong all this time?”
“I guess so. I guess we need to stop slamming our eyes open so recklessly.”
And a bit later:
“I can’t believe you broke your Ralph’s tasting streak!”
“I’m a total sheeple,” Regina admitted. “I couldn’t order something weird in front of those other kids. I’m deeply ashamed.”
“It’s okay. We can go this weekend and get you back on track.”
“Papaya sorbet, here I come!”
Without discussing it, they passed the intersection where they usually parted ways and headed for Lena’s house together.
As they came in through the mudroom, Lena could hear her parents talking softly in the kitchen and knew by the elaborate politeness that they were arguing.
“… acknowledge what you’re expressing, and I respect your feelings,” her mother was saying. “But I hope you’ll endeavor to see my viewpoint as well.”
“I certainly understand your concerns,” her father replied, “but I was hoping, since it’s only a few hours on a weekend night, that you could put your work aside and come out. The Robinsons are in town for just a day.”
Ah. The Restaurant Argument. It was a classic. Lena’s mother hated restaurants. She claimed, at various times, that they were unclean, that they were overpriced, that they oversalted everything, that they were noisy… et cetera. Her father took these objections at face value and would try to engage with them individually. He didn’t seem to realize that the reasons were a smoke screen. Valerie Lennox simply hated going out to eat. Period.
Here, for example, she was employing the Too Busy with Work defense. She would win eventually. She almost always did. Lena could count on one hand the number of times she’d eaten at a restaurant with her mother. She’d gone out to eat with Regina’s family far more often than she had with her own.
“Hey, girls!” her father said with forced jollity when he noticed them. “How are Lena-Bean and Gina-Bean today?”
“Fine, thanks,” said Regina.
“It’s Regina-Bean now, Dad,” said Lena. “She changed it.”
“A name update!” Dad said. “Felicitations!”
When they got to Lena’s room, Regina asked, “Was that the Restaurant Argument in progress down there?”
“I think so. He never learns.”
“Weird, since he’s a teacher.”
Lena’s father taught high school science in a town a safe distance away.
“That’s part of the problem,” said Lena. “He’s all fact-based and rational, and she’s going on pure lizard-brain instinct. He can’t win.”
They sat in comfortable silence for a while, and Lena went ahead and basked in things being the way they should have been. She was about to ask Regina—she really was. She was about to ask about Jared and what was going on with him and were she and Lena still best friends and would they always be best friends. This would have been facing her fear, which was what she was supposed to be doing. But it was so pleasant to be lounging around together, talking about nothing and not talking at all.
“How’s Myron?” Regina asked.
So they chatted about Myron and what he’d been up to lately (not much). Afterward they spent some time laughing about Hope’s hazing of the new Climate Change recruits, and that almost brought them around to the subject of Jared, but not quite. And then it was time for Regina to leave.
Lena’s dad drove Regina home. After they’d dropped Regina off, Lena asked him: “Going out to dinner soon?”
“Nope,” said her dad. “Maybe next time the Robinsons are in town. From New Zealand.” He glanced at her sideways. “So, Regina, huh? That might take some getting used to. It feels more formal somehow.”
“Probably because ‘Regina’ means ‘queen.’ Maybe you’ll do better with Reggie. That seems to be trending.”
“Reggie,” her dad said, as if trying out a new jelly bean flavor. “Does that mean Lenny isn’t far behind for you? Should I be practicing that?”
“Only if you want me practicing Glenny.”
CHAPTER 17
The next day might have been less chaotic if Lena had spent time the previous evening thinking about the two pieces of paper from the small gym. But, happily floating in the warm bath of her reunion with Regina, she had forgotten about them as soon as she put them in the jar. The only thought she had given to the Meditation Group was recognizing that she was eager to do some more Finding and Facing. She had started planning her next fear as if she were putting together an outfit.
What would it be this time? The garbage disposal coming on with her hand in it? Too grisly to picture. That glass elevator at the mall? Too easy to picture—not even a challenge. By the time she got to the small gym that morning, she had a good one picked out: balloons. Not the harmless Mylar kind, but the kind that popped loudly if you so much as looked at them funny.
Soon she was lying on her mat, picturing a bunch of angry-red balloons straining with excessive helium and so thin-skinned they were translucent in places. Ready to blow, in other words. The voice was instructing her to reach out toward her fear, to touch it, and she was about to maybe do it, when she heard the other voices.
Underneath the instructing voice, running below the synthesizer and noodly piano, she heard a sound like a whispered chant. A group of people saying the same phrases over and over. She stopped listening to everything but the chant. She turned up the volume but still couldn’t make out any words. Was this what Sam had been on about?
She realized the chanting might not be the app. Maybe a group of kids was chanting nearby. Was there a Chant Club at Cranberry Bog Middle School she was unaware of? And if so, how did it have enough people to get up a good chant when Climate Change Club had only six measly members? If you didn’t include Jared and friends. Which she didn’t. They were fair-weather Climate Changers at best.
She took out her earbuds and the chanting stopped. She put them in and there it was. So it was the app. The main voice was telling her to gently guide her fear to the edge of the woods and beyond. To let her fear out into the sunshine. But she didn’t know what she’d missed and was worried she was supposed to have tied up her fear with a stout rope before letting it out. So she gave up and waited for session 4 to end.
The moment Sam sat up, Lena said, “I heard those voices. The ones you were talking about. Like a bunch of people chanting?”
“That’s them,” said Sam. “They seemed louder to me this time. Maybe we need to let Call Me Barb know there are sound-quality problems.”
Tom dove into his backpack for a notebook before Sam had gotten to the end of that sentence. “Anyone else have issues to report?” he asked, clicking a pen.
