Bad Creek, page 2
Joanna gave one of her monologues about the Good Ol’ Days and Gum gave Iris a play-by-play of his entire year. What classes he almost failed. What pranks he helped pull on the dean of his prestigious private school. The stick-and-poke tattoo some hot senior guy gave him. It looked like a gray smudge on his thigh, but according to Gum, the quality of the tattoo didn’t matter if the artist was hot.
It was supposed to say Carpe Diem, but the M was illegible, so when she squinted she could only make out Carpe Die.
Iris didn’t have any real-life updates to mention. She wasn’t on the tech crew for the spring musical this year. She didn’t rerun for student council vice president either. No developments on any romantic prospects. Courtney Shaw did invite her to a party. And she could have been flirting, but since last summer, Iris hadn’t had the energy, and Courtney ended up hooking up with Tamia Spencer later, anyway. Gum definitely wouldn’t want to hear all about the blanket cocoon Iris spent the last twelve months hiding in, watching reruns of her favorite ghost-hunting show, Dark Unknown.
The crackle of the fire was the same, but it didn’t warm Iris up like it should have. And without Glory’s perfectly curated playlist there was too much dead air. Aidan probably thought all their traditions were pointless now; that was why he hadn’t come. She tried not to fault him for it. This was bound to happen eventually. Even if Glory was still around, everyone would be ready to grow up, and Iris would be left behind.
Gum was still wearing the friendship bracelet from last summer. It was so worn that the shades of blue faded into gray. Iris pulled this year’s edition from her backpack and tied it around his wrist. “The zigzags are cool,” he told her.
He didn’t notice the other bracelets at the bottom of the bag. The red one was useless, and now the yellow one might be too. At least Gum still cared—or he was acting like he did, for her sake. Would he believe her hunch, if she told him?
“The bugs are getting bad,” Joanna said after an hour. That meant she and April were going inside, and Iris could stay up as late as she pleased. First Night Bonfire only really started when the adults left.
But Gum stood too. “I got church in the morning,” he announced.
“Oh.” Iris tried to hide her disappointment.
“But I’ll see you at the cookout tomorrow?”
Their week had a sacred order: after First Night Bonfire, there was the Second Day Cookout. Third Day was dedicated to that year’s Summer Project. Fourth Day was the volleyball tourney and pizza at Todd’s. Mini-golf on the Fifth Day. Then a shopping trip on the Sixth. The week ended with the Fourth of July party at the beach. The Garrens went home the following morning.
Iris nodded. “Yeah.”
Gum gave her a salute and returned to Cabin 3, directly next door.
Everything was so wrong. Why was he leaving? She was acting normal. Well, as normal as she could. It was everyone else who was looking at her weirdly and treating her like she had become a swirling vortex of grief. It wasn’t fair.
Joanna gave Iris another sad little smile as she gathered paper plates and wrappers into a trash bag. As if to say, See, Iris? We’re back. We’re doing the First Night Bonfire. At least one of your boys is here. How could anything be wrong?
As if she didn’t notice how, every now and then there would be a pause—a hiccup in the conversation, leaving room for someone who wasn’t there. The void Glory left was obvious at home, but somehow it was worse in Bad Creek. Iris felt like an idiot for weaving those bracelets in the first place, for expecting any of this to be the same. It couldn’t be. It wasn’t a vacation without the Disasters. And they weren’t the Disasters without Glory. Iris was the only one stupid enough to think otherwise.
The red bracelet weighed a thousand pounds in her bag. Iris couldn’t carry it around all week. She slipped into her room, her parents in the living room behind her, chatting quietly. She wondered if they spoke Glory’s name in private, when they didn’t think their living daughter was listening.
She shut the door. It was breezy outside, but she was already sweating in this little cabin. She tore off her windbreaker, balling it up and chucking it against the wall. It landed beside a crooked bit of floorboard, where the wood was slightly off-color.
This was where she and Glory hid their secrets from their moms. Where they pretended they were pirates, burying precious treasure they found on the beach. Seashells, rings, and bottle caps. Whoever had last closed the lid on their hiding spot had closed it quickly. The wood wasn’t secured into place.
Iris knelt and pulled away the plank. The hiding hole was about as deep as a shoebox and only a little wider than her hand. It was empty, save for one item: a red Moleskine journal with last year’s date written neatly on the cover in gold Sharpie. There were a million others like it in Glory’s room at home. Iris had never realized this last journal was unaccounted for.
She wasn’t supposed to touch her sister’s stuff without permission, but she couldn’t help tearing it open and marveling at the organized chaos. Part diary, part sketchbook—Glory recorded her year in watercolors and colored pencils, poems and quotes. January was purple: pen drawings of telephone lines and street signs. April was pink: splotchy flowers labeled in Latin. The end of June was an explosion of color. There were paintings of melting ice-cream cones. Joanna reading on the dock. Gum smiling with his eyes closed, the sunburn on his cheeks immortalized in a hot-pink marker. Glory made her friends stand perfectly still for portraits instead of snapping a photo for reference. “Because the masters draw from life,” Glory would explain. Then, if someone wiggled or tried to speak, she added, “Move, and you die.”
Posing for Glory was always worth it. Glory made Iris’s curls look like elegant ringlets. Her soft jawline belonged to a goddess from the Renaissance; her dark eyes held galaxies. She looked like someone famous. Important. That was how Glory drew everyone, especially Aidan. The sketchbook was full of him. Pages of his freckles, his crooked canines, his chipped black nail polish.
Glory must have shoved the sketchbook into the hiding place before leaving for Savi Traxler’s pre–Fourth of July party. She couldn’t have known she wouldn’t get a chance to finish it. That the lake she swam in for seventeen summers would swallow her up.
June’s colorful portraits were traded for July’s muddy blacks and blues. There was no more of Iris. No more of the boys. July 1 had a house covered with ivy that must have been in a movie or something, because Iris didn’t recognize it, and Glory didn’t draw things that didn’t exist.
July 2 was full of eyes, the same ones over and over again, looking up from heavy lids. These harsh, inconsistent lines didn’t match her usual style. Glory was a perfectionist who kept her charcoal pencils at a precise point. But these marks were blunt, forceful. Obsessive, yet careless.
July 3. Her last day alive. Iris had to stare at the sketch for a moment to figure out it was not only a dock, but the one at Savi Traxler’s lake house, marked by the vague form of a floaty castle in the background. The shadow in the water was new. Blurry, featureless. A single word was scratched on that page: Waiting.
The next one was even stranger. Glory rarely drew herself; she was far too humble to do a self-portrait. But this was clearly her. Those were her pointed eyebrows, arched up in fear. That was her mole, her one blemish, under her eye. She was underwater—her curls floated around her face and bubbles trailed from her mouth, opened in a scream. Dark hands were wrapped tight around her throat.
Chapter 2 Gum
Gum didn’t know why sitting and standing and kneeling and eating a wafer once a week made him a good person. He was actually dead set on being what his family considered a bad person. It wasn’t that Gum hated his family; they just didn’t like him, and the feeling was mutual.
He looked up, squinting at the morning sun. One of the Midwest’s seven wonders glared down at him. How blessed he was to be in the presence of the Second Largest Crucifix in the World. Every year it seemed to get taller, the gaunt face of the Lord and Savior carved in pine even more accusatory. Could this wooden Jesus see inside his head?
Screw you, he thought, just in case.
“Hell, Daniel, did you sleep in those clothes?” his dad said, as they both exited the car. He wasn’t a tall man, but his only son was especially not tall, so the elder had a few inches on him.
Gum tried to smooth the wrinkles on his shirt. “No.”
He’d barely slept at all. He’d lain awake in Cabin 3, dreading what the week would bring. Aidan had ghosted them, and Iris was all wilted. She was trying to act okay, but she was never a very good actor. Gum didn’t have the power to cheer her up anymore. He felt useless.
Clarice stepped out next, effortlessly unfolding the wheelchair from the trunk. Gum missed the old nurse, Darlene, who had taught him to play poker. Clarice was thirty years younger and tried too hard to be his friend. She now carried the last person out of the car, a tiny middle-aged brunette. Though her clear blue eyes were open, she wasn’t awake.
Beth Clavey could have married a rock star but had settled for her high school sweetheart: a nice, hardworking Catholic boy named Aaron Gum. Legends called her the life of a party before the accident. She was a free spirit; her energy was infectious. She lit up any room. That’s what people have to say when someone dies.
Except Beth hadn’t died. She’d suffered a traumatic brain injury. That’s what happens when someone goes four minutes without oxygen. No one saw her fall off the dock, but luckily her twin brother, Bruce, found her in time to save her. Well, sort of. She hadn’t been awake for the past fifteen years, but anyone would tell you she was the best mother to live.
As the family walked toward the church, the congregation expressed their joy to see them. Look! The Claveys still made their yearly pilgrimage to Bad Creek!
How wonderful.
How peachy.
The small talk was interrupted by someone yelling, “Are you kidding me?”
It was Gum’s cousin, Hudson, wearing a turquoise shirt so bright you could see it from space. Uncle Bruce moved closer to him, and whatever he said back was too quiet for Gum to hear over the chatter in the parking lot and the obnoxious man-made waterfall at the base of the crucifix. Hudson crossed his arms, toned and tan from years of winning swim meets, before muttering something under his breath. Gum wasn’t an expert lip reader, but he dabbled in swear words, and he was ninety-nine percent sure Hudson had just said, Fuck you.
Hudson glared at his dad for another long moment, then turned away, eyes locking with Gum from across the parking lot. Gum pretended not to notice. He knelt to re-tie his dress shoes. It had been a few years since Hudson had tried to kick his ass, but he wasn’t going to provoke him. Thankfully, it was time to go inside. There was a lot of bumping and excuse me’s as Clarice struggled to wheel Beth into the church. She tried to secure a seat in the back, until Gum’s father told her the bad news. The earth would stop spinning if they didn’t sit with the whole extended family in the first pew. Mass wasn’t for the Claveys to worship; it was for the Claveys to be worshipped. But Clarice was new. She didn’t get it yet.
When they finally sat in the coveted front row, there was an empty space next to Hudson’s little sister, Annie. Weird. Was he still outside, pouting? Hudson wouldn’t miss Mass in Bad Creek. He got away with it back home in Kentucky, but not here. Not with Grandpa watching.
Hudson was the golden boy. The Claveys thought sunshine shot out of his ass. Whatever they had been arguing about earlier had to be something big. Gum could only imagine the horrible deed his cousin had committed. Did Hudson want to attend the wrong Ivy League school? Did he start seeing the wrong senator’s daughter?
Gum tried to forget about it. He intended to get through Mass like he usually did: pulling at the rip in his dress pants and picking crud out of his nails. The priest went on about how “no matter where we go, we always have Christ,” and “we can’t take a vacation away from faith.” Grandpa nodded along and glanced around to make sure everyone else was moved by the identical copy-pasted sermon the priest gave every year.
Silently fidgeting didn’t help Gum’s restlessness. His body itched like he was allergic to the air in the church. You barely slept, he reminded himself. Lack of sleep would make anyone feel off. It always took a while to get used to sleeping in Cabin 3, but he’d been tossing and turning the whole night, dreading today. Dreading tomorrow. He knew this summer would be a bit awkward; he’d expected that. But he hadn’t anticipated this sense of danger. This fear eroding his insides.
And it was getting worse the longer the priest droned on.
He tried to do some people-watching. He’d made a bet with himself last year that, by this summer, the eighty-something-year-old organ player would be dead or at least in a nursing home. Somehow, though, she was still playing away with the same big hat and long, wrinkled fingers. The boy across the aisle had a serious nose-picking addiction. The kid’s dad either didn’t notice or didn’t care. That would never fly in Gum’s household. Even during the school year, from states away, Grandpa was watching. And so was God. Both were harder to ignore in Bad Creek. Grandpa’s mustache quivered as he mouthed along to the priest’s words. The eyes of wooden Jesus pierced through the stained-glass window.
Gum looked at the hanging lights on the ceiling. If they all fell, he would be a goner from where he was sitting. But there were no earthquakes in Michigan and probably no tornadoes like back home, so there was little chance they would. Damn.
When Gum squirmed in the pew, his dad gave him a warning look. It said, Don’t try anything, or I’ll drop you off in the middle of the wilderness to be eaten by bears.
His dad didn’t really care about Jesus either. But Grandpa did. Gum couldn’t just leave now. He’d been pretending for so many years.
“Don’t know why you’re so obsessed with pleasing them,” Glory had said, after he was late to their sand volleyball practice because of church one summer. He’d arrived sweaty, still in his khakis and button-down shirt. And Glory, everyone’s self-appointed big sister, decided this was an opportunity for a lecture.
“Not everyone has cool moms,” he’d pointed out. Her eyes narrowed. He braced himself for a rant. How it was totally unfair for him to tell her to check her privilege, when his grandpa owned a freaking golf course. But her expression softened.
“Do what you have to. But you know you can’t go on like this forever, so you’re basically punishing yourself for nothing,” she’d said, stealing one of his candy cigarettes and twirling it around her fingers. “If I were you, I’d just take the L.”
But Glory didn’t really get it. She couldn’t. Her parents didn’t expect anything but her authentic self. She didn’t even have a curfew. The Claveys didn’t give love unconditionally like the Garrens. He had to behave in church to stay their good graces. He had to live a Godly Lifestyle or risk being shunned. That unspoken threat was always hovering above him, ready to strike down at any second like a righteous guillotine.
Gum used to envy Glory.
Now he envied the nose picker.
You’re fine, he told himself, though he still felt like he was going to burst out of his skin. The uneasiness kept creeping up until he couldn’t help but twitch. He tapped his fingers against the pew. This was a panic attack, right? He needed to remind his brain where he was, so that he wouldn’t get lost.
When he looked up, the priest was out of focus. The faces in the pews were distorted, unrecognizable. Every shadow darkened as if the sunset were here at ten a.m.
The full-body itch was replaced with pressure. All at once, gravity was doing overtime on him. What was it called when your head feels like it weighs thousands of pounds on amusement rides? Negative Gs? Or was it positive Gs? Gum stood, gripping the back of the pew. He half expected his hand to go through the wood. Nothing felt solid anymore. When he shuffled down the aisle, he thought he heard his dad ask, “Where are you going?”
He couldn’t see any faces. Not only was everyone blurry, but they were empty too, soulless as cardboard cutouts or mannequins. There were at least sixty bodies in the chapel, yet Gum felt like the only living, breathing person.
He somehow burst out the front door, down the sidewalk, and into the garden with the stupid waterfall and world-record-holding crucifix. He thought he could ride this out without any witnesses.
He was wrong.
A girl about his age stood in front of the cross’s concrete base, staring at him with curiosity, as if Gum were the one who didn’t belong here. The color was sucked out of her skin; she was all grays and blues. Her dark hair was drenched, stuck to the side of her cheeks. She smelled like rot.
He froze. Because what the hell was he going to do? All his systems went on standby mode. This couldn’t be real. Glory would never let anyone see her looking anything less than perfect. And, you know, she was dead.
She was heading for him. Slow, careful movements, like he was a wild animal she didn’t want to scare off.
“You’re not real,” he said to her. His voice was an octave higher than usual. She totally didn’t exist, so why did he say that? She cocked her head. “You’re not real,” he repeated with more confidence. Still, she didn’t disappear. She was only getting closer. And smelling worse. Like moldy flesh and dirty dishes left outside in a bucket for months.
So now he was hearing things, seeing things, and smelling things. Awesome. Gum couldn’t even hear the birds or the rustling of trees anymore. There were only the ragged breaths of Glory Garren. But she sounded more bear than girl. Each exhale was low, hoarse. The closer Glory got, the more gravity pulled Gum down. He fell to his knees.
Why was this happening? Why here, of all places? He closed his eyes, thinking, God, I swear I’ll actually start praying and stuff if you make her go away.
She was right above him now. Gum could do nothing as she looked into his eyes and put a moist hand on his forehead.
