Freeze Tag Page 8

  She wanted to fight back.

  But how did you fight a Lannie?

  If West, who could wrestle and tackle, could not fight, how could Meghan? What was the weapon?

  Was there a weapon?

  “Hello, darling,” said her mother. The kiss they always shared rested gently on Meghan’s cheek. “How was your day?”

  Meghan could not help it. Her eyes filled with tears.

  “Sweetie!” said her mother. “Tell Mommy. What’s wrong?”

  Mommy. As if she had called her mother Mommy since second grade. “It’s West,” said Meghan.

  “I know. Breaking up is so awful. Has he hurt you? Do you want me to kill him?”

  Meghan managed a giggle. “I don’t want him killed. I just — ”

  Just what? Meghan did not even know. Whenever she saw Lannie, she remembered, and she believed, and the frozen horror of the girl sapped Meghan’s strength and turned her knees to jelly. But when she was not around Lannie, it was all impossible, and she was embarrassed, and felt stupid and hopeless.

  They went down the hall together to the bedroom so her mother could take off her shoes. This was always first priority at the end of a workday. Mrs. Moore kicked off the high heels, wiggled her bare toes in the carpeting and said, “Aaaahhhhhhhhh.”

  “Why don’t you get a job where you can wear sneakers, Mom?”

  “I hate sneakers. I love high heels. I love shoes. I love being dressed up. I even love work. It just involves a certain sacrifice, that’s all.” Her mother kissed her again. “Now tell me everything.” They flopped back on the king-sized bed, shoulders and heads hitting the fluffy rank of pillows at the same instant. Staring up at the ceiling, they snuggled their sides together.

  Meghan suddenly remembered a thousand snuggles like this.

  A thousand days after daycare in which she and her mother had bed-flopped to share heartaches and triumphs.

  On cold days they pulled a comforter up over themselves and on hot days they turned the fan straight into their faces, so their hair blew up onto the headboard.

  Meghan suddenly remembered the purse her mother used to have when Meghan was little. Oh, it was practically a suitcase. Mrs. Moore practically needed wheels to move it. How many days had her mother reached down into the capacious bottom of that handbag, and made all kinds of excited noises and raised her eyebrows and twitched her lips and said, “What do I have in here?” while the little Meghan waited, full of anticipation. And each day, a tiny treat: a single chocolate kiss, a package of bright colored paper clips, the monogrammed paper napkin from a restaurant or a giveaway vial of perfume from the department store.

  How thrilled Meghan had always been.

  When you were little, it only took a little.

  But I never wanted to be here, thought Meghan. I always wanted to be over at the Trevors’. What was the matter with me? Home was wonderful. Why was I so sure theirs was more wonderful?

  “Mom? Did it ever bother you that I spent so much time at the Trevors’?”

  “Oh, yes. It bothered your father more, though. I knew you needed the company. You’re very sociable. You like noise and people. There aren’t enough of us here, and your father and I are too quiet for you. It used to hurt Daddy’s feelings terribly that the instant we finished dinner you’d bolt out the door and go to the Trevors’, where things were fun.”

  “Did it hurt your feelings?”

  “In a way. I always wished the neighborhood kids would come here for a change. Sometimes I’d stock up on Popsicles or candy popcorn or jelly doughnuts and hope I’d be the one who got the kids, but I never was.”

  Meghan had always thought her mother disliked the mess of visitors. She turned on the bed to stare at her mother. They never did this. They seemed to talk most easily staring upward at the ceiling and not at each other. How pretty her own mother was. What a nice profile she had.

  Why did I want Mrs. Trevor all this time? thought Meghan, and she was suffused with guilt. She buried herself against her mother’s warm hug and they lay softly on the bed without speaking.

  After a long time the lump in Meghan’s throat went away.

  She had told her mother nothing. She had said nothing about the horror of Lannie, and the taking of West, and the freezing of her own flesh. And yet, she was so comforted! Her mother was so solid. So there. So safe.

  So mine, thought Meghan.

  She knew with a stab of understanding that she had been able to spend such huge amounts of time at other people’s houses because she had known absolutely that her parents would love her anyway. She had been safe doing anything at all. Safe in love.

  And Lannie.…

  What had Lannie been?

  Unsafe.

  Without love. Without even a molecule of love.

  Unsafe.

  If you are not brought up in the safety of love, thought Meghan Moore, you yourself become unsafe. It is unsafe to be near Lannie. She is as dangerous as a collapsing bridge or a caving-in cliff. All because of love.

  “Ohmygosh!” said Meghan, remembering things out of nowhere, the way your mind does sometimes, all on its own. “Mom, don’t you have a meeting tonight? We haven’t even thought about supper! You’re late! You haven’t even changed yet! Ohmygosh!”

  Her mother said. “It’s only a meeting. You and I needed a hug. We haven’t had a good long hug in ages.”

  Meghan’s eyes filled with tears. Her mother had been there, waiting for this hug, and Meghan hadn’t been home.

  “It’ll be okay in the end, darling,” said her mother softly, lips moving against Meghan’s hair as she squeezed her daughter. “I’m so sorry you’re having trouble with West. I know you’ve always adored him. I know how it must hurt. But you’ll tough it out. You’re my strong girl. You’ll do the right thing. You’ll make it.”

  Chapter 9

  MEGHAN WAS STRONG. BUT to be strong alone — it was hard.

  She wanted to be strong together!

  After two weeks of being discarded like something you can’t even recycle in the garbage, Meghan went over to the Trevors’ after school just the way she always had. She had the courage to do this only because she knew that West had his mother’s car that day, and she had seen him drive away after school with Lannie, and the car was not back. So only Tuesday would be there, and possibly Brown, if he didn’t have sports.

  Meghan didn’t knock. She had never knocked at the Trevors’, just walked in. “Hi, Tues,” she said nervously.

  Tuesday leaped up from the television. She raced across the room and flung her arms around Meghan. “I’m so glad you’re here!”

  There. That was the welcome and those were the words. Some of the leftover frozenness in Meghan’s lonely heart eased.

  “It’s been so weird,” said Tuesday. “West doesn’t talk to anybody. Not me, not Brown, not Mom, not Dad. I guess he uses up all his speech and energy with Lannie and he comes home this drained-out old thing. Sits over his homework without seeing the page, without lifting the pencil. Mom and Dad are beside themselves. You won’t believe this, but they think he’s lovesick.”

  “Over Lannie?”

  Tuesday nodded. “Over Lannie. Brown and I tried to inch into an explanation that the sick one is Lannie, and the trapped one is West, and the one in danger is you. But you know parents. Even mine. They just got annoyed and stomped around when we reached the Freeze Tag part. West didn’t like it either. He wouldn’t even back us up. He just looked at his hands and said he didn’t know what we were talking about.”

  Looked at his hands, thought Meghan. Why his own hands? Did Lannie pass it on? Can he do it, too, now? She swallowed, trying to gag down this horrible image. “I didn’t even try with my parents,” she said. She checked the window. There were no cars approaching. All they needed was for West and Lannie to drive up while she was on the premises.

  “West had to take her to the library,” said Tuesday.

  “She studies?”

  “She says so,”
Tuesday shrugged. “She’s attached herself to him like a starfish to a rock.”

  “How can he stand it?” Meghan could not bear it that West was managing. Was there something redeemable in Lannie that West had managed to find? If anybody was going to find good things in an evil person, it would be a Trevor. They were big on silver linings.

  Mr. Trevor came in. He got out of work at about the same time the kids got out of school, so he was usually home in the afternoons. “Hey there, Meggie-Megs!” he said, much too heartily. “Say! We haven’t seen much of you lately. How’ve you been, kid?”

  “Fine,” said Meghan, because what other answer could you give a grown-up?

  “Sorry you and West sort of split up,” muttered Mr. Trevor.

  Meghan said nothing.

  “They didn’t sort of split up,” said Tuesday. “Lannie forced herself on West.”

  Mr. Trevor did not look as if he believed that. Clearly, he believed it took two to tango; if West was dating Lannie, it was because West wanted to date Lannie.

  “Lannie stinks,” said Tuesday, laying it on the line.

  “I’m sorry,” said her father, addressing both girls, “that this turn of events has happened, but life is like that when you’re young. You fall in love lots of times with lots of different people. So let’s not say anything unpleasant about West’s girlfriend.”

  Tuesday threw her arms in the air. “Let’s,” she said. “Let’s say lots and lots of unpleasant stuff about West’s girlfriend. And then let’s do something unpleasant to West’s girlfriend.”

  Mr. Trevor frowned and left the room.

  But Tuesday and Meghan grinned at each other. The grin of conspirators. Allies. Teams. They even winked.

  “I’m staying at the Trevors’ for supper, Mom,” said Meghan into the telephone. “And I’ll be studying with Tuesday. I’ll be home around ten, okay?”

  “That’s pretty late for a school night,” said her mother. “How about nine?”

  Nine. Meghan wasn’t sure it was going to be manageable before nine. “Fine,” she said to her mother. “I’ll be home by nine.”

  The thought of crossing the open space between the houses after dark was so scary Meghan almost quit right then. She would have Lannie’s eyes following her, Lannie’s knowledge, Lannie’s plans.

  “You can crawl across the grass the way they do in desert warfare,” suggested Tuesday, giggling. “Belly flat, head down, bullets whizzing through your hair.”

  For Tuesday it had become fun. An adventure.

  But then, Tues wasn’t the one who had been frozen in the truck. Tuesday hadn’t felt snow piling up on her open eyes. Tuesday hadn’t felt the cold passing into her heart, taking her into another world.

  Tuesday’s pretty bed jutted out into the room, leaving a space between the hanging bedspread and the wall. From the doorway you could not see down into that space. Meghan unrolled the sleeping bag in which she had spent so many nights and lay down, hidden. The afternoon grew dark. Tuesday and her brothers and parents had dinner. They made a lot of noise. None of it was West. Five people for dinner and four talked.

  But he would talk tonight.

  Mr. and Mrs. Trevor would watch their favorite TV programs and the children would be sent to their desks to do homework.

  Well, they would do homework. But it wouldn’t be a school assignment.

  Meghan stayed beneath the level of the windowsill, just in case Lannie was lurking outside, peeking, staring, thought-policing.

  It was eight-fifteen before Tuesday led West into her silent unlit bedroom.

  “Sit on the floor,” Tuesday said to him, and burst into a spatter of giggles.

  “Tues, I’m tired,” he said. “I can’t play games anymore. Isn’t it enough I have to play this endless game with Lannie?”

  Meghan crept out from behind the bed.

  West stared at her. She held a finger to her lips.

  He sagged in a funny way, as if he were being rescued. “Oh, Meghan!” he said, and he said nothing more, but it was enough. He sat down next to her, and Tuesday sat with them, which Meghan regretted, but then, tonight’s plan did not call for a kiss. It called for strategy.

  “What’s going on in here?” hissed Brown.

  “Crawl in,” whispered Tuesday.

  Brown checked out the participants. “War council!” he said delightedly, and dropped down, and crawled. He would make an excellent desert warfare soldier, he had that belly technique down perfectly.

  The four of them lay on their stomachs, propping their heads up with their cupped hands.

  “What,” said Tuesday, “are we going to do?”

  “You’re asking me?” said West. “You think I’ve come up with something?”

  “Where does Lannie get this power?” said Tuesday. “Maybe we can cut off her source.”

  West shook his head. “I asked her how she calls it up. I was half thinking I could freeze her. If I knew how. She said she’d stage a demonstration for me. She said she’d freeze that gym coach I don’t like.”

  “Wonderful,” said Brown.

  “Exactly. I start yelling ‘No, no, no, no, no!’ and Lannie says to me, ‘Don’t worry, West, it’s easy, all I have to do is touch him, you won’t be involved. I’d do that for you,’ she says. Like I’d be happy afterward.”

  “But Lannie must touch you all the time,” said Tuesday. “And you don’t freeze.”

  “She does touch me all the time. But I don’t touch her. It’s not so bad if I just sit there and let her do what she wants.”

  It sounded pretty bad to Meghan. But still, Meghan began to enjoy herself. This was nice, this meeting of the best friends, plotting in the dark, hidden by the furniture, safe from the bleached eyes.

  “I give Lannie hundreds of excuses for why I can’t see her every waking minute,” West said. “I use sports, chorus, homework, term papers, weather, baby-sitting, Tuesday, Brown, Mom, Dad, Grandma.”

  “Grandma?” said Tuesday.

  “I said when you’re eighty years old and you’re stuck in a nursing home five hundred miles away, you want to hear from your oldest grandson. I’ve written a lot of letters.”

  Meghan giggled. West’s face split into the old familiar grin. Oh, she loved him so much! Okay, they were going to whip this thing. Together they were going to knock Lannie out of commission.

  “You should have been here at breakfast this morning,” Tuesday told Meghan. “It was so funny. Mom says to West, ‘You can have the car, dear.’ And West says, ‘No thanks Mom,’ because the last thing he wants is to be alone with Lannie yet again. And Mom goes — ‘There’s no such thing as a seventeen-year-old boy who doesn’t want the car. Are you sick? Are you taking drugs?’ So after we make our way through the no-I’m-not-on-drugs conversation, Mom wants to know the truth about why West doesn’t want the car. And the best my stupid old brother can come up with is — it’s tough finding a parking space.”

  “Oh, yeah, Mom believed that,” said Brown. Tuesday and Brown burst into gales of laughter. West flushed. Meghan rested her hand on his. It was their only touch. The only touch in so long! He lowered his gaze and seemed to draw comfort from her hand. No doubt it was very different from the one that had been touching him these last weeks.

  Tuesday became very businesslike. She did not want this evening to deteriorate into some sort of icky romantic thing. “I think,” said Tuesday, “that you’ve given it enough of a shot, West. Now in the morning, you march up to Lannie and you tell Lannie it’s been fun, but it’s time for you to move on.”

  West looked at his sister incredulously. “After what she did to Meghan?”

  “It’s worth a try,” said Tuesday.

  West shook his head. “She’ll hurt somebody.”

  “We’ll keep our distance.”

  “She’ll run after you.”

  “Don’t be a wimp,” said Tuesday sharply. “You have to let Lannie know the score. Otherwise, this could go on forever.”

  Tuesday
made it sound so simple. Meghan tried to believe her. That West could just say, Hey, Lan, been fun, see ya around, back to normal now, don’t hurt anybody, ’kay?

  “Okay,” said West, nodding, trying to give himself courage. “You’re right. It can’t go on forever.”

  Meghan ate a huge breakfast, having skipped dinner the night before. Her mother was delighted. Mothers always loved seeing you eat breakfast. Even though Meghan had fixed it herself, her mother seemed to feel she could take credit for it.

  But she was not so eager to go outside.

  For this was the morning. West was to tell Lannie to skip off and leave him alone. Leave them all alone.

  To whom was Lannie the most dangerous?

  Would she turn on West, for breaking his promise? Would she turn on Meghan, for being the one West still wanted? Would she turn on Tuesday, for being the sister who started things?

  This won’t work! thought Meghan. He mustn’t do it! Lannie isn’t going to say, oh, well, it was worth a try, have a nice life without me, West! Lannie’s going to attack!

  Meghan rushed to the telephone and stabbed at the familiar buttons, to call West, tell him no, no, no, no, no!

  She didn’t get past the second number.

  West, Tuesday, and Brown were already outside. West had his mother’s car keys in his hand; was unlocking the doors. Tuesday was getting in front — Lannie’s place. Brown was playing Indian and hollering and whooping and generally attracting attention.

  Meghan set the phone down gently. She got into her coat. She pulled on her mittens. She tightened her scarf. Perhaps Lannie’s touch could not go through clothing. Perhaps wool or goosedown could save Meghan.

  Right, she thought. There is no getting away from Lannie.

  Meghan came out her front door.

  Lannie came out hers.

  The Trevor children looked up Dark Fern Lane, and saw them both.

  West, Tuesday, Brown, Lannie, and Meghan all knew. This was a test. The game had reached another level. They looked at each other and, even from her front door, Meghan could feel the heat and the cold, the hatred and the love, the fear and the need.

  No one else did.

  Two houses up, the rest of the Dark Fern Lane children waited for the buses. There were two kindergartners at that stop, two first-graders, no second-graders, one third-grader. Then there was quite an age skip up to Brown. Lannie intended for Brown to be on that bus, not riding in the car with West and herself.