A Wounded Name (Fiction - Young Adult) (18 page)

CHAPTER 22

The rest of the morning and afternoon passes by as I lie on my bed, my hand over the bruise on my neck. I can feel my heartbeat through my fingertips with each rush of blood to the damaged skin. It throbs and stings beneath my touch like something alive in its own right.

When he finally managed to get to his feet again in the shower, Dane kissed me so sweetly the star scalded my breath, but then he wrapped himself in one of my towels and walked away. This morning he stood up on the widow’s walk with a microphone and crowed for hours like a demented Peter Pan.

Peace doesn’t last.

My door flies open and I flinch, start to sit up on the bed, but then Dane is there, pinning me to the mattress. Half the buttons of his black silk shirt are undone, the other half matched to the wrong hole, and his black slacks are unfastened and barely clinging to his narrow hips. His hair stands about his pale face in every direction. Wildness lives in his eyes, a frantic, manic gleam that’s supposed to go away with the medication he probably hasn’t been taking.

His chest rises and falls in short, sharp pants; his bleeding lips tremble with the force of each breath. He looks as though he’s been loosed from Hell. His fingers dig into my wrists where he pins them to the bed. Pain blooms beneath his touch, sleepy and familiar.

He shifts his grip, still hard and strong, to hold my wrists with one hand. The other moves to my face.

“Dane …”

A finger presses softly against my lips, and I fall silent. His eyes follow the path of his fingers as he traces every line and curve of my face, like he would memorize it, or draw it, somehow immortalize it beyond his means. His touch carries down to my throat. He lingers at the bite, his breath warm and sharp against my ear. He pushes a thumb against the mark, and I bite my cheek against a cry of pain; his hips dig into mine, and the cry turns into a silent gasp.

He yanks my turtleneck up until he can press his lips where his class ring belongs and isn’t. His cheek rests against my breast, my heart, the sun that spins and burns with his name written into the flares. His face softens, but his fingers close even harder against my wrists. A sudden, damp warmth trickles through the silk and lace of my bra, and I realize he must be crying. Silently, subtly, with nothing else but this kiss of tears to give it away.

He lifts his eyes to mine, the thin corona of grey nearly drowned by the pupils. “You took your pills this morning.” His voice, rough and low, sends shivers down my spine.

“Yes.”

“But you’ll let me do this anyway.” His hand moves down and I gasp, a too soft sound swallowed by his harsh kiss.

In the moment of death, or perhaps the moment of awakening, Hamlet’s soul splintered. Three Hamlets: one the Headmaster that was, one that is sorrow, one that is rage.

Dane isn’t dead, but he’s splintered as well, fractured and shattered into so many different pieces that I never know which of them I’ll see. There’s a knot between my lungs, a solid force that allows no air to pass, and I writhe against his touch until the knot explodes with a breath that shapes his name.

Just as suddenly the breath is gone again, lost to the hand that closes now around my throat and squeezes gently. His fingers trace warm smears against my skin, readjust themselves over and over again as he slowly increases the pressure. “You’ll let me do anything to you, Ophelia, even this. Why? Why do you let me do this?”

Black lights burst before my eyes with unexpected, dazzling colors. They’re beautiful, but too soon they disappear into a growing darkness that spreads inward from the edges of my vision. It sweeps me away, floating on an endless ocean of weightlessness.

There’s nothing here.

Not the salt of his tears against open wounds, not the way he carves his name into my body, not even the echo of the wonder. Laughter rushes in to fill the void, some of it my mother’s, a euphoric cacophony that would cut and bleed if there was anything real.

The hands snatch away, and there’s pressure on my mouth, air forced into my lungs. The darkness fades into a spill of light and color that makes no sense, and I mourn its loss as the world races to reclaim what was nearly stolen. His eyes wide, his face horror-struck, Dane stares at me. His hands tremble against the mattress on either side of my head.

“Ophelia,” he chokes out, as though the hands had been a collar around
his
throat.

But I let him collar me now as I let him collar me with his ring, because sometimes it’s a choice.

I take a deep breath and feel the muscles protest, feel the bruises that will form.

This is the Dane who made a reckless promise, who burns with the need to keep his word.

This is the Ophelia who broke her promises, who clings to a sputtering star to keep from drowning.

He rolls off the bed and backs away, still staring at me like I’m something new and terrifying, like I’m the ghost that plagues his promises. When I simply lie there and watch him, he risks a single step forward, brushes a fingertip against my swollen lips. “Doubt that the stars are fire,” he whispers brokenly, “doubt that the sun moves, doubt Truth to be a liar, but never doubt that I love you.”

With a hoarse, panicked cry, he hurls himself against the locked window.

A shriek rips from my throat as he collides painfully with the unyielding glass. He stands, shakes himself out, and starts to laugh hysterically. “Rapunzel in her tower,” he gasps, backing towards the door. One foot in the hall, he strikes a dramatic pose, declaiming loudly for the entire house to hear. “Danae in her prison, Ariadne on her island, Jephthah’s daughter in his stupid vow! Your father will protect you straight into misery and Hell!”

He darts back into the room, yanking my sweater back into place and cradling my face in trembling hands. “But what happens when the walls are breached?” he asks in a voice little more than a breath shared between us. Startled shouts and footsteps hammer up the first flight of stairs. “What happens when Zeus comes, when Theseus leaves? What happens …” He swallows hard, closes his eyes as his forehead leans against mine. “Ophelia, what happens when the promise is made?”

His face swims in a sheen of tears. When I try to answer, my voice is as shattered as the boy on his knees before me.

When a promise is made, it must be kept.

Or broken.

The footsteps reach the third floor, and Dane springs into the hall, crashing into Father and Reynaldo. Through the door, all I can see is a tangle of limbs. “Thank you for the string, dear lady!” Dane yells as he extricates himself. “When I leave you on that stinking rock, think well of me until your Dionysus finds you!”

Curled in the center of my bed, I bury my face in my knees and laugh until the tears come.

“Ophelia, are you—” Father struggles to gain his feet, one hand braced against the wall. “Reynaldo, quickly, go to the Headmaster and tell him—Ophelia, are you all right?”

I scrub my face with my hands and sit up. “I’m fine,” I whisper, my throat tight and painful. “He scared me, that’s all. I don’t know—I just …”

Which role does Dane want me to play this? I’m not part of his game, not really, but by staging this scene in the house, by dragging Father and his stooge up the stairs, he’s hauled me into the center ring. What is he trying to do?

I cross my arms against my stomach, clutch my elbows against the need to fly apart, to shatter. “He burst in and grabbed me, and he was just … spouting nonsense.”

“We’ll have to tell Claudius,” murmurs Father. “This is … I knew he was out of balance with grief over his father, but I had no idea you meant so much to him. This cannot be anything less than the madness of love!”

Love is its own madness?

But then, I suppose it is, sweet and painful and consuming, a way to drown so deliciously that it doesn’t even occur to you to gasp for air. I open my eyes and stare at the broken lock on the window.

“Passion can, at times, break our reason.” Our? I look up at him, but he sees something impossibly far away. “I am sorry for it, Ophelia.” He hesitates before touching my shoulder. “Are you all right? Did he hurt you?”

Even as we speak, bruises bloom in violent bursts of color against my skin.

But I let him do anything.

“No,” I whisper. “He just scared me.”

“Have you two argued recently? Any hard words?”

“You told me not to be around him without you or Gertrude present,” I remind him. “I told him that before classes resumed. He was angry then and has been angry since, when he has not been sullen and silent or … about his antics,” I continue carefully. “He’s interrupted my classes a few times, but other than that, we’ve barely spoken in two months. Though …” I take a deep breath and pray again that I’m making the right choice. “He has left notes outside my door, which I’ve never answered.”

“Which must have contributed to this …” He rubs a hand against his beard. “I thought this was just a passing attraction, that he was just trifling with you. God curse my jealousy! I thought him too young to form any sort of proper attachment.” This time he doesn’t hesitate before pulling me to him in a gentle and all too brief hug. “I need you to come with me to see Claudius. If there is a solution to Dane’s behavior, he needs to be told before keeping this secret causes some greater harm.”

The idea is enough to make me bite my swollen lip to keep from laughing. Claudius, the master of harmful secrets, will somehow amend this problem? He can’t take away Dane’s pain without losing everything he’s won since the summer.

But Father’s hand flattens against my back and gently propels me away from the window. “Come, Ophelia. And bring one of those notes.”

And because I try to be a good daughter, despite all my failings, I follow.

CHAPTER 23

The Headmaster’s office has a small waiting room attached to it, a place for parents to sit in comfort until the Headmaster is ready, and it’s here Father leads me. I sink down into a chair by the door and flick off the lights while Father enters the office to arrange for a moment or two of Claudius’ time. There are other voices inside, and I know Father won’t interrupt them, but he’ll hover until he’s had his say.

Moonlight floods the room from the tall windows that march along one side. It casts shadows of purples and blues against the carpet and walls, stretches the furniture out of proportion, gleams against the metal curve of sconces and statuettes.

Without Father standing over me, I push back the sleeves of the dark violet sweater and inspect my wrists. I can see his fingers, his hands. Already the angry red fades to a soft purple. As time passes, the color will deepen, the pooled blood collected under the skin in damaged cells, individual microcosms whose walls have been breached by a storm of fury and drowned in a tide of blood.

If I close my eyes, will I hear the bells of all those lost cities resonating in my veins?

But this, this mass of marks and color, this souvenir of fury and loss, this is what I am.

I am a bruise in the moonlight, a fragile-skinned creature with shadows under my eyes, drowning in the whispers of night-purple hair. I am a living wound upon the soul.

I’m a ghost without the sense to leave the body to its eternal rest.

I am a bruise, and Dane is the one who inflicts me.

The pain is there in the guilt in my father’s eyes, in the horror of Dane’s. He wields me as a weapon against himself, because I at least am a pain he understands. There isn’t a thing in the world that can make sense of a murder, of the loss of a father, but a bruise … a bruise is such a simple thing to understand. It’s science. It’s fact.

It’s me.

I tug the sleeves down to hide my wrists and turn the overhead lights back on.

The door opens and doesn’t quite close, and shapes pass by me in the sudden brightness. It takes a moment to recognize Messrs. Voltemand and Cornelius, from Monticello Academy and Reggie Fortin’s progressive education project. I suppose it makes sense that the Fortins wouldn’t give up. What pretty words did Claudius send them away with this time? What empty promises of friendship?

Then I hear a sound that makes me sit up and pay attention to that sliver of open air between me and the office. It’s the sound of a throat clearing, but it’s delicate. Feminine.

Gertrude never goes into the Headmaster’s office. The closest she ever went before was this room, to soothe nervous parents or comfort a child called to the house for whatever reason. She always said her work was outside of the office, that she had no business there, and yet there she is.

“Welcome, Mr. Rosencrantz, Mr. Guildenstern. Thank you very much for responding to our request, especially so quickly.”

Rosencrantz? Guildenstern?

Why has Claudius brought the Toms back to Elsinore?

In their time at the Academy, Tom Rosencrantz and Tom Guildenstern were simply a pair, just Ros and Guil, or sometimes the Toms. They never had much use for me, and they didn’t seem to enjoy spending time with Horatio or Laertes, but they’d put up with us to spend time with Dane.

In my nicer moments, I could call them awkward friends.

More realistically, I could acknowledge that they wanted the advantage of being friends with the Headmaster’s son. Ros, nervous and fluttering, and Guil, with his endless flattery and smug overconfidence, they don’t know Dane, either of them, and I think we were all privately relieved when they graduated two years ago.

Dane gets e-mails from them occasionally, usually stories of parties and conquests that sound half fabricated. They’re supposed to be in college, learning business so they can one day step into their fathers’ places.

I stand and silently swing the door the rest of the way open, leaning against the frame.

“You mentioned a mystery, Headmaster?”

That’s Guil, always the first to speak, the first to barge in, with a nervous little laugh that follows everything he says even when it isn’t a joke.

“Rumors being what they are, I know you’ve heard something of Dane’s recent behavior,” Claudius says grimly. Ice clinks against a glass, followed by the delicate chime of crystal and a splash. “We might well call it a transformation, for certainly he in no way resembles the boy he was. There must be something more than his father’s death that has unhinged him, something more to create this behavior, but what that stress could be, I can’t imagine. You two are his friends of long duration and know him well, so I would ask you a favor.”

“A favor?” Guil scratches at his ear with a high-pitched titter. “What sort of favor?”

“I would ask that you stay with us awhile in one of the guesthouses and put your energies to spending time with him, to discovering just what afflicts him so we may find its cure.”

Ice clinks again in the short pause; his throat works convulsively to swallow.

“I am, of course, grateful that you have taken time from your courses to assist us in this and will be personally speaking with your dean to ensure that this doesn’t speak against your academic records in any way.”

Gertrude’s heels tap on the hardwood floor of the office. “He has often spoken of you, even after your graduation,” she lies gently. “I’m sure there are none to whom he is quite so attached.”

Because it’s the duty of a wife to assist her husband with judicious flattery where appropriate.

“If there is any way you can help us with this, we would not be remiss with our gratitude,” she continues. “For your time, for your sacrifice, we wish to give you a living stipend while you’re with us.”

Ros coughs anxiously, a half-born sound that trails into a true cough and a gasp for breath. Gertrude discreetly hands him a handkerchief, and he thanks her with a weak smile. He’s never sure of what he’s saying, doesn’t like to speak in front of people. “We owe a duty to the school; you could just—”

“But we are glad to assist in any way we can,” Guil quickly says over him. Fabric rustles, followed by a muffled
ow
. “It’s a privilege to give you any service you ask of us.”

“Thank you, Rosencrantz and gentle Guildenstern.”

“Thank you, Guildenstern and gentle Rosencrantz,” Gertrude corrects Claudius with a wry laugh. “And if this does not come too soon upon your arrival, please, go and seek my son at once.”

“God make our company healthful to him,” Guil replies pompously.

Chairs scuffle and scrape against the floor. The two young men stand to stroll out of the room without even a glance in my direction. Ros gnaws on a fingernail, a muscle tic making his left eye twitch constantly. Coarse caramel hair curls tightly against his scalp and his skin, normally the color of milky coffee, has a sallow, unhealthy cast, like someone without enough fresh air. His clothing is just a little bit too big, always close to the right brands but not quite. Beside him, Guil’s clothing is always just a little too tight, meant to complement a physique that he thinks is better than it is. He’s darker than Ros, much darker, with a shaved head and a very narrow line of hair along his jaw that pretends to be a beard. A gold stud gleams in his left ear. They leave the door open behind them, and before they’ve even left the waiting room, Guil is already full of plans to make Dane spill all his secrets.

Poor Dane.

But Father’s plan for Reynaldo and Laertes starts to make a little more sense. It still won’t work, just as it won’t work here, but Father and Claudius have broken their stalemates in very nearly the same way. Neither of them can ask their questions directly with any hope of an honest answer, so they call for others to do it for them.

There’s nothing overtly malicious about what Claudius is doing; it could even spring from genuine concern. Certainly Gertrude seems relieved at the possibility of a breakthrough, of a cure.

But how can it help to bring in those who have only ever looked for the rewards of being connected to him? They don’t know him; they don’t know anything of what’s happened this summer.

They don’t know that by playing mad, he’s becoming it.

Dane knows, though, or at least suspects. Perhaps he only fears. But he knows there’s a strong possibility that his promises are forcing a disconnect between thought and reason, between reason and impulse.

I can see it in his eyes when he looks at my bruises.

I can hear it in how his voice trembles when he speaks of promises.

The Hamlet that Dane sees, the Hamlet he makes his promises to, is the ghost born of madness and rage and fury. That Hamlet is the one who was murdered; the Hamlet who sits with the angels is the one who died. But Dane doesn’t know that, doesn’t know there’s more than one, and I can’t tell him because it doesn’t change the promises he’s already made.

Because knowing he made his promises to the wrong one might make him shatter further.

Sometimes I tell myself that if I play at being a good daughter for long enough, I’ll eventually become one. Like it’s just a matter of practice. One day, after so many rehearsals and attempts, I’ll just wake up and be the daughter my father wants to see. It’s never worked, and I know it never will.

It wasn’t the theory that was wrong, just the application.

The Dane that came to my room wasn’t an act. He wasn’t performing for anyone, couldn’t have counted that I would scream and have to tell my father part of what happened.

He came to me because he’s scared, because the madness he plays with becomes more and more a part of him, the part that singes my body to a tight point of pain and shatters me. The part that’s scared the wonder he sees so rarely may not exist.

I never thought I would envy my own madness, but I wish I could give this breed to Dane. There’s no pain in my mother’s madness, only wonder. Whatever suffering comes from others, not from the madness.

But Dane …

Oh, Dane.

I cross my bruised wrists over my heart and push until the pain and the circling star become one. He gives me the pain he can’t bear.

How much more pain will he find to give?