Dark Stars E-Book

Caroline Kepnes

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 712

Beschreibung

Twelve chilling and thrilling stories from the darkest stars of modern horror including Josh Malerman, Caroline Kepnes, Stephen Graham Jones, Ramsay Campbell and more…From the terrifying claustrophobia of a couple stuck together during lockdown to a desperate desire for attention during adolescence and the haunting vision of outliving your children, these stories are modern horror at its finest.Created as an homage to the 1980 classic horror anthology, Dark Forces, edited by Kirby McCauley, this collection contains 12 original novelettes showcasing today's top horror talent. Dark Stars features all-new terrifying stories from award-winning authors and up-and-coming voices like Stephen Graham Jones, Priya Sharma, Usman T. Malik, and Alma Katsu, with seasoned author John F.D. Taff at the helm. An afterword from original Dark Forces contributor Ramsey Campbell is a poignant finale to this bone-chilling collection.Enter if you dare, dear reader, and discover what horrors await in Dark Stars...

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Also Available from Titan Books

Title Page

Leave us a Review

Copyright

Dedication

Foreword

by Josh Malerman

Introduction

by John F.D. Taff

The Attentionist

by Caroline Kepnes

A Life in Nightmares

by Ramsey Campbell

Papa Eye

by Priya Sharma

Volcano

by Livia Llewellyn

All the Things He Called Memories

by Stephen Graham Jones

Trinity River’s Blues

by Chesya Burke

The Familiar’s Assistant

by Alma Katsu

Swim in the Blood of a Curious Dream

by John F.D. Taff

The Sanguintalist

by Gemma Files

Mrs. Addison’s Nest

by Josh Malerman

Challawa

by Usman T. Malik

Enough for Hunger and Enough for Hate

by John Langan

Afterword

by Ramsey Campbell

Author Notes & Bio

Acknowledgments

DARKSTARS

Also Available From Titan Books

Dark Cities: All-New Masterpieces of Urban Terror

Dead Letters: An Anthology of the Undelivered, the Missing, the Returned…

Exit Wounds

Hex Life

Infinite Stars

Infinite Stars: Dark Frontiers

Invisible Blood

New Fears

New Fears 2

Phantoms: Haunting Tales from the Masters of the Genre Rogues

Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse

Wastelands 2: More Stories of the Apocalypse

Wastelands: The New Apocalypse

Wonderland

NEW TALES OFDARKEST HORROR

DARKSTARS

EDITED BY

JOHN F.D. TAFF

WITH A FOREWORD BY JOSH MALERMAN

AND AN AFTERWORD BY RAMSEY CAMPBELL

TITAN BOOKS

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Dark Stars

Paperback edition ISBN: 9781789098983

Electronic edition ISBN: 9781789098990

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

First edition: March 2022

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This is a work of fiction. Names, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

Introduction © John F.D. Taff 2022

Foreword © Josh Malerman 2022

The Attentionist © Caroline Kepnes 2022

A Life in Nightmares © Ramsey Campbell 2022

Papa Eye © Priya Sharma 2022

Volcano © Livia Llewellyn 2022

All the Things He Called Memories © Stephen Graham Jones 2022

Trinity River’s Blues © Chesya Burke 2022

The Familiar’s Assistant © Alma Katsu 2022

Swim in the Blood of a Curious Dream ©John F.D. Taff 2022

The Sanguintalist © Gemma Files 2022

Mrs. Addison’s Nest © Josh Malerman 2022

Challawa © Usman T. Malik 2022

Enough for Hunger and Enough for Hate © John Langan 2022

Afterword © Ramsey Campbell 2022

The authors assert the moral right to be identified as the author of their work.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

This book is dedicated to all of the teacherswho spend their time nurturing talent, impartingwisdom, and gently nudging people towardfulfilling their potential.

I am deeply appreciative of all that you have donefor me and continue to do for others.

FOREWORD

BY JOSH MALERMAN

Horror is having a moment.

Maybe it always is, I suspect that’s true. But right now? This is our moment, any and all writers, anybody alive and doing it. And maybe even some of the dead ones, too. From teenagers trying their hands at their first short stories to men and women a hundred years old who still thrill at getting it down on paper: horror is indeed having a moment. And us twelve, the twelve writers between the covers of this book?

We’re part of it.

Thing is, there’s a pandemic afoot. For that, we couldn’t get a photo of the twelve of us together. Sorry about that. We couldn’t fly to one place let alone stand arm in arm, our smiles to be seen. I like to imagine it, though, Alma Katsu somewhere in the middle, the rest of us fanning out from there. John Taff quietly staring the camera down, proud and at ease, for having brought the group together in the first place. In this photo (that does not exist) I imagine myself and Caroline Kepnes with drinks in our hands, John Langan and Chesya Burke on the verge of laughing from a joke one or the other made. Stephen Graham Jones, Gemma Files, Usman Malik all seated on the porch rail, the darkening sky behind them; some blood and shadow in the air. In this photo (that does not exist) Priya Sharma is mixing paint in a plastic cup, prepared to paint eyes on the rest of us. Livia Llewellyn is pointing at Ramsey Campbell, who either just spoke or is just about to speak, seconds away from saying something the rest of us will cheer.

But . . . no photo. And that’s okay. What do writers do to mark the occasion when there’s no camera in sight?

We write it down, of course.

Dark Stars is our photo, a snapshot of the twelve of us at this moment in horror, this moment horror is having.

It’s everywhere. Yes. Horror is on your Christmas tree and in your cereal. It’s on your shoes, your jacket, your hat. It’s in your Twitter handle and, for us lucky ones, it’s in your dreams, as there’s no shortage of imagery (obscure and not) in your numerous daily feeds. But I’m not even talking about the ubiquitous state of the genre; I’m pointing a bony, bloody finger at the books, the stories, the scripts, the tales. Horror is something like black taffy these days, enough elasticity to stretch across any room (even the word “room‚ feels a little confining while discussing the modern state of horror: Is it a room actually? Could be something else), and you’ll find that elasticity here in the pages of this book. Most of us writing today grew up when horror was having another moment, the holy/unholy 1980s. We were drawn to the paperbacks with black spines and red titles as if they were needles and the rest of the store was made of hay. But our book life didn’t start and end there, most of us didn’t build a home in horror and never leave town. We ventured out. We read the classics. We read self-help books. We read adventure novels and romance novels and books with no plots and books with titles that sounded more profound (at the time) than The Darkness or The Dead. We stretched our reading and, for that, stretched our eventual writing with it. You’ll find it everywhere in the new horror releases these days: more than a mash-up, modern horror has reach. Diversity helps that, of course. Diversity in writers, diversity in readers, diversity in language, cover art, titles, pen names, real names, places of birth, countries of birth, countries we call home, states of mind we call home, too. And while none of this is to suggest the best horror stories of any era were so bland as to be singularly horror and nothing besides, we’re currently stretching things more than they’ve ever been before.

Let’s stretch that photo (the one that does not exist). You take one side, I’ll take the other, and we’ll pull. And the twelve of us pictured will actually stretch, becoming elongated things with elongated faces, our expressions no longer determinable, the purpose of our gathering completely impossible to guess at. New monsters, we say. Even us, even as we write them, even as we read them, too. And there’s John Taff, still eyeing the camera, still in control, still saying (without speaking), I knew this was a good idea. Because John has not only experienced previous moments in horror, but he read the books that acted as snapshots of those eras, too. Kirby McCauley’s Dark Forces comes to mind. So does Paul Sammon’s Splatterpunks. And John, aware as anybody that horror is in motion, that horror breathes (horror is one of the only genres that can flourish when it doesn’t breathe, too), John said, Somebody get a camera.

Say cheese.

I can’t speak for everybody else in this book, but I’ve never been one to zero in on the “marketplace.” Before having anything published (but after signing with my agent) I received an email detailing current trends in the publishing world. It scared me silly, the idea of actually following these trends, strategizing in any way according to them. It wasn’t that I frowned upon someone who would, it’s just that it seemed to be the opposite of what I was feeling: an unchecked enthusiasm for all things unsettling, all things that go bump in the (day or) night. I wasn’t looking to tap into any modern taste, I just wanted to freak somebody out. I wanted to touch the same darkness our predecessors touched, and I hoped it was still there. But this hope was foolish, no? For isn’t it up to us, our era, to create that darkness? I suspect my peers in this book feel the same. It’s the kind of thing you can feel in a person’s writing. And what would you rather be presented with? A skilled storyteller with the passion of a stone, or a person who can’t stop themselves from telling you their story, what happened, all “talent‚ be damned?

I think somewhere therein lies the moment horror is having. Did Poe feel the same? I suspect he did. His words are fire. I find similar smoke in the Weird Tales writers of the twenties, thirties, forties. And there’s no doubt Beaumont, Serling, Bradbury, Nolan, Matheson rode their own electricity all the way to the page. Can you feel Shirley Jackson’s urgency in her stories? I can. You can, too. We talk often about the fear of the unknown, how it will forever rank First in Fear, but let’s take one step into this concept: rather than leaving the unknown to the confines of the story itself, let’s wonder as to the unknown of the people who are writing it. The best way to really scare somebody is to surprise them, to come suddenly from the shadows you, yes you, created. The worst thing an era can do is ape the one before it. Where’s the unknown in that?

Readers, meet Gemma Files. Stephen Graham Jones. Usman Malik. Chesya Burke. Livia Llewellyn. John Langan. Alma Katsu. Ramsey Campbell. Caroline Kepnes. Priya Sharma. John Taff. Me. Some of you have no doubt read many if not all of the names found within. Some of you, if not all, are in tune with the moment horror is having. But for those of you who are not, who are coming to the genre today, by way of Dark Stars . . . welcome. My biggest hope is you don’t entirely recognize the style, the storytelling, the spirit within. Any of these stories could be a movie. Any of them could be told across a campfire, bottle in hand. But all have been written down.

Because horror is having a moment and we all feel compelled to mark it.

Now, let’s stretch Time, just enough so we reach the days immediately following the pandemic and the current state of things. Let’s stretch Time so that the twelve of us featured here find ourselves at a convention. We’re all in the lobby of the hotel in a fine city (any city will do right now, and usually does) and we’re talking horror. Maybe we’re offering opinions on one another’s stories or (more likely) we’re ecstatically discussing how wonderful it is to be at a convention again, face-to-face, attending panels, buying books, surrounded by like-minded people after spending a good deal of time with ourselves. And when the talk turns to how each of us managed to endure our own private lockdowns, the conversation will invariably touch upon the very book you hold.

How did the genre flourish in such times? Because there was no stopping it. Where did we, the readers and writers, find solace at such a troubling moment in history?

Why, through books, of course.

And through seeing our names in print and sharing a table of contents with one another, some of the brightest voices in a genre that’s well and alive. And at that convention, I hope someone approaches us with a camera. And I hope they say, Hey, before you dozen go your own ways, while I got you all together, let me take a quick picture.

And we all line up. Alma maybe somewhere near the middle and the rest of us fanning out from there. John Taff smiling at the camera.

And just before he hits the button, our cameraman says,

Say cheese.

Then: Wait, you people write horror.

Scream it instead.

Josh MalermanMichigan 2021

INTRODUCTION

I had the idea for this anthology a few years ago, when Josh and I were brainstorming projects we could work on together. Because, I mean, who wouldn’t try to pin Josh Malerman down with projects to work with him on? I’m not crazy, you know. Working with Josh is like grasping the live end of an electrical cord, with all the ensuing energy and none of the imminent death.

The idea was to come up with something that could follow on what Dark Forces, that seminal eighties horror anthology edited by Kirby McCauley, had done. Namely, bring horror to a wider audience.

That sounds ridiculous, right? Horror needs a wider audience with people like King and Straub and Rice and Barker? With the popularity of television and movie properties such as Bird Box (Josh!), Us, The Haunting of Hill House (or Bly Manor), Hereditary, Midsommar, and Lovecraft Country?

Okay, how about bring a wider spectrum of horror to the audience?

Ahh, there, ding-ding-ding.

Dark Forces succeeded in showing that horror was much more than a dark-alley genre. It wasn’t just the lowbrow backwater many literati (and many of my college English professors) proclaimed it to be. In classes, I was often told that, according to Henry James, my taste for the works of Edgar Allan Poe was “the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection.”

In all deference to James, suck it.

Dark Forces didn’t so much prove that horror could be soaring and literary as remind. Poe, yes, but Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Bram Stoker, Wilkie Collins, H. P. Lovecraft, yes, even Henry James all proved that well before Dark Forces was published.

But McCauley’s Dark Forces reminded readers that this quality was a fundamental bedrock of horror. It featured writers like Stephen King, sure, but also Joyce Carol Oates and Isaac Bashevis Singer and Ray Bradbury.

So, I didn’t feel the need to readdress that. Horror can be literary. Check!

What I wanted to show—okay, really remind readers of—was horror’s vast range, the huge canvas that it can paint upon. The numerous, diverse voices that are writing horror, reshaping it, making it their own. Range is important to me as a writer, and I wanted to flaunt the range of this genre to readers.

Yes, horror can be literary. That’s important. But what’s even more important, especially now, is that we acknowledge just how expansive horror is. That horror can push more boundaries than just about any other genre and in ways other genres simply don’t . . . or can’t. That horror can stretch anywhere from the quiet, literary side all the way to bloody guignols, and all points between.

Within these covers are stories that run the gamut from traditional to modern, from dark fantasy to neo-noir, from explorations of traditional horror tropes to unknown, possibly unknowable threats. It’s all here because it’s all out there now in horror. I’ve said many times that we appear to be in a kind of Golden Age of Horror. We’ve gone from a time, say sixty or seventy years ago, where there were just a few successful authors out there writing horror—say Shirley Jackson or Richard Matheson or Ira Levin or William Peter Blatty or Robert Bloch—to a positive fiesta of horror authors too numerous to name, yet too good to ignore.

That’s what I wanted with Dark Stars, and that’s what I hope I’ve been able to bring to you. Some already have it, but every one of the authors in this book deserves the attention of and recognition from readers.

I’ve taken nearly six hundred words to sum up, but the idea of Dark Stars is simple. And it’s this: expand your horizons, not just about what horror can be, but what horror is.

John F.D. Taff

Southern Illinois

March 2021

THE ATTENTIONIST

BY CAROLINE KEPNES

The first time he calls, I’m not there. I’m not home to answer. I’m down at the beach. It’s 1993 when alone means alone. The beach by our house is small and stupid if you ask my sister. It’s just a pond and it’s just me. I don’t know that he’s calling. I don’t know that someone out there is thinking of me, trying to find me.

That is all I want, to be wanted, pursued, and I’m getting what I want and I’m not there to know it.

Reg is home. She doesn’t come to the beach because she doesn’t like to be away from the phone. Once I heard my dad tell my mom that Reg has the soul of a beauty and the body of a worker. My mom told him he was terrible, but she also laughed. Reg is hopeful, hungry. Her eyebrows grow so fast that she has to pluck them every day and she picks up on the first ring because that’s who she is. The ringing phone is Reg’s favorite sound in the world and the irony is that to answer the call is to silence those bells. It’s a big day for Reg. The last night of the county fair and she wants to go but not just with me, with boys. The phone is a promise. A beacon of hope. Boys, knock on wood, if she’s lucky.

“Hello?”

That’s how she always answers. Her voice lifts as if the telephone is such a mystery. The caller is no dummy. He hears the longing in her voice. He probably knows how she is. The soul of a beauty and the body of a worker. He probably senses that she fantasizes about making out with a guy on the Ferris wheel, any guy, please, someone.

“Hello,” he says. “Is Maeve there?”

You’d think Reg would be upset that he wants me, not her, but we’re sisters. In her head we’re a monolith. What’s good for me is good for her. So she’s cutesy and perky, treating every word like a barren cupcake with so much potential.

“Well . . . Actually . . .” See how she spreads out the words? Frosting on her cupcake. Creamy, or maybe sloppy. “Miss Maeve isn’t around right now . . .” And see that? See how she calls me Miss Maeve as if that’s a thing she calls me? It isn’t. He has Reg all figured out by now. Maybe he can see her through our bay window in the front of the house. Maybe he can’t. But he wouldn’t be surprised to know that she’s wearing these cutoffs that shrunk in the dryer. They’re tight. They cut off her circulation and leave red marks on her belly, but she wears them so that if some man called and asked what she was wearing she could be like, tiny cutoffs and a tube top. She’s not a liar, my sister, and she wouldn’t say she was wearing the shorts if she wasn’t and all summer she’s been hopeful—Whatif we met brothers? What if a new cute guy moved into the house across thestreet—and all summer I’ve been real—Wedon’t know any brothers. That house is condemned.

I’m embarrassed for her. Younger but older than me, the voice of reason. Impossible to imagine her on this planet before I came into the picture. But there she was and here she is, the happiest she’s been in weeks as the lights dim in the theater of her mind and she twirls the phone cord and licks her teeth.

“Well,” he says. “That’s too bad. I was hoping to catch her.”

She lies down on the sofa. Legs in the air, opening and closing. Bare feet. Can he feel her offering her body to him? God, she hopes so and she picks up a bottle of nail polish and shakes it. “Sorry to break your heart . . . Is there anything I can do to help?”

To this day, she cries when she gets to this part of the story, like it’s her fault, the way things went down. She’s ashamed of her own desire. Her fantasy. Her excitement about stealing him. She couldn’t help it. He reminded her of Davey.

*   *   *

Real quick, let me tell you about Davey.

Three summers before the summer I’m talking about, Reg was the one working at the club and she liked a member too. A guy named, well, Davey.

She had good reason to think the feeling was mutual. They kissed at a party on a beach. There was a fire pit. She thought he kissed her because of the flames. Everyone’s beautiful by a fire. Davey knew what she looked like in the daylight and he told her he’d call. But he never did. Then his family moved, I don’t know where. I just know that Reg was different when the waiting gave way to this weird form of horrific acceptance.

It was about the rejection. It wasn’t about him. He, too, looked best by the fire. He was good but not great, but being so foolish was hard on Reg. She thought she was stupid. For months she was annoying and tense. Her whole body looked different, like someone turned some screws and tightened every joint. She got skinnier and hairier. Not enough to be sent to some hospital for girls, because like she said, I can’t even do an eating disorder right. All of her sentences were like that, framed to highlight her failure as a human.

All of this for him. Stupid Davey who was only cute if you waited until dark and lit a fire.

Anyway, it was a year and a half later, almost Christmas. Reg was helping Mom clean out all the places you forget need cleaning. She and my mom got these little pads you put under the legs of heavy furniture. They managed to move the dresser in the front hall.

And Reg saw something on the floor.

A tiny scrap of paper.

Reg, Davey called 508 . . .

Reg screamed so loud that she woke me up. I ran into the living room.

“What happened?”

“What happened?” Reg was always that way. A bull digging in. Repeating what you said to remind you that you asked for it, as if all of your words were just food in her mouth, repurposed and regurgitated. “Well what happened is that Mom destroyed my fucking life.”

“Reg, calm down.”

“For sixteen months I have hated myself and thought I’m stupid and ugly and insane and deluded and probably fit to be institutionalized.”

“Reg, stop it.”

“For sixteen months I have been sure that I oughta be locked up, throw away the key.”

“Do you hear yourself? Where is this coming from?”

Reg cried now. Real messy sobbing. There were no words for a while, and it wasn’t the kind of crying where you go and hug her. Mom looked at me—Doyou know what this is?—and I lied to Mom and shook my head. No.

Reg blew her nose on her shirt. “Mom, how did you let this happen?”

“Let this happen . . .”

“This is from Davey.”

“Dave . . .”

“Davey. Davey Lane. From two summers ago.”

“Was he here? I don’t remember a Davey.”

That was mean; it’s Mom’s house and she knows her way around. She knew that none of us had ever had a boy over back then, same way as now.

“No . . . you don’t get it.”

Mom laughed. “Well, what else is new?”

“Mom, it’s not funny. This message is from Davey Lane. You took this message and I liked him and he said he would call and until right now I thought he never did call and I have made myself crazy wondering why for almost two years and I can’t believe you did this to me.”

“Me? Well that’s ridiculous, Regina.”

“You ruined my life.”

“Oh I did, did I?”

“If you had put this message in a safer place like maybe on my bed or on my desk, if I had seen it, I would have called him back and had my first boyfriend. I would be a whole different person by now. I would be confident, I might even have a boyfriend . . .”

“Most of these things don’t last, Reg.”

“Well, I guess I don’t get to know if mine would have, do I?”

Mom made a visor with her hand in that way she does when you can see her actively regretting her decision to have kids, wondering what it would have been like if she’d had boys. “Reg, you don’t have to be this dramatic. It’s one damn boy and if you knew him so well, I’m sure you would have mentioned him at some point or bumped into him since.”

“Impossible. He moved away.”

“Well, then good. It wasn’t meant to be.”

“You ruined it. This is my Mystic Pizza. I am living in Mystic Pizza, but now it’s too late. My Charlie thinks I hate him.”

Even I knew that Reg went too far with that Mystic Pizza crapola and Mom wasn’t into movies, especially movies like that, but she knew enough to know when one of us was going into what Dad called clunker mode. He always meant that to be funny and it was and it wasn’t and my mouth hurt. My head hurt. The house was too quiet. Too full of women—not me though, I was just a girl—and Mom put on a Carol Brady tone. “Alright, Reg,” she said, like she had all the power. “Let’s get this floor cleaned up.”

But Reg grunted. “Make her help you.”

Her was me and Mom was blunt. “She’s sick. You know that. Come on now.”

It was true. I had strep.

Reg started crying again but these tears were different. Mom went to her. She squatted on the ground like someone in church about to pray. “Reg,” she said. “All you can do is see this as good news. He called. So that’s good.”

“He’s gone.”

“But he called. So now you know that he liked you. Yes?”

“Yes, but.”

“No but. That’s all that matters. He liked you. Many boys will like you.”

Reg rolled her body onto the sofa, almost into it. Mom stood up. “Regina, no.”

But Reg wouldn’t let us look at her. “It’s too late. I’m too messed up in the head.”

This time, when she started crying, Mom kicked the coffee table. “Oh, for fuck’s sake, Regina. It’s not my fault or his fault if you’re this much of a mess over one boy you barely knew one summer several years ago.”

“Two years. Not even two.”

“Well so what? You shut yourself down? You mope and melt over one damn boy? A boy you barely knew? Let me tell you something about men, young lady. Men go after it, okay? Men try to get what they want, if they really, really want it. They don’t call once. If he liked you, if he was worth your tears, one unreturned message wouldn’t have deterred him. So enough, okay? Enough!”

Mom left the room and soon she left the house—I’m going to the grocerystore—and I sat down in the big chair by the sofa so Reg would know I was there. The front hallway looked so weird with the giant dresser in the middle, like a brown beached whale bear. I said that to Reg, and she laughed and rolled over so she could see the dresser, too.

Her face looked different, like the car right after a wax job and you know it will only shine like that for a day or so. “Funny,” she said.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” she said.

“Do you wish you never found the message?”

She was staring at the dresser so intently. Maybe that was for my benefit. Maybe she wanted me to think that she was evolving before my eyes. “Mom’s wrong.”

“What do you mean?”

“Davey did like me a lot. See, Mom likes jerks. Jocks like Dad. Guys who are pushy and won’t take no for an answer. But Davey was sweet. He didn’t write a poem for me or anything, we never got that far, but he was pure. His feelings for me were so strong that he couldn’t call again, you know?”

She seemed so sure of herself and I was young. I believed every word. “Wow,” I said. “Are you gonna call 411 and find his main house?” She looked at me like I wasn’t making sense, so I tried to be clearer. “I mean his real house, where he lives during the school year and all that.”

Reg laughed like I was younger than I was. She was always a little mean when she was happy. “His summer house is just as ‘real’ as his family’s winter house,” she said, and she didn’t look at me. She was too busy hatching a plan, making things seem better than they were, squinting at the wall like a professor. “No,” she said. “I can’t call him. That’s what makes it a tragedy. Only boys can call girls. Only boys can go after what they want. You call a boy, he knows that you want his attention and he can’t help it. If he liked you before, he likes you a little less now that he knows that you like him.”

“That’s not fair.”

“No,” she said. “But that’s the way it is. And there’s more.”

There was God in my sister. Knowledge. Light. “What?”

“When you know that a boy is obsessed with you . . .” See that? Now Summer Davey the poet was obsessed with her. “Well,” she said. “Attention from boys is the best drug. You get his attention and suddenly, you don’t need a lot of other stuff, you know? You don’t really need him, only his attention.”

She was on her feet now, headed toward the dresser. I offered to help, and she waved me off and then she wiped down the dusty floor until it was shining like a freshly waxed car. She was Hercules. She moved the dresser back to its spot on her own and she clapped her hands. Proud. I swear she was taller. Leaner. Even prettier.

She was like that for a while. My dad made jokes about this new cocksure Reg and my mom gave her extra money so she could get highlights in her hair, hoop earrings. No boys called the house, but this was the house that Davey had called. She was the one that got away and she never let us forget it.

Six months later, things changed. She stopped wearing earrings. She said one of the holes was infected and she didn’t want to freshen up her highlights. She went back to being the Reg she is now, the Reg she was before. Gloomy. Screws all over her body, tighter than ever. You’d think that me and Mom and Dad would have been upset, but in some weird way it was a relief, like oh right, this is Reg. Housebound. Attached to the phone.

One day after school I asked her what was wrong.

“I miss him,” she said.

“Davey?”

She nodded. “I think I’m dying . . .” All of Reg’s favorite books were about pretty high school girls dying. All of her favorite movies were the movie versions of those books and that enraged her because the girl in the movie was prettier than the girl in the book, because when Reg read the books of course she became the dying pretty girl.

I asked her why she was dying and she answered without hesitation. “Male attention deficit disorder,” she said.

“Wait,” I said. “I have that.”

“No, Maeve, you have ADD. Attention deficit disorder. That’s different. Doctors have that figured out and you take your pills and you’re fine. I have a deficiency of male attention. MADD is different . . .”

Now it had a nickname. MADD. “I never heard of that.”

“Because it’s a thing we’re not allowed to talk about, even with Mom. You can only find out about it from a sister.”

“How do girls without sisters find out?”

“They don’t. That’s why girls without sisters are so mean . . .” That was a dig at Gretchen, her best friend. Gretchen had three brothers and Gretchen could be mean. My mind was in overdrive. I was ten going on seven. The type of kid who would have gone back to believing in Santa in a heartbeat if presented with a shred of evidence. A plate of crumbs.

Reg started talking. She said the first time she had MADD was the summer she met Davey. She liked him but he didn’t like her back. Finding the message helped, the proof that he had in fact liked her. But old attention wasn’t new attention. Attention was milk. It was eggs. Better fresh than stale. Time was passing, wreaking havoc on her body. She was growing out bangs. Fighting MADD, a nasty disease. “See,” she said. “Without male attention, your body stops producing certain life-or-death hormones. If no guy likes me or looks at me within the next ten days . . . I’m a goner. Bring on the casket.”

There was nothing I could do, nothing Mom could do, nothing Dad could do. No doctor could help. Boys had all the power. But I didn’t want her to die and I grabbed her precious cordless. She laughed. “No,” she said. “Don’t tell me to call Davey. You know I won’t and also . . . Mom was right. He never liked me. Let’s just forget about it . . .”

She was agreeing with Mom—MADD was a disease—and I wanted to help her, save her. Your teeth hurt and you go to the dentist, but you need attention and there’s no such thing as an attentionist. “You can’t just give up,” I said.

“Alright,” she said. “It’s like this. As it turns out, Davey never liked me. Ever. He only called this house to get Gretchen’s number. I was a fool to be so happy about finding his message because I actually thought he was out there pining for me and . . . I don’t want to talk about it.”

This was bad news and she was rolling over into the wall, into herself, but I was emboldened. Maybe I was the attentionist. “Okay,” I said. “But that was a long time ago. Maybe you should call him anyway.”

“He never liked me.”

“But you’re awesome. Maybe he likes you now.”

“No,” she said. “Remember when you found out Santa is fake? Well that’s what this is. All that retroactive attention I thought I was getting . . . it turns out I never got it and I know I never will from him or any guy ever so just do me a favor and leave and let me die because there is no point. None. I am mad and I have MADD and that is all.”

I left. I went to my room and marked the countdown to my sister’s death on my wall calendar. Those days are still vivid in my mind. Mom and Dad and Reg acting like everything was normal. Reg bought hair clips that changed her life—Mybangs are off my face, hallelujah!—and she didn’t die. I knocked on her door on the eleventh day.

“What?”

I opened the door. “It’s been over ten days.”

“Huh?”

“You have MADD,” I said. “You told me . . .”

She howled and laughed because I had actually believed her and how could I be so smart and stupid all at once? MADD wasn’t real. I turned red because yes it fucking was and she shook her head at me. So young. So dumb. She called me Kiddo and that was a new one. I didn’t like it. I didn’t want to be Kiddo and I didn’t like her either. I had given away something without meaning to and I didn’t know what it was. She was different. Vicious. That’s how I knew MADD was real. Slower than she’d said, but real. In her movies, the dying girls are just like this, prone to mood swings and viciousness.

She had to tell Gretch about this—they were back on good terms, friends again—so she went and got on her bike to ride to her house. On the way there, she hit sand. It wasn’t a smart fall. It was dumb. Her head was banged up and she broke a leg in the bad way, and she was home for a solid month with a cast. But this was good, you see. For the first time ever, boys came to our house. As friends, yes, but they brought flowers, they ate all our chips and signed her leg. She got so much attention. None of them liked her like that. It was just a thing to do. They came together and they left together like she was a movie. And the boys. One of them took a big poop in our half bathroom and clogged the toilet. Boys with big lumps in their throats and legs that shook so hard you could see the coffee table tremble if you looked closely. They filled up our house with their smells. They had no attention spans, their eyes moved around so much it made you dizzy, but their presence was attention.

It’s why Reg healed.

Their attention was consistent as the sun, lingering after they left, the stench in the bathroom, booted footprints on the front hall doormat. Reg had no permanent damage from the fall and the doctor said she was lucky, but I knew it was me. I saved her. Me, the attentionist behind the scenes. I drove her out of the house, onto her bike, and she was good for a while, back at school. But then her group of friends splintered into nasty little duos. No more groups of kids and so many family-sized bags of chips expiring on top of the fridge. And why do they call it family size when what they really mean is friends?

Honestly, I’m sure of it. Not one boy in our house ever since.

*   *   *

So, do you get it? Do you get why Reg needs for this guy on the phone to be the start of a new chapter in our lives (her life)? She is coy: “Who should I say his calling?”

And he laughs but she talks over him. “Wait,” she says. “Don’t tell me.”

“You’re the boss.”

“I know who you are.”

“Oh you do, do you?”

“Yep.”

“Okay. Then tell me who I am.”

“You’re Tony. Tony from the club.”

“I’m Tony and you are.”

“It’s Reg,” she says. And that is something that has never shifted. Reg loves her name, the full version, Regina like the pizza place, and the short version, probably the only “Reg” you know.

“Well, hello, Reg.”

“Well, hello, Tony.”

*   *   *

I know we just got back in it but real quick, let me tell you about Tony.

Tony is my “crush.” He’s a member of King’s Landing, you know, where Reg worked for two summers and never got a boyfriend out of it. Dad laughs when he overhears us talk about the boy members of the club. You sound like soldiers talking about war. That’s what we are, according to Reg, soldiers of love!

I work in the snack bar. Five days a week. Tony plays tennis at the club. Also five days a week. He drinks Arnold Palmers that he puts on his family’s tab and Tony only lives here in the summer. He has blond hair and a good serve and he could be a hot mean guy in the movies that we both actually love—TheKarate Kid and One CrazySummer—and that’s where me and Regina fall in line together.

We know you’re supposed to love Ralph Macchio and John Cusack. But we love the bad guy. The spoiled preppy in his Corvette. The ruthless bad boyfriend with all his boys blindly following him to the dark side.

Mom says we’re demented. You can’t change people, especially men.

But Reg and I have a secret. We don’t want to change them. We like their evil.

We’re not kind and popular like Elisabeth Shue and we’re not cool girl guitarists like pure Demi Moore and we freaking know that, you know? We don’t want the underdog. We just don’t have it in us. We want that preppy jerk with the money. When Dad sees us swoon at a blond bully, when he overhears me talking about Tony, how he said his Arnold Palmer was especially sweet today and how that means that I am especially sweet, Dad shakes his head at Mom, at us—Sendthese clunkers back to the shop!—and that’s only fuel for the fire. Reg and I are equals this summer for the first time. I’m at the club, on the ground, and she’s at home—summer school means she can’t work—and she’s the veteran to my soldier. I go to battle, into theater, and I return in my uniform. Smoldering. Spent. And then we analyze. We strategize.

“Well he did it,” I told her, one random day.

“He asked you out?”

“He requested that I make his Arnold Palmer No Ice.”

All rich boys and all rich men, they all want Arnold Palmers (no ice) and Reg crossed her arms. “You specifically?”

“I know it’s not a big deal but it’s the way he said it. His voice. I want a CD of him just saying Hey Maeve, Arnold Palmer no ice. That alone would be enough.”

Reg was the senior officer and she didn’t like that. “Let me pluck your eyebrows,” she said. “You look like an animal.”

And then a few days later, she must have done a good job with my eyebrows because Tony was bold. He hopped the counter and winked. I won’t tell if you won’t tell. And then he spiked his friend’s drink with a nip of vodka. Vodka. It was the closest we’d ever been, physically, and it had to mean something.

Same way it had to mean something a few days later when he said Have a good weekend, Mary. He called me Mary so that I could correct him—Actuallyit’sMaeve—but of course I blew it, blurted a lame You, too and Reg said we’re not hot enough to play hard to get and I told her I freaking know that.

It’s hard to be losing the war. To keep fighting. But we pull through. Just last week, Tony called me Maeve and his voice was buttery, warmer now, as if there was heat beneath the butter. Reg said this was good and Dad said we were starting to spook him. “Scarier than Poltergeist,” he said. “Clunkers in heat. Didn’t your mother teach you anything? You can’t control things. Especially these . . . never mind.”

Never mind indeed and what does he know? Nothing.

Tuesdays are my Mondays and Reg is always up first, in the kitchen frying eggs. I am slow to rise, I hate the start of a new week, but last Tuesday, she said this was her purpose in this summer life, to egg me on, and we laughed so hard—war can be fun—and then she was serious. “I feel it my bones,” she said, same way she did every Tuesday all summer. “This is it, Maeve. This is the week Tony asks you out. Trust me. I know it.”

*   *   *

So now you get it.

Reg wants this for me. For us. She is putting on lipstick as if Tony can see her. And she is focusing so hard that she forgets he’s there and he coughs.

“Hello? Reg, are you there?”

“Sorry, Tony.” She says his name to make it official. God how she has waited for this moment.

“That’s okay. So yeah. I’m not up to much today. I was just trying to get ahold of Maeve . . .”

My sister goes weak at the knees because of that language. Get ahold of Maeve. “Sorry, Tony, but you can’t get ahold of her here. She’s at the beach by our house.”

“I didn’t know she lives by the beach.”

“Well, not the beach-beach, but the pond.”

“Which pond?”

“Jacque’s Pond. Do you know Sonny Boy’s Lane? It’s by Osef’s Path . . .”

It’s a side note but it has to be said. The names of the roads in our neighborhood are ridiculous. Pond names. All possessive, as if at some point a hundred years ago, Sonny was out there with a stick screaming This is My Lane and Osef was a few feet down the way screaming back, This is My Path. Ocean people are much better at naming roads. Tony’s an ocean person. His street is named for nature—ShoreRoad, By the BayDrive—and you get it, don’t you? This is a big deal for Reg. Selling the lake to an ocean boy. So, of course when he asks her to slow down so he can take notes, she obliges.

“Thanks,” he says. “I had no idea there were ponds around here.”

Regina gulps. That was so rich boy of him. Saying lake not pond. She craves that mean fire but it burns. “Cool,” she says. “Hey, what are you doing right now?”

“Um . . . I believe I’m talking to you, Reg.”

Oh, to hear the truth and know for sure that you are not delusional. What is happening in her head is happening in the world. She is talking to a boy. A boy who likes me (and down the line, maybe her!). “I’m so stupid,” she says. “But yeah. Maeve is down at the lake so you should surprise her.”

“Oh really?”

“She’s all alone down there, too. It’s a pretty hip spot.”

The lake is not “hip” but her heart is so loud in her chest, working overtime for her for me. “I don’t know,” he says. “Are you sure she’d be into that?”

“Oh God yes and it’s really so cool. I mean not cool like . . . well it’s just deserted so you can do your own thing and nobody bugs you.”

“Well,” he says. “I guess I better get ready.”

“Yeah,” Reg says, and she is going for it now. Applying mascara. “You should get ready because she won’t be there forever. It is the last night of the fair and all . . .”

Tony laughs and thanks Regina for the help and she hangs up the phone and does jumping jacks. She wants to look and feel her best when our new life begins. She sees it all so clearly: My Tony shows up at the pond. He surprises me. We swim in the freshwater together. We make out on the dock. We swim back to shore. We slide into his Beamer in our damp suits and we make out again before we start the quick drive to my house where Regina just happens to be waiting in the bay window. She’s wearing her cutest cutoffs and her most flattering little T-shirt. It is the last night of the fair—she bats her eyelashes, oh right, totallyforgot—and Tony has a friend—all rich boys do—and later that night, the four of us strut through the white shell walkway to the 1993 Budleigh County Fair. We’re on the first double date of our life (lives?) and we both get fingered by rich boys on the Ferris wheel and our dad was wrong.

We’re not clunkers, not anymore.

*   *   *

While my sister is picking out which cutoffs are just right, I’m in the lake alone, treading water, swallowing more than I mean to.

I still don’t know that Tony called. I have no way of knowing. I’m not psychic. I’m breathing heavily the way I do, not getting anywhere, going in messy circles around the dock like some half-assed lazy shark. I climb the ladder onto the dock and the wood is cold. Ponds are moody. There’s a little clique of clouds that won’t leave the sun alone—I should have gotten the nerve to climb up here earlier—and I lie on my back, the way you do for the pediatrician, with my arms flat, as if I am bracing myself for a cold hand.

This is the most alone you can be in the world, and it’s also the loneliest after a few minutes, when nobody whistles or jumps into the water. But I don’t let it get to me. I always stay up here until I’m dry. I’m strong that way. I’m the one with discipline.

I close my eyes and go into my fantasy world.

It’s a do-over, of course. It starts in early July. The first day at work, the first time I make an Arnold Palmer for Tony. In my fantasy I’m better at flirting. I do what Reg says you have to do and let him know my door is open.

And because I made myself vulnerable, everything in my life is more exciting. Adrenaline pumps thorough my body and I come to this beach and swim out to this dock and I attract better things.

A boy is visiting his grandparents—step-grandparents, to explain why I’ve never seen him, why this is all new to him—and he sees me on this dock and I’m strong. He can practically smell my adrenaline. I call him Kevin in my head, and he changes into his swim trunks and can’t get into the water fast enough, can’t get to me fast enough. In my fantasy, I’m a relaxed person, so I’m sound asleep on the dock—browner than I am in real life, legs a writer could describe as sinewy—and then I feel-hear something.

Drip. Drip.

I yawn and blink and yelp when I see him. Standing on my dock. He is wet. Dripping. He’s nowhere near as cute as Tony, of course he has wrong red hair and you just know he’s nice, as kind as Ralph Macchio. I could never love him. But I let him touch me. I let him try and make me love him and I love this process. The stakes are low. I am in shop class, learning how to maneuver my way around a real live boy. Learning the physical things in a safe way. This is how it feels when someone wants you more than you want them. This is how it feels to be the loved one. And this is how MADD works. I use the attention I get from Kevin to make Tony want me even more.

It doesn’t make me a monster. It makes me someone who knows what she wants.

At the tennis club, I’m thinking about nothing but KevinKevinKevin and boys know this. They feel you the most when you stop caring about them, when you don’t yearn. So that’s why Tony can’t stop thinking about me. MaeveMaeveMaeve.

And Kevin is a guy who is willing to get his heart broken, so when I do it, when I tell him that I can’t see him anymore, he doesn’t implode in a bad way. He writes songs about me and years from now, he becomes a famous rock star and you know what? He’s better off because of that summer that I broke his heart. My attention calcified his bones. Sharpened everything in him so thank God for me, after all.

Me.

And about Tony . . .

Well, Tony and I fall madly in love. It’s hard to picture if I think too hard but there are some things I see clearly, on mute. In montage form.

Tony beside me, a hand clamped over my mouth because I’m too loud and happy about his other hand. The thing Reg swears feels good, as if she knows for sure.

I see us in a Guns N’ Roses video. I am leaving a bar—it’s a fantasy, we go to bars—and I am livid. Hurt. He was flirting with someone else and he chases me down in the rain. In the cold November rain. She meant nothing and I am everything and he can’t live without me, he won’t live without me and he is a terrible person and before you know it, I’m kissing him, cupping his perfect face in my hands.

You are my terrible person.

Tony’s lips are on mine, his hands are hungrier than Kevin’s, sturdy, not so nervous, larger than I imagined, bigger than Kevin’s—remember him?—and that’s the best part of the fantasy, the fact that I get to break Kevin’s heart, that I feel awful about knowing that I will hurt him. I am a good person. Kevin was training wheels to prepare me for the real thing and that’s not my fault. That’s the fault of this big mean beautiful clunker of a world and then I hear it in real life.

Drip, drip. Drip.

That’s the hook of that scary story someone tells you at a slumber party when you’re a kid, when the dark is the scariest thing in the world. But I’m not a kid. I have a job. I’m fourteen years old and I’m on a boring dock on a boring lake in my boring neighborhood and the sun is out and what is that sound?

Drip, drip, drip.

Before I open my eyes to investigate, the dripping stops. Cut off by the roar of an engine, an engine with a bad esophagus. A painful exhausting whinny that sets every square inch of my dry skin on fire. What was that? Who was that? But I’m too late. All I see is the back half of a blue loud pick-me-up truck going, going, gone.

And the drip? Well it was me. I got my period.

I climb into the water and swim to shore and my body is all revved up and my teeth chatter as if it’s cold—it isn’t—and my head hurts and my hands tremble and I have to laugh. I’m not a soldier of love, of anything. I scare so easily? I was the drip, and the truck was just some landscaper, no doubt, or some old man who stopped by the lake to pick something out of his teeth. He probably didn’t even see me. I’m ridiculous and chubby—too many Arnold Palmers, as if drinking what Tony drinks was gonna get him to like me—and I am traumatized for no reason. I don’t want to listen to Reg tease me about my period—You’re such a dork, Maeve,seriously—so I sit on the picnic table like a sea monster. A lake monster.

This is almost officially the summer that nothing happened and no one is here and I like my bathing suit enough, so I take my T-shirt and shove it in there to catch the blood and I walk up the cruddy path, onto the street, and on the way home, I start a whole new fantasy for the fall. In this one, I get a job in a bookstore and I don’t have to wear ugly stiff blue shorts at the bookstore. I wear blue jeans that love me, they get down on their knees and hug me. Tony comes back for Thanksgiving and he barely recognizes me because I’m talking to another boy, the autumnal version of Kevin, a homeschooled boy whose parents just died—which will make it all the more terrible when he falls deeply in love with me, when I have to break his heart and leave him, just like his parents, if you think about it . . . In this fantasy, Kevin commits suicide—as it turns out, there is no getting over a girl like me—and I am bawling at his funeral—theguilt—and autumnal Tony is caressing me, wanting me to stop—It’s okay, Maeve. He loved you. It’s not yourfault—and I’m walking faster now and you know what?

I am cool. I adapt. Just as plucky as a sick girl in one of Reg’s dumb movies.

It’s okay that Kevin dies in my fantasy. It’s okay that Reg and I failed to meet boys. Nothing good happened. But nothing bad happened either. The dark and the light need each other, and my house looks different to me now, small as ever but now it seems like it settled on this little hill to fool people into thinking it’s bigger than it is.

Reg in the bay window. All dressed up with no place to go and flipping the pages of YM. Clutching the cordless phone, pretending to be on with a friend—I can tell when she’s lying—and acorns are raining on our driveway—we have too many trees—and suddenly I’m not so happy. I hate the wad of T-shirt turning red in my bathing suit. I blame Reg for it. I hate my fantasies and I hate the both of us for being two sides of the same worthless coin. Clunkers. She’s too needy—can’t even sit on a couch and just be—and I’m too good at meeting all my needs in my head. She goes to the mall, to the real beach and looks for it at least, but me? I spent the whole freaking summer alone in the pond and what a lie.

I’m not independent. I was never alone.

I was passive, waiting for Imaginary Kevin to see me, flashing a vacancy sign every time I saw Tony so that he would know he can have me if he wants. How I threw myself at these boys with my routine, rolling out the red carpet—no, it’s a doormat—and no boy even noticed me, did he?

I carry on up the driveway, a wounded warrior, and Reg spots me finally and she leaps off the sofa and tosses the YM as well as the phone and why? Why is she mad at me? She had two years on this planet in this house when it was all hers. Maybe that’s why we can never be friends. She was born before me, she is a loner at heart, and maybe her “male attention deficit disorder” isn’t so much about boys as it as about me. The baby who challenged her for Mom and Dad’s affection, for their attention. Some people are meant to be a big sister and some people are not. Reg is not. She yanks the door open and blasts into my face and she is louder than loud, always.

“What the hell, Maeve? Where is he?”

“He who?”

“Don’t be a dick. How did you manage to screw this up and what is that bulge . . . Oh my god you little freaking pig. Look at you! Of course you screwed this up! Did he see you like this?”

I follow her into the house and run into the bathroom because I am a pig but I am not a pig and she is out there ranting and it feels good to clean myself up. I splash cold water on my face. I am younger but older. Calmer. And I walk into the living room like it’s half mine, which it is, okay a quarter, but mainly I walk in there like someone who figured it all out. I know that we are clunkers. I know if we were entrees at Friendly’s you wouldn’t put us back in the oven, you would just toss us and start from scratch.

“Alright,” I say. “What seems to be the problem?”

“Well obviously the fact that he’s not here.”

“He who?”

She groans. “‘He who’? Are you serious right now? Tony as in your Tony. Duh! ‘He who?’ I mean you say that like you know all kinds of Tonys. Your Tony, obviously.”

Only in this house is he my Tony and I blush. “From the tennis club.”

My sister is a crazy person—why would Tony be here?—and she clenches her fists and growls and she flops on the couch and she goes into the sofa the way she did the day she found the message about Davey.

“Reg,” I say. “I’m sorry. But I don’t get it. Why would you think Tony would show up at the pond?”

She waves off a fly that got in because the screen door takes a long time to close, because flies like it in this house. We’re bad about taking the trash out, so now it’s gonna be me and Reg and this fly. The house is odd in this moment, the way it was that one time that Mom got a cleaning lady. Something is different here and yet nothing is different. Reg is crying and Dad is away on business and Mom is off helping her friend May paint her new apartment—Fake Aunt May: the original clunker—and the fly clips me—I smell like blood—and Reg stops crying. Finally. She rolls over.

“Sorry,” she says. “I just . . . I really thought this was it.”