Secret for a Song Read online

  SECRET FOR A SONG

  By S.K.Falls

  Copyright © 2013 by S.K. Falls. All rights reserved.

  This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Secret For A Song

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty One

  Chapter Twenty Two

  Chapter Twenty Three

  Chapter Twenty Four

  Chapter Twenty Five

  Chapter Twenty Six

  Chapter Twenty Seven

  Chapter Twenty Eight

  Chapter Twenty Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty One

  Chapter Thirty Two

  Chapter Thirty Three

  Chapter Thirty Four

  Chapter Thirty Five

  Chapter Thirty Six

  Chapter Thirty Seven

  Chapter Thirty Eight

  Chapter Thirty Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty One

  Chapter Forty Two

  Chapter Forty Three

  Chapter Forty Four

  Chapter Forty Five

  Chapter Forty Six

  Chapter Forty Seven

  Chapter Forty Eight

  Chapter Forty Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty One

  About the Author

  Also by S.K.Falls

  For N. and M.

  Chapter One

  I ate my first needle when I was seven.

  You’d think something like that would be preceded by a major emotional moment, perhaps the slowing of time itself or some other heavy-handed bullshit. But no, there was nothing. I just remember thinking it was much too quiet in our seven-bedroom house. My mother was present—in a physical sense anyway—but I hadn’t seen her since she’d put out my breakfast. I was out of school, it being another glorious summer here in tiny, bucolic Ridgeland, New Hampshire. The oak tree, bowed over the roof like a curling hand, tapped on my bedroom window.

  I opened my drawer, the one where I kept all the goodies I found—discarded plastic gemstones, spent toy gun pellets, dried earthworms—that I thought, for some unknowable kid reason, were worth saving. There lay the sewing needle, a perfectly small, lethal sword. I wanted to be a sword swallower, like the ones in the circus. I knew people came from all over the world to see them.

  So I put the thing in my mouth. It was cold, and the sharp point pricked my tongue on the way down my throat. I imagined it seeking the softest spot of my stomach to pierce. I imagined my stomach filling with blood, imagined it gushing out my mouth and nose and ears, and then who wouldn’t be looking at me? Even my mother would be forced to look.

  But I waited and waited, and nothing of the sort happened. I couldn’t feel the needle anymore. I opened my mouth, knelt on the tufted stool before my painted white vanity, and peered into the dark cavern of my throat. I didn’t see any rips. Where the heck had the needle gone?

  I went searching for my mother, my (sadly un-bleeding) stomach twisted in knots of excitement and dread. What would she say? What would she do?

  Tucked away in the corner of the dining room, she was reading the newspaper with a cup of tea at her elbow. She was East Indian on the surface and English at heart, my mother. I don’t think she’d ever forgiven my dad for whisking her away to the States when they married, though from what I understood, she’d gone willingly enough. Her black hair was pulled back into a sleek ponytail—the kind of thing that my mass of curls refused to be even back then. She didn’t even look up when I slid into the chair beside her. I remember grabbing her sleeve and pulling.

  “What, Saylor?” Yanking her arm away, she turned a page and kept reading.

  “I swallowed something.” I wiggled in my seat. What if it came out of my butt when I pooped? Would it hurt?

  She kept reading.

  “I swallowed a needle.”

  There was a pause. I thought maybe she hadn’t heard me. But then her head turned, and I saw her eyes: the deep brown coated with a mixture of fear and anger and irritation. An actual flurry of emotion.

  She grabbed my shoulder. “You what? Why on earth would you do something like that?”

  I shook my head, still astounded at the sheer weight of her hand on my skin, the warmth of her breath on my face.

  Mum pushed her chair back and ran for the phone.

  The rest of that episode came back to me in waves every now and then. An image here, an image there, scattered through the trails of my memory. I remembered going to the hospital. I remembered them putting me in some scary machines, looking at pictures of my stomach. I remembered Mum reading to me in the waiting room, out of some kids’ magazine, her breath still sweet and metallic from her tea.

  I remembered I never wanted it to end.

  I stood with my hands in my hoodie, looking down at the street below. New Hampshire was pitching a hissy fit complete with sleet that refused to be rain, the kind of weather that made people want to curl up inside with coffee and a book. I, of course, was a different story.

  I did love this kind of weather, but not for the reasons most people did. I liked it because the lines in the hospitals were usually small, as sick people decided to risk taking their at-home medications another day. I liked it because the doctors lingered longer in my room; the nurses were more likely to make small talk. I liked the way rain sounded against Plexiglas windows.

  “I’m double-parked, so hurry. We don’t want to be late.”

  Turning, I nodded at Mum. I trailed my hands along the boxes the movers had arranged by the door. My first apartment, and I was leaving it already. I’d honestly planned to stay here more than six months.

  I supposed I should’ve seen this coming. My grades had taken a steady nosedive since the beginning of the semester. The freedom had, quite literally, gone to my head. The credit card my parents had given me, and probably never checked before paying off, had been going to medical supplies more often than not. Though, had they thought to check, they’d only have seen my charges at the local pharmacy and assumed I was buying condoms or tampons.

  Laxatives were cheap and easy, and my condition baffled the doctors. I’d forgotten the kind of high I got from seeing a new doctor—the one in my hometown was so used to seeing me. That wide-eyed sense of honest to God wanting to help was so rare to capture anymore.

  But they’d done blood tests. Of course the laxatives had showed up. I thought they metabolized quicker than they actually did. It had been a mistake on the website I’d used as my guide to getting sick; a website I definitely wouldn’t be using anymore.

  The car purred as we crossed downtown, spraying parked vehicles and light poles with muddy slush. The steady squeak and drag of the windshield wipers was lulling. I inhaled deeply, breathing in Mum’s tea rose perfume.

  “Is it a left here?”

  I nodded.

  When we parked, she got out and slammed the car door behind her. I tried
to hold in a smile. She was angry. She was here.

  The mannish college psychologist stood when we walked in, her hand outstretched, stubby fingers waiting. Next to my mother, she looked ridiculous in her cheap black pantsuit and gelled cropped hair.

  “Mrs. Grayson, it’s nice to meet you. Have a seat.”

  “Please call me Sarita.” Mum grasped the collars of her cream-colored coat and pulled them together at the base of her throat, as if she was trying to protect herself from what was coming next.

  I sat next to her, positioning the toe of my boot so it was right next to her shoe. I looked at our feet, side by side on the threadbare carpet. They were the same size.

  “Sarita.” Dr. Milton looked down at the folder on her desk, shuffled a paper or two, and then sat back. “Are you... aware of the nature of Saylor’s ailment?”

  Mum glanced at me. “I’m aware she’s been lying about her health again. She’s been doing that since she was small, exaggerating how bad things are.”

  Shame and anger turned my blood to molten lava. Just the way she said it—as if I was intrinsically broken or had come defective without a receipt.

  “It’s unfortunately a bit more serious than that.” Dr. Milton cleared her throat like she’d done the past couple of weeks every time she was uncomfortable. I wanted to rip her folder into pieces and shove the pieces down her throat. “Saylor has what’s called a fictitious disorder. That means she creates symptoms in order to play the role of the sick person. But the thing that concerns me most, as a mental health professional, is that she could put herself at some serious risk if she’s not careful.” She paused, itching her chin. “As I said in my phone call, the campus clinic found traces of laxatives still in her bloodstream, which explained the seemingly untreatable upset stomach she reported. But Saylor still denies her involvement in her disease. In addition, she’s doing poorly in all of her classes, something that’s to be expected from someone with such a chronic condition. I’m afraid it’s only going to progress and get more serious until she accepts help.”

  Mum refused to look at me, but I saw the lines bracketing her mouth. The lines that emphasized just how disgusting, how disturbed, she thought I was. “We’ve made her a series of appointments with one of the best psychologists in her home city.” She rose.

  Dr. Milton stood too, speaking quicker when she saw we were about to leave. “While that’s excellent, I’d really like to encourage you and Mr. Grayson to go to these sessions too. Fictitious disorder is really a disorder of the family system, and—”

  “Thank you. We’ll look into it.”

  We strode out, me at Mum’s heels, breathing in her scent. Behind us, Dr. Milton cleared her throat.

  Chapter Two

  My ex-new apartment was about an hour away from my parents’ house, the same one I’d grown up in. When we pulled into our gated community, I felt that familiar feeling of breathless excitement, sort of the way you feel before a ride at an amusement park begins. It was how I’d always felt in my own skin, in my own life: heady, giddy, as if I could fall at any minute and never get up again.

  I watched our giant two-story Southern-style house get closer, its siding more gray than light blue under the spitting sky. As Mum pulled neatly into the garage, I watched with my head tilted back against my seat. It looked like the house was swallowing us whole.

  She turned the car off and we sat in the suffocating darkness, listening to the engine’s tick-tick-tick as it cooled down. My eyes adjusted and I saw Mum take a swig from the water bottle in her cup holder. The sound of her swallowing was thunderous.

  “Won’t you miss your friends?” she asked after a moment. “We had to pull you from school. What are you going to tell them?”

  Putting my forehead against the window, I laughed. The glass fogged up, obscuring my reflection. “What friends?”

  After a pause, Mum got out and closed the car door behind her, a soft, final thunk.

  I followed her in the darkness, neither of us bothering to turn on the lights.

  The house still smelled the same, like glass cleaner and paint, even though I’d been gone half a year.

  I’d had to do my freshman year at New Hampshire State as a commuter student. My parents insisted on a trial run because, according to them, I wasn’t “reliable”: the politically correct term for “batshit crazy.”

  I’d gone all of last year with only a few incidents because I’d wanted out that bad. Even crazy chicks dig their independence. But once I got what I wanted—a place of my own without a pink bedroom—I’d given in to the urge again. Why? Attention, love, curiosity. Take your pick.

  You might think it’d be hard to disappear in a state the size of a freaking bread crumb, but it’s not. It’s actually really easy to be overlooked.

  When you’re an only child you spend all your younger years worried that, when you finally go out into the big, bad world, people won’t like you. You haven’t had years and years to practice social cues with a sibling. You haven’t been honing your manners or reactions or whatever the hell it is that keeps humans so well-separated from the other animals on the totem pole.

  That’s a solid thing to worry about, really. But the problem is it never occurs to you that there’s something even worse: that people may not even know you exist. You could be as substantial as smoke hovering in the air. People could walk through you.

  I didn’t like being insubstantial.

  I took my wet boots off in the mudroom, discarded my coat on the hook. Meandering through the kitchen, I walked to Mum’s craft nook. It was where she spent her days since deciding four years ago that she wanted to take up dollhouse-making as a hobby. She spent thousands of dollars a month on those little creepy things. I saw the bill once.

  At the moment she was working on a bright yellow house with a tall, pointy roof and white scalloped trim. It looked like she’d been laying wood plank flooring inside. A tiny bottle of glue sat neatly capped on the table.

  “That’s real mahogany,” she said, coming up behind me. “3/8-inch thick.” She stroked a plank, caressing the wood grain as if it could feel.

  “Mm.” I tapped on a window, traced a scalloped edge. “It looks like a kids’ gingerbread house.”

  Her face froze at the insult, and then she rearranged her features to exhibit nonchalance. “I’m putting the kettle on. Would you like some tea? I can bring some to your room.”

  I grinned and shook my head, pulling out a chair. “Nah. I think I’ll stay here with you while you work. Is that all right?”

  She crossed into the kitchen without turning. “Of course,” she called. “But you’ve got an appointment with your new psychologist in half an hour.”

  That was how we were: taunting each other, making snide comments, being passive aggressive. But as long as my mother hurled those words at me, as long as she provoked emotion—any emotion—within me, I felt like I was home. I felt like I belonged.

  After about twenty minutes, I knew it was time to go to my room and get dressed for the meeting with the psychologist. Besides, I had something I needed to do. As I made my way upstairs, my heart began to pound in my chest and my palms got sweaty. I imagined that athletes probably felt the same way before a big game. That burning anticipation, it was almost like a drug.

  I dumped my duffel bag on the pink-flowered bedspread and gave the drawers in my nightstand and dresser a cursory look, but they were what I’d expected: empty. I’d taken the best of my stuff with me to college anyway.

  With one eye on the door, I opened the side pocket of my duffel and slipped my fingers into the “secret” pocket I’d created with my scissors. There it was, nestled inside, my newest toy. Cupping the syringe in my hand, I walked into my bathroom and closed the door with my foot.

  I slipped my hoodie off and stood in front of the mirror in a thin white t-shirt and jeans. The yellow light from the sconces made me look sallow, maybe even slightly jaundiced. There were dark shadows under my eyes but I rubbed them with my
fists anyway to make them a little redder. Appearances were important.

  Pulling the plunger out of the syringe, I spat into the empty casing before replacing the plunger. Once I’d tugged the neckline of my t-shirt out of the way, I inserted the needle into a thin blue vein on my chest and pressed down on the plunger. Heat and pain scorched my skin; I bit down on my lip to keep from crying out. I set the syringe down on the bathroom counter and rubbed the spot I’d just injected. It was red and a little swollen already.

  See, the internet was my best friend. I’d just found out that the human mouth contained more bacteria than the human rectum. Ergo, when you injected saliva into your veins, it created abscesses. In direct contrast to the internet, my biggest enemy was my body’s own immune system. It was a frustrating feeling to expose yourself to the chicken pox or bronchitis and come away with only a vague sense of a stuffy nose.

  But the internet solved most of those issues for me once I realized there were people there just as sick as me. It was like a wonderland, but with information on the most sick-making drugs, on which parts of your own body could be turned on themselves. Seeing the worry on the doctors’ and nurses’ faces was a glorious, religious experience. Sometimes I wondered what other people did with their time.

  “Saylor.”

  I put my hoodie back on and slipped the syringe into my pocket before opening the bathroom door. “Yeah. Coming.”

  Mum was in my bedroom doorway, hovering like an unwanted insect. She never entered my room when I was in it. “Time to—”

  “Go get shrunk. Yeah, I know.”

  This wasn’t the first time my parents had got me “help,” and it wouldn’t be the last. The key was to go a few times, just to show them I was willing. It was easier for them to look the other way and for me to continue to do what I wanted to do if they thought they’d put in a reasonable amount of time to my “rehabilitation.”

  When we got in the car, Mum turned on the radio to her special BBC station, a sign that we weren’t going to engage in conversation. My first thought was: “Fuck that.” I turned the dial so the posh guy’s voice muted. Mum glanced at me, her threaded eyebrow arched above her Prada shades.