Friendswood Read Online Free Page B

the assistant—her name was Sahara? Shawna? “Wednesday isn’t going to work?”
    â€œNo, no, it’s fine, it’s fine. Tell Avery I’ll see him then.”
    Sahara or Shawna said, “Avery said to bring some business cards with you if you can.”
    Stan stood up, his pants loose and pouchy on his chubby frame. He gathered some papers, saluted Hal good-bye, and walked out the door.
    â€œWill do.” This was it. He felt it. He’d prayed good, and he’d prayed right. Avery might just offer him what he wanted.
    Hal hung up the phone, feeling the unnatural stillness of the office. He looked up at the bulletin board above his desk, a lost phone number pinned there that had once meant something, and next to it, the picture of Cully, kneeling reverently on one knee in the bright green turf, his football helmet clutched under his arm, his padded shoulders broad and proud over the number 12, his face so full of hope.

WILLA

    T HE RAIN CAME DOWN, a tattered curtain closing over the world, or sometimes like a million tiny glass doors. One had opened to Willa just before the storm blew in, and she’d seen behind it, an old man in a black cowboy hat calmly sucking on a cigarette as the wind lashed through the trees, his legs cycling in a haze of silver just before he evaporated. He’d appeared only for a couple of seconds, and as usual, she didn’t know what it meant. Sometimes at the edge of her sight line, she saw bright streaks of blood or unscrolling clouds. When she lay in her bed, she’d seen a shotgun hovering near the ceiling darkness, turning and turning again, like a blade in a fan. Outside her window, a sequined dress billowed in the noon sun, then broke apart into rags. Another day, the number 7 pressed up through the mirror, precise and haloed, as if it were cut out of light. She discovered, sitting alone and staring at a pinhead, that she could will a wobbly vision into place, but couldn’t predict what it would be. This extra sight was a weird new ability like double-jointedness, come to her late in the summer, but she didn’t know if it was real.
    She hadn’t told anyone, not even Dani. Saturday there was a shed party in the woods, and she might tell her then. Cully would be there with his dogged eyes and secretive mouth, his tallness. That night in the spring, at the stadium near the concession stand, she and Dani had been talking to him, and he jokingly put his arm around Willa, let his handrest on her shoulder for a few seconds, and when his fingers flicked at the seam of her shirt, it knocked the breath out of her.
    Trapped in the house because of the rain, and bored, she stared at the dead plant on the windowsill in her room, until one of the stalks kicked into a leg and started walking out of the pot. The leg grew fur, and then a wing, fleshy at first, and then more transparent, and it flew through the glass of the window. She got up, went to the computer, and looked up
hallucination
online. She tapped her foot on the floor, her forehead hot as she scrolled down the blue screen. First she read about a Korean mushroom that, if swallowed, made a person see fluorescent-colored birds. Then she discovered tangled maze designs that you were supposed to stare at until your eyes blurred, and out of the blur, a picture emerged of a face or the silhouette of a cat. On a mental health site, the words
psychosis
and
schizophrenia
were highlighted red, and her fingers on the keyboard started to tremble. She read the questionnaire: “Do you feel unexplainably sad or afraid? Do people understand you when you speak? Do you ever hear or see things that others can’t?” She wondered if other people saw similar flashes of shape or color, as if the air had hidden wrinkles in it that held things, objects that appeared just for a few seconds when the atmosphere unfolded.
    In a spiral notebook, she wrote down a list of the visions that had appeared so far.