Darkheart

The Past: In & Out

Heather shouldn't be going in--she knew that. But what was a summer without a little romantic intrigue? And God only knew she needed some fun.

The last few days had been depressing. Or not exactly depressing but something else, something she couldn't exactly describe. It was almost as if she'd walked through the hours in a general malaise, feeling just sort of . . . off, as if she needed to stretch out or stop eating or swim in some chlorinated water--as if she didn't fit into her body quite properly and needed to slough it. There weren't any particular reasons beyond the one she wouldn't quite allow herself to think about: work was fine, Ignacio had smiled at her in his shy and playful manner when they'd met eyes in the dining hall, the weather was gorgeous, and the Maritime Festival promised to be memorable for once. In spite of all of that, though, she suffered a palpable detachment and wasn't sure how to restore her former contentment.

The morning after the beach party with Ashley and her brother and the counselors, Heather had found herself in her backyard. Her mother wasn't any sort of gardener, but somehow a gorgeous swathe of wildflowers grew along the side fence, where just the right amount of shade and sunlight dappled the earth. They'd grown there in the summers for as long as Heather could remember, requiring minimum care to return year after year, continuously reseeding themselves. Black-eyed susans, and purple asters, butterfly weed and daisies and Queen Anne's lace--they exuded a jubilance toward life that Heather was sure she'd been able to relate to--could still relate to, if only she could shake the melancholy clouding her.

She'd wandered outside with a purpose, though, and it hadn't been to look at the foliage. The doll her grandmother had given her in her hand, Heather had passed the flowerbeds and approached the shed where her step-father kept yard equipment and tools. She'd opened it up, easily located a hammer, and without much thought, smashed in the doll's face. One of the glass eyes had blinked at her from a fragment of porcelain, but unamused, Heather had picked up the pieces and tossed them into the wildflowers, flinging the body after them. It'd been at that point that she'd noticed, rather peculiarly, a single poppy hovering over the tops of all the white, yellow, and purple--scarlet red with a black velvet core. She'd not seen it at first, and it reminded her of a strange story she'd heard once, about a woman who always wore a velvet ribbon around her neck, a red flower at its center. The woman never took it off, no matter how many people asked. Even when she got married, she never told her husband why she wore it. But she always promised she'd tell him one day. It was on her deathbed, Heather recollected, that the woman did at last permit her love to remove the ribbon, and when he did, the woman's head fell off.

Heather had pondered the weirdness of that story on a few occasions, and yet both that tale and the poppy that had recalled it to mind held her for only a single laden moment before she'd turned back into the house with a slightly lighter heart.

Well, that had been a few days ago. Why she thought of it now was irrelevant. She was misbehaving, and she felt zero shame for it. They'd been at the Maritime Festival, on the beach, she and Ashley and Amanda and Lindsey. Danny had seen someone else he'd known, gone off with them, and his absence thinned the atmosphere enough that Heather had begun to enjoy herself. There'd been people everywhere. The bands consisted of once-aspiring musicians with no reservations and the food was all fried and greasy; there were drunk twenty-somethings playing and hanging around the volleyball nets and tossing horseshoes; children ran sugared-up and parentless through the manageable crowds with glow-sticks and sodas and ice cream; young people found one another and discovered ways to acquire alcoholic beverages from their tipsy parents, then split and coalesced into peer groups new and old. And even though for many a teenager the festivities were deemed "lame" by their communital nature, few could resist attending them if only to flirt and bend rules somewhere other than a basement or a backyard or a porch. The shore was ablaze with life and energy, with warm evening air and the promise of things memorable.