Chapter One

Chapter One

It was bad enough Piper even had to go to therapy, but waking up at the crack of dawn for it was close to torture.

The sun-set orange walls made her squint. There were no windows in the hallways and she knew from the various readings about therapy, that bright walls tended to make people happier and think in positive ways. For Piper, it mocked her. She wanted to be out in the sun, the real one, not in the headache inducing one.

“Good-bye Piper,” Dr. Schipani said.

Piper gave her a smile and shut the door. Dr. Schipani would watch Piper walk down the hallways and out the doors if she let her. Piper liked to let her get right to writing ‘hopeless’ on her case file again for the uncountable number in the fourth year of these sessions.

She opened up the steel door at the end of the hallway where her mom sat in the waiting room picking at the same hole she worried at for these years. They had replaced all the chairs a year ago, but had left this one. On that day, her mother had stared at the red upholstery a shade lighter than the rest before taking her familiar seat and sitting on her hands.

Her mom stood up and shaded her eyes from the bright sun. It reflected off the bright blonde of her hair and Piper felt a ping of jealousy. It was stupid, she knew, but Piper’s hair was too dirty of a blonde to ever reflect anything. Instead it hung around her face and to her shoulders refusing to do anything of interest. She considered it to be collateral damage of being twelve.

“Bye Miss Greene!” Piper waggled her fingers at the receptionist who looked up for a second to give Piper a forced smile that turned into more of a grimace. There was a time when Dr. Schipani used to come out and give reports to her mom, but once Piper overheard a report that included ‘no progress’ and ‘intervention,’ she threw a fit. Some of it involved called Miss Greene a shallow girl who only existed on social media. It was rude, but she did apologize. Still, she had been almost afraid of Piper afterwards. Piper didn’t think it was fair, but she didn’t think a lot of things were fair.

Her mom packed up her book in her purse and opened the door for Piper who skipped out into the sun. She gave one sigh that was relaxed rather than the exasperated one she made when she walked in and then followed Piper into the parking lot.

“So,” she said when they got into the car. “What’d you two talk about?”

“Confidentiality mom. Technically, I’m not allowed to tell you.” Piper smiled and looked out the window.

“No. Dr. Schipani isn’t allowed to tell me if you ask her not to, but you never do that. Can you tell me why you never do that?”

“I ask her not to tell you why,” Piper said. Sarah pursed her lips and Piper only smiled. “We talked about the usual things, Mom. She asked me how I felt about summer vacation. I told her I was excited. She asked me about Jackson, I said he’s the same as usual. She wanted to talk about dad. I told her no, thank you.”

She rubbed the leather steering wheel hard with the pad of her thumb. “She wanted to talk about your father?”

Piper noticed her mom’s cheeks flare up. It wasn’t out of anger, but sadness. Four years ago when her dad left, her mom would collapse into tears when she thought Piper wasn’t paying attention. Eight-year-olds are typically underestimated, even more so than at twelve. Piper guessed it took around a year for her to stop crying at the drop of her dad’s name or at least, she got better at hiding it. Now, her face only flushed at his name, but she never cried and almost was rid of the crease that used to appear when she tried not to cry. The wrinkle was a reminder, but the action was almost non-existent.

She had to tread carefully. “Yeah, but I didn’t want to talk about him. I don’t think Dr. Schipani needs to know anything about him.”

“You can always talk about your father, Piper. I hope you know that.” Usual parent talk.

“Anything else?”

“She asked me about Aiden, but we didn’t talk much. Time was up.”

Sarah pursed her lips this time and Piper rolled her eyes in response. Aiden was the person-not-talked-about and yet he was the reason she was in therapy. He was what she was supposed to talk about according to her therapist who has had multiple conversations with her mom about how Piper should be and yet will not at home. It wasn’t that Piper had given up; she had talked about Aiden every day for a year, asking when he would come back. After her dad left, the talk dwindled and started to only remain in therapy. After her mom wasn’t crying all the time, they had mom-daughter therapy sessions (a real bonding experience except Piper was so afraid to upset her mom, she usually let her talk) and Piper would recount her story to her teary-eyed mother and the therapist would try to get to the “root” of the problem. The diagnosis was that her story was a coping mechanism. She invented a fantastical universe to deal with the real life event that she couldn’t handle.

Piper thought that was crap. The therapist tried to have her draw it, write it, and tell it looking for cracks in the surface. After she heard the phrase “coping mechanism” repeated to her mom when she was ten, she went home and Googled it as any girl her age would. She read the description, fitted it with her supposed symptoms, and read the ways to handle it. She already knew she was past the stages. Five years wasn’t too early to try and get her to come to the realization on her own. She knew that Dr. Schipani was trying to find discrepancies amongst the different ways she told the tale. There wasn’t any and even if she was lying (which she wasn’t) she would have read this and then made sure her coping story was airtight.

“Please don’t roll your eyes at me, Piper. I didn’t say anything. I just miss Aiden, that’s all.”

Piper didn’t agree with her. Just like her mom had stopped crying over Piper’s dad, Piper had stopped crying over Aiden. Instead all she felt was anger and determination. She missed her dad too but she was angry at him for not being able to support her mom even if it was Piper’s fault. That wasn’t how relationships worked and Piper didn’t need to be shrink to know that. She was angry that nobody believed her and she was determined to get Aiden back.

They turned into the driveway of their small three-bedroom home. Sarah turned off the car and relaxed in the seat. When Piper didn’t add anything to the conversation, she opened the door. “Tomorrow morning we have to be at the farmer’s market by eight. Be ready.”

She got out of the car and walked through the door. Piper knew her mom wasn’t ditching her and she liked it better this way anyway. After any conversation with Dr. Schipani about Aiden (which was most of the time) she stole off to the woods to be alone for a while. It let her gather her thoughts and it let her mom talk on the phone and get an update (usually negative but pretending to be encouraging) from Dr. Schipani.

It wasn’t early morning, but it was better than nothing. She walked a few trees into the woods until she reached one with cherries hanging from smooth branches. She climbed halfway up the tree under the branches that wouldn’t support her weight and cherries hung in front of her green eyes.

Piper began to hum the same tune she hummed to Aiden. It was simple and hadn’t reached the complexity of a twelve-year-old’s imagination, but it comforted her.

It had been the typical summer’s night. Everything was dripping from a summer storm that had gone through and Piper and Aiden were engrossed in a book they picked out from the library earlier.

“Keep reading!” Aiden urged Piper.

Piper was just old enough to read to Aiden who was impatient, but a great listener. Piper tried not to stumble over the longer words and put on funny voices for him.

“Ezra was trapped in the cave and alone. He didn’t know which way to go, but he knew she would save him. When he saw her, it was like a dream, a beautiful dream that gave him hope,” Piper read.

“She didn’t look like you then!” Aiden teased. Piper stuck out her tongue at him and gave him a shove. He crawled back over and got under the covers with her on the bed. The window was open and let in a cool breeze that smelled like cut grass, and the sounds of peepers melded with Piper’s voice.

Piper flipped the page to a picture of the cave and Ezra huddled in the corner. “Spooky!” Aiden loved scary stories even though he woke up in the middle of the night screaming most of the time. When Piper read to him at night, she ended up sleeping with him in his bed just in case of nightmares. It let her parents sleep soundly next door.

“Ezra waited and heard a snap of a branch outside. Maybe that’s her! He thought. He crept up to the gap in the stone and looked out. Something in the darkness reached out but it wasn’t the girl from his vision. There was a bony hand with black fingernails reaching towards them and suddenly crack!”

Aiden and Piper both screamed as a real crack of thunder went off at the same time a blinding light filled the room. Piper threw the comforter over both of them, shaking.

Her shoulders slumped after she stopped trembling. She was supposed to be the brave one. She was three years older than Aiden. She yanked the blanket off her head, red faced, but glad there wasn’t enough light from the book lamp to reveal her embarrassment.

“It’s alright Aiden. The lightning just hit close that’s all.”

There wasn’t a peep from him and usually by this time, he would be trying not to cry. Aiden didn’t like thunder.

“Aiden?” Piper pulled the comforter from where he had been sitting just moments before, snuggled into the pillows. Nobody was there. She swore he never moved from the bed, but he wasn’t under the bed. She even opened the closet despite the monsters, and he still was nowhere to be found.

She searched and searched, tears starting to pour down her red face and a lump in her throat..

“Mom! Dad!” she screamed until they came rushing.

Piper took fifteen minutes to calm down and by that time police had arrived. The only thing Piper knew was that she had been reading a book and when the lighting hit in the book, it hit in the backyard. She showed them the book, but the police were interested. Before her mom could throw the reminder away, Piper hid it in the back closet.

Piper stopped singing. The three cherries in front of her were roughly the same size, but the fourth closer to her hand grown and barely fit in the cluster.

She plucked it off, rolled it to the tip of her fingers, and popped it in her mouth, red juice dying her lips.