What Do You Mean?

Do you remember the smell of your elementary school? I remember mine, its one of those childhood memories that sticks out for some reason, a shock of bright color in a line of moments that have begun to fade to black and white as I’ve grown older. It smelled sticky, and I believe that was the first time I’d ever thought of a scent that way in my young life. I think it was the linoleum, it held onto everything that had ever wafted through it. All those years, decades now, of children, teachers, parents, and all their sack lunches had merged into something offensive that always reminded me of cheese. My sister went to the same school, and when I attended whatever concert or play she was a part of as a grouchy teenager I remember scrunching my nose as nostalgia assaulted me, much more unpleasant than adults made it seem. Even as a college student I was forced back to the school for a cousin’s recital, and all those years later it still smelled the same. It was an absolute fact in my universe, Stony Lane Elementary reeked of the fact that children would always smell horrible. I knew that I could recognize that smell anywhere, I knew that the school would never get it out, and when I arrived for my nephew’s concert, I knew that it was wrong. I finally accepted that all of this was wrong, and as the wrong sister sitting stiffly beside me gripped the armrest between us so tightly it began to creak, she knew that I knew.

I’d arrived back home that Tuesday, It was Thanksgiving, of course I’d come home. The only thing my mother asked of my sister and I was that for two times out of the year we set our differences aside and pretended that we were a family again. Thanksgiving and Christmas, that was all she asked, and it was the least I could do. I’d been obliging to my mother’s one request for the past few years, gritting my teeth as my sister’s oafish husband spouted whatever nonsense he’d picked up from the most recent right-wing podcast that had caught his ear. His son wasn’t far behind him, the two of them ordering my once unstoppable sister around like their personal housemaid. I had been dreading seeing this whole show again as I drove toward home and tried to put it out of my mind in favor of concentrating on the road that I could barely see through the rainstorm. It had been blowing ever since I crossed into Rhode Island, and the couple near misses I’d had on the forest-lined roads to my sister’s house forced me to abandon muscle memory and focus. Not enough to ignore my phone ringing, though. As it sang its ear-worm at me, I reached for it at the same time my tire hit one of the many backroad potholes. The phone bounced, I reached to catch it, and by the time I realized the screeching I heard was the horn of an approaching car instinct had already taken over. I yanked the wheel hard to the right, the sound of the horn overtaken by the cry of the tires and my breaks as the car skidded hard, managing to avoid the F-150 that screamed past me without even slowing. My Subaru did a full 360, skirting to a stop just before the tree line with a curly cue of skid marks left behind. The ringing in my ears drowned out everything else but the rolling sound of adrenaline racing through me in cold waves. My breathing was fast and uneven but after a few tries I forced myself to slow down, my knuckles white as I gripped the wheel just to hold onto something real. My phone was still ringing, and after it stopped and started again I managed to answer it with a few swipes of a shaking finger.

“Where are you?” A woman snapped at me down the line.

“Who..?” I hadn’t expected my voice to be a whisper, so I cleared my throat and tried again. “Who is this?”

There was a long pause. “…Did you seriously delete my contact? Its Ally, you idiot.”

“Oh..” Ally, my sister, of course. I hadn’t recognized her voice for a moment. “I’m almost there, I.. I actually think I missed the driveway.” I strained to see behind me in the rain.

“Well get here, Mom keeps calling me asking where you are. Its driving me nuts.” Ally sounded distracted; she always was these days.

“Don’t call me when I’m driving.” I muttered before hanging up. We hardly ever talked on the phone; we both knew it was strictly business when we did.

I shook out my hands before making a U-turn after triple checking no other cars were coming down the road. I almost missed my sister’s driveway again in the rain but managed to swerve into it at the last minute, narrowly missing her mailbox. Ally’s house always looked like it was empty. No matter how many lights were on inside the windows always seemed dark, some ridiculous tint her husband had insisted on for privacy. The storm made it worse, and for a split second I thought I’d gone down the wrong driveway. In a sheet of rain her house looked rundown, the pale green paint peeling and sickly, but just as fast it returned to normal. Through the haze I could see Ally opening the door and waving to me, a gesture I awkwardly returned as I parked and scurried through the rain. I breathed out a greeting as I tried to brush past her into the house, but her open arms stopped me before I could reach shelter. When Ally moved to hug me I jumped, which only caused her to laugh as she pulled me close.

“Why so skittish?” She chuckled. “Its just a hug!”

“Right..” I wrapped the arm not holding my bag awkwardly around her shoulders. I couldn’t remember the last time my sister had hugged me, but I was sure her shoulders have never felt so sharp before. Had she not been eating enough? When Ally released me, she was smiling so wide it looked strange on her face.

“I’m so glad you’re here, Rosie.” She said, smile never wavering.

“Glad to be here, I guess.” I replied, biting my tongue as the childhood nickname that I hated returned once more. This time I managed to slip past her and finally out of the rain. “It’s a mess out there, I almost got absolutely wrecked by a truck.”

“How frightening.” Ally replied, but her voice was suddenly childish, setting my teeth on edge as I looked back at her and scowled.

“Are you seriously making fun of me for almost getting into a car crash?”

“Of course not!” She replied quickly, her voice back to normal now. “I’m just so glad you’re here.”

My brows knitted together. “Right..” with a great shrug I stripped off my coat and hung it on an ugly coatrack that must have been new. “Well, I’m going to bring this upstairs and change before I drip everywhere.”

“Oh, don’t worry, Vinny will take it for you.”

“Vinny will take it?”

On cue my nephew appeared, cleaner than I had ever seen him and smiling. Before I could even greet him, he’d taken my soaking backpack.

“Hello Aunty Rosie!”

The high pitch of his young voice dug into my ears. “Hey buddy, how’s it going?”

“I’m going to take this upstairs!” and he did just that, marching up the carpet clad steps with more determination than I’d ever seen him show before. I looked at my sister in shock. Her son was famously a spoiled brat, spitting and screaming when asked to perform even the smallest task.

“What’s gotten into him? Did you send him to military school or something?” I thumbed up the stairs after my nephew.

“What do you mean?” the innocent tilt of Ally’s head was almost mocking.

I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of getting a rise out of me, so after another long pause I turned away to kick off my shoes and began toward her kitchen. “Where’s Jim?”

“James is asleep right now. I’m sure he’ll be up soon.” Ally’s voice floated from behind me and my hair stood on end, the bottom falling out from my stomach as a shocking fear at having my back to her sent another wave of icy adrenaline through my veins. I’d fought with my sister many times, but I’d never been afraid of her before. This wasn’t just fear, it was panic, my instinct’s screaming at me to keep my eyes on the predator that had never done me harm. I put my back to her pale kitchen cabinets as soon as I could, and only then, when I had both Ally and the door in my sightline, did my heartbeat begin to slow. Ally showed no signs of seeing my fear, but she watched my hands closely as I gripped the island countertop between us.

“James?” I tried to laugh. “When did that happen? Is he finally trying to get people to take him seriously?”

“Don’t!” Ally’s voice shocked me again, this time with its surprising volume and bass. For a moment I could have sworn her mouth stretched longer than it should have been able to as she frowned for the first time since I’d arrived. “Talk about my husband.”

And she was smiling again, so hard that it looked like it hurt. “Please.”

I stared at her, heart racing once more. “Ally… what the fuck?”

“What do you mean?” her cadence was identical to a few moments ago.

I didn’t answer. She was messing with me; she had to be. Her and her nightmare child were messing with me.

“Wow you’re so funny.” I spat. “I’m going to go change, then maybe James will be awake enough to say hi to his sister-in-law.”

Ally didn’t try to stop me, but I felt her eyes on my back the whole time I walked up the stairs even though she couldn’t see me from the kitchen.

I’d been to Ally’s house many times, enough to know how to get to the guest bedroom without guidance. I certainly knew it well enough to recognize the place, so when I got to the top of the staircase and an unfamiliar hallway stretched out before me, I stopped dead. Ally’s hall wrapped around itself, the master bedroom sitting at the front of the house. This second level went straight back with more doors than Ally had rooms. It reminded me sharply of the house we’d grown up in as children and I stood there frozen longer than I realized. When Vinny exited the door that would have been mine as a child I nearly fell backwards with the surprise.

“Aunty Rosie!” I flinched at the name. He hadn’t always called me that. “Come to your room!”

“Vinny did… Did your mom redecorate up here?” my voice shook, even I didn’t believe my weak explanation.

“What do you mean?” Vinny replied, but I could have sworn it was Ally’s voice I heard.

I shook my head and pushed open the bedroom door. “Go find your mom, Vinny. I’m going to get some rest.” He was gone before I started talking.

The room I stepped into was my bedroom. The shock of its familiarity rooted me to the spot. It was my bedroom just as it had been twenty-five years ago, walls haphazardly plastered with posters of bands and anime characters, floors covered with dark clothes and friendless shoes. My bed was freshly slept in, unmade because sometime when I was twelve or thirteen, I had decided making it was pointless. Cheap bookshelves packed with anything I could get my hands on lined the walls, photobooth strips of me and my middle school friends pinned to them with thumbtacks. The little white desk my dad had gotten me when I was eight and had insisted I needed a ‘big girl’ desk was shoved in the corner where it had always lived, halfway to the graffitied state it would die in when I left for college.

I felt sick. This room didn’t exist anymore. It and the house it had lived in had been knocked in favor of duplex condos years ago. Mom had insisted I come home when it happened, and in a morbid show of respect for the years we’d lived there we’d all watched the wrecking ball take it down together. Even before the house fell this room was gone, stripped of all of its best parts and brought with me to school. Mom had turned it into an exercise room before she’d sold the place all together. This space that had once been my fortress of solitude was long dead, but as I unpinned a glossy picture of my childhood best friend and I it felt as real as anything else. Even still, it couldn’t be. I had this picture, now worn and dog-eared over years of moving apartments. It sat in a frame on my wall at home with several other photos that I could see in this room, still apparently in their youths.

“This isn’t possible…”

“Rosie!” my mother’s voice as it had been before age had stolen its power snapped through the room like a shot, but when I turned it was Ally at the age she was meant to be, smiling that same stretched smile.

“A-Ally? Is this a.. a joke?”

“What do you mean?” the phrase set my teeth on edge again, but as I gestured to my childhood bedroom my stomach dropped. The buttons on Ally’s well fluffed, barely used throw pillows glared at me from their perch atop the bed that had always been in her guest room. Outside wide double windows that I never had growing up the storm raged on, but the light looked surprisingly different. I checked my watch, but the hands had stopped moving. I pulled out my phone and Friday’s date blinked accusingly at me from the screen.

“But it was…” I made no protest when Ally interrupted me.

“We’re going to be late, Rosie! Come on!” Ally turned on her heel and strode down the hallway that wrapped around itself, ending in the master bedroom at the front of the house. I followed her numbly, my mind still back in a childhood bedroom twenty-five years gone from me.

“Where are we going?” I asked quietly, mostly because it seemed like the right question to offer.

“To Vinny’s school, of course! His Thanksgiving play is about to start!” Ally stepped out of her front door with no coat or umbrella despite the rain, and I couldn’t bring myself to be surprised when she walked right passed her car and into the road.

“We can’t walk to Stony Lane, Ally.” Even as I said it, I could see the looming shape of our elementary school, a building clear on the other side of town, emerge from the haze. It too looked abandoned, but as I swept the water from my eyes it never returned to the state I had last seen it in. It didn’t become the school I’d attended as a child either, and what should have been a given provided me with a moment of surprising comfort.

I don’t remember walking in, I don’t remember greeting Jim or any of the other parents. I'd grown up with many of them, but as I sat down in the familiar auditorium I watched in detached horror as the years fell from their faces. High school and middle school flew by in the wrong direction until Ally and I were the only adults in the room. I could hear the creaking of seats all around me, but I refused to look anywhere but forward. The eyes were like hot coals, each finding somewhere to sit on my frozen body, and Ally’s were most searing of all. The smell only hit me then, because there was a smell, but it was wrong. In that moment I would have given anything for the sticky unpleasantness that emanated from my elementary school. Instead, sulfur and ozone filled my nostrils, thick and sharp and worse than anything I’d smelled before. It was coming from everywhere; it was coming from Ally and Jim and it was coming from me. I bawled my fists and closed my eyes; tears I had no control over streamed down my cheeks.

“Ally, I’m so scared..” I whispered, and somewhere far away my mother laughed at me.

Beside me Ally’s armrest creaked and snapped. I peeked an eye open, and the old wood had come away in her clawed hand, now rotted and stinking of wet. Shaking I forced myself to look at her. Her smile went all the way up now, splitting her cheeks in a bloody display that crept into her hairline and met at the back of her now perfectly visible skull. I couldn’t get myself to scream, the sound strangled into a whimper in my throat as the wrong sister leaned toward me.

“What do you mean?”