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Ziggy liked to think that she had never wanted a guy to like her.
Well, there was that one fan letter she had written to Ian Gillan, who had replied very nicely with his autograph and neglected to mention the fact that she had offered him three different dates for their wedding. But that had been years ago and she had grown a lot since then. She didn’t mean to be thinking about Nick Goode this way. Before she had started camp this year, she had hated him.
So, she definitely was not going to be doodling his name into her notebooks and all of that dumb, girly kind of shit that someone like Sheila might do, giggling all the while.
But she was thinking about him, thinking more about him than she really wanted to be. She didn’t want to think about anyone. Not about Cindy, who seemed to be slipping away from her every day. Not the Sunnyvale kids, who seemed to have everything that Shadyside had always been denied. And not about this stupid camp, which despite herself she’d been looking forward to a little bit, though she never wanted to admit it.
She had known Nick for years from this stupid camp. Hell, she’d probably seen him in town, too, but had been too busy looking down. She didn’t generally go to Sunnyvale, but sometimes she’d had to – the only post office was over there, for one, since the one in Shadyside had been abandoned ten years ago. (She could remember running up the wheelchair ramp as a little kid as her parents waited in line to mail things. It had been fun, then.) The main grocery store was there, too. Everything in Shadyside seemed to pick up and move away.
Just like Cindy seemed like she was trying to do. Like she was trying not to see Ziggy at all, more and more.
Ziggy was stretching out in the bed in her cabin, trying desperately to get comfortable. Why was it so hard to sleep away from home, even when home hadn’t felt like home in a long time? Her bed was small and her room usually reeked of mold, but it was familiar, maybe. She knew what to expect, there.
Ever since she had started falling for Nick Goode, she had no idea what to expect about anything.
Here at the camp, everything reeked of pine and wood shavings, like an air freshener. Or she could walk outside, where everything smelled like dirt.
She climbed down the ladder and stood at the door of the cabin. She could go exploring, maybe, and make her way right back to her bed and no one would even notice her. People didn’t notice someone like her unless she was up to no good.
Maybe she’d walk her way home and sit at her table and start eating some cereal, wait for Cindy to realize that she had left and come back home to get her.
She wished. Cindy would probably be busy with her new friends and her new life, so busy she wouldn’t notice if Ziggy left.
So she didn’t leave. She cracked open her journal and began to write. She refused to look at anything after she had already written it – better not to edit herself. No one would ever read this again; maybe she wouldn’t.
After all, life could be cheap in Shadyside. She might not even make it to next year.
***
It was three years after she had gone to camp that Ziggy stumbled upon her old journal again. She didn’t recognize it at first and assumed it might just be homework, or maybe something of Cindy’s. But the handwriting was both unmistakable and barely legible, which meant it must be hers.
There were so many crossouts, where Ziggy had suddenly felt self-conscious – so much for writing without worrying about it. She was always going to worry about how she was perceived, even if it was only by herself. Most of it was rambling, notes about the day and how much she hated Sheila (“Sheila is a big fat bitch” was written across one page in huge script, with “fat” then crossed out and “skinny” written underneath it).
There was something tucked into the sides of the journal, too.
Ziggy turned over the notebook and shook it for a moment. A stack of small papers were tied together with a ribbon.
Which was odd, as Ziggy couldn’t remember ever having bonded anything in her life with a ribbon. It wasn’t her style. It was the kind of thing that Cindy would be into.
It took her a few tries to untie the ribbon – it had been knotted together tightly, as if Ziggy was trying to seal it away.
She had no memory of any of these pages. What had they been?
She unfolded one of the letters and looked at it. The handwriting didn’t seem familiar, not at first.
And then she read the first words, “Dear Ziggy” and she felt as if the earth opened up to swallow her.
***
Dear Ziggy,
I keep thinking about all of those horrible things that happened at camp, replaying them over and over in my mind. It’s like a movie that I can’t stop.
So I need a distraction, and I figure that you must too. So I figured we could do our book club, and we could just do it in an honor system kind of a way. I know you’ll keep your word. You’re trustworthy like that. You’re not like those other Shadyside girls, and I’ve known that for a long time.
So let’s read! I’ve enclosed a few books that I found in my English teacher’s top ten books of the century (I don’t want to go too far back and have to deal with all of those old people that my grandparents would have been reading), and let’s start with this one. It’s not too long, so I figure we can see how it all works with this one.
Write back to me by the end of the month and let me know what you think.
- Nick
***
She paused. She wasn’t going to read this shit. There was no purpose in reading things like this, in pouring over pain. Even though this had been afterwards, after… after camp, there was still that mist lingering over it. The same that had been hovering over her since.
And yet, she had replied, because what else was she going to do, locked away in Shadyside to listen to people want to ask her what had happened but then stop short, smile a little to feign embarrassment, and then go on as if they had left as the better person?
They wanted to know. Shadyside and Sunnyvale both; they wanted to know the details and they wanted to either tell themselves that it wasn’t them, that they were alive and it wasn’t them, or that it could never be them.
Nick was different. In his letters he had never talked about it, not directly, and she never caught glimpses of him at school. That made sense though – freshmen and seniors didn’t usually interact. But if she did, if their paths did cross, would he look back at her or would he keep moving by, never wanting to be seen with a girl from Shadyside in public?
She could come up to him, find out where he was and linger by his locker, hold flowers and smile when he walked by.
But that wasn’t the way it was for girls from Shadyside. They were confined to groping behind the bleachers or slipping away in the bathroom to snort cocaine. No one took them to prom, no one wanted to be around them. Except other Shadyside kids, of course – rolling around in the slime and the mud for all time.
She didn’t want to try to hope for more, what would be the point of all that? That had been Cindy’s quest, her thing – she had wanted to go off to college, to smile in pictures and come back with a degree. Or, maybe, never come back at all.
And she could have done it, maybe she could have done it if things hadn’t gone the way that they had. Cindy would have been a good student, a conscientious one, if a bit of an overachiever. Ziggy could still picture her in a cap and gown, flipping her tassel over her head.
But there was no point in picturing things like that, things that never could happen. And Ziggy had thrown it all back in Cindy’s face, again and again, when maybe she should have been throwing it back in her own.
Because at school, she did peek behind her to see if she could see Nick. She came up with scenarios where he’d have to come into her classroom to ask the teacher something, to shill for a charity maybe. Sometimes the seniors came in to ask if anyone had any canned goods.
***
Their book club hadn’t stayed with just the classics. They’d gotten into Stephen King eventually, despite what Ziggy had said about wanting to stick to Judy Blume. Though, she’d been there, too.
Ziggy tried to pick the longer books, the ones she could slip notes into and think about at night before she went to bed – speaking of going to bed satisfied, she’d cracked a smile when she’d stuck a Post-It note in the middle of Deenie with an arrow saying “masturbation begins here! Better watch out Goode!”
When he’d replied, he’d sent back the Post-It note with the words “haha, very funny” underneath it, and he had attached Carrie in turn.
“There’s some of that in here, too,” he wrote in his letter, “Though mostly it’s a lot of people talking about how boobs are evil. What do you think of that, Ziggy?”
Ziggy could remember the way she had snorted at that. Sure, technically she owned a pair, but she had never particularly contemplated them as a subject, as anything to be good or evil.
“I suppose,” she remembered starting to write back, “In Sunnyvale, boobs are good, and they are only evil in Shadyside.” But then she had crumpled it up and tossed it in the trashcan. It was too dismal, too dark, too… too Ziggy. She figured that Nick wasn’t going to want that. He had come around to “weird”, but nihilist might be a step too far.
And then she cracked open Carrie and began to read. She hadn’t expected it to be so relatable – the idea of being chosen to be cast out due to things behind your control, the fact that no matter what you can’t fight fate sometimes. It all rang true, too true.
What would she do if she was given powers like that, the power that if she just concentrated, she could make objects around her do anything that she wanted? Would she use it for good… or for evil? If she had that kind of power, would she end up going just as crazy as the Shadyside Killers had, one right after another, all following in a line?
Or maybe she’d be able to keep her head. Maybe she wouldn’t let anger send her off to dump beans on Sheila’s head when she was being obnoxious in the lunch room. Well, Ziggy had thought to herself, as opposed to when she was being obnoxious in the classroom, or being obnoxious outside of school, or when she had been obnoxious at camp. Sheila and obnoxious just seemed to go together, like “white on rice” or “chocolate and peanut butter”.
Or Ziggy and Nick.
That had been a stupid thing to think, and Ziggy knew it, but now she was picturing something else she could have done if she had Carrie’s powers. She could turn off all the lights in the school and slip over to where Nick was, to kiss him on the neck, for one.
He wouldn’t even know she was doing it at first, but when he figured it out he wouldn’t mind. That was the nice thing about just turning it around in her head – no danger of rejection, not here! Instead, he’d wonder why she hadn’t just done it all along. And maybe it would be in the middle of prom, too – Nick’s prom, of course, not Ziggy’s, otherwise that might just be weird. Nick would look at her and bat his eyes and Ziggy would wonder, yes, why hadn’t she done it so long ago? At camp, maybe, or before?
How long, she would say out loud, had she loved Nick, just the way someone would say it in some cheesy romance movie?
What would it feel like if he kissed her, if he let her kiss him?
But she wouldn’t let herself go that far. No, no, she was like Carrie.
Better not get to ahead of herself or else the bucket of blood would come crashing down, whenever she would least expect it.
***
She went to school each day and tried to pretend that things were normal, that her sister hadn’t died right in front of her a few months before.
There was no sympathy for Shadyside, even when they should have gotten it. There were no counselors that came to talk to her to ask if she was okay, even though Ziggy had spotted teachers with their arms around some of the Sunnyvale kids and telling them about what a horrible thing they had gone through, of course they could have extra time on their tests, good kids like them didn’t deserve to go through things like that.
Ziggy could have screamed, of course, but no one would have bothered to hear her. They would have tuned her out, written her off as more Shadyside trash.
And that had never used to bother her, not really – she had leaned into the role, had been whatever people had supposed her to be even if she didn’t feel it sometimes. Even before their dad had left, even before their mother had started drinking, there had been some curse put upon her, something hanging over her door, blood above the doorway but in reverse, telling something that these were the children who should be taken away, but slowly, painstakingly, a few each generation and the rest left to fade away on a street corner.
But at least she could stay in school. She could graduate, and figure out her life. She knew she wasn’t going to college – that had been Cindy’s dream, never hers – but she had never really thought beyond high school. Maybe she could get a decent job, bring home some money, get married, have a kid or two and… do what? Fade into the oblivion? Start drinking? Leave the kids all alone?
Maybe. But maybe not with Nick. Maybe something about him might balance it all out, help to keep her safe somehow. Help her to see above way that was just out of reach now.
They could have a nice little spot in Sunnyvale, they could sit on the porch and watch the kids walk to school. They could wake in the morning and drink coffee together before Ziggy went off to work somewhere, some factory or some office. And they would never, never talk about what had happened at Camp Nightwing, and soon enough it would be like none of it had ever happened at all.
***
“Okay, you really sent me Superfudge this time?” Ziggy said out loud as she opened the package on her bed. She found herself laughing out loud, laughing to no one. These moments, these were the ones where she could forget, where she didn’t have to worry, where she felt like she remembered who she was for just a little while. Who she was, or maybe who she could be.
Who she could be if she could make it out of Shadyside. But she pictured it, stepping outside, crossing over the town line. Something would emerge from the ground and pull her back, would tell her that it would never let her leave. And maybe it would look exactly like someone she loved.
So maybe, no, she wouldn’t go, not even in those pictures in her brain. Maybe she would just sit here and read this book – it’d only take a day or two, less if she rushed it, but maybe she could drag it out. Even something simple might lead to a good letter to Nick. See what he thought – or maybe he had started to think she was dumb? Maybe her letter on Carrie had bored him. Maybe she was beginning to bore him. Maybe she was too young, too uneducated, too Shadyside.
Maybe the next letter would simply say “I never want to see you again” with no signature. After all, he was going to be the new sheriff one day – how would that election look, with Ziggy on his arm, everyone whispering? Maybe she would just remain his dirty little secret, the woman he would keep in a house in Shadyside and visit on the weekends without his perfect blonde wife (or maybe Sheila, an older, still bitchy Sheila) ever knowing. Or, maybe, caring.
It was heartbreaking, to always be able to see far enough ahead.
***
Nick’s letters didn’t stop, though. For all that he never said anything to her in public – or called her on the phone (which might have been because it was out of service recently, Ziggy needed to remember to check on that), his ideas spilled out in those letters, folded on top of each other in sheet after sheet after sheet as if he was writing from somewhere away at war instead of from the other side of the tracks.
He praised how smart she was, how insightful, even when she’d simply asked a question or noticed a passage was, as she would say “interesting”, which would usually set off “funny”, like “it’s funny how…” but then she would usually not say whatever she was going to say because Nick might take it as an insult, as a slam, and so she’d cross it out and pretend she hadn’t.
But maybe he would listen to her. Maybe he liked her enough to let her realize… Realize what?
Realize what she had left behind, maybe. Realize what was still ahead. Was there anything still ahead, though? Sometimes, she wasn’t sure. Sometimes, she wanted to talk about what had all gone wrong that night at Camp Nightwing.
And the one little thing that had, maybe, gone right.
***
Sometimes, when Ziggy would dream, she’d dream about Nick. But not like the fairy tales her mother would tell her and Cindy growing up, where Sleeping Beauty knew who they prince was because she had seen him in a dream, once – it was always disjointed when she saw Nick, he always seemed to be not-quite-right, not quite himself, always a few steps ahead of her or a few steps back, looking at something that Ziggy wasn’t able to see just yet. She would wake up tired, confused, and wanting. Aching, somehow. Like there was something she needed to say, something she needed to hear, but she was too far away to get there.
She would try to jot it down on a piece of paper when she woke up, would try to look at them later and try to make sense of them. But they would all just be words that no longer mean anything, like she had translated them all into another language that she didn’t speak and then, pointlessly, back into English again. Sometimes she even thought about sending one of these sheets to Nick. Maybe he would find some key in the words, some understanding. He was going to be a detective, right? Maybe he could Sherlock Holmes this shit and let Ziggy get a decent night’s sleep for once.
She never sent it, but she could picture the look on his face – Nick opening up the envelope and finding, instead of the letter, just scribbled words in a circle, or across the edge. Or a thousand pieces of paper ripped up and placed inside the envelope before Ziggy stuck her tongue to it, sealed it, and sent it back across the tracks.
***
Before long, it was the end of the year. They would be fading into summer – for the Sunnyvale kids, they would go back to camp - somewhere else, now, no one would ever think of reopening Camp Nightwing and allowing Sunnyvale kids to risk their lives in a place like that.
For Shadyside, though, there was nothing now. There would only be smoking weed behind the school, or getting followed around the local stores, or hanging out at the mall and looking at things they couldn’t afford.
And, for Ziggy, it meant that she’d have to remember everything again.
She had hated school when it was going on, hadn’t been able to focus on anything her teachers had said. She had handed in all her work late, despite the fact that she had once been an A-/B+ student. The teachers had sighed, looking at her as she had looked back at them, unaware that whatever was due was due and without any sympathy for her.
So it always seemed to go with Shadyside. Even the teachers who had seemed to see promise in her before, or the ones that had talked up Cindy’s college prospects, seemed to look at her with disdain now.
But it had been a distraction, even if it had been a distraction that had just been a parade of her constantly disappointing the people around her. Now, with Camp Nightwing gone – not that she would ever go back even if they had managed to resurrect the thing – it would just be walking from her house over to the library, maybe, or talking walks, or picking up smoking, or thinking about Nick.
It was going to be a summer so depressing and boring that sometimes Ziggy wondered why she even kept trying at all. Maybe that was the only way to make it so they didn’t win, even if she couldn’t put her finger on who “they” were. Sarah Fier, for one. That old witch really had it out for Shadyside, didn’t she? And she wasn’t the only one.
What would turn somebody into a witch that would cast a curse for centuries, Ziggy wondered. What had someone done to make her so angry?
Or maybe, maybe anger wasn’t it. There were a lot of things that lasted longer than that. Grief, for one – that seemed as if it could last a lifetime, maybe even past it. Or sadness.
Sadness had sprouted up around this whole town, like the world’s worst roses, and seemed to be always choking all of them at once.
There had been nothing to look forward to this summer, so maybe that was why Ziggy found herself walking down the street, headed toward Nick Goode’s house with no real plan in mind.
***
Ziggy, a few years before, had had a skateboard that she would ride around the neighborhood, before she either lost interest or it had been lost in the garage somewhere. Maybe her mother had sold it when they’d been low on rent one month.
She could have used that now – she could have sped down the slopes of the sidewalks and she could have gotten there quicker. And she wouldn’t have had to worry about all of the neighbor women in Sunnyvale sticking their heads out of their windows so that they could make sure Ziggy knew that they disapproved.
She could remember a time when she had been six or seven, running down the street in Sunnyvale while her mom mailed something inside at the post office – the Shadyside one had long since been shuttered, even back then.
She had been playing with a stick, smacking it against the concrete, pretending to write her name. And then, her feet had caught on an uneven rock and she had fallen forward, chipping one of her new, permanent front teeth.
She had stood back up in shock – not in pain, not yet though, even then Ziggy was slow to show pain or vulnerability.
An old woman with a cane, an old Sunnyvale woman, had turned to her and scowled at her.
“That’s what you get. Shadyside trash running up and down the street. You’ll ruin this whole town, too.”
And Ziggy had looked at her, not understanding.
Now, as she pumped her arms, trying desperately to make her way to Nick’s as if it was some kind of a beacon in the darkness, a lighthouse – she did understand.
***
She knocked on his door. It might have been a bad idea – it was probably a bad idea, when had she ever had a good idea? – but here she was and if she left now, she was just going to get told that she was out here trying to TP the Goodes’ house or that someone’s mailbox had been stolen down the block. She had to commit to it, now.
She hoped that his mother wasn’t home. She would probably look at her and wonder what the cat had dragged in, demand that her son never have anything to do with her ever again. It would be like a movie, but there wouldn’t be any kind of resolution at the end where Ziggy’s good spirit would make up for her poverty.
Things didn’t work like that, outside of the movies.
The door opened, and she breathed a sigh of relief. Because, yes, it was Nick, standing a the door, his eyebrows going up in surprise.
“Ziggy?” he asked. “What are you doing here?”
“I decided I would come see what the future Sheriff was doing.” She tried to sound casual, tried to sound like someone who just dropped in on boys all the time. But right now, all she wanted to do was run, to get back to her house, to start crying and keep going until she washed away in the sea. But her feet wouldn’t move; it was like she was affixed to the spot.
“Well, I can show you,” Nick said, “Come in, come in.”
Ziggy swallowed. This couldn’t be – could it? None of this could be happening. It must be another one of the dreams; she would look down at the mat and find that she didn’t have any feet or was on a jetpack or something.
“Are you sure?” she asked, even though she suddenly wanted nothing more. She wanted to stand in Nick Goode’s house and wonder what it was like to live there.
“I asked, didn’t I? Come on, Ziggy. You came all the way here, didn’t you?”
If she wasn’t fooling herself in that moment, it almost sounded like a threat, like he was calling her some kind of a visit tease.
And so she stepped inside, feeling a chill suddenly despite the heat outside. The Goodes had air conditioning, and boy were they not afraid to use it. Ziggy wondered if this was what it felt like to live in Alaska, or Antarctica. She reached towards the banister, imagining her fingers leaving trails on it, a trail of slime from Shadyside within this perfectly clear, white house. Part of her wanted to destroy it while Nick watched, but the other half wanted to keep her hands off of everything. It seemed like a museum.
“Wow, your house is great,” she said.
“Yeah, it is.” Nick’s voice sounded far away, dismissive, like he had never really paid attention to this place and its high ceilings and the way the light shone in from outside, the way nothing seemed to be dusty and the way someone must have been cleaning up in here every day. The houses weren’t like that in Shadyside.
But she didn’t say that. She didn’t say anything else because there was nothing left to say. She was here, with Nick, for now, and she had no idea what she wanted to say.
Finally, she ventured, “So, did you finish The Dark Half?”
Nick turned his head as if he hadn’t heard her at first, but then he nodded.
“What did you think?”
He began to walk up the winding staircase, gesturing for Ziggy to follow him. It was like heading over to his cabin, back at Camp Nightwing, except way less mosquitos and there was much less likely to be a killer walking through the door.
Maybe.
“I thought it was interesting,” Ziggy started, “How… well, there’s good and bad in everyone, right? And Thad’s managed to manifest itself as a whole other him… And that sometimes your demons can really come get you in the end.”
She could have sworn that Nick’s eyes glazed over there for a moment, as if he had left the conversation and had transported somewhere else entirely.
But that would have been stupid. Just another weird, Ziggy moment.
“And sometimes it’s all right to be a little bad,” Nick said, and then he leaned in and kissed her.
***
Now, Ziggy shoved the letters back into the box. There was no need in rehashing all of that. She knew, now, that those dreams had been for nothing, for Cindy and for her both. They had all been the kind of things that no girls from Shadyside would ever get.
It was a lot more than three years, now, but here she was, looking at those letters again. Ziggy had locked herself away – that was one of the only ways in Shadyside. You either gave in to the darkness, or you hid from it, which meant that you hid from anyone who could possibly know the real you. And so, no, she wouldn’t be with Nick. That hadn’t ever come to pass.
But she could still look at those letters, sometimes, and she was. It was nice, to remember, sometimes.
That was when the phone rang. She listened to the message.
It was happening again. It was all happening again.