Neverchangeable | Chapter 8

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My eye burns. The one that’s no longer there. It’s a feverish heat that swells in my scooped out eye socket and presses up against my brain. I haven’t noticed until now. My head is splitting. It’s a headache like nothing I’ve ever had before. I haven’t noticed. Dad’s liquor cabinet is still stocked. I grab a bottle. I look at you. You say nothing. You just wait. Wait like you tried to teach me how to all those years ago, by the pond, by you, by Farley, by the bonfire. Your voice going, Just wait, Mutt – just wait!

It was the only way you knew. If you were a better hunter, you wouldn’t have told me to wait. You would have shown me to run towards my prey. You hid behind good manners and a smile. You let me be the one to run ahead. Not until later, though. Much, much later. Never felt quite right. It just was. I didn’t much like being your lure. You would have loved being my trap.

But first, I hear you say, Learn to wait.

I waited and waited. Now here you are. Your face melting beside me.

Remember that first time you let me hunt?

The first time was an accident. You were still at the farm. Mrs. Developer was still developing the land. She acted real sweet about the whole thing. Let you stay put until the end of construction. Left the family house at the farm for very last. Started with Lagoon’s Lodge, of course. Built her very own palace. Filtered all the grime out of the pond and really did transform it into a mystical lagoon. Going there every day to check on the progress, she was performing magic.

Next, Mrs. Developer built the actors’ lodgings. Dorm-style buildings with a gym and sauna on the main floor. She built them behind the barn, just tucked behind you and the family house. Mrs. Developer imported actors early on, long before the season started. For training, she said.

Those first few months are how I know you would have made a good lure. Or better yet, a good trap… in my great transition from fishing to hunting. You were so welcoming to the beautiful young actors and actresses. Oh, how they ate you up. Oh, how you loved it when they did. Imposing yourself on their parties with tins of cookies or plates of biscuits, or best of all a slice of juicy gossip. You were so good at making friends. I was sick of waiting for mine to stumble up to the cabin by some chance. Ironic, how the answers to all my problems came to me by chance then. Your mouth has widened as it’s disappeared into the fat bellies of the larvae as if to laugh at me, “See?”

You always have a bad habit of being right.

It was that morning of chance that you were being infuriatingly right again. You were telling me to get out more, to make some friends, maybe even meet someone. Kept taunting me, “We’re in a forest filled with people – why can’t you just go out there and talk to one lonely person?”

All day, it felt like. Every time I’d turn the corner, from the bathroom or into the kitchen, there you would be, yapping about me needing to get out. Get out, get out, get out. Said it enough times that I eventually did.

In the daylight, the shadows were enchanted into emerald green strokes hidden between the leaves of the forest. Dragonflies hovered in the air and cicadas buzzed. Life vibrated everywhere. College students laughed and joked while rehearsing their lines and new accents. Some pranced around in their costumes, hair and make-up half-done, glitter sweating down from their foreheads into their eyes, curls stuck to the sides of their faces. Others kept to themselves and studied diligently, silently, as if some big-wig agent might waltz through Faeland Woods and rescue them from their dreary lives. Like a real life fairy tale. Instead of love though, the hero was money. Turns out, it was always money.

I didn’t have to walk far. I could have stopped right there. Loitered in front of the actors’ lodgings and made nice with a few out-of-place co-eds. I could have played up the uncle role or maybe even pretended to be a father figure to some of them. I could have attempted to start a cult. That’s what people on the internet had started accusing Mrs. Developer of doing. That was ridiculous though. Mrs. Developer didn’t want love or devotion. She wanted a real hero, like the steadily increasing digits in her bank account. If love and devotion were needed for her hero to come, so be it. She would love and devote away and count the money in her safe at the end of each night before tucking herself into bed between her pink 500-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets. But a cult? Mrs. Developer had enough to keep track of with the management of Faeland Woods. Mrs. Developer didn’t have time for cult.

No, I was her only follower.

Most everyone else drooled over Madame Liliana. She didn’t come around often enough to maintain a cult, though. Still, the online newspapers rumbled. Cult, cult, cult. The rumors only fueled business. Pre-season tickets were sold out.

The young actors practicing their lines by the lodge were too focused to be talked into a cult, though. Or talked into anything, really, not even an uncle or a dad. Not that I wanted to be a cult leader. That kind of thing was too obvious. Too ostentatious. Still, I needed college kids that didn’t move with so much purpose.

Trim actors strut up and down the paths in bathing suits and leotards, crop tops and cut-off shorts, sweatpants and running shoes, the uniforms of youth. I had traded in my cargo shorts for golf shorts years ago, my own long hippie hair for a thinning top. The watch on my wrist would never be sported by a twenty-something. No, it took years of websites before Eiyez ever took off to afford this watch. Years none of these kids had yet. Their idea of a hard night’s work was partying into the small hours of the morning while drunkenly blurting out their scripts in a beer tent. They did it so seriously, you’d think there were somebodies already. Maybe a few of them were. I didn’t know. It was best if I didn’t know. That was Mrs. Developer’s job: the knowing.

You would have found out. Would have known everyone by their name, would have found out their Daddies’ names, their pets’ names, and their favorite color too. You would have made a great hunter. You were always too scared. Now look at you.

Should’ve been a hunter.

The long grass tickled my thighs. My eyes scanned the trails from behind my decade-old Ray Bans as I walked. No one was the right one. Either too serious, too milk-fed, or too crowded by friends. On the phone is no good, either. Not for my type of hunting. The ones always on their phones are too hard to infiltrate. They always seem to be more street savvy the more chronically online they are. Those quiet, pretty girls, they pretend they’re looking at their phone, but I see them eye me from beneath their long hair. I notice them notice me out of place. Usually the types to have some sort of true crime paperback bullshit poking out from their bags. That type of girl. No, those ones are no good. Even if they are loners like me. We can smell each other from a mile away, our opposite types. Maybe they’ve dated a guy like me in high school or some summer they stayed in their college town. Maybe they’re just smart. I dream of them. They read of me. We leave each other alone.

I know where the type I want will be. You did too, bringing all that food around the actors’ dorms. The watering hole always has prey.

Lagoon’s Lodge was about a fifteen-minute walk away. The trek from the family farm house to the pond was one I’d made my whole life. The pond – lagoon – was where the banquet hall was. Mrs. Developer winked when explaining the layout to me. Her hands waving all over the blueprints, her long, acrylic fingernail pointing at the distance between the actors’ beds and their watering hole, she said, “To keep the actors trim. Good for digestion, you know. Health and wellness perks.”

You never made a habit of going out to the pond. Not even when we all were kids. Said it made you too sad. That it was spooky. You didn’t believe in ghosts you said. The pond gave you chills. Just cause it’s so damn old is what you used to say. When Lagoon’s Lodge went up, you made it out once. Was the only time I saw Mrs. Developer and you butt heads. You didn’t see it like that. She did. I paid for it later that night.

Mrs. Developer and you, you two seemed to get along for the most part. She let you stay in that forsaken farmhouse for so long. You thought I was up at the cabin the whole time. In a way I was. In a way, Mrs. Developer and I both were.

That afternoon at Lagoon’s Lodge with your muumuu flapping in the wind and Mrs. Developer’s hairspray drifting on the air, you pointed at the pond. You asked, “Why’d you have to dig it all up like that?”

You shook your head, “What’d you do with all the fish?”

Mrs. Developer watched you limp back to the farmhouse. She hopped on her golf cart and zipped to the parking garage behind Lagoon’s Lodge. I followed her behind the lodge to under a slice of shadow where her penthouse suite backside balcony hides us away from the hot summer sun. Her jade eyes hidden by Gucci sunglasses the way mine hide behind my Ray Bans on that first hunt. On that afternoon with you and Mrs. Developer and the damn pond though, she slapped me across the face with the back of her hand. When you asked what the scratch across my cheek was, I told you it was bushwhack. I didn’t tell you it was the garnet gemstone on Mrs. Developer’s pointer finger or the way she made me lick the blood off it after.

When I hunt, there’s a white scar on my cheek. My Ray Bans cover it. The right branding can cover a lot.

That summer day you told me to get out was just as hot as the day Mrs. Developer slapped me.

When I got to the edge of the lagoon, there Mrs. Developer was, staring down from the front balcony, all the way up at the top of her castle. Knowing she’d be watching made me bolder. I walked around the lagoon, past the beer tent, and through the front door. I caught Mrs. Developer’s eye peering over the top of the stairway, the fragmented light of the chandelier scattered across her Botox skin. The wrinkles persist. They catch the shadows where the light cannot touch. I want to touch those parts. My eyes break away and I walk towards the dining hall. I can hear her listening from up high.

The dining hall is just past the seashell-crushed staircase. On the way there, is a lounge and bar where music plays. Mostly jazz. Pre-season, the actors are the DJ’s. They play robust hip hop and jerk to Korean pop songs. I walk by them. They don’t pay me a second glance. I keep going.

Inside the banquet hall, I find them: my prey. I sit there and wait – no, no waiting now. I stalk. I stalk them as they walk back and forth between the long, mahogany tables with trays full of unseasoned chicken and undressed salads. I count their bites. My legs cramp folded in the chair. The corner’s darkness feels comfortable. Students’ conversation fill the room. I try to catch the tail end of one. They’re topics I don’t know or care to know; social media trends and reality TV show titles pass through the air like clouds.

Cold water splashes across my stomach.

In front of me, two girls in their twenties. One appalled at the other, the other appalled at herself. Both perfect mouths dropped into perfect O’s. I insert myself into the girl’s apology, “Please, it’s fine. It’s a scorcher of a day, anyhow.”

Her blue eyes brighten. I do a scan. A Queen’s University t-shirt. I tell her I lived in Vic Hall in first year. She laughs. She flips her red hair over her shoulder and looks to her friend. She tells me, “Amanda here goes to Western.”

I play along. I go, “Ew, Western. You know they never partied as hard over there as we did.”

The red head laughs and shakes her head. The other girl, Amanda, rolls her eyes. She says, “I could drink both of you under the table. Especially you, old man.”

Her manicured finger touches my chest, still wet with her friend’s drink.

Amanda has long, smooth summer legs and dyed green hair. Her lips are plump, her eyelashes thick. I pictured those perfect lips grimace in unbridled pleasure, those green curls falling down the back of that silky bronze back. I picture her legs tangled with the redhead’s perfectly creamy ones on a patch of grass outside the cabin. I ask if either of them has a boyfriend. Amanda says she does. I tell her, “That’s perfect!”

Because it is.

I tell the girls, “I’ve lived here for year. I’m good friends with the owner of this place. There was this old cabin up there off the beaten trail. Used to be perfect for parties. I practically used to live up there. Always left something for the next party if you know what I mean.”

The redhead looks at Amanda. She smiles. I go on, “I have no use for it anymore. But you and your boyfriend should go up there some time.”

I look at the redhead. I tell her, “You too. Bring friends. Whatever. Just follow the weird wooden markers to get there. They’re shaped like yellow diamonds and have different carvings in them.”

I tell them, Stay safe!

I go up to the penthouse suite. I get on my knees. I knock on Mrs. Developer’s door. She opens it to let me in.

Mrs. Developer’s penthouse suite takes up the entire top floor of Lagoon’s Lodge. The first room is a small foyer with a slim, pearly chaise and table with sticks of incense. There's another room guarded from the first with a set of frosted glass double French doors and silky blue curtains. From the first room you can go left, to the kitchen and dining room, right to the office and powder room, or ahead straight towards those locked double French doors. Mrs. Developer leads me ahead.

On the other side of those doors, a California king-sized bed waits back and center. Thick sheets plume up from the mattress in thick clouds. An open-aired silk canopy surrounds the four-post bed frame and on the ceiling is a mirror, painted with swirls of gold. Beside the bed, a few feet over is a large, burgundy leather desk chair. A glass desk. A wall of screens. Each one features a different angle of Faeland Woods.

In the bottom left screen, Amanda and the redhead. Mrs. Developer turns the volume up. They’re giggling. The redhead is texting. Mrs. Developer's phone buzzes:

AMANDA AND I NOT FEELING WELL. MUST BE A BUG. TAKING REST OF DAY OFF TO RECOVER. WILL WORK DOUBLE-SPEED TOMORROW.

Mrs. Developer texts back, That’s fine. Come back tomorrow rejuvenated xo

The girls run back towards their dorms to get ready. Mrs. Developer gives me my reward.

You would have been delighted. You would have been appalled.

Chapter 9 TBC...