36. Gerard
Gerard
Hand in hand, Gerard and Emory groped their way out of the pitch-black bathroom and into the hallway.
The school had lost all power, evidenced by the emergency lights spearing the darkness over every exterior door.
Outside, the storm raged. Gerard pulled Emory closer for support.
At the opposite end of the hall, the islanders poured out of the multipurpose room in a line of flashlight beams, looking like a cult on their way to a ritual offering. Everyone spoke in hushed tones. Gerard squeezed Emory’s gloved hand in reassurance, even though he had no idea how this would go.
“Everybody remain calm,” Sergeant Adye announced. “The winds have reached dangerous speeds and downed some live power lines outside. We are now shelterin’ in place in the library, since there are no windows there.”
“Please move in a slow, orderly fashion,” said the school’s principal, who was doing a poor job of not sounding panicked. “Thank you.”
A tropical storm portended different risks to islanders than it did to mainlanders.
While the partygoers all marched toward the library, Gerard assumed they were worried about their crab shanties, their homes, their heirlooms, their boats.
So much could be lost in a single violent act of nature.
He felt for them, even as he knew he needed to protect Emory from them.
Gerard spoke to Sergeant Adye while Emory stood behind him. He told him that “his cousin” was feeling sick and that he needed to be taken home. “Didn’t you hear? Dangerous. Downed power lines. Everybody to the library.”
Surprisingly, the mood in the library wasn’t all dour.
While the chatter had a distinct edge to it, nobody was whispering like the space usually demanded.
Tables were pushed together to plop the rest of the drinks and snacks on.
Children found spots among the stacks and munched on fun-size candies from their pails or knapsacks.
The only concerning thing about the scene was how many people were removing their masks. Gerard led Emory to the farthest corner and, in a show of solidarity, kept his own mask on.
One of the parents suggested they all gather to share ghost stories, so everybody moved and formed a circle.
In the center, people stood their flashlights on their ends.
The differently colored bulbs fused into a single shaft of orangish-yellow light slicing upward like a makeshift fire that painted the ceiling with a brilliant glow.
Even though there was no real fire, and the heat had kicked off when the power went out, Gerard grew sweaty under his mask. All he could think about was getting Emory out of there, a goal that thrummed beneath his skin. How long would they have to keep up this charade before they could escape?
One by one, people passed around a costume wizard wand as a talking stick. The ghost stories shared ranged in length and general spookiness. While they served as a good distraction, the storm only intensified, if the pounding on the roof was anything to go by.
As the night wore on, restlessness infected the room.
Emory, on the other hand, seemed unexpectedly calm beside him. Gerard wished he could lift his mask and dissect his expression—an expression that would finally be visible. An expression he loved.
In the bathroom, immediately after he told Emory he loved him, he worried it might come across as if he’d withheld the word until he could see him, but an unconscious part of him had already scrounged up the word and scribed it on the note.
“Who would like to go next?” asked Kellen. Beside him, Angie sat, bouncing Kellen Jr. in her arms. For a baby, he barely made a peep, almost as if he were a prop for Angie’s costume as a mama bear.
Eyes shifted around when nobody volunteered right away.
Gerard’s eyes landed on Emory.
Sitting in the library, in a circle full of costumed people, the air bright with sugar and sweat from those too young to know the virtues of deodorant, Gerard couldn’t pinpoint the moment he’d fallen for Emory Griffin. Maybe it was all the moments strung together in a daisy chain.
It didn’t really matter.
All that mattered was that he loved him.
And what Emory did next made Gerard love him even more.
Emory
“I’ll go.” Emory’s raised hand shook in the air.
Underneath his mask, Emory felt Gerard’s gaze intensify. He focused instead on the fortifying love that seemed to undulate in the air between them. Love was power. Power that fueled his courage.
Whispers passed around the circle. Strange looks roved his way. They didn’t deter him.
In the room, he was the elephant. There was no way of knowing how long the storm would last, but if he spent several more hours hiding under this mask and costume, he’d sweat himself to death.
The library was cramped with bodies and books.
Books full of stories. After the previous night, it was time to tell his.
The costume wand got passed to him. In his hands, it was an enchanted baton of truth.
“This is a story about a mysterious, menacing invisible monster…”
“Em—I mean, Cousin Cameron.” Gerard’s voice was heavy with warning.
Emory shrugged it off. If he was going to earn Gerard Wells’s love, he needed to do so with a clean slate. No more running. No more hiding.
When he first registered his reflection in the bathroom mirror, he shivered upon not recognizing himself.
The longer he’d sat in the circle and listened, the more he realized that he didn’t recognize himself right away, because he was no longer himself.
At least not the same version of himself that had hauled his belongings in trash bags onto the island for the first time.
Four weeks had changed him. This island had changed him. Science had changed him. Music had changed him. Most of all, Gerard Wells had changed him.
Even if he no longer identified as the Emory who stole and tricked and deceived, he could not deny that he had done all those things. Multiple times!
When he started his story of the twisted invisibility experiment gone too far, he looked around at the faces of the raptly listening islanders and confronted the hard truth that they had not deserved his malevolent hocus-pocus.
Regina’s apartment with Gerard was the first place that had felt like a home since he was five years old.
This island, these people—they called to him.
Some ancient, mystical voice in the storm outside told him that he could weather anything, any move, but now was the time to stay put and be part of a community. If they’d have him.
“The mad scientist needed a lair all his own in a remote, unreachable locale such as the one we find ourselves in now.” His voice dropped half an octave, taking on a gravelly quality like the narrator from old episodes of The Twilight Zone.
As he detailed the dastardly deeds of the invisible monster, some children plugged their ears and curled up into their parents’ sides for protection. Those parents, however, leaned in as they caught on to hints of events that had taken place around the island.
Through the telling, Emory let the story go. Not once after that first attempt did Gerard try to stop him. He must’ve understood simply by the tone of Emory’s voice that this, like it or not, was necessary.
“Then,” Emory said, confidence unwavering.
He reached into the center of the circle and grasped the nearest flashlight, turning it up beneath his chin for eerie emphasis.
“On Halloween night, in one final act of monstrosity, the invisible man infiltrated the annual masquerade party in disguise, skulked about the place, causing everyone to wonder who he was and where he’d come from.
” In Emory’s peripheral vision, he saw Sergeant Adye bolt to attention.
“As a storm surged, they were all cooped up together in the school library and entirely unprepared for his final act…” Off came the mask.
Out came a few gasps of recognition. “Turning himself in.”
Silence strangled the room. It was such staggering silence that nobody, until later, registered that the rain and the wind had halted. They were either in the eye of the storm or it had passed entirely.
“Em—” Gerard’s voice was a whispery wobble.
“It’s okay,” Emory said, setting his hand over the one Gerard had placed on his bicep at some point during the story.
Here goes nothing, he thought. “I want to say I’m sorry to all of you.
I should not have stolen your food, borrowed your golf carts, or sowed chaos among your community.
It was easier for me to scare you all than it was to confront my own fears, especially my fear that nobody would ever see me.
But Ger—James showed me that we can’t entirely control how other people choose to see us, but we do control how we see ourselves.
I don’t want to see myself as a thief and a liar.
I want to see myself as a scientist, a community member, and a good partner. ”
He turned to lock eyes with Gerard, who beamed pride straight into his soul. He kissed the back of Gerard’s hand before standing and extending his wrists out to Sergeant Adye. “I’m ready now. Arrest me.”
The room seemed split. Half the islanders were vocally confused. Half the islanders were ready to act out their vigilante fantasies, hobbling up to their feet in anger. Sergeant Adye slid in front of Emory and, in one booming shout, quieted the crowd.
Sergeant Adye squinted his eyes in curious inspection. “Did all of that really happen?”
“It did,” Emory said.
“You swear to it?” he asked.
“I swear to it.” Taking ownership of his actions felt good. Better than he even expected.
Sergeant Adye peered past him, eyes landing on Gerard, who placed a comforting hand on Emory’s back. Gerard said, “I was there for almost all of it. With God as my witness, I swear to it.”
Skepticism still reigned supreme in the sergeant’s expression. “But how? How did you do it?”
A few other voices popped in with similar questions.
He had breezed over that part before, not wanting to lose his audience with facts and figures and jargon, because it was a confession, not a research presentation before a lecture hall of his peers.
But there was genuine curiosity not just on the sergeant’s face, but on many of the islanders’ faces as well.
“Do you really want to know?” Emory asked, self-conscious suddenly, which he found deeply silly, given that he was waiting to be cuffed for his crimes—some he had committed, others he hadn’t, but that was beside the point.
“I’m mighty curious,” said Joe, his former employer.
“I’d be interested to hear what you were doing up in my apartment all this time,” Regina said.
The rest of the room lit up with agreement.
Weighing his options, Emory turned back to Gerard. “Do you still have the dulcimer?”
He nodded. “You want to— Are you sure?”
He wasn’t, but there were some things in life you’d never be sure of, but you did them anyway or risk living with regret.
Emory addressed the crowd. “Look, if I tell you how I turned myself invisible, it has to stay in this room.”
Almost everyone nodded in agreement. They had no reason to trust him, and he had no reason to trust them, but doing so anyway was probably the scariest part about that Halloween.
Gerard left for a minute and then returned with the dulcimer. “Are you really sure you want to do this?” Somebody scooted a wooden chair up behind Gerard; its legs screeched. “I’ve never played it on this before.”
“It’ll be an experiment.” Emory smiled bravely.
“What is all this?” Sergeant Adye asked.
“I put my findings into a song.” Behind him, Gerard tapped out the rhythm with his foot, counted them in. “Let me sing it, and then I’ll go with you quietly. Fair?”
The sergeant nodded. “Fair.”
Emory cleared his throat, deciding to let these people see behind the curtain. “This one’s called ‘The Invisibility Song.’” He gave the islanders a tepid smile. “I hope you like it.”