Chapter 28
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Maya
The wave hits me just as I’m trying to figure out how to adapt a lesson on symmetrical leaf patterns for a combined second-and-third-grade class.
It’s not the violent room-spinning nausea of the first few weeks on the new meds, but a low, steady swell.
My stomach clenches, and the text on my computer screen blurs.
I push back from the desk, my chair squeaking in the cramped trailer, and take a deep, measured breath.
In. Hold. Out.
I feel like there’s not enough air in the trailer, but when I manage a deep breath, I smell dry erase markers and Zachary’s faint, spicy cologne. I focus on the latter and the feeling crests, then slowly recedes, leaving me shaky and hollow.
“Okay,” I murmur to the empty room. “Snack drawer.”
It’s become a ritual, a bright spot in the queasy landscape of my days.
When the meds became a non-negotiable part of my life, and the nausea became my unwanted shadow, Zachary cleared out the deep bottom drawer of our shared credenza that sits against the wall almost exactly in between our two sides of the trailer.
It's our one piece of decent furniture in this glorified tin can, a heavy oak monstrosity someone abandoned in the school's storage room.
Now, it's a lifeline. I pull the heavy brass handle, and the drawer slides open with a satisfying thunk. I let out a little sigh of relief when I see that he’s restocked.
My breath catches, a small, genuine smile pulling at my lips.
Zachary has taken to this task with an almost comical seriousness.
He’s gone out of his way to drive to Portsmouth, hitting the Polish and Chinese supermarkets in the old waterfront district.
My fingers trail over the new additions, a treasure trove.
A bright red bag of sourdough pretzels, hard and salty enough to cut through the worst of the fog.
A tin of delicate, buttery Polish cookies that melt in your mouth.
A vacuum-sealed pack of spicy seitan sticks—weirdly, the sharp chili heat actually helps.
And tucked in the back, a plastic tray of green tea mochi, soft and powdered, a gentle sweetness for gentle days.
It’s the most tangible, practical “I care about you” I’ve ever received. I grab a handful of the pretzels, the rough, salty crust a welcome, solid sensation against my palm.
I settle back into my chair, munching on a pretzel stick and forcing my brain to reconnect with the words and pictures on my computer screen. Zachary is off in the main building, wrestling with the ancient printer, which means I have a solid, uninterrupted—
A sharp, hard knock raps on the trailer door.
I freeze. It's too aggressive to be Zachary; plus, Zachary doesn’t knock, he just comes in since it’s his space too. It’s too late in the day to be a student, they’ve all gone home. The knock comes again, three raps that shake the thin aluminum door in its frame.
“Come in,” I call out, my voice tighter than I want.
The door swings open, and the cramped space of the trailer seems to shrink by half. Trevor ducks his head to clear the frame, his broad shoulders blocking the sliver of gray autumn sky. He fills the room with a kind of restless, critical energy, like a bull in a dollhouse.
“Maya.” He doesn't smile. His eyes flick over the piles of books, the laminated posters I’ve been sorting, and land on the half-eaten handful of pretzels in my hand.
“Trevor. What’s up?” I keep my tone light, casual, though my pulse is already doing a nervous tap dance against my ribs. I hate being alone with him.
“Got a minute?” It’s not really a question. He steps inside, letting the door swing shut with a hollow clang, and the space is immediately too small for his disapproval. “Had a… situation come up this morning. Regarding the Fall Harvest display outside of the cafeteria.”
I fight the urge to close my eyes. Not this again. “What situation?”
“Got a call. From a parent.” He crosses his arms, a movement that makes his ill-fitting blazer strain. “The mother of one of our second-grade students.”
“Okay...”
“She’s… concerned. About the direction of the Halloween decorations. Or, rather, the lack thereof.”
I just stare at him. “The lack thereof?”
“Her words.” He shrugs, a gesture meant to convey ‘don't shoot the messenger’ that somehow just feels smug.
“Apparently, she's worried we aren't including enough ‘normal’ Halloween things. She mentioned a distinct lack of spiders, witches, and ghosts. She feels the current display is—and I quote—‘a little sterile.’”
“Sterile?” I repeat, my voice dangerously high. “It’s a harvest display, Trevor. It’s gourds. Corn husks. It’s designed to be inclusive for kids who don’t celebrate Halloween. It's the perfect, inoffensive, autumnal compromise. We do this every year.”
“Well, this year, it’s causing problems.” He shifts his weight, and I can smell his sharp, cheap aftershave. “And unfortunately, it’s not just the complaint.”
A cold, heavy dread sinks straight through my stomach, eclipsing the nausea entirely. “What do you mean?”
“This,” he says, and I notice for the first time that he’s holding one of the gourds from the offending display in his hand. “To make matters worse, it was brought to my attention that part of your display was… vandalized.”
It’s a beautiful, warty green-and-orange gourd. He holds it up between us, then slowly, deliberately turns it around. At first, I see nothing. Just the rough, bumpy skin of the gourd.
“See?” he says, a note of false patience in his voice. “Right here.”
He taps a fingernail against the rind. And I see it.
It’s small, so small I’m not even sure I’m seeing it right.
Scratched into the tough green skin, using the natural, warty lines of the gourd as a guide, is a word.
It's crude, barely legible, the kind of carving a kid would do with the tip of a pencil, and it’s a word I know with chilling certainty.
WOLF.
Four letters that seem innocent, but mean so much more to me.
Lupus is Latin for wolf. The disease that is eating me from the inside out.
The name doctors gave it, centuries ago, because of the wolf-like, butterfly-shaped rash it can leave across the nose and cheeks.
My most terrifying, closely guarded secret.
Carved into a gourd that is part of my fall display.
But it's carved so subtly, so cleverly into the natural texture, that if you weren't looking for it, if you weren't the person it was meant for, you would miss it entirely.
My blood runs ice-cold. I feel my own vision tunnel, the trailer's walls seeming to press in. I am suddenly, terrifyingly, aware of my own heartbeat, loud and frantic in my ears. This isn't just vandalism. This is a message. Someone knows.
“I don't see anything,” I lie, my voice a dry croak.
Trevor sighs, a put-upon sound. “Come on, Maya. It’s right there.” He traces it again. “It looks like... ‘WOLF.’ W-O-L-F. What is that, some kind of... inside joke? A team name? It's just... odd.”
“I see a scratch,” I say, my voice shaking. But I'm not looking at the gourd anymore. I'm looking at him. His shrewd, assessing eyes. His total lack of surprise.
“It’s a word, Maya. A confusing word in this context.
And the parent’s complaint, combined with this.
.. it’s exactly what I was afraid of. These…
artisanal… displays you insist on, they’re drawing the wrong kind of attention.
They’re provoking a reaction. If you’d just stuck to normal Halloween—spiders, ghosts, like she said—none of this would have happened. ”
The logic is so twisted, so fundamentally backward, that it takes my breath away. He’s blaming me. He's blaming a gourd.
And a horrifying thought surfaces, a dark, ominous bubble of suspicion. The carving is so small. So hidden. Who found it and brought it to Trevor’s attention, as he claimed? Who would have been looking at the back of a gourd that was part of a big display?
It’s something only I would notice. Or... or someone who wanted to make sure I noticed it. Someone who wanted to make me feel small and targeted and crazy, all at once.
The pretzels in my hand are suddenly unbearable.
I have a white-hot, violent urge to crush the entire handful, to grind the salty fragments into my palm until they draw blood, to throw them at his smug, impassive face.
I thought I had designed the perfect display, a display to offend no one. A display that was just... fall.
And now I’m beginning to wonder if these complaints are even real. Is this parent really complaining? Or is Trevor just making it all up, piece by piece, to make my life harder? But why? Why would he do that?
“Trevor,” I say, and my voice is a low, dangerous growl that doesn't sound like me. “That is the most ridiculous thing I have—”
The trailer door jiggles, then swings open, and Zachary walks in, his arms full of freshly printed lesson plans and worksheets. He’s smiling, his sandy-brown hair messy from the wind.
“The printer jammed twice,” he starts, “but I won. I finally—”
He stops. His smile evaporates. He takes in the scene in a fraction of a second: me, white-knuckled, standing behind my chair like a cornered animal; Trevor, holding the gourd, his face a mask of patronizing concern. The air in the trailer is thick and toxic.
“What’s going on?” Zachary asks, and his voice is suddenly all business. He drops the papers on the closest table, the sound loud in the silence.
I can't tear my eyes away from Trevor. I just point. “Trevor,” I say, my voice dripping with a venom I can’t hide, “was just telling me that my harvest display is ‘provoking reactions.’ A parent has complained that there aren't enough witches or other normal Halloween decorations.”
I see the confusion then the dawning, furious understanding in Zachary's eyes. But before he can speak, I add, “And apparently, someone carved a word into this gourd.”