Yesterday morning I woke up to the sound of my alarm clock blaring at 4 a.m. I crankily threw back the covers and watched through crusty eyes as my feet began to shrivel up from touching the cold stone ground. I had forgotten to close the window. Great. I said to myself, grabbing a grey towel from the dirty laundry basket and a bar of soap from the tin can I kept beside my bed.
I ran down the stale-aired hallway of Saint Anne’s Foster Home toward the communal showers. I liked being the first one awake in the morning, even if it was a pain to get myself out of the sack. When I got up at 4 a.m., usually nobody else would be in the bathroom to bother me. This morning however, I already heard at least two showers going. This is just perfect, I thought, they are going to use up all the hot water before I even get there.
Stepping into the bathroom, I immediately knew that something was off. The water in stalls four and seven were going, but no towels or toiletries were left hanging on the hooks. Someone had also forgotten to close the shower curtain in four and peeking around the side I could see nobody was there. The water was just falling to the floor on full blast.
“That’s weird,” I said aloud, half expecting someone to call out, “don’t worry about it man, Ollie just ran back to his room to grab a towel” or something like that.
Ollie is also an early riser. Well, I shouldn’t say that, really. Ollie doesn’t ever actually go to sleep, so normally if anyone is up in the morning showering with me it’s Ollie, or Adam. Adam is our ROTC wannabe. He wakes up every morning to go for a jog up and down the three-story foster building, and sometimes I’d see him in the showers too, cooling off after his run. So, this is what I thought it might be. Maybe Adam was in seven and would call out at any moment to let me know that Ollie would be back soon. I waited. Still silence.
“Hey Adam, man, you in seven?”
Nothing.
I walked to the back of the showers toward stall seven, and that’s when I noticed it. Pooling out from beneath the shower I noticed a slow-moving mixture of water and what looked to be a dark red liquid.
Quickly I pulled back the curtain and when I did, I collapsed to my feet. I reached out to the body of a young man, maybe 16 or 17, with warm hazelnut colored hair and bronzed corkboard skin. His face was covered by a mass of tangled locks and blood dripping down the side of his head. It looked like he had smashed his face against the wall and fell on the floor face down. His mouth just barely underneath the water, he wasn’t breathing.
“HELP!” I called out. “SOMEBODY COME HELP ME! THERE’S A KID HERE, HE’S NOT BREATHING, SOMEBODY PLEASE HURRY!”
I heard running from down the hallway. I turned to see Ollie dashing toward the bathroom with a uniform grey Saint Anne’s towel wrapped around his waist. Mother Mildred came in behind him with a security officer. They entered the room and Ollie started shouting.
“MOTHER! MOTHER! HE’S OVER HERE IN SHOWER SEVEN. HE PASSED OUT WHILE I WAS SHOWERING AND HIT THE FLOOR. I RAN TO YOU AS SOON AS I COULD.”
“Quiet down Oliver. We need you to step back for a moment while we take care of this. You’ve surely woken the others with all your yelling. Go and close the door. Lock it so nobody can come in, and please turn off that damn shower before you waste all of our hot water!” Mother Mildred snarled at Ollie. I stepped out of the shower.
“He’s dead.” I said. “He drowned.”
Nobody acknowledged I was there.
“Excuse me, are you listening to me? The kid is DEAD. What are you going to do? Have you even called an ambulance?”
Nothing.
“What’s the name of the child, Mother.” The officer asked pulling out a notebook and pen. He reached over past the curtain to turn off the water.
“Ethan, Ethan Baxter. 17 years old.”
I winced. No. No, it can’t be. This isn’t possible. I haven’t even showered this morning. What is she talking about? I am standing right in front of her.
“Ethan Baxter…” the officer wrote down. “Any living family members to contact, or potential adoptive parents to reach out to?”
“None,” Mother Mildred said sharply.
You lying snake! My Uncle is still alive. He writes me now and then; you’re going to have to call… wait…what am I even saying? That’s not me. I’m right here. They’re just ignoring me.
“Alrighty ma’am, that will be all this evening. Let me call some folks to come and clean this mess up for you. It looks like he just tripped and hit his head. Unfortunate for the kid. It wouldn’t look too great for the establishment to have something like this hit the news right now. Want me to take care of him for you Mother?”
“Yes, Officer Vanis, that would be much appreciated of you,” she said.
Ollie turned a stark shade of white, even whiter than his normal paper colored complexion.
Mother Mildred took notice of this. “You best keep your mouth shut, Oliver Irving,if you know what’s good for you.”
“Ye…ye…yes ma’am.” Ollie stuttered. Both Mildred and Officer Vanis exited the room while they took several phone calls. Amazingly, only two kids had woken up and were peeking out their doors to listen – that is, until Mother yelled at them to go back to sleep. Ollie stayed behind in the showers and walked over to the body.
“I’m sorry Ethan. If I had just moved your head before I left…maybe you’d still be with us.” He reached out and touched his hand to a cold, clammy and rubbery wet one laying on the shower ground. When he touched the hand, I felt a shiver go down my body. Looking down, I saw my legs begin to fade into the tiled bathroom floor, then my waist, my chest, arms, and hands. I watched them dissolve into the air around me. The last thing I saw before it all went dark was Ollie’s bright blue eyes filling with tears. His dark blond hair was starting to dry and curl upward. He looked destroyed.
Then for a moment everything seemed to stop, and from the darkness emerged a small dot. Very faint to the eye, but it grew larger and larger with every second. It rapidly shuddered up and down, until I could see images again.
I saw a body being carried out underneath a white blanket, and I heard Mother Mildred tell me to go back to my room. I felt confused because it seemed like she was yelling at someone else. Not Ethan Baxter, no, and my body carried out the actions with its own will, not my own.
We reached room 203. Strange. I thought. This isn’t my room. The body entered through the door and turned to the left where a mirror hung on the wall, so I could see our reflection.
I now resided in the mind of Oliver Irving. It wasn’t like I could control him or anything. Ollie still had control over his own movements and thoughts, but I could tell when I thought of something, he felt it too.
Oliver
I’d only known Ethan a few months, but he was the first person who talked to me here at the home. He had just had his 17th birthday and had knocked on my door, room 203. I opened it, and there he stood with a butterscotch pudding cup in his left hand. He held it out to me,
“It’s my birthday, I thought I’d bring you some pudding to celebrate,” he said.
I furrowed my eyebrows together. “Shouldn’t I be the one bringing you a present then?”
“Nah man,” he said. “There’s nothing that I want really. The lunch ladies gave me this pudding cup, but I don’t have much of a sweet tooth, so I thought you would maybe like it.”
I looked down at the cup in his hands, the top of the container was sealed but I could smell the sugar from a mile away. It made my stomach rumble.
“Thanks” I said, taking the cup out of his hands.
Ethan Baxter didn’t have to pay attention to me. I was one of the younger teens in the home, 14, but he made it a point to find me at lunch out on the front lawn and to sit with me. We sat together every day until last week, that’s when Mother pulled him into her office.
Nobody likes going into the office. Nothing good ever comes out of being called there. Ethan seemed to be in it a lot.He was always fighting with the staff members about house policy and getting to speak with his relative…I think it was his uncle. The walls are thin here, so a lot of the time I’d hear Mother and him shouting at one another.
“You dirty little brat! All you do is waste my energy and food. I wish they’d let me kick you out of this place. You’re practically an adult and should be making use of your time by getting a job instead of hanging around with the younger kids.”
“They’re lonely, Mildred. We hardly ever get any time to talk to one another around here because of your list of crazy chores and policy guidelines. The last time I had a job you took all of my money away from me.”
“Don’t you talk back to me, young man. It’s MOTHER to you, and if I say you need to get a job and pay me dues, then that’s the way it’s going to be. My house, my rules. Unless you care to leave, then there’s the door.”
“I would if it were just me, I cared about, but you treat all of the kids in here like absolute shit. You only care about a paycheck.”
“For all I care, you could drop dead tomorrow. It honestly would be a blessing to not have to deal with you and your trashy teenage attitude for the next year.”
“The only way I’d drop dead is if you poisoned my garbage of a plate for lunch, Mildred, and then my uncle would come to find me and you’d be locked away where you belong.”
I heard cackling through the walls.
“Oh, you poor, pathetic boy. If your uncle gave a rat’s ass about you or your wellbeing, you would have been living with him for the past five years instead of me. Seeing as he hasn’t bothered to come and pick you up, I’d imagine he wouldn’t care if you disappeared from this building. Better yet, this town, or the whole freaking world. It would honestly be a relief for him if you just toppled over and died.”
“You’re a horrible woman.”
“You’re an insufferable child.”
When I was hearing this, I thought nothing of it. That’s generally how Mother talks to everyone in the house. She isn’t a kind person.
I look at my reflection in the mirror hanging on the wall. It’s been thirty minutes, thirty freaking minutes since I saw them carry Ethan away under a sheet, like nothing had even happened. I ran my fingers through my hair and stared at the puffy blood-shot eyes looking back at me.
Something was different about me. Maybe it was because of what I’d seen, or heard weeks ago, but I felt angry, more defiant. I felt like justice was the bottom barrel for what Mother had done to Ethan, the only guy who had ever really had my back around here.
I swear, looking at my eye’s in my reflection, I could see the faintest transition of color from bright blue, to a stormy grey. The same color as Ethan’s.
Ethan
“CAN YOU HEAR ME OLLIE?!” I screamed. I could see him staring at his reflection and getting more and more angry. No, wait. Ollie wasn’t getting angrier…I was getting angrier, and it was showing up in Ollie’s physical response.
“Ollie,” I whispered. “If you can hear me any way in the slightest, please reach out to my uncle.”
Ollie backed away from the mirror and turned towards his window. Outside it was stark and overcast weather. He darted his eyes to the floor towards his beat-up grey Skechers. To his left he saw a thick dark blue jacket.
“Do it Ollie. Please do it, for me.” I pleaded.
It was almost as if our thoughts had merged into one because, as I pled, Ollie’s hand reached for the jacket. He jammed the sneakers onto his feet and grabbed a drawstring black bag from under his bed.
Inside he crammed a box of saltine crackers, a bottle full of water, an extra set of clothing and some cinnamon gum. On top of his dresser, inside of a tin can like my own, Ollie kept some soap, a toothbrush and spare change totaling about $24. He shoved all of it into the bag on top of the rest and turned toward the door to exit.
“This is for you Ethan. Thank you for being such a good friend.”
My mind washed over with a feeling of calmness and relief. Somebody cares about me, I thought, looking through Ollie’s vision.
“Thank you, Ollie.”
Oliver
I ran down the steps of Saint Anne’s and fled through the first story corridor. When I reached the exit, I didn’t care to even look back. I barreled out into the streets and toward Pickett Avenue. I tried remembering bits and pieces of things Ethan had told me about his uncle.
“He goes by Pete, I got this thing from him.” A memory surfaces and shows me an image of Ethan and I sitting on the steps to Saint Anne’s. He’s wearing a black baseball cap backwards, and his curly brown hair tapers around the edges of his ears. Dangling around his neck is a dog tag with the initials PEB. This is what he was referencing.
“Pete E. Baxter?” I asked.
“Peter Elliot Baxter, Uncle Pete. I haven’t seen him since I was a little kid. He writes to me now and again, telling me how he wishes I could stay with him.”
“Why can’t you?”
“Uncle Pete is my mother’s half-brother. My parents never granted him guardianship over me. As far as the law’s concerned, I am not tied to him in any way.”
“That’s awful, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be Ollie, I have a plan. I’m going to meet him soon.”
“You are?” I tried not to look skeptical, but I couldn’t stop my face from making a doubtful expression when Ethan said that to me.
“Yeah, I am.” He looked away from me, trying not to make eye contact. I think everyone had been telling him for the past five years that he wouldn’t be able to do it.
I shook my head and scratched my knee. The concrete was beginning to mark loose pebbles of gravel into my skin. “How do you think you’re going to get away with that?”
Ethan grinned, “Easy, he wrote me a letter last month telling me he was staying somewhere in the city. No exact address, but he mentioned this photography place he likes going to with his family.”
“Your Uncle Pete has a family?” I asked.
“That he does, a wife and a daughter. My cousin Danielle. She was born after I was sent off to Saint Anne’s. She’s maybe about five right now…” I looked down.
“Well still, how do you figure on finding out where they live with a photography shop?” I asked. Ethan smiled again at me, this time a little more uncertain.
“I’m hoping one of the photos will give me an address of some sorts.” He said.
I remember thinking to myself that it was a crazy idea, and for once, agreeing with Mother. Wouldn’t his Uncle have reached out by now to claim him if they lived in the same area?
“Good luck” I said.
“Thanks, I’m going to need it.” Ethan replied.
Ethan
I don’t even think I’m telling this kid to run anymore. He’s doing it on his own, flying down 11th Avenue like it’s his daily jog or something.
“Keep going Ollie! We’re almost to the photo shop!” I’m screaming in my own brain. Well, I guess Oliver’s brain, I wonder if he can ever hear me.
We round the corner, and that is when I see it. A large black and white sign saying, Mr. Shine’s Photography Shop. Oliver huffs out short breaths while reaching for the door handle. A small bell rings when we enter.
“Hello young man,” says a cheerful and booming voice. “I’m Ian Shine, welcome to my fine arts establishment. What can I help you with?”
“Oh, um … I’m looking for a friend of mine’s uncle you see … I was told he lives close by and likes to take photos here with his family.” Ollie stammers.
“Ah, Mr. Baxter, yes! He flew out of the city two weeks ago I believe. Sometimes he brings his family here on business trips and they drop in for a photo together or two. They say it’s for Christmas cards but I’m pretty sure they just like being reminded that they can do things like that together. What’s your friend’s name?” Oliver hiccupped over his own thoughts again. I could feel them racing around in his head with me.
“His name is Ethan, Ethan Baxter. We live … we lived together at Saint Anne’s. I’m Ollie … er I’m Oliver Irving.” It looked as though the man did a double take.
“Ah yes. Mr. Baxter has mentioned your friend before. Told me he had a nephew out here that was being raised by a nice foster home. A place where the kids even call their caregiver, Mother. He told me he was waiting for him to turn 18 so he could surprise him with a family visit.”
“Nice home my ass,” I said. Shockingly, Ollie mouthed the words I was feeling. Mr. Shine raised his eyebrows at us, orI guess, him.
“Of course, I have heard other rumors from other customers saying that very same thing. I suppose I should listen to a boy who lives there. Does the Mother know where you are at this moment, by the way?”
“No,” Ollie and I said, synced together. It was like the longer I stayed in his head, the longer it felt like my own. The longer his body felt like mine too. Mr. Shine stepped back, we had raised our voices and sounded defensive. He seemed concerned.
“Well, by that tone of voice I’m thinking you’re not supposed to be here, but I can also see the feelings you’re showing in your eyes.”
“You have no idea.” I’m thinking, but Ollie spits out these words instead, “Ethan, he passed this morning. Mother, she and the officer talked about taking care of it, but I think there is something bad going on, Mr. Shine. I need help. I need to reach Mr. Baxter.”
A solemn expression took over Mr. Shine’s face.
“Mr. Baxter is not available right now. I’m sorry for the loss of your friend, Oliver Irving. If I were able to contact his uncle now, I would, but even so I don’t think it would make much of a difference. Pete has the ‘perfect family’ – I can tell when they walk in to get their photos done together that they want to keep up that kind of image. Sadly, an estranged nephew probably never fit the picture.”
“But you said they wanted to see me on my 18th birthday,” I said. I didn’t catch the words coming out of Oliver’s mouth in time.
“Ethan’s birthday, yes.” Mr. Shine seemed unphased by this mistake. “They planned on visiting for a while and giving him a bundle of things to start his life after leaving the home. Though, I suppose that won’t be happening now.”
Tears began streaming down our face, both Ollie’s and my own. It was true what Mother said, nobody really did care about me. Mr. Shine’s expression softened.
“I have a spare room in the back. You are more than welcome to stay the night here, Oliver Irving. I won’t make you go back to that place. Nobody should have to deal with the things you’re going through right now.”
“You have a bedroom in the back?” We ask.
“Yeah, my entire apartment is in the back of this place actually. Saves me time and money. So please, stay as long as you like. We can try and get more of this sorted out in the morning.”
He walked us to the back of the building and showed us a wooden door that was painted white.
“In there, get settled,” he told us.
Oliver and I walked into the room and looked around. It was already 10, no, 100 times bigger than our places back at the home. There was a queen size bed, large dressers, a chest and a huge mirror on the wall in front of the bed. There was also a big open window covered with creamy curtains . Our home for the night.
By now it was getting dark outside, and we were exhausted from the day. Oliver crawled into the bed with his clothes on and fell into a deep sleep.
Oliver
I’m sitting on the floor of Saint Anne’s bathroom. The showers are still running, and I see blood crawling out of stall seven.
“Ethan!” I call out.
“Hey bud, I’m here,” says a voice behind me.
“Wait, you’re alive? But the blood, I saw your face…this morning Ethan you…you drowned, and Mother and that awful cop took you away.”
“I know they did Ollie. I’m dead, you’re dreaming of me right now.”
“How is that possible?” I ask. I’d never talked to someone in my dreams before. Especially not someone from the dead, and this felt so real.
“When you found me this morning Ollie, I somehow managed to encase myself in your subconscious. I am still with you. Sometimes when you are awake you say things you don’t mean or do things you wouldn’t normally do. I’m part of you now until…”
“Until when?” I interrupt. I’m feeling anxious and violated. I know this isn’t his fault, bu t my brain had been feeling the best with the two of us sharing it. I couldn’t pinpoint a reason for any of my actions today, but for as crazy as this sounded to me … talking to my dead best friend … it made the most sense.
“Until I find closure I think.” He tells me.
I rub my hands against my dreamscape skin and blonde hair.
“That could be a while,” I tell him.
“I know, I’m sorry Ollie.” His body gets fuzzy, I think I’m waking up.
“Don’t be sorry Ethan. What happened to you was tragic, and the way they handled it is unforgivable. I’m going to help you get closure. I promise I can do that at least.”
He looks puzzled. His image is breaking up even more.
“How?” he asks.
“You’re fading now, it’s almost morning. I’m going to start with Mr. Shine, but we’re going to find out what Vanis and Mother did to your body, and we’re going to notify your family…”
“They don’t care about me. She was right.”
“Don’t say things like that Ethan. We don’t know the full story. We will look for it tomorrow. Hopefully then you’ll be able to move on and find some form of peace.”
“Thank you, Ollie.” Ethan’s image dissolves and my eyes begin to shudder open. I look into the mirror on the wall across the room.
“Anything for you. You’re my best friend.”
Story By Dakota Brown
Illustration By Maxen Stone
Design By Joel Bartlow
Lori Smith
I didn't want it to end. Very fun to read.