by Chloe Garner
A week ago, less, a day, she would have brushed her hair and gotten dressed, put on lip gloss and eyeliner and earrings, but today she just put on moccasins that kept her feet off the gritty floor and walked into the front room and sat down in the open spot on the side couch. Dennis wasn’t here today, but there were others she hadn’t seen before. Trevor was in his chair in the corner, and Robbie was pacing back and forth behind the couch.
The room went silent as she showed up, but she didn’t act like she’d noticed.
“Good morning,” Trevor said.
“Morning,” she answered, letting her hand fall out to lie on her lap wrist-up. It was like she’d poked a hole in the universe and let in a bolt of light, the way everyone stared.
It really did mean something. It wasn’t just Robbie taking things out of context. She watched Trevor who, unconcerned, watched her back.
Someone coughed, and someone else whispered.
Robbie was glaring at her. She turned to face him, drawing a breath.
“I’m here,” she said.
It seemed like the thing to say, and it broke whatever had blocked up the nervous agitation in the room. They went back to doing whatever it was they normally did to burn energy.
The man on the couch next to her, one with a piercing at the back of his neck with a chain that wound around his shirtless chest to hook onto his belt loop, chewed on his thumbnail. She wondered how often people jerked on that chain, and if it wasn’t part of the point of it.
“You can’t close the door,” someone said.
“I had to,” Robbie answered. “He’s going to ruin my sister.”
“I don’t like you talking about me like that,” Lizzie said. “I can see who I want to.”
Robbie ignored her.
“You’re declaring war,” someone else said.
“It’s already war,” Robbie answered, throwing his arms up. “Look what happened yesterday.”
“What happened yesterday?” Lizzie asked the man with the chain. He twisted his mouth to the side and spoke around his thumbnail.
“They were out hunting and had a blowup at the park.” He grinned. “Broke the fountain and dropped it on a guy.”
“What?” Lizzie asked, looking at Robbie. “You blew something up at the park?”
He cast a glance at her, then, with a pained, meaningful look at Trevor, ignored her.
“They’re getting out of control. You could help.”
“That’s not what we do,” someone new said.
“It isn’t,” the man with the chain said confidentially to Lizzie. She glanced at him, figuring something out, and shifting a fraction closer.
“What blew up?” she asked.
“The furlings,” he answered.
“Ah,” she answered. “Was he okay?”
“Who?” the man with the chain asked.
“The one they dropped the fountain on.”
“What?” the man with the chain asked.
“You said they dropped it on him,” Lizzie said, feeling like the lead had slipped away from her again and she was lost.
“Not the fountain,” he said with a giggle. “The blowup.”
“Oh.”
She looked at Trevor, who could clearly hear and was somewhere between barely containing laughter and smug satisfaction.
She shook her head, and he shrugged. Just for her.
The feel of his fingers on her arm. She got goosebumps and shifted away from the man with the chain, just resettling her weight, wanting to keep the idea of that touch just to herself. A secret.
He knew.
How did Trevor know?
“Dennis is looking for another herd,” Robbie was saying. “Either you need to push them or you need to stay away.”
There were giggles around the room, including a loud, awkward one from the girl named Sybil. She was tapping the toe of her boot against the baseboard.
“It’s going to keep happening,” Robbie said.
“Until we get an angel,” Trevor said.
Robbie looked sharply at Trevor, who shrugged in response.
“You know it’s true,” Trevor said.
“It is,” the man with the chain said, looking down at the back of Lizzie’s wrist.
“What does the angel do?” Lizzie asked him.
“She takes them away,” he told her.
That was less helpful than she’d hoped, but she nodded.
“Lizzie, please go away,” Robbie said.
“I want to understand,” she said, but Trevor stood. It was like the whole floor shifted, the way everyone reacted. The chained man leaned back against the couch, and Sybil rolled along the wall toward the kitchen.
“She can’t,” Trevor said. “Not yet.”
“It’s unbalanced,” someone said.
“We need her.”
“She can’t go.”
“They’re just going to blow up again.”
“Lizzie,” Trevor said, walking for the door. “Will you just come walk the neighborhood with me?”
He put out a hand, and she looked at Robbie.
She wasn’t even sure she wanted to go with him, and yet she looked at Robbie first.
“Don’t,” he said. “Just go back to your room.”
He was lucid.
Aware.
Angry.
Was it because he was getting better, or was it because she was getting closer to understanding?
Or was it neither?
Was she losing her mind and he just seemed to make more sense?
She looked at Trevor again. His posture hadn’t changed at all. He wasn’t demanding. He had asked. He’d actually asked.
She looked back at Robbie.
“I want to help,” she said, standing. The man with the chain touched the back of her hand with the tip of one finger, the way people put their fingers on photographs they were looking at. She looked down at him, but he wasn’t looking at her. He was looking at her arm. She twisted her mouth to the side and then went to Trevor. He opened the door and went out, and she went with him.
***
They went to stand by her car.
“I don’t know if I like this neighborhood,” Lizzie said.
“That’s okay,” Trevor told her. “We don’t have to stay here if you want to go somewhere else.”
She stood there at the car for a minute.
“Can you tell me what’s going on in there?”
He shook his head.
“No, that’s a long way down the road.”
“You weren’t supposed to go, were you?” she asked.
“I do what I want,” he answered. “You weren’t supposed to go.”
Lizzie raised an eyebrow.
“Me?”
He nodded.
“They understand,” he told her.
She shook her head.
“I don’t.”
He smiled.
“You want to go walk the strip mall down there?”
“Okay,” she said, and he pushed himself off the car and started for the road. She put her keys away and went to walk alongside him.
“You should know that this isn’t how this is supposed to go,” he said after a minute, as they walked.
“Which part?” she asked with a quiet laugh.
“The angel and the demon are natural enemies,” he said.
“I thought you and Lara were friends,” Lizzie said, and he nodded.
“We were, but we were never close. I make messes and she cleaned them up.”
“What messes do you make?” she asked. He shrugged.
“Car accidents, trees falling down, boys falling off of skateboards,” he said.
Lizzie looked at him, then frowned at the road.
“I thought you were more balanced than that,” she said. He laughed.
“Go ahead and say what you need to say.”
“It isn’t your fault,” she said. “I don’t know what guilt trip someone put on you at some point, but you can’t fix things that are
just accidents.”
“No,” he said. “That’s your job.”
“Now there’s a head trip,” she said. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
He shrugged. He was back in his baggy clothes and his leather jacket, despite the warming summer weather, and he hadn’t shaved this morning.
“What I said,” he said. “I cause the messes and you clean them up. How much cleaning did you do last night?”
“What?”
He nodded, hands in his pockets, not needing to look at her.
“What?” she asked again. “He went to bed and it was still early. What was I supposed to do?”
“How much?” he asked again.
“The whole kitchen,” she said. “The hall. The bathroom. I took everything out of the kitchen freezer and put it out in the chest freezer to let the kitchen freezer defrost…”
She stopped.
She really had done all of that.
Why?
He laughed, still not looking at her.
“It feel better?”
“Maybe a little. I’m controlling what I can.”
“You’re trying to tell them what to do, but you don’t see them, yet. The house is infested, and they’re trashing it, and you’re fighting them with a dustpan.”
“What are you talking about?” she asked.
“Furlings,” he said. She pounced on that.
“The guy with the chain,” she said.
“Michael,” Trevor supplied.
“Michael used that word.”
He nodded.
“We all do.”
“Is that like hooligans?” she asked.
“No, we’re the hooligans. They’re the furlings.”
He smiled, putting out a hand. She thought about it, not intending to punish him, but not sure.
She wanted to hold his hand. He made her feel calm, like Robbie wasn’t going to just fall to pieces in front of her eyes, like maybe things were going to be okay, but at the same time, there was such a danger to him. Robbie was right that he was dangerous, and even her skin knew it.
She took his hand, putting her fingers through his, and let the weight of his arm pull her closer against him as they walked.
“The house is infested,” she said. “I keep hearing rats in the walls.”
He looked at her.
“Do you?”
She nodded.
“Yeah. I put out poison, but it doesn’t seem to be helping.”
“No, they like poison,” he said.
“Your rats are so badass they like poison?” she asked.
“No, the furlings,” he said. “Poison is a bad idea, by the way. They probably won’t do anything to you or Robbie, but they’ll get it out where the neighborhood dogs can find it, and then you’re a bad neighbor.”
“What are you talking about?” she asked.
“What would you do if you could see chaos, personified, everywhere around you?” he asked back. She frowned.
“Is this an existential question?”
“More than I intended, I think,” he said with a laugh. She shook her head.
“What are you talking about?”
He drew a deep breath and they paused to cross the main road into the little shopping center where Lizzie had been getting groceries for the last week.
She looked over and found that his eyes were closed.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“I don’t like crossing big streets like this,” he said. “Things just go wrong.”
“You’re kidding,” she said. “You don’t cross the street?”
“Not ones like this. You do it.”
She waited, but he appeared to be serious. She frowned, then pulled his hand in a bit closer against her and looked back and forth across the street.
It was a busy road, to be sure, five lanes with a turn lane that ran pretty consistently, and there wasn’t a signal for the shopping center, but it was just a question of getting to the turn lane and then across the next two lanes. She wouldn’t have thought twice about it, except that he’d made it an issue.
“All right,” she said, stepping out quickly in front of the next pair of cars, and then waiting. And then again. They hit the grass on the far side, and he opened his eyes, looking over his shoulder.
“What do you do when you don’t have me to get you across the street?” she asked.
“Get on the bus and wait until it hits the end of the line and turns around,” he said.
“You’re kidding,” she said, and he shook his head.
“Wish I were, but no.”
“How do you ever get anywhere?”
“It takes a while,” he said.
Superstition.
She’d seen enough of it, before.
“You know you can cross the street on your own and nothing is going to happen,” she said.
“It doesn’t work like that for me,” he said. “And I’d take the bet and prove it to you, but on a fifty mile an hour road, someone would get killed.”
She frowned, looking back at the cars.
“You take on too much responsibility for the random chance around you,” she said. “It isn’t your fault Lara died, and trees just fall down.”
He laughed, tucking her arm against his side.
“I appreciate you trying to fix me, but there’s nothing wrong with me. The fact that I see the tree that might fall down is one of the reasons I’m good at what I do.”
She dropped her eyebrows at him and he nodded.
“You want to get an ice cream at the grocery?”
She dropped her nose to her hand and laughed.
“Do you eat at all, without me?”
“Pretty much, no,” he said. “Lara fed me all the time, too, if it makes you feel any better.”
“Why would it?”
“I can’t keep a job,” he said. “I can’t focus on a task like that.”
She stopped, turning to face him.
“You’re not as broken as you think you are,” she said. “I know that’s how it feels, especially with who you’re hanging out with, but I think you could, if you wanted to.”
His face softened, and he put his thumb to her hairline, brushing her hair back behind her ears. She remembered she hadn’t brushed it. Was walking around in her moccasins and her pajama pants.
She would have to fix that.
Soon.
But it was southern California, and while the girls who were allowed to do that kind of thing generally aged out at twenty-three, she wasn’t so inappropriate that they wouldn’t sell her a tub of ice cream at the grocery store.
“I can’t do it, Lizzie. We all need you, me most of all, but I can’t make an income. I can’t keep an apartment. I can barely remember where I slept last night.
“Where did you sleep last night?” she asked. “If you don’t have an apartment.”
“I don’t want to let you in on that part of my world yet,” he said. “I was asking you about chaos.”
“Right. Because you can’t focus enough to keep an apartment, but you want to have an existential conversation about chaos.”
He nodded.
“That about sums it up.”
She shook her head.
“I don’t know about chaos,” she said. “I do know about being sick.”
He dropped her hand and took two steps away from her, folding his arms across his chest.
“Are we back there again?” he asked. “Really?”
“The world isn’t out to make you miserable,” she said. “And, yes, you see things that other people can’t see and sometimes you get flashes of really, really bad things, and I don’t understand, but it isn’t your fault when bad things happen, and you can’t prevent the accidents that happen to other people.”
“This is why Robbie couldn’t ever talk to you,” Trevor said. “You know that? Because you keep coming back to him being broken.” He was angry, now, a surprise that Lizzie wasn’t sure how to deal with. �
��What if he wasn’t broken? What if he were gifted? What if he could see the rest of the world, the parts that you’ve been blissfully unaware of for most of your life, the ones that are real and are bad and that cause things like car accidents and trees falling on houses and your wife to die?”
“He can’t,” Lizzie said.
“Sure, fine, whatever,” Trevor said. “None of it’s real, all of it’s in our heads, collectively, because that makes sense. What if? What if he could?”
“Then we’ve been terrible to him,” Lizzie said. “We’ve ruined his entire life because we didn’t believe him. But it wouldn’t be a gift. It would be a curse, to have to see all of those things and not be able to do anything about them.”
Trevor held up a finger, pointed at her, almost like an accusation.
“Exactly,” he said. “To not be able to do anything about them. But what if you could?”
She scouted for an answer to that.
“Then you would be evil not to. I think.”
He nodded.
“Live with that.”
He turned and walked away, and from his pace it was apparent she wasn’t invited to join him. She watched him for a minute, then turned and started back toward the house, confused and sad.
For the very first time, she thought about just going home.
***
“Where is Trevor?” Robbie asked when she got back. The living room was still full, still agitated, and suddenly quiet once again as she came in.
“He left,” she said, going back to her room and closing the door behind her. She went to stand in front of the mirror, finding the can of surface cleaner on her dresser and going to clean the mirror out of frustration, and she heard the conversation begin in the main room again, but she didn’t listen. She pushed her hair off of her face and went to start the shower.
The water came out of the showerhead brown, and she tipped her head to the side, glaring at it.
“Give me a break,” she said, hitting it. The water turned a darker brown. She hit it again, and now it was nearly black.
“Cut it out,” she said, hitting it once more. It ran clear, and she shook her head at it, getting a towel and going to get her clothes for the day.
She’d pricked him, somehow, but she wasn’t certain how. She hadn’t said anything she hadn’t said before.
Had he started to think that she believed them?
Had she been pretending to believe them, in order to get them to talk to her?
