All the Things We Do in the Dark

by Saundra Mitchell

  I take a step back. “Not mutually exclusive.”

  “I know who did.”

  I can’t, can’t, can’t believe I’m standing in semidarkness with a killer, listening to him talk with a text-to-speech thingie on his phone. Like, he should be wearing half a mask and a cloak and rise up in the smoke behind me or something. It’s creepy and wrong, and Great, why don’t you keep on talking to him, Ava? “Then why didn’t you go to the cops already?”

  Frustration flashes up in his dark eyes. He shakes his head; it echoes all down his body. He’s annoyed and frustrated, and he points at my bag. He doesn’t have to speak; I understand. Whatever he has that will convince me, I’ve already got in my possession.

  I don’t know the right thing to do. My knees wobble, encouraging me to sink to the floor and cry. That fixes up this little red wagon, doesn’t it? Crying? Very helpful. Clutching the bag tighter, I say nothing.

  He types at me furiously. “Pics of license plates! Chat screenshots! Cleared the whole phone except for stuff about this. Evidence!”

  Wavering, I search his face. There has to be some sign he’s lying. Or a light that will tell me he’s not. I want to find it. I want to know for sure, but all there is is a face. Dark brows, brown eyes, high cheekbones, thin lips. Some color slapped into his cheeks, some hair falling across his forehead. He looks ordinary.

  (Most people do.)

  “You don’t need evidence to talk to somebody,” I say, uncertain. I know why I kept Jane; my reason is good. My reason is reasonable.

  “Cop’s nephew did it,” he replies. Then he arches a brow and points at my bag again.

  Suddenly, it’s all there in my head. The gallery I was so afraid to open, the one that didn’t have an archive of Jane’s body, but instead, cars. License plates. The cruiser in the driveway in the snow. The unnerving lack of texts and mails and chats. The only signs of life some screenshots from Discord—pieces of conversations that made no sense out of context.

  Context. I start to crack at the edges. He might be telling the truth. And when sheer panic drops away, I tremble. All that adrenaline has to go somewhere. It pools in my hands and feet, leaving me shaky and numb.

  “How’d you find her?” I ask.

  “Tracked her phone till it disappeared. Searched.” He lifts his chin in defiance. “You?”

  “IT WAS AN ACCIDENT.”

  That’s what I say, but I don’t believe that.

  I was supposed to find her. I was supposed to keep her safe. I am her keeper and her guardian; I’m her sister and her best friend. Jane and I walk in the same skin. I breathe for her.

  “You don’t know her. I do. Just let me have it.”

  Relief hangs just out of reach. That would be easy: surrender everything to him and let whatever happens happen. Let Jane go before I have to admit what I’ve done. Before I have to really think about why I did it. Boxes upon boxes tumbling open in my mind. Everything spilling out, everything mixing together.

  With a knot in my throat, I say, “You could be lying about all of this.”

  He shrugs. The expression says it all. Yeah, he could. He could be the second coming of Ted Bundy, for all I know. But he could just as easily be King Arthur in black.

  Thumbs sliding on his phone, he stares at the screen, then looks up at me as he hits Enter. “I didn’t attack you.” The voice on the phone doesn’t have emphasis, but he flashes his eyes at me on you.

  History isn’t always what happened; it’s how the people who lived it remember it. We study the Revolutionary War, and we call it American. George Washington seems American, but he wasn’t at first. Alexander Hamilton wasn’t American, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, not American—they were British.

  The British weren’t coming; the British were already here. Those forefathers were traitors right up until the moment they won the war.

  And so, I see 1LostMarble’s point. I don’t like it, but I see it. Let’s say he’s telling the truth—and I think maybe, possibly, he is—who am I in this situation?

  I’m the stranger who appeared in the night while he stood over a friend’s clandestine grave. I’m the stalker who lingered in his store for hours watching him work. I’m the thief; I might even be the pervert. This war isn’t over yet; we don’t know who wins. I tell this story, but I could be the villain. The villain never thinks they’re wrong. Oh god, am I wrong?

  “I need to think about this,” I say. “I can’t do this here.”

  He looks like he might throw his phone on the ground. He makes a move, like he’s going to approach me, but then he stops. Rasping frustrated fingers through his hair, he thumbs in a one-word response. “Why?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  When he speaks aloud, I fully realize why he’s using an electronic voice. He’s angry, and his words don’t fall out fluently. The consonants repeat; the vowels drag. He has a stutter, one that trips over itself when he shouts, “You-you’re c-c-razy! Just . . . give it to me!”

  The stage floor creaks as I move toward the door. “Meet me after school.”

  “Where?”

  Good question. I say the first thing that comes to mind. “Wescott’s Coffee, downtown.”

  He’s reluctant. Still annoyed. He thinks he’s negotiating with a terrorist, but that’s too bad. I have leverage, and I have questions. I’m not letting him decide Jane’s fate alone. I’m just not. So he can meet me or give up on getting his evidence/phone back.

  I skirt around him. My footsteps echo in the auditorium. The second bell is about to ring

  (or maybe it did and I missed it?)

  and I’m going, no matter what. It’s not that I care about being late to class (okay, I care a little). But I need to get away, take a breath. Get my thoughts together.

  The last few days have been chaos. Elation and drugged; all my unhoped-for wishes coming true and all my worst fears rising up in a snow-covered grave. Pushed by Syd, pulled by Hailey—I can’t think clearly. And that’s what I need right now. Clarity.

  Backing toward the door, I ask, “Are you going to be there? We get out at two fifty.”

  His jaw is tight and there’s an irritated vein flickering in his throat. But he nods, and now I have a date with a killer. Or with an ally. Jane’s friend. Someone who actually knows her. Someone who knows her name.

  And I am selfish. I don’t ask it. For a little while longer, she remains my Jane.

  There is heat.

  There’s heat in the ground, and it rises.

  Slowly, because the earth is all about slow. Tectonic-plate-motion slow. Geologic-time slow. All that lethargy is essential. If the ground shifted like the sun, nothing would grow. The earth takes seasons to shift—early snow is early snow.

  It isn’t ice.

  It isn’t permafrost.

  It isn’t permanent.

  That prehistoric Ice Man in the Alps had tundra and eternal winter to tide him over until that glacier encased him in ice. Those mummies in the Andes have cold air and stone to keep them, until everything in them turns to leather.

  Northern Maine has no tundra, no permafrost, no glaciers lurking. It has snow that comes early, but earth that still warms. And worms. Things alive in it still live; things dead on it are still dead. And while the large predators find the small delicacies, the small predators wait for just enough heat, just a little warmth, to start their feast.

  Inside out because bacteria don’t need to breathe—but they have breath.

  That breath makes marks on skin, it mottles flesh, it exhales gases. It’s hot air from the inside: puffing up everything soft, pushing out everything that’s soft. Tongues and eyes and other organs near other holes . . .

  All those archaeologists who find remains and say, “It looks like she just fell asleep yesterday!” are lying.

  They lie because no body—not Ötzi the Iceman or the Andes Ice Maiden or the climbers who failed to climb down from Mount Everest—looks as if they fell asleep yesterday. That lie makes us fe
el better. It makes us believe in all the bodies on television that are nothing more than blue lipstick and grey powder.

  You know it’s a lie because you’ve been to a funeral. You’ve heard someone say, “Look how peaceful . . .” and maybe even, “Just like they’re sleeping.” You know in your heart, your still-beating heart, that it’s a lie. But you take the lie, you chew the lie, you swallow the lie.

  If you didn’t, you might never stop screaming,

  The dead, even the recently deceased and gently preserved, primped and powdered and wearing clothes someone else picked out for them—they do not look like they’re peaceful or asleep.

  And neither does she. Especially because the earth is warm, and it radiates, slowly, upward, inexorable.

  The worms don’t crawl in. They don’t crawl out.

  But bodies are full of living things. What they do from the inside is so much worse than what a few well-meaning worms might do looking for a place to weather the storm—

  Well, it’s really better if you don’t think about it. Just enjoy the nursery rhyme instead.

  I TEXT MY MOTHER FROM A BATHROOM STALL. Going to be late tonight; hanging out w/ Hailey. A truth—not all of it.

  I’m not sure I like you going out so much on school nights.

  My head jerks back. Did not expect that. I really didn’t. She was mad when I was blowing in late or when I was out without telling her—those made sense.

  And when she told me I needed to let her know if I was going to be late, that order stuck. But now she just randomly doesn’t want me going out on a school night? Like she knows anything about what I do? I compose a couple of replies, deleting and rewriting until I have one that doesn’t sound annoyed. I’ll make sure I’m back before eleven.

  Invite her over, Mom says. Order pizza. Double pepperoni, on me.

  No. That’s not what I want. We’re supposed to go flying: music on the radio, darkness outside, black threads of highway unfurling as we drive everywhere, nowhere. Maybe we’d go to the fire tower again. Stand like queens together above our strange, silent nation. Sitting in my house, with pizza, how am I supposed to brush the wild, flyaway strands of Hailey’s hair from her face?

  Not gonna happen. She keeps kosher.

  Mom’s response is almost instant. Veggie lovers, then.

  Please? We already have plans.

  What plans?

  Jeez, Mom, come on! I rack my brain, and I can’t think of a way to honestly say what we’re doing without telling her that we’re just going driving. Because I don’t think she’d like it.

  I can come up with the reasons why all on my own: the weather, the roads (mostly okay now), the darkness, the youth of the driver, the make of the car, something.

  So my reply is imprecise. We’re just hanging out. Watching movies.

  Her answer: Netflix and chill?

  Rolling my eyes so hard, I stand up and lean against the wall. Leave it to my mother to not only dredge up ancient slang but to deploy it accurately. My face gets hot with a blush, because I’m nowhere near ready for “and chill,” and also, my mom literally just asked me if I’m having sex with someone in the most antique way possible.

  I touch the microphone icon and say, “No comma mother period. Netflix and homework period.”

  Fine. Go tonight. Tomorrow night, we’re going to have a talk.

  Oh, good. A talk.

  Gathering up my stuff, I glower, complaining in my own head. She’s never done this to me. We don’t fight. We really don’t; most of the time she’s great. Treats me like an adult, trusts me to do the right thing.

  The water comes out ice-cold; I shiver as I scrub my hands in it. I guess all that trust came easy, since I didn’t go anywhere or do anything. Approved outings with her; sanctioned time with Syd, who calls her Mom, too. Tension snakes around me, thinning my breath. She wants to keep Rapunzel in the Tower; she’s decided I need a trim.

  Realizing I don’t want one feels like a bubble popping and light pouring out. I lean over the sink and face myself in the mirror. Me, my scar . . . and behind me, Jane. She’s amused, shaking her head at me.

  “What’s so funny?” I ask her.

  Jane holds up a hand, her fingertips missing. All of her fingertips are missing, little shards of bone sticking up just past her flesh.

  Mom doesn’t want to fight. She never wanted to fight. She just had to and lost, and now I’m giving her a hard time. I plunge my hands under the icy water again. It’s a shock the second time. When I splash my face, I gasp.

  It’s like a slap, and I come to.

  I’m talking to a dead girl. Meeting with a stranger who could still be her killer. Hiding a dead body in the tree line above the Aroostook River. And I’m fighting with my mom about leaving the house. About my curfew. This is so messed up.

  I am so very, very messed up.

  I AM NOTHING BUT ALL CAPS. I’M TWITCHY AND TOO full; there’s too much in my skin. Every time someone closes a door, I jump. The hallway between classes was a roar that never ended.

  And now, the sound of fingers on keyboards in the library is constant thunder. I should be in Econ. I should be parsing out A=P(1+r)Y against the average cost of five different secondary education options, i.e., how much the compound interest is if I go to Harvard instead of Northern Maine Community College.

  But I skipped Econ because the answer is A L O T and W H O C A R E S ? because I just had a conversation with a guy who threatened to find me, managed to find me, and claims he didn’t kill Jane, even though I caught him standing over her body twice. Do I have a coffee date with Jeffrey Dahmer?

  My life was good and fine and tethered. All the boxes were sorted and sealed and stacked. A place for everything; everything in its place. Me at Syd’s side with nobody else, really. Me at home every night immediately after school. Me at home, gorging on Korrasami fanfic with a heaping side of Stucky. Me with other people’s hopes and dreams and philosophies needled into my skin. It was a good house. It was a good life.

  And then, her.

  Before Jane, I barely thought about him. I sometimes felt him. But only sometimes. I had my scar, but it wasn’t open; it didn’t bleed. It didn’t bloom and beat with my heart and threaten to split me in half. I wasn’t

  (a basket case)

  ripped up, tripped up, cutting class, driving without a license, lying and lying and lying—

  I was safe

  (but I wasn’t falling in love)

  (touching lips, touching palms)

  (flying in the night).

  I keep dragging my hands into my hair and twisting. Hard. I can’t tell if I’m trying to keep from crying or trying to make myself sob. People don’t look over; the library, at least, is a bastion of people who want to be alone—who long for a place to be still, to be quiet, to escape.

  That’s why we all look up when Syd sweeps in. She has keys and tiny bells and other dangly, jangly things sewn to her jacket. Each step is a song, a merry whisper, and seeing her come toward me is like a light. A brightness right in the middle of my chest, the possibility of . . .

  What?

  Salvation? Hope? A whole new escape, I don’t know. It just feels good to see her walk toward me. Like, I want to jump up and hug her and hide in all her familiarity. I turn in my chair; my chair doesn’t turn with me. It traps me in the carrel so I half rise, then fall back down when Syd arrives.

  “So are you still on the rag or what?”

  .

  .

  .

  I don’t realize I’m yelling in the library until it’s already happening. A torrent of fury spills out, magma rolling inexorably through my words. I couldn’t stop them if I tried. I don’t even want to.

  “Are you done being a jealous bitch?”

  Syd rears back. Her brows fly sky high, ash-blond against the blue of her curls. “Oh, you did not.”

  “Oh yes I did,” I say. “Because that’s what this is about, right?”

  “I don’t even know what ‘this�
� is, Ava!”

  I bend my fingers back so fast counting that they hurt. “Your attitude, your mean-girl texts, your kidding-not kidding—”

  “How about your”—she mirrors me, mocks me, counting with her fingers—“attitude and lies and screw-Syd-I’ve-got-a-girlfriend bull—”

  “Ladies!” barks the librarian. She shoves herself to her feet and starts toward us. This isn’t a silent library, but it’s quiet. Usually, people don’t scream in each other’s faces.

  I try to push my chair back again. It tips from under me. I grab the edge of the carrel; somehow I stay on my feet as the chair crashes to the carpet. “I don’t have an attitude, and the rest of it is— Wow, I don’t even know!”

  With a quick glance back, Syd judges how far the librarian is from us, and how much she can get away saying before she arrives. There’s probably a physics equation for this, but we’re just estimating. Turning back to me, Syd says, “You don’t even know because you don’t want to know.”

  “I don’t know because you don’t tell me—”

  “Ladies!” the librarian yells. She steps between us. Her voice is firm and icy; she doesn’t have to lay a hand on us to move us. “To the office. Now.”

  THE LIST OF THINGS I’VE NEVER DONE IS GETTING shorter and shorter.

  Never snuck out.

  Never drove a car alone.

  Never cut class.

  Never got detention.

  Never held hands.

  Never been kissed.

  Never had sex (?technically? girlginity intact, boyginity uh . . . ?)

  Never climbed a fire tower.

  Never stalked someone.

  Never hid a body in the woods.

  I have detention for a week. My mother. Is going. To kill me.

  But hey, I’m having new experiences! The only things I can do are smile in disbelief and marvel at myself while I sit in room 415, by the radiator, amazed that detention just looks like bored kids doing homework.

  Wow. Just wow.

  I did manage to shoot off a text to Hailey; I didn’t tell her I had detention. I said I had to stay after to talk to a teacher. This is half a lie and barely counts as I am staying after. And I did talk to Mr. Monogan.