I’d said, “Do I sign in here?”
And he’d said, “Yep. Take a seat wherever.”
So now that I think about it, I didn’t lie at all. And lying to myself about how I’m not lying to Hailey makes me hate myself a little.
God, I am such a mess. When she finds out, she’s going to run as fast as she can, far, far away from me and all my disaster. And she should. She really should.
Rubbing my eyes, I dip my head just long enough for Mr. Monogan to say, bored, “No sleeping.”
Now my face flames, and tears spring up. Out of reflex, I glance to the other side of the room, where Syd set up camp after she arrived. She stares at Canvas on her iPad, probably uploading homework or digging around for the link to one textbook or another.
Even here, she looks comfortable. Collected. Her curls spill over her shoulders; her matte lips purse thoughtfully. I wonder what it’s like for everything to be fine. What it’s like to have a life where nothing really, truly awful ever happened. That’s probably not fair,
(she has problems; she cries; she hurts)
but right now, I just don’t care. It’s her fault we’re in detention. She lied to me first. She’s still lying to me. And now she’s just . . . sitting over there, fine. My guts churn and my face burns and I could laugh or cry hysterically at any moment, and she’s fine.
I suck in a sharp breath and cut my gaze toward the window. Jane lounges there in the reflection, comfortable in her plaids and her jeans. She drums the exposed bones of her fingertips on the desk, dra-dada-dum, again and again until it almost becomes a melody.
Maybe I’ve misunderstood since the beginning. Maybe Jane is real, and I’m not. Maybe I’m the body in the woods, stripped of everything, even breath. It could be, it could actually be, that I’ve been dead this whole time, one Sixth Sense away from cliché: not seeing dead people; being them.
Letting go, I lose myself in Jane’s lazy rhythm. I stare at nothing; I bother no one. This is all right. I am quietly nothing. I barely exist.
I am not real.
HAILEY LEAVES ME WITH A KISS OUTSIDE WESCOTT’S Coffee.
She’s going to strength training, and she thinks I’m going to do my homework and wait for her. This after she already swung back around to school to pick me up after I “talked to” Mr. Monogan. It hits me again: we’re barely together and I’m lying to her.
And I’m using her, because I needed a ride. I let her waste her time for me because I needed a ride.
My birthday and Christmas money is running out. If Mom looks at my bank account, she’s going to see a charge for Lyft, and I can’t explain it. Can’t ask Syd, obviously. Can’t drive myself: still no license, no idea when I’m gonna get one.
I don’t want to be this person, and at the exact same time, I don’t know how not to be this person. Mr. Burkhart is obsessed with pinpointing the moment the American experiment really began in history. I’m positive that in the Ava experiment, the moment I became Ava-After, began when that man ran his finger down my face. He drew the map in my flesh, and it inexorably led here.
(Lies, lies, lies, my head sings.)
It’s the path I’m on. So I push into the warmth of the coffee shop. The air is bittersweet, heavy with coffee and bright with cinnamon. Music jangles low in the background, something acoustic and plinky. For a moment, time twists and it’s two months into the future. The cold behind me; the heat before me. It feels like Christmas.
It feels like everything is okay.
Then 1LostMarble drops a hand on my shoulder. He drags me back to October with two words typed into his phone. “Over here.”
There are already two cups on the table. Nice but also evidence that I’m really late. As I sink into the chair across from him, I peel off my gloves, but I don’t reach for the cup.
That’s one of the cardinal rules, ladies. Watch your glass, never leave it unattended, don’t take a drink if you didn’t see the bartender/barista make it. (Has anybody ever said, “Hey, gentlemen, don’t put drugs in people’s drinks?” Have those words ever been lined up in that order, in history, ever?)
“So?” he asks, typing two letters into his phone to produce the question.
And so help me god, the impulse to ask him what happened crashes into me like a train. I mean, I heard the stutter, so that’s probably why. But still my brain picks at it. Has he always been this way? Is he in therapy? Why is he using a phone instead of . . . I don’t know, an official talking box. It’s all rude and none of my business, and I have to fight myself not to ask.
(Not to be the same as all those people who look at me and wonder.)
The reason I win the fight is because I hate the answering. I hate that the question exists at all—people are people and variegated, and that’s what happened. I have a scar; he uses his phone to talk. Nature, nurture, evolution, epigenetics, something that feels good in the summer: that’s what happened.
“Hello?”
He waves a hand in front of me, to snap me out of it. Out of reflex, I reach for the cup in front of me. I will not drink. I won’t, I warn myself. But I do wrap my cold fingers around the steamy cardboard.
“Start from the beginning,” I say.
Annoyance sparks across his face. Pressing his lips together, he types angrily and then glowers when the phone delivers his reply in monotone. “How about you start at the beginning?”
Fine. I gather a breath. I summarize my week. One paragraph. Simple.
“The day of the big snow, I was walking home, following the river. I started up the hill to get to the road. I slipped and knocked a log over, and there she was. I covered her back up, and I left. Now you.”
With an incredulous laugh, he stares at me a moment, then says, “That’s not all. You came back.”
“To check on her!”
“You didn’t call the police.”
“Because I didn’t . . .” I stop. My mouth goes dry as old leather. The reason why is simple and complicated. It’s logical and
(basket case)
reasonless. Sucking my tongue to wet my mouth again, I squeeze the cup of coffee, little strokes of pressure that make the lid pop up, then collapse. Finally, I choose accuracy without precision. “I was afraid.”
This time, he snorts at me. “Of what?”
“The police,” I say sharply. Something in his expression softens, and I go on. “And when I saw you there, I thought you did it. I assumed you did it. I was trying to catch you.”
“You attacked me.”
“I was protecting her,” I say.
“Decked me with a flashlight.”
Rigid, I say, “Fine.” I don’t want to call it that, but fine. We can brush past that and get to the point. “I attacked you. And we both know what’s happened since then. So now your turn. Start from the beginning. How did you find me?”
“The same way I found her.”
After the voice stops, he swipes across his phone and adjusts something on the screen. Then he slides it in front of me. Anticipating the question, he already wrote out a wall of text to answer it. Is that smart and logical, or is that terrifying? I can’t decide.
The first line starts, I met Lark—
A little earthquake runs beneath me; a stiletto slips between my ribs. I look up, catching a glimpse of Jane just as she dissolves. My friend, my sister—the one who haunted me and shared my skin—unbecomes. No more denim jacket, no more heavy boots. No more knowing looks, amused or annoyed or leading.
Now there is Lark. A stranger with the same face, someone new. Someone I’ve never met.
Trembling, I look back at the screen.
I met Lark playing Rust. She broke into my base like a boss, but she didn’t gank me or steal my stuff. She put up signs on all the walls. Painted them with stars and moons. Wrote stuff like, Anarchy Interior Design and This Base Improved by ArcanePriestess. That’s her handle in the game.
We talked all the time on Discord, we were **friends.** She was fighting a lot with h
er mom. Her mom kept kicking her out. She’d couch surf for a while, then the cops would show up to bring her home because her mom reported her missing. It got really bad at home, and Lark started talking about getting emancipated or whatever.
The next thing I know, she’s hitchhiking from Provo across the country. I’m keeping track of her on Google Maps, just in case. She says she’s going to visit everybody she knows from online. People from Rust, people from Minecraft, I think somebody from Overwatch.
She’s, like, there are two of you in Maine. I’ll visit him, then I’ll visit you. I told her she could crash with me as long as she needed to.
The whole trip, she texted me, pix, etc., but the night she was supposed to meet this other guy, nothing. I was worried. Her phone was in Walker’s Corner, but it wasn’t moving. So I found the other guy on Discord and asked what was up. He said he never saw her. When I pinged him again, he ignored me.
Her phone was still live, so I went to it. Her phone and her bag, I found in a dumpster in Walker’s Corner. I found her jeans in the woods. Then I found her.
As I read, I purse my lips. It sounds real, but I’m not the best judge of character, am I? Returning his phone, I ask, “Did she know you were stalking her?”
He frowns. His thumbs fly. “I wasn’t stalking her. I was keeping an eye on her.”
An answer that doesn’t instill all the confidence in the world. And I sit there a moment, and realize what he said, in the beginning. The same way I found her. My throat closes, but I manage to ask, “So you hacked into my email account?”
He shrugs. “You took something from me. I needed it back.”
“Show me,” I say. I don’t want to be closer to him, but I pull my chair closer. I want to see this dark magic on his phone; I want to see the rabbit and the hat at the same time. “Show me how you found me.”
This time, he speaks aloud, carefully. “It’s not h-h-hard.”
And then he shows me just how easy it is. He already had one email address for me: school. That gave him my real name from the online yearbook. My real name gave him my gmail address, and a little app on his phone hashed through the password. With the password, he logged into my account and
Oh
My
God
It’s just right there. Google Location. Timeline. Bright red dots showing every place I’ve been for the last couple of years. My trips to Mount Desert to see my dad. My failed week at Hirundo.
Zoom in, and there’s Syd’s house, over and over. There’s Hailey’s house. The school. What I assume is the fire tower, because that dot is in the middle of nowhere.
Switching to his speech app, he asks, “You wanna see all your Google searches? You spend an awful lot of time trying to find out how to get special cats to come to your Neko game. Also? You searched for missing girls with an Aquarius tattoo.”
I want to throw up on the table. In his lap. I want to cover my head and wrap myself in a billion blankets. All this time, I thought I was safe in my house. Safe and hidden and safe and . . .
I excuse myself to get a cup of water. I need cold to pour down my throat, to ice me from the inside. I need to repack my boxes. I need to run.
BUT I DON’T, BECAUSE WHEN I LOOK IN THE MIRROR, Jane—Lark—is still there. She reflects me as I drink from the tap and scrub my wrist across my mouth to dry it. Her hands funnel into her hair as mine do the same. She is me; I am her.
“What am I supposed to do?” I ask her.
Her lips move only so long as mine do. She blinks when I blink. When I exhale and look away, she does the same.
A splinter of a thought lodges in my mind: What if I haven’t seen her at all? Not in my room, not in bed. Not in front of Mom’s car, not in mirrors or glass or curves of polished metal. Not in class, not at home. Not at all.
What if I imagined . . .
(that is not a thought i can have)
(I have to get a box, a new box, stuff that thought down,
down,
down,
compress it until it’s nothing but a seed. Fit it in the tiniest box; that’s right. Wrap it with duct tape and tie it up tight. We’re not going there again. We’re never going there again.)
But I am going back to the table, where 1LostMarble sits. It’s funny how no one around us notices anything. Wearing bright beanies, stuffed into overstuffed coats, people come and go at Wescott’s Coffee, and they never seem to cast a look at me or 1LostMarble, not even once.
We look like two kids, one chai, one mocha—we could almost be cute. This could be my adorable coffee shop meet-cute, ha: he lost his phone, I found his phone, what comes next is charming misunderstanding, inexplicable attraction, and a sweet, foamy finale where we fall in love.
My head spins. No one cares. It’s almost funny how hard I work to seem okay; it’s almost funny how little it seems to matter.
Tapping into his phone, 1LostMarble hits Send and the bored, robotic voice says, “So can I have it back or what?”
A tale of two cell phones. I take his and I type but don’t hit Send: “Why didn’t you go to the police?”
1LostMarble spreads his hands out, exasperated. Then he rolls his eyes and takes the phone to reply in text. “I’m on probation.”
When I rear back, he rolls his eyes again. Typing faster now, he turns the screen to me, typos and all. I read right over them; on the list of important things right now, perfect presentation is way down at the bottom.
You know those digital signs over the highway? The ones that tell you if there’s road construction coming up? I hacked into a bunch of them for a prank.
I don’t understand, and I say so with a frown. He types again, for a long time, then shoves the phone under my nose again.
I reprogrammed them to say stuff like “The Cake is a Lie” and “Zombies Ahead, Run!!” It was a joke, but the state doesn’t have a sense of humor. They tracked me down and arrested me for destroying public property. I didn’t destroy dick but w/e.
Cops dragged me out of work in handcuffs. Took away my phone, so when they questioned me, I couldn’t answer. The stutter gets worse when I’m nervous. Everything just shuts down, right? But they thought I was screwing around.
I was in there for hours until my dad showed up. Got a plea bargain: no jail but probation. Not supposed to use computers, etc. So I knew everything had to be correct and tight before I went to the cops. Then I find out the guy who did it lives with a cop.
So.
So.
Under the whir of the coffee grinder, I fold my hands together. Lace my fingers up, squeezing so hard my knuckles ache. I feel the rumble of the inevitable. It’s a choice: right or left; Things I Can, Things I Can’t.
This cold snap won’t last forever. I can’t save Jane. Like, literally, I can’t keep her much longer. Even if rotting waits for spring, well. I’ve seen her hands, her fingers, with the tips bitten off. She’s delicious, and wild beasts and creatures can’t be blamed for their hunger.
Keeping her will destroy her, and without this dude’s evidence, Jane gets touched and violated for nothing.
I know absolute squat about her. But he—
He has those game chats and background information, and god, he knows where her clothes and her phone are, too. Locked inside him: her name, her hometown, the last fight she had with her mom. The people she knows; the ones she meant to get to know.
Who really hurt her. Where that monster lives.
A headache splits my brain in two. Funny how neither of us went to the authorities. The police I don’t trust because I know what they would do to solve her; the police he doesn’t trust because this guy is related to one of their own and he’s afraid he’ll end up in jail. Here we are, balanced on either side of a scale.
The two of us, we’re not friends. We’re not even acquaintances. We’re two perpendicular paths. We crossed; we won’t cross again. Our intersection is bright. It burns.
In the distance, there is the rumble of the inevitable. I’m not
the only one who knows where she is; she will be exposed. The ice won’t keep forever. Winter can’t stop time, only slow it. And if he gives her up, the cops might never look past him to get to her.
We have to do this my way. Whatever evidence is left, we collect it. We make the case airtight: no questions, no doubt. Then I’ll deliver it in a white-girl-perfect-victim package. 1LostMarble never even talks to the cops. I pretend I’m Girl Sherlock, and I dazzle them with everything they need.
Fait accompli.
So, I don’t reach for my bag. I don’t give him the phone he came for. Instead, I ask, “What do we still need?”
And then, almost as an afterthought, I add, “And what is your name?”
ON STEADY FEET, I WALK OUT OF THE COFFEE SHOP.
The cold outside is an assault, but I don’t care. His name is Nick. He’s going to call me. He’s not happy about any of this, but he doesn’t get a say.
My whole body aches. It’s like somebody beat me up. (I may be that somebody.) There’s that buzz in my head again. The too-much buzz, the weight of emotions as they snap and break free. Boxes tumble open, and my thoughts are a screaming, jumbled mess. I’m being pulled into pieces, and I know what I want.
I want to run down the alley, the one that goes to the river. I want to throw myself at Amber and tell her to tattoo whatever she wants. Just give me a new skin to be in. Make me over; transform me into an unknown Ava, a brand-new Ava. One whose body he would never recognize.
One that’s better and fearless, and knows what to say when her best friend goes haywire. One that holds hands any which way—just dig the needle in deep and draw a new map of me, one so bright and vivid and fierce that no one sees the scar anymore.
But I don’t. I don’t have the money. I don’t have the time. I want to be brave enough to give up my flesh, but I’m not. I’m not, I’m not; and I duck into the candle shop and ask to use the bathroom.
All the Things We Do in the Dark Page 15
