Deviant

by Helen FitzGerald

  She checked the letters at the bottom.

  One was signed with a “C.”

  One with an “R.”

  The next, a “G.”

  An “H.”

  Then an “O.”

  Last, an “N.”

  And, of course, the “A” at the sign she had helped with. Which was now gone. The images were in all kinds of places; they were huge and easy to see. Of course they were. It was the Graffiti Tease, the big new craze corrupting LA’s youth, if Stick’s father were to be believed.

  Well, he could rest easy, Abigail thought bitterly. The Graffiti Tease was over. More than over. As she’d just seen with her own eyes, it was already being erased.

  MELANIE MADE THEM THICK, rich, duck curry for dinner, with foul globs of jelly. If the stepmom was upset about having to clean the kitchen earlier, she didn’t let on. The default-content-wifey mask was firmly back in place.

  Abigail opted out of the charade. Besides, the stink alone was enough to keep her away. She had zero appetite. And Grahame was too distracted from his “business meeting” to complain about her absence at the table.

  At her desk, she printed out the graffiti images and glued them into Becky’s Book of Remembrance, one page at a time.

  She found a picture of Stick online: a year-old Bebo profile pic, and stuck it to the next page. Weird; he was absent from Facebook and Google Images, just as he’d been absent from Becky’s funeral. Was it deliberate? Was he trying to stay under the radar? Joe had much more material on him, most of it relating to his arrest. Several newspaper articles, in fact. “Youth gets six months for vandalism and resisting arrest,” read a headline. She cut and pasted the image of his face from that one, printed it, and stuck it on the page after that.

  What next? She’d save the letter from their mother for last.

  Only the rich need fire in their bellies. Becky had typed this on her computer the night she died. Abigail found herself scribbling the words on the blank page. Then she grabbed the phone and copied down the text messages, as meaningless as they seemed. Any scrap, no matter how tiny and strange, still added up to Becky’s life.

  be there at 10

  sent you the file

  he has a box of it in his den. I think he’s going to do me. Thinks it’ll help. I changed it.

  On and on … From memory, she drew a picture of Becky’s room as it had been before they cleared it. The desks, computers, bed, fridge, bar. Was she being silly, drawing pictures of the clothes she’d worn when they met? The crop top. The jeans. The belly-button jewelry—she’d never thought about it before, but the ring had a pendant: two tiny silver birds, their wings spread, free. Not unlike Nieve’s …

  Her heart squeezed.

  Best not to think of Nieve now. Not until she had a chance to get back to that house, and to take a good look at what was inside that chest. If anything was inside. If it hadn’t burned to cinders. She grabbed the iPhone and flipped over the graffiti Becky, Stick, and Joe had done, copying down the letters on a new blank page. They probably spelled something, right?

  C.H.A.N.O.R.G.

  C.R.A.N.G.O.H.

  C.H.O.N.A.R.G.

  N.O.R.G.A.C.H

  In less than a minute, she’d driven herself crazy. The letters did not form a word. And, as far as she knew, the final letter had been painted. So, an acronym, maybe?

  Come Hither All Nobodies Of Roaming Gnomes

  No Ownership Reigns Green And Clear Help

  Red Carpets On Hospitals Bring About Gangrene

  She Googled “Graffiti Tease” and found hundreds of articles that had come out since the last letter was painted. Headlines included: The final letter is A, but what does it mean? And Graffiti tease just a tease? And, the most recent one—I’ll tell you what it means: Nothing.

  She almost laughed. What was the point? It was meaningless, all of it. But just as quickly a lump formed in her throat. Her eyes watered. She threw herself down on the bed and shook with sobs.

  Becky was dead. Nothing she could do would bring her back to life. On the other hand, what else did Abigail have but Becky’s death? If she had to live for the sake of ghosts, she would. She couldn’t let Becky die like this, unmourned except for a sham funeral.

  No. There were two things she needed to do.

  The first was to figure out what was so important about her father’s den. Why it was mostly kept closed, why Becky was so mysterious about it, why Becky had mentioned it in her text to Stick. And second, more importantly, she had to know what was inside Nieve’s chest.

  DINNER WAS LONG CLEARED, Grahame and Melanie safely shut in the master bedroom, when Abigail turned off the lights and prepared to head out.

  Becky’s iPhone suddenly buzzed in her pocket.

  Abigail nearly screamed. Clamping one hand over her mouth, she sat back down on her bed and stared at the screen in the darkness.

  One new message: The world is crap without you.

  Sender Unknown.

  Stick? She decided not to ring back. It might not be him, and if it was, he’d freak out, thinking it was Becky’s ghost, or the police. Instead, she texted a careful reply: This is Abigail. I’m alone. If that’s Stick, can you pls call me

  The phone made her jump again when it buzzed a second later. She answered it.

  He spoke quickly, accusingly: “Abigail, why have you got Becky’s phone?”

  “Hello to you too, Stick. The funeral was shit and I’m terrible and my father and step-mother have turned out to be aliens. How are you?”

  “Sorry, I’m just … was just worried someone else had it.”

  “Well they haven’t. I nicked it before my new father threw all her stuff away.”

  “Did he really?” His voice was different now. Sad. Not stressed and angry.

  “You should have gone to the funeral.”

  “I couldn’t. She would have understood.”

  It was so much easier this way, Abigail realized. Stuff just came out when you weren’t face-to-face. “You were in love with her,” she found herself saying. Rather: confirming.

  “That was never gonna happen. I loved her, but it wasn’t like that.”

  Abigail wasn’t comfortable with her relief at the answer. It wasn’t right to think about her own feelings when Becky had just died. But she did feel relief, and she was thinking about her own feelings. “You’re right,” she stated, fighting herself. “The world is crap without her.”

  A quiet “yeah” was all she heard next.

  Abigail had never talked about anything personal over the phone. Landlines didn’t exist on the commune. Cell phones were rare. And both were out of bounds or unaffordable in her life as an Unloved Nobody. But there was a larger truth, too. She’d never been close enough to anyone to need a phone. No reason to ring anyone and talk about her feelings. She’d seen intimate phone conversations on TV and movies, and it was … other-worldly. Frankly, it terrified her. Stick’s voice was incredibly close, and loaded with emotion. She lay down on the bed and held the phone to her ear, pressing it against her, taking him in. “Where are you?”

  “You’re really similar to Becky, you know that? Upfront.”

  “ ‘Where are you’ is hardly a weirdly upfront kind of question.”

  “Ha. Different accent, but otherwise I could be talking to her.”

  “You’re avoiding it, aren’t you?” She wanted to know where he was sitting, what he was wearing. She wondered if he was lying down like she was.

  “No, I’m not. Talk to me about anything.”

  He doesn’t want me to know where he is.

  She told him about visiting Joe, how weird he’d been, how he didn’t seem like himself. She told him about the brutal walk to and from Juvie, and about the freeway sign, now covered with an advertisement. (She left out her righteous indignation that Becky’s last Graffiti Tease mission had met with failure.) She hoped he’d say something to help her make sense of it all.

  But he didn’t give anything away. “Keep
talking,” he prodded.

  She told him about her day with Becky, and how she felt she’d never been closer to anyone. “Silly, isn’t it?” she finished in a jumble. “We only had a few days together.”

  “ ‘Sometimes we had whole conversations without opening our mouths,’ ” Stick quoted.

  Abigail’s heart thumped. “The Shining. Right! That’s exactly—”

  “It’s not silly.” He cut her off. His voice caught. There was a pause and he coughed. “Nothing you say is silly.”

  She nodded. He couldn’t see her, but she nodded all the same. She was on the verge of crying again, herself. “It’s good to talk to you, Stick,” she blurted out. She wondered if she should bring up what his father had said, or even that she’d spoken with him.

  “Listen, I’d better go. But let’s meet up tomorrow. Keep the phone safe. Delete the texts and logs. Don’t tell anyone you spoke to me. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ll text you tomorrow night,” he promised.

  “Right. Tomorrow.”

  She hung up and let out a deep breath.

  What the hell was going on?

  Curling into a fetal position, she pressed a pillow to her chest.

  She replayed it all in her mind. She drunk in the bereaved warmth of his voice: “Sometimes we had whole conversations without opening our mouths.” Only a mixture of fear, guilt, and grief kept her from smiling.

  At precisely midnight, Abigail pressed her ear against the door of the master bedroom. There were sounds. The TV? Maybe …? She cringed. Not what she needed to hear, not from a father and stepmother, not now. Whatever. People in mourning did what they had to do. She’d read somewhere once (in an absurdly dry textbook that the sweet boy from Hillhead Library had shown her) that death could provoke a subconscious urge for intimacy. She’d giggled then.

  She wasn’t giggling now.

  No matter. It didn’t concern her. Even if Grahame and Melanie weren’t watching TV, they were occupied. Tiptoeing along the dimly lit hall, she opened the door to the den.

  She wasn’t sure what she was expecting to discover. The room itself was boring: all in brown, ceiling-height bookshelves lining two walls, filing cabinets along another and a desk under the window. Everything was neat and sterile. Like Grahame himself. She peeked inside the drawers. Every file related to GJ Prebiotics: Accounts, Personnel, Meeting Minutes, et cetera, et cetera, yawn. Nothing interesting or suspicious. In the bottom drawer was what looked like a cooler, but too small for ice and a few pints. The silver padlock required a four digit code. A safe, perhaps? Probably money or jewelry inside. She rifled through his desk … nada.

  Then she spotted a small crystal bowl. Car keys.

  Abigail grabbed them, closed the door behind her, and hurried out the side door to the garage. The car’s canvass top was down. She hesitated, then opened the door and slid into the driver’s seat, sticking the key into the ignition—Alarm! Bad idea. Shite. She turned the key one notch back, as Becky had taught her during their driving lesson, and pressed SAT NAV.

  The racket died.

  With a sigh, she jabbed at LAST JOURNEY. If Grahame’s meeting was so important that he couldn’t include his lone surviving daughter, if he believed that she couldn’t “understand” his “business,” then that was his problem. Screw him. She would judge for herself.

  An intersection and postcode lit up: 98564.

  She held her breath. Was there a noise? She whispered the postcode out loud so she would remember it: “Nine-Eight-Five-Six-Four.” Sliding out of the car and closing the door as quietly as she could, she crept back into the house. Grahame and Melanie hadn’t stirred. She rushed back into the den and dropped the keys back in the bowl. After grabbing another wad of cash from the jar on top of the fridge, she phoned a taxi.

  Yes, she was technically stealing again. But why feel guilty? Melanie had told her: this is your home.

  She scrawled a note and left it on the kitchen table.

  Staying with my friend tonight. Back tomorrow. - A

  IN THE TAXI, ABIGAIL phoned Bren. He answered on the first ring. She’d planned to apologize for the late hour, but he was wide awake. Music blared in the background. She sheepishly asked if she could crash at his place tonight instead of the Friday date they’d “diarized.”

  “Yippie!” was his response. “I’ll make hot toddies.”

  “I may be a while. I have a few stops to make.”

  HALF AN HOUR LATER, she found herself staring at a warehouse in the middle of an industrial wasteland. This was where Grahame had driven for his meeting? Even the grizzled taxi driver seemed dubious. But the intersection and postcode matched.

  She handed the driver some bills and told him to wait.

  Thumbing her backpack straps, Abigail pushed through the open chain-link fence and began to circle the dark building. A few stray shafts of light poked through holes in a single battered side doorway. She peeked inside, on a brightly lit cavernous space, piled with neat stacks of blank cardboard boxes. Must have been around a thousand of them. There was a small office … and a man with his head down on the desk, asleep. His fat hump of a back rose and fell in an even rhythm. A security guard?

  She tried the door; it wouldn’t open.

  After a quick hunt around back she found a shattered open window and slithered through. She wasn’t even sure what she was expecting to find. Nothing leapt out at her except the boxes, and the man—who, thankfully, was still snoring. She carefully tore open one of the cardboard lids. Inside were small clear plastic bottles filled with milky white fluid. She grabbed one and frowned at it. GJ PREBIOTICS.

  A yogurt drink. What an idiot she was.

  BACK IN THE TAXI, speeding toward Becky and Stick’s hideaway, Abigail squirmed. She was annoyed. A bloody yogurt drink. Just as her father had said. There was also a second label on the bottle: PA23. Science gibberish, but the sequence seemed familiar for some reason? Perhaps she’d seen in it one of her textbooks. Or perhaps her stupid imagination was running wild again. That was the most likely scenario. She hadn’t had a good night’s sleep since Becky had died.

  She shoved the bottle in the bag, tucking it under the Book of Remembrance. She stared at the street lights whizzing by the window, trying to think. There must have been a connection between Stick’s promise to talk tomorrow—well, now today—and what she’d uncovered in her mission to celebrate Becky. He nearly told me as much without telling me.

  Abigail almost spoke the last part out loud so she could hear just how idiotic she sounded. Her thoughts had become gibberish, too. A random sequence. She was lost. Truly lost. She had no idea where she was or what she was doing. LA was not Glasgow. LA was a mystery. LA was dangerous in ways even she couldn’t imagine.

  Before she knew it, the driver was pulling up in front of the ramshackle house. This time he refused to wait. “Here!?” he muttered. “Forget it.”

  He snatched her money and careened off into the night.

  Well. At least she had Becky’s iPhone.

  She also had a flashlight, poached from the attic, which could make a handy weapon if anyone leapt out of the shadows. And she could always call Bren or Stick in a pinch and breathe to them her dying gasps. At this point, she was too exhausted to be frightened.

  The kitchen window was still smashed. The lights were still off. Abigail crept once around the perimeter of the deserted house. Once she was absolutely sure she was alone, she darted inside and fumbled for the key around her neck. But as she crouched in front of the chest, she saw that the lock had already been broken. The lid creaked as she opened it with her free hand. The flashlight wobbled. She aimed the beam inside.

  Empty.

  Shite. She’d hoped and prayed that there would be something, anything. She slammed the torch against the chest. Shite shite shite! As fast as the anger consumed her, it dissolved. Now she felt guilt for lashing out. She would never damage this chest. Memories overwhelmed her: of Nieve dragging it out in the sun
, of sitting on it and playing the guitar. She was a party-pleaser, Nieve, always choosing songs people could sing along to. “American Pie” by Don McLean and “500 Miles” by the Proclaimers. Abigail touched the velvet interior. This was as close as she would come to touching Nieve again—

  There was a bulge. Underneath the velvet. Abigail aimed the beam and traced it with her finger. Something thin and rectangular was hidden in the lining. Using her key, she ripped at the corner of the fabric and tore it with her hand. A large white envelope fell to the bottom. Trembling, she shoved the torch in her mouth and tore it open. A note from Nieve. She swallowed hard. God, she hadn’t seen that handwriting since the commune.

  Underneath was a document, ten pages or so, stapled together.

  Abigail read hungrily, pulling the flashlight from her mouth and holding it over the shaky yellowed notepaper.

  If you found this letter, it means you found each other.

  When is it? Years?

  If you found each other, it’s because Sophie knows it’s time.

  These are my last words, my beautiful, beautiful girls.

  And I am smiling as I write them because you have found each other!

  Be brave.

  What you have to do now,

  You have to do together.

  Read this file carefully. It is not a small favor your mother and I ask.

  It will be very hard,

  Just remember—

  What you do, you do for Sophie. Wonderful, glorious Sophie. Girls, believe me, your mother is the most incredible person I have ever known and she loves you both with all her heart. And what you have to do now, you also do for silly old Nieve.

  You do it for happiness.

  But most of all, my ever-majestic birds,

  You do it for freedom.

  Abigail’s eyes stung as she read. She sniffed and wiped her nose with her sleeve, slumping down on the floor beside the chest. Yet she also felt annoyed. For once, could someone leave her a letter that made sense? She put the note aside and glanced at the stapled document.

  Stamped in red on the front page were the words TOP SECRET.

  She flicked to the next page.