“I don’t talk about that stuff, Rob,” Marley says suddenly and sharply, washing the ocean from my mind. My head whips around and I see him scowling, jaw clenched, as he stares through the windshield.
“Okay…,” I drawl, uncertain how to respond.
“I don’t bring up your past,” he continues, “so don’t go digging up mine.”
“I was just curious,” I say.
“I know.” He sighs heavily, sounding irritated. “You’re always curious. I get it. I was curious too once—still am sometimes—but that’s not an excuse.”
“I’m your friend, Marley,” I say, the words feeling strange but right as they exit my mouth. “We’re supposed to talk about this kind of stuff.”
“I barely talk to Neon about it and we’ve known each other for years,” he spits. “What makes you think that I’d want to talk about it with you?”
It feels like a punch to the gut, so I go punching back.
“You want to if I want you to,” I sneer, knowing immediately that it’s the wrong thing to say.
“So just because you can, it means you should? So I can talk about your past with you, look as much as I want?”
“Go right ahead,” I say. “There’s nothing there I’m ashamed of. Not like you and your army days.”
“Fuck you,” he growls. “I might not be able to read your emotions or get you to spill your guts about things, but I know you’re ashamed of what you did to your parents. Anyone would be.”
That shocks me into silence. I keep staring at the road, long and flat and empty, and can’t even muster up the genuine desire to hear Marley apologize. After all, he’s right.
Do you forgive yourself?
* * *
“Honey, I’m home,” I call out to the loft with false cheer, tossing my keys onto the entryway table. I love the clink they make in the ceramic bowl that Indah brought from her apartment. It’s the sound of owning something, of having something stable and permanent.
It’s the only sound in the apartment right now. My hollow sitcom cry of return has fallen flat in an empty and quiet apartment. I walk toward the living room, silently relieved for once to be alone, still fuming and hurting from my fight with Marley. I dropped him off at the library without either of us saying a word, and I’m not sure I want to say anything to anyone right now.
Then out of the darkness comes a hand, lit up with blue sparks, from the direction of the couch.
“Is Blaze with you?” I hear Neon say.
“Nope.” I walk over to the couch to see her lying there, staring at the ceiling, electricity dancing around her hands.
“What’s up with you?” I ask, starting to move toward my armchair, the one that Marley brought home, specifically for me, before my stomach swoops painfully. What if Marley never does any kind thing for me, ever again? I reroute to the couch, flopping down in the limited empty space, Neon’s feet brushing against my leg.
“Indah and I had a fight,” she says, moping. “And she had to leave for work and Marley is, I’m assuming, at the library—”
“Yeah, he is—”
“And Blaze is out god knows where, hopefully not setting anything on fire or shooting up, and I’m just…”
“Yeah,” I say, like I understand what she’s feeling.
“But you’re here,” she says, nudging my legs with her feet and looking up at me. Her eyes are electric, piercing, like they’re trying to see through my skull and into my brain. “You’re always here when I need you, Damien.”
“I am?” I ask, genuinely surprised but warmed by the sentiment.
“You’re reliable.” She shrugs and smirks a bit at me.
“Can’t say that’s ever been said about me before,” I scoff.
“Have you ever given anyone the chance to?” she asks, cocking her head to one side like getting a different angle on me will reveal my secrets.
“You don’t strike me as the type that needs reliability.” I’m deflecting, happy to sink into Neon’s problems for a little while. “Doesn’t that make life infinitely less interesting?”
“Not at all,” she says. “Reliability isn’t the same thing as being boring. Trust me, I say this as someone who is neither.”
“You’re definitely not boring.” I grin.
“According to Indah, I’m not very reliable either.” She pouts, swinging her legs down until she’s sitting beside me.
“Is that what your fight was about?” I ask, confused. Neon has seemed plenty reliable to me since we all moved in together and she made it official with Indah.
“She wants me to commit,” Neon says with a nod. “Fully commit. It’s one thing for us to share a bed, a home, call each other girlfriend, but she wants…”
“You already are committed, aren’t you?” I ask, wondering if my wanting them to be together and happy has worn off. “What, does she want to get married or something?”
“Well, no, obviously,” she snaps. “We’re not allowed to do that.”
“Oh. Right.” I blush, embarrassed at my small-town ignorance. Not that I didn’t know women couldn’t get married to each other, but it never occurred to me to think about it until this moment. The idea of spending my life with another person is so foreign I can’t imagine its being appealing to anyone.
“She just wants something more, though, than what we have,” Neon continues. “A declaration of lifelong devotion or something. And it’s not that I don’t want to—I am committed to her. I love her and I think I show it, but … I can’t get her to believe me.
“She scares me, you know?” she continues softly. “She’s so warm and beautiful and fucking good. And I know that she gets me—gets us”—she waves her hand between us—“the Unusuals, what we are—but she’ll never really understand, and that … that scares me. I’m worried that she’s going to wake up one morning and look at me and realize that she wants someone normal. So it’s just easier to keep her at arm’s length, easier to just call her my girlfriend and not ever talk about it, because if I don’t talk about it, I never get hurt. But she can tell. She can tell that I’m distant, that I’ve always got one foot out the door. And I don’t know how to fix it.”
Neon says all of this without looking directly at me or taking a breath—it pours out of her, her fingers crackling occasionally as she talks. She finishes with a heavy exhale, there’s a moment of silence, and then she turns to me and says:
“You did that, didn’t you?”
“What do you mean?” I ask, playing dumb.
“You made me say all those things. You know I don’t like it when you use your ability on me, Damien.”
“I wasn’t trying to,” I tell her. “It just … happens.”
“How long is that excuse going to work?”
“It’s not an excuse—”
“You’re an adult, you’re responsible for what your power does.”
“What, you’ve never had your ability go rogue on you?”
“Of course I have,” she concedes, rolling her eyes. “But not really badly. Not in years.”
“So it eventually just … calms down?” I ask. “Like Unusuals puberty or something?”
“Ha, can you imagine?” She snorts. “What a nightmare that’d be. But no—I worked at it. Like most things in life, you can’t just wait for it to be handed to you.”
She pauses for a moment before tossing her hands up and rolling her eyes again.
“Well, I mean, for those of us that aren’t you,” she moans. “I get that you’re used to literally having everything handed to you, but most people have to work to get better.”
“I know that,” I spit. “I’m not some spoiled child.”
I can’t win. Marley knows I’m not spoiled—knows that I’ve had to deal with difficult things in my life—but he only knows that because he knows about the monstrous things I’ve done in my past. Neon can’t know any of that, and so she assumes I am what I appear: a boy who gets everything he wants.
“I’m sorry
,” Neon says softly.
Neon never apologizes to me.
“Fuck, would you stop that!” she shouts.
“How do you even know it’s me doing it?” I retort. “Maybe you just realized that you should actually apologize once in a while.”
“I don’t need this from you too, Damien,” she snaps.
“Guess I’m not so reliable after all, huh?”
We sit there in the darkness, avoiding each other’s eyes. I’m coiled tightly into the warmest corner of the couch, feeling prickly and sad and incapable of not hurting every person I know. It’s happening, I can feel it. The only people I’ve ever met in my life who could maybe understand and accept me are starting to grow tired of the way I am. They’ll run like all the rest. A heavy, sour weight starts to sink in my gut as I think about all the ways I’m breaking what I have, unsure if my wanting it to heal itself will be enough.
“Do you want me to feel good?” Neon’s voice comes up from the darkness like a wisp of smoke.
“What?”
“Is that something you can do?” she asks, voice quiet as she leans toward me. “If you wanted it bad enough, could you … fix people?”
“I don’t know,” I say, shaking my head. “I don’t see how.”
“You get whatever you want, right? So just want for me to figure it all out. Want me to be happy.” Her eyes are bright and wanting and I want. I want so badly.
“Trust me, Neon, if wanting to be happy was something I had control over, I think I’d be a pretty different person.
“I’m not sure it’d be real happiness anyway,” I murmur after a moment, afraid to admit it.
She cocks her head at that, the sparks on her hands pausing and dissipating. After a moment, she digs into her pockets for cigarettes and a lighter and I wonder if it’s just that she always has to be doing something with her hands.
“It keeps me from shocking myself and everyone else into oblivion,” she explains, answering the unvoiced question.
“You can shock yourself?”
“I do it all the time by mistake. Sometimes on purpose, if I need to stay awake or … well, there are other applications.”
“Is this one of those things that I don’t want to know about?” I ask, half-serious.
“Probably.” She snorts around her cigarette.
“I never thought about if you could use your ability against yourself. I guess because it’s physical…”
“You mean you can’t?”
“How would that work exactly? The whole deal is that I want stuff and then other people do too. I can’t want what I already want … more.”
“Good point,” she says, flicking the lighter and lighting the cigarette between her lips.
The weighty silence descends again as the air between us fills with smoke and the light sound of Neon’s breath.
“What do you want?” she asks after a moment.
I don’t answer her. I turn the question over and over in my brain, trying to look at all sides of it, tear it apart, rearrange it until all the different bits of the question form a new shape and reveal an answer.
I want so much, but I have no idea what it is that I want. I look at the woman across from me—her curious brown eyes that spark with blue, her soft, dark skin that looks so warm and touchable but that I know could kill me with a single surge of electricity. Neon is the most interesting person I’ve ever met, and here she is, looking at me like I’m the most interesting thing she’s ever seen, and I want so badly for that undivided attention to be real, to be genuinely hers, that my ability starts to go round and round, like a snake eating its own tail.
I’m collapsing in on myself, burrowing deeper into my mind, trying to bury the desire to have Neon love me that’s rising up my throat. It isn’t working—the desire too strong despite the fact that I know it’s wrong, the darkness inviting more darkness—when I suddenly find myself jumping out of my skin with a shout.
“Jesus, calm down,” I hear as every hair on my body stands on end.
“What the hell, Neon?” I pant, settling back into the couch. “Did you just shock me?”
“Just a little.” She smiles, flopping back to lie down again. “I could feel you starting to want something when I remembered that my ability can shut down yours.”
I rub my arm where she shocked me, smoothing out the hairs, trying to feel her touch lingering there. I’m so worn down, so hollowed out from my fight with Marley, that any touch, even in the form of electrocution, makes my heart ache with need. But mostly I’m relieved that Neon lit up the darkness before it enveloped me completely.
“You can really feel it?” I ask, blinking away tears that I think I can pass off as a reaction to the shock. “When I’m using my ability?”
“Kinda.” She shrugs. “I couldn’t at first, of course, but I’m assuming no one can.”
I nod.
“Right,” she continues. “And I’m guessing most people never really figure out what you can do?”
“People sometimes get suspicious, but…”
“It’s easy for you to make them not suspicious?”
I shrug. “People never really know what to be suspicious about,” I tell her. “They can feel that there’s something different about me—they realize they’re doing things that maybe they wouldn’t normally—but no one’s ever guessed it. How could they?”
“What about your parents?” she asks, and my blood turns cold.
“What about them?”
“Are they like you?”
“What, thoroughly Midwestern looking?” I quip. “Yeah, yeah, they are.”
“You know what I mean,” Neon says. “Are they Unusual?”
“I don’t know,” I answer after a moment, choosing my words carefully to avoid repeating the argument I had with Marley. “I don’t think so. They never—they never said anything to me. They never did anything out of the ordinary. They were just … they were really standard parents, you know? Always telling me to eat my vegetables and get my elbows off the table, shuck the corn … all that boring stuff.”
“‘Shuck the corn’?” Neon laughs. “I mean, I know you said you had cornfields, but damn, you really are from the middle of nowhere, huh?”
“You have no idea,” I groan. “Nothing but cornfields for miles and miles. At least, that’s what it felt like. I haven’t been back there in years.”
“Why’d you leave?”
“Why does anyone leave their hometown?”
“Fair point.”
Neon is smiling softly at me now, relaxed and vulnerable. I don’t know that I’ve ever talked to anybody this way. My ability doesn’t seem to be doing anything to her and here I am, willingly talking about Them. The topic feels less dangerous than it did in the car with Marley. I’m fully in control this time; I only have to reveal as much as I want to.
“Where are they now?”
“Huh?”
“Your parents,” Neon clarifies. “They still in whatever nowheresville you come from?”
“Nope,” I say, shaking my head. “I’ve got no clue where they are.”
“Oh,” she breathes. “Gotcha.”
“What about yours? They know about you?”
“Nah.” She grimaces. “They’re back in Arizona. I call them once a week—”
“Once a week?”
“Yeah, dude.” She smiles. “Why, is that weird?”
“I have no fucking clue what’s weird,” I say, and Neon laughs that big, sharp laugh she has. It makes me smile, loosening the tight knot in my chest that Marley and talking about my parents put there.
“Yeah, okay, fair enough.” She nods.
“So, they’re cool with you?”
“Like I said, they don’t know about me,” she says. “They know I repair motorcycles in LA and that I date women sometimes—”
“And they’re cool with that?”
“Yeah, they don’t care.” She shrugs. “They don’t like that I smoke, but … do you think your pare
nts wouldn’t have been okay with it?”
“My dad smoked, he couldn’t exactly tell me not to.”
“I don’t mean that, you barely smoke as it is,” she tells me, sitting up, and I roll my eyes. “No, I mean the not-being-straight bit.”
I blink at this, surprised by the turn this conversation has taken. I watch Neon squish what’s left of her cigarette into the ashtray in front of her, before she flops back into the couch with a sigh.
“I’m not…” I flounder. “I’m not gay.”
“Okay,” she says simply.
“Why do you think I’m not straight?” I ask, my heart beating faster.
“Indah said you kissed some guy—”
“I kissed a bartender when I was wasted and sad.” I snort. “I’m not sure that qualifies.”
“Gotcha.” She nods sagely. “Did you like it?”
“Eh.” I shrug one shoulder.
“So you are straight,” she says.
“I’m—” I start before realizing I have no answer to that question that I can give confidently. “I told the bartender that I hadn’t thought about it much when he asked.”
“Because your parents were homophobic?”
“What?”
“Have you not thought about it because your parents would have had a problem with it?” she clarifies, and I try not to be offended by the cloying pity in her eyes.
“I don’t know that they had a problem with it,” I say truthfully. “You and Indah are the first not-straight people I’ve ever really met.”
“That you know of,” she points out.
“Right, yeah, I guess,” I agree, even though I’ve never thought of that.
“So it never really occurred to you, huh?” she probes. “Having options?”
“Do I have options?” I ask, my face heating. “I’ve never thought about any of it because my first kiss was when I was thirteen and I liked the way that Anna Slauson’s hair looked in a ponytail and then the next thing I know she’s kissing me and it’s warm and soft but then all of a sudden she’s pulling away and she looks terrified and starts crying because I guess she didn’t want to kiss me but she did anyway because I’m a freak of nature who puts people in situations they don’t want to be in, so, no, I don’t feel like I have options.”
A Neon Darkness Page 19
