Bombshell

by Rowan Maness

  The fault lines didn’t bother us—we’d banded together. We were protected by the shared, unshakeable sense that We Did Not Belong Here. We were three very different people, who felt out of place for very different reasons, but it turns out that’s a pretty solid basis for friendship.

  Halfway across the courtyard, someone called my name.

  As I turned toward the sound, I thought I saw something dart across the courtyard—a kind of undulating flash. Paws in the dead grass. Gone before I took a breath, sun-blasted.

  Jackrabbit, I thought, hoping that was all.

  Mary-Kate and Rhiannon walked on without me. I grabbed for my sunglasses.

  “Hey, Joss!” the voice said again, closer. This time I could place its sickeningly sweet enthusiasm, which, to my ear, never failed to sound absolutely hollow. It was Leah Leary, a girl I’d had three sleepovers with in elementary school because our mothers were on the same committee.

  I watched her walk toward me, wheeling a gigantic rolling backpack. It hit the back of her ankles with a thunk when she stopped moving.

  “What do you want?” I asked. She never seemed to get offended, which was why I couldn’t help but try my hardest to offend her.

  She fiddled with the backpack’s plastic handle, which was decorated with ribbons in Xavier Prep’s signature blue-and-yellow plaid. I pictured her braiding them together, at home, alone.

  “Shane said you might be interested—”

  “He’s wrong,” I interrupted.

  “We’re going to this movie tonight—”

  “I’m not interested.”

  “Sorry,” she said, her voice rising ever so slightly, to the frequency of a boiling teapot. “I was just trying to be nice. Shane wanted me to ask you.”

  “Tell Shane I’m busy,” I said, leaving before she could say anything more.

  Just because she’s dating Shane doesn’t mean I’m available for re-friending. She should know better, anyway. She should be protecting herself.

  Rhiannon’s hand-me-down Volkswagen pulled up to the curb at the front of the school. Across the parking lot, streams of gross little steroid monkeys from the boys’ school, Brophy, descended on their huge pickup trucks and ugly-era Mustangs.

  Rhiannon was blasting a Blondie song when I climbed into the backseat, and her off-key voice competed with Debbie Harry’s perfect one as they both screeched against the roar of the air-conditioning.

  “Mr. Lauren, behind us,” Mary-Kate shouted from the passenger seat as we started driving.

  Mr. Lauren, my AP bio teacher. Friend of the youth, on the side of the angels. British, weirdly attractive. Drives an intensely cool little car—small, red, foreign, old, but not too precious or showy—a dented Volvo coupe, teacher’s salary paint job. He lets me play music during class and doesn’t mind if I look at my phone while we’re running experiments. I smiled at him through the back window. He looked surprised and smiled back.

  “Mmm,” Rhiannon said, watching him in the rearview mirror. “He makes me feel all Dateline: To Catch a Predator.”

  I laughed. “That show was an insult to teenage girls everywhere.”

  “Here it comes,” Mary-Kate said.

  “I mean it. They have these people whose job it is to pretend to be teenage girls, and they all do the same thing—dumb themselves down by ninety-five percent and type stuff like ‘I’m so horny 4 U’ in some dark lair of a Yahoo chat room. There’s no style, no nuance, no character development. And they’re scraping the bottom of the barrel. Picking up creeps like that is the easiest thing ever.”

  “Joss is defending the child molesters again,” Mary-Kate scolded.

  “I am not. I’m defending us. What does it say about society if the mark of authenticity—for both perverts and pervert catchers—is that teenage girls must talk and write like complete idiots?”

  They didn’t respond. Rhiannon rolled the windows down and turned the music up as we slowly coasted across campus.

  My phone buzzed.

  New message from JAMES

  James: Are you there?

  I checked the clock, cursing daylight saving time for throwing off my calculations. I couldn’t remember if it was an hour behind or ahead in Los Angeles.

  “Let’s get coffee!” Rhiannon sang.

  Am I here? Am I here?

  “Drop me off first?” I asked.

  “What?” she and Mary-Kate both complained.

  I searched my phone for the right time zone.

  “I have a—a thing,” I said.

  They groaned.

  “Fine,” said Rhiannon, making a hard U-turn that sent me flying across the backseat.

  “Rhiannon!” I shouted.

  “Fine,” she repeated. “But you’re coming out tonight. No way you’re staying home to chat with Random Weirdo number 2,863.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I said, fastening my seat belt.

  Rosie is sitting in the café at her exclusive art school, looking out at a tree-covered hill. A tiny brown rabbit appears, just at the edge of the tree line. The rabbit twitches his nose. Rosie watches—there’s something strange about this animal. He is small, but he looks heavy. Not fat. Held down by a force. Rosie looks away. It takes effort. She looks at her phone.

  I texted James.

  Me: I’m here.

  CHAPTER 2

  Church, mall, school, prison. Church, mall, school, prison. In the desert they’re indistinguishable—a never-ending row of big stucco boxes pumped full of freezing, artificial air. Windowless monoliths. I watched them zip by, judging the churches by the size of their crosses, the malls by the size of their parking lots.

  The only break in the chain of stucco boxes is the occasional lush, rolling golf course, landscapes so out of place they are like a gash in the desert floor, spilling neon green. Lakes with cement beds.

  Rhiannon merged onto the freeway, headed north. Beneath the overpasses there are mosaic depictions of Kokopelli, the ancient Native American trickster god, paused mid-dance, playing his flute. A god reduced and cheapened, banished to rush-hour traffic for eternity.

  As we drive past, I swear I see the turquoise tiles shift as the Kokopelli lifts his head out of the concrete.

  Trickster.

  Arizona can be beautiful, though, if you take away the boxes and asphalt. The valley is surrounded by patchwork mountain ranges—some red and round, some scrubby and low, and the biggest, distant and snowcapped. Every night there are brilliant sunsets, and in the late summer, monsoons like color-shifting mood rings full of pink and purple light come barreling across the desert at a hundred miles an hour. A high wall of dust envelops everything, bringing with it the smell of rain on hot concrete and an aura of wild electricity, and it’s like you’re on another planet.

  On days like that, on days when it’s not too hot or too hazy, it almost makes sense that humans should live here. But most of the time, it doesn’t. Why anyone would settle here instead of plodding on just three hundred miles west and living in paradise, I will never understand.

  Off the highway now, moving out of Phoenix up through the vast burbs, way out, all the way to my neighborhood, nestled against red-dirt foothills. Rhiannon and Mary-Kate are talking, but the music’s so loud I can’t hear them, and I’m thinking of James, anyway—James and the Kokopelli, James in the middle of a monsoon.

  James is my favorite. James is my favorite? James is my favorite, right now. He’s twenty-eight and heads an art collective—I’ve thoroughly stalked each member on their fantastically non-ironic social media feeds. He is shy about his own art and forthcoming about his insecurities in a way that isn’t tiresome or narcissistic. He lives in New York—not upstate, where Max lurks in a grad school laboratory, but in Brooklyn.

  He messaged my avatar Rosie on Facebook a year ago. Rosie is nineteen and goes to art school in LA. She’s kind of a mess, but well-read, a flirt with a dry sense of humor. Not light-years away from the truth, at least compared to Anna the model, Emma the married former bea
uty queen, Rebecca the anthropologist studying remote Alaskan villages, Jessica the pro surfer, Lucy the dissatisfied housewife who lives in a trailer home in Nevada, or anyone else I’ve ever made up. I even used my real pictures for Rosie’s profile.

  From the first notes James and Rosie exchanged, they were able to talk about real stuff without worrying the other person might not understand. I am acutely aware of how unusual that is.

  Me: We can do it, though. We could walk in a dream forest together.

  In his last nightly e-mail, James said he didn’t believe that we could meet on the astral plane—that our bodies could follow the trail of our words and manifest in front of each other in a new dimension. He didn’t say “Rosie, that’s crazy,” but he was definitely thinking it.

  But I know it’s possible. I’ve done it before.

  He is quick to respond, and I can feel the hunger there.

  James: You’re teasing me with this whole idea. You know how much I want to meet you.

  Me: Why don’t you think it’s possible?

  James: Let me think about it.

  I know to wait before responding. He is going to change the subject.

  James: Hey, have you read that Alan Watts book yet?

  Me: I checked it out from the library, but I haven’t started it.

  That’s true.

  James: You have to. It’s so good.

  Me: Cross my heart. I’ve just got to get my dumb show finished and ready before I can think of anything else.

  I was on the edge of a sweet James daydream, ready to jump into it and escape, to distance myself from six classes of boredom and clock-watching, from the stubborn heat and my frustration with Max. I wanted to walk in nature as Rosie, who would notice the subtle beauty of pale green moss on a dark tree trunk, who would record it with an artist’s eye, in that special way she had of describing. She would tell James, and he would see, too—

  My phone buzzed. The text with James was obscured by a new notification.

  New message from BLOCKED NUMBER

  I love the moment after you get a new text, before you open it. Sometimes when I’m feeling self-indulgent I let them sit awhile, so I can just exist with the knowledge that there’s an unread text waiting for me. It’s like mini Christmases all day. Despite the heat, I got goose bumps.

  But the text wasn’t right. It was wrong.

  XXX: LIAR

  The wrongness was somewhere between the screen and the four black letters. Serrated pixels sent on bad vibes, reaching out from a remote, unseen place.

  I remembered other texts. The first had come about three weeks ago, and since then, there’d been one every few days. New message from BLOCKED NUMBER. Blank when I opened them. Maddening, an empty text. I thought it was a glitch.

  But now it was talking.

  It could be any of them, Joss.

  Joss. Whose voice was that? My own, but removed, as if the thought had jumped ahead without me. My thumb hovered over the reply box, and I realized my hand was shaking.

  “Joss!” Rhiannon shouted.

  “What?” I snapped, startled, deleting the text from Blocked Number. I could not think about the unseen place and who might be reaching out from there.

  “We’re here, you horny little liar.”

  “Here?” I asked, then realized the car had stopped and was idling in front of my house. “Oh. Here.”

  “Yes. Where you live. In the real world. Get out. Go do whatever it is you do,” Rhiannon said.

  “I like to refer to it as ‘decompressing,’ ” I said, reopening the conversation with James.

  Me: Can we switch to Chat? My phone’s about to die. No idea where the charger is.

  Get the phone away. Put it out of your mind.

  “So go. Decompress. I will collect you later. To go to a party. With real people, who have faces and feelings.”

  I climbed out of the car and slammed the door, giving Rhiannon a big fake smile as they drove off. From the passenger seat, Mary-Kate shot me a worried look.

  I hurried to the gate and punched in the access code: 1113, my birthday. People like gates here. Gates and access codes and security guards patrolling in tricked-out golf carts. The gate clanged shut behind me, and I ran through the tiny front yard and punched the same code into another keypad to get into the actual house. Saltillo tile, stainless-steel appliances. A tract home with all the upgrades.

  Just like every day, I passed by my dad’s studio and pressed my hand to the door. It’s always shut now—what a cliché. Someone dies and you shut up the room like a coffin. That big home office with oak built-ins. He’d stacked the shelves with canvases and ripped the carpet out. “I need a glass room. I need more light,” he said once, when my mom caught him about to take a mallet to the back wall. “For God’s sake, Jay, we’ll hire a contractor.” But here we are. There hasn’t been any light in there for months.

  Enough. Up the stairs to my room, past another closed door—my older brother Dylan’s bedroom. It’s empty too, but not because of death. Shoes off. Uniform off. Mind racing with a thousand thoughts to tell James, all the things I’d been thinking about while staring at a splotch on the wall in French class, or the back of someone’s head in US history.

  I pulled on a pair of pajama bottoms and a tattered Kinks T-shirt, grabbed my laptop, and sprawled across the bed, throwing the computer open, impatient as it labored to wake up. The screen flickered and the dashboard appeared with a shudder of mechanical protest.

  I skimmed through my long list of screen names, chose RosieRose, and signed in. James was already on—he messaged me first.

  sharkliver: Someone left it in the stairwell of my building.

  RosieRose: Left what?

  sharkliver: The Alan Watts book. That’s how I found it.

  RosieRose: It was me. I left it there for you.

  sharkliver: (Some small part of me thought so.)

  RosieRose: The part that sees me, sometimes, walking ahead of you on the street, or across a crowded restaurant? Even though you know I’m here in LA?

  sharkliver: That part, yes.

  RosieRose: The squishy part.

  sharkliver: The part that belongs to you.

  sharkliver: We are god in disguise, pretending not to be himself.

  What was James saying? Did he know? Was it him, controlling things? James and the Kokopelli. A flash of blue as the car drives by, a mosaic made of turquoise planets, each spinning, each a world. James in one, figuring me out.

  sharkliver: ^ That was a quote. From the book.

  Mary-Kate and Dr. Judson would say, have said, that lying so much and so easily makes me paranoid.

  RosieRose: Woah. Deep.

  RosieRose: But it should be “herself.” God is a girl.

  sharkliver: You’ve met Her?

  RosieRose: She is cruel, but fair when supplicated.

  sharkliver: I want to read this book to you.

  RosieRose: You can, on the astral plane.

  sharkliver: DON’T SAY “ON THE ASTRAL PLANE”

  The last two messages, sent at the same time. Down to the last fraction of a second on the timestamp.

  sharkliver: In our bed.

  Sometimes, with James, in the pauses between our messages, it feels like he’s in the same room. Distance becomes fluid, and I can bring him closer just by looking at the words on the screen.

  RosieRose: If we were in Our Bed, we wouldn’t be reading.

  sharkliver: Our brains already fit together. Imagine what it would be like if our bodies could catch up.

  I clicked over to Rosie’s Facebook account and found the page for James Constant. In his profile photo, he was standing on a balcony looking out—at what, I didn’t know. I always picture the ocean. Short brown hair, a shadow of stubble, eyes turned up at the corners by an easy smile. Artistic, smart, evolved. That a guy like him existed made every forced interaction with a Brophy boy all the more depressing.

  Thank you, Goddess Internet, for showing me the way.<
br />
  sharkliver: Tell me about your show. Did you decide what you’re going to do?

  I looked around my room for inspiration. Everything neat, orderly. Rhiannon would say “anally organized.” A corner full of houseplants I was trying to keep alive. My bearded dragon, Bueller, in her tank, hiding beneath a faux dinosaur egg. Posters—Dalí’s Galatea of the Spheres, Christina’s World. Four squares of color on the wall from the time I almost decided to paint the walls blue. Hanging near them, a small collage.

  What was that from? Seventh grade? Personal mandalas.

  RosieRose: I’m trying to find a way to fabricate these sculptural personal mandalas I designed. Since my last crit I’ve felt so shitty about it all. People were mean. I want the work to protect me from that.

  RosieRose: I’ll show you when I have something made. I can’t really focus right now though. There’s all this other crap going on.

  sharkliver: What crap?

  RosieRose: I think I have a stalker.

  RosieRose: I keep getting texts from a blocked number. They just say LIAR, that’s all. Nothing else. For a few weeks now, like five times a day.

  sharkliver: Why LIAR?

  Was that too much? I should have changed the word.

  RosieRose: No idea.

  sharkliver: It’s probably a friend fucking with you.

  RosieRose: Yeah. But it makes me edgy. And I did have an incident, when I was thirteen. This guy was obsessed with me. But it couldn’t be him. At least, I think.

  Maybe James can help.

  sharkliver: Shit. I gotta go.

  sharkliver: I’m sorry.

  I didn’t expect that.

  sharkliver: Rosie?

  I watched the blinking text box.

  sharkliver: You know you’re the only one for me, right?

  I slammed the laptop shut. He’d won that round. I was thinking of him. I wanted him.

  I thought of how his hands might rest on my shoulders, what it would be like to look into his eyes as they met mine for the first time. The idea of having a real boyfriend paralyzes me—it seems so much more satisfying to imagine something perfect instead.