Bombshell

by Rowan Maness

  KIRSTEN IS CALLING

  A photo of a woman, similar enough to the sketch in Mr. Lauren’s notebook.

  “You are such a snoop.”

  Mary-Kate behind me, with Mae Castillo at her side.

  Mae narrowed her eyes and pushed against me, looking in the car.

  “Are you going to answer it?”

  “I was just walking by,” I said, looking at Mae but aware of Mary-Kate’s crossed arms, her shifting feet.

  The top half of Mae’s body disappeared as she bent down into the car, retrieving the still-ringing phone. She handed it to me.

  “Dare you,” she said.

  I held the phone. Kirsten’s downcast eyes were staring right at the word “Answer.”

  “Don’t,” Mary-Kate said, right when the ringing stopped. I dropped the phone back into the car window, where the voice mail notification chimed.

  “This is the hot teacher’s car,” Mae stated.

  “I know,” I said. Then my phone buzzed. I glanced at the screen—James had written back.

  Nice. That was quick.

  “Who’s that?” Mary-Kate asked.

  The way she and Mae were standing together bugged me, made me feel guilty and harassed. Mary-Kate hadn’t responded to my most recent texts—I hadn’t talked to her since the pep rally. I wanted to tell her about Kit and our upcoming date. Proving to her that I had some interest in the outside world was half the reason I’d decided to go to the concert with him.

  And I was sure I sensed a secret, shared knowledge in Mae’s demeanor. She and Mary-Kate talking after cheer practice, Mary-Kate venting about her weird friend’s Internet fantasy life, Mae probing for dirt, fascinated by it but not understanding.

  The bell rang, and suddenly girls were emerging from cars all around us, zombies compelled toward the church-mall-school-prison complex.

  Mary-Kate and Mae were walking too—Mary-Kate turned back, motioning for me to follow. I waved her away and stayed behind, slouching against Mr. Lauren’s car.

  I opened Mary-Kate’s Instagram—her entire social media presence consisted of a Facebook profile she’d lost the password to and the Instagram, with its eleven photos from the week I’d convinced her to download it—and scrolled through her friends list until I found Mae Castillo.

  I was looking for something to hate, but there wasn’t much. Pictures of the almond grove on her parents’ farm, chickens and goats, a couple sunsets, cheerleading and soccer. One of the most recent featured Mary-Kate. Forty weeks deep in the feed I started seeing the same girl over and over—finally, one photo was captioned celebrating 6m with my girl @drewzy

  That makes sense.

  I friend requested Mae, knowing it would catch her off guard, and started toward school slowly, wanting to savor James’s letter.

  Rosie Robe,

  I understand about not seeing each other, keeping it this way forever. We’ve been living in a land where there is no game, but there’s a voice at the back of my head saying “It’s a boy’s job to push.”

  And I think that as long as you’re separate from my life, I’m always going to have to choose. The more I come to you, with my eyes closed, the more everything around me (apartment, friends, half-eaten sandwich, refrigerator magnets) fades, becomes contingent, unreal. My backpack blurs into the couch, the windowpanes float out of their frames and up into the sky. Everything feels paper-thin.

  That’s why I need you here, with me. Not because it will be any better, or so we can take selfies together and post them to make our exes jealous, but because I need you to make the world vivid again.

  An interruption.

  New message from BLOCKED NUMBER

  XXX: http://josslies.tumblr.com

  Sick with lack of control, I clicked the link.

  The Tumblr page loaded, now with something extra—a new post. A familiar face. A photo of Peter, the one that was on all the local news sites when he robbed the fireworks store and stole a car to cross state lines to get to Amelia.

  Peter’s sad eyes, hollow cheeks. Above the picture—

  RIP

  Beneath it—

  VICTIM #1—PETER CAPLIN

  His face in the window, at the door. He knew the moment he saw me.

  I was under the bell tower again. No trace of morning coolness. Cicadas starting up and a shadow figure watching.

  “Hey.”

  Girl, Xavier uniform, not the shadow closing in but a human, someone I should know. Face hard to recognize through a dysmorphic veil. Leah Leary, friendly dinosaur.

  “Hi,” I coughed out.

  “We’re late,” she said, walking past, backpack rolling behind. Every time she spoke to me it was like she needed something. Positive feedback, a pat on the head. I couldn’t stop picturing her and Shane fucking. It was gruesome and relentless.

  I stared at the phone, willing my fingers to move.

  Me: Who is this? What do you want from me?

  The phone vibrated.

  XXX: I am Believer, and I want you to pay.

  CHAPTER 8

  “You’re being sweet,” Rosie was saying.

  “I mean it,” James whispered to her.

  On this visit to the astral plane, James built a tree house. He said he wanted to, and Rosie encouraged him. Her room at the Dream Palace was a blank slate, and James’s vision colored it in—wooden slats for walls, a window open to the forest.

  In the center of the room, a bed with grey linen sheets, endless mounds of white pillows, a worn flannel blanket. James held Rosie there, and the solid mass of their bodies was one true thing.

  “The rain’s nice.” Rosie spoke into the nape of James’s neck.

  They both became aware of the sound of soft rain hitting the tree branches outside the window. Sunlight filtered through the leaves, suspended in the air as diffuse luminous particles.

  James wanted to do something about Peter, the person stalking Rosie. He wanted her to come to New York for a while and stay with him, or for him to meet her in Los Angeles and whisk her away to a hotel while the police tracked the guy down. Rosie made fun of him for wanting to be a manly hero, but she made him feel good for it too. Her parents were dead. She had no family.

  “Just telling you about it all is really helpful,” she said.

  “You promise to tell the police? At least file a report,” James insisted.

  “Okay, tomorrow,” Rosie agreed.

  “You don’t deserve this,” James said, as Rosie increased the rain, dimmed the light.

  Rosie wanted to say “Sure I do,” but that didn’t make sense for her. Rosie didn’t deserve it.

  Joss does.

  Shh, sit back, relax with James. He is here. That is a miracle. It’s some kind of magic. You’re like a witch.

  It’s hard to tell whose voice that is.

  Rosie’s arms are transparent. She tries to meet James’s face, but his body is not real enough. The rain has gotten louder. They’ve lost it.

  • • •

  sharkliver: You don’t deserve this.

  I never say I love you, though it’s been said to me. Peter, Max, George, the others—they lay the words down at the altar of an idea, at the things in their lives they wish they could change.

  James hasn’t said he loves Rosie, but sometimes he just writes her name, and they both know what it means.

  sharkliver: Rosie.

  sharkliver: It’s late.

  RosieRose: Stay up with me? Olivia’s out. I’m all alone.

  sharkliver: I’m falling asleep. Need to be awake in a few hours.

  sharkliver: God, I want you here.

  sharkliver: Good night?

  There was a pause—a pause I felt him feeling.

  “Good night, James,” I typed and said aloud.

  I really was home alone. My mom was at her weekly widows group meeting. Widows Who Wine. It always goes late. I say, “Drinking your sorrows away again?” And she says, “I’m a grown-up woman; I do what I please,” and sometimes, if
she’s angry, “Would you rather I was here with you?”

  The answer is mostly no, but sometimes, yes.

  But she’s not here, and I can put on some music, however loud I want. I’d taken Dylan’s record player from his room as soon as my mom got the text saying he was at the airport in Mexico City and wasn’t coming back to finish his degree in communications at Arizona State. He had a huge record collection—some of his mixed in with some of my dad’s. I knew the one I wanted, with my dad’s initials written on the front in blue ink. JLW, same as me.

  Jay Louis Wyatt

  I put the record on. Crackles and fizzes, the ones he used to hear.

  I was thinking about how maybe some of the people I talk to online are dead people. I was thinking about how ears work. I was dancing around to the song, in my pajamas, fantasizing about dying in James’s arms. I was forgetting about the Tumblr with Peter’s picture on it. I was singing the words to a song I knew by heart, trying to remember the first time I heard the lyrics, the first time I heard the phrase astral plane.

  In the silence after the song ended I heard my phone buzzing on the bedside table. I approached it slowly, hoping and fearing—

  New message from SHANE

  Shane: EB?

  I tried to remember how we’d known to meet up with each other before we had cell phones, but couldn’t.

  Outside, I started walking toward the greenbelt at the end of the block.

  I forgot how cool the night gets, after the temperature shifts and the pavement releases its heat. No moon, clouds moving quick and soundless, covering and uncovering the stars, carrying the far-off scent of pine and rain. I passed long, empty driveways, one after another, lined with lavender, sagebrush, prickly pear. A huge aloe vera plant stretched her octopus tentacles out from a pink pebble side yard, reaching for the bushy shadow of a towering bougainvillea.

  At the greenbelt, a depressed slope of crabgrass connecting two subdivisions, I found the “EB” Shane was talking about—a giant electrical utility box set back from the street, protected from view by a tall hedge on three sides.

  I put my foot on the lip of a recessed panel with a “Danger! High Voltage!” warning sticker on it, and climbed up.

  Shane was sitting cross-legged, facing away, headphones on. A puff of smoke rose into the night, and his arm bent backward to offer me a messily rolled joint. Orange embers tumbled into a pile as I inhaled, centering myself, reorienting after the encounter with James.

  You’re on the box with Shane, in your pajamas, like a million other times.

  Music continued to leak out of Shane’s headphones after he took them off, turned around.

  “What’s inside this thing?” I asked, knocking on the utility box. “What is it for?”

  Shane thought for a moment. “Gauges? Or, I don’t know, pipes?”

  “It’s weird that we don’t know.”

  Shane was still guessing, like he hadn’t heard what I said.

  “It’s something to do with the power company. I see guys checking it sometimes. They unlock all the doors. They have special keys.”

  “I have a theory,” I said, lying down. The box was humming. It wasn’t solid. It echoed if you kicked it, like it was just covering something up, something that was mostly underground.

  Shane took the joint from my hand.

  “Okay,” I went on. “So it’s some kind of monitoring device. And it’s studying all the humans. Gathering information.”

  Shane laughed.

  “What?” I asked.

  “You always say ‘human’ like you aren’t one,” he answered, and I looked up at him, smiling like the Cheshire cat in the dark. With my ear against the box, I tapped my fingers, listening for reverberations I could interpret.

  Shane lay down next to me.

  “Blue Dream,” he said.

  “What?”

  “That’s what this strain’s called,” he said, exhaling.

  “Seems accurate,” I said. “Home life getting to you?”

  “Dancing with the Stars on at full volume for what seems like hours, cold meat loaf, soused parents oozing stress.”

  “Grim, grim,” I said, picturing Shane in his bedroom, silently seething.

  “What about you?” he asked.

  I didn’t want to lie to him, to spin something out of nothing. It was too much work, and I was having a hard enough time dealing with being in my own body. The Blue Dream lifted me up on a shaky platform—I shouldn’t have smoked. It made the boundaries too porous.

  Oh my God, Peter. Poor man.

  “I want to tell you, but you’ll be weird.”

  “Why?”

  “You’re always weird.”

  “Okay, but why?”

  I had to regain control, had to shift the conversation so the coyote wouldn’t sniff us out.

  “Just—look at this.”

  I opened the last text from the blocked number, now marked as “Believer” in my phone, and handed it to Shane.

  “Open the link,” I said.

  He sat up quick.

  “I’ve been getting texts,” I explained. “I was ignoring them. But then—”

  “It’s him,” Shane said softly, and then I was back there, on the day I opened my front door to find Peter standing in front of me. He and Amelia were supposed to meet. She was on her way. He was waiting at the fireworks store in New Mexico—the halfway point between them. I had to get out of it. Called him from the house land line posing as Amelia’s “friend,” spinning a story about a car accident. He tracked the number. I didn’t know he was capable. And he drove all night through the desert to find the person who called him, and when I opened the door, he knew I was Amelia.

  Shane came later. Maybe he was thinking of that part now, after Peter chased me into the backyard and I hid but he found me, dragged me out from under the covered patio table, pushed me to the ground. Shane stepped out from the kitchen, saw Peter on top of me, shouted “Joss!”

  I’d never told him what was happening when he arrived, before Peter got scared and ran out the back gate. It must have looked like Peter was going to kill me—but he wasn’t. He was watching my face, seeing Amelia’s. He was hurt, confused. He was trembling.

  “Jesus,” Shane said. “I don’t know if I can handle this right now.”

  “Yeah, that’s pretty much where I’m at too,” I said, reacting to Shane’s reaction, trying to keep it light so he wouldn’t tailspin.

  “Believer?” Shane questioned.

  “I can’t figure it out. I mean, this Peter stuff? He’s dead. Nobody knows we were”—I faltered a little—“connected, except you, my mom, Dylan. Maybe one of the cops?”

  The cops who found him. The gun he’d bought just before he met Amelia, when he was released from prison after ten years and the world seemed wrong, when he was going to end it anyway. The cops read my name in the suicide note. My dad answered when they called.

  Amelia saved him. Joss killed him.

  “You’re fucked,” Shane said.

  “No, no, no,” I begged. “Come on, be helpful. Have ideas.”

  The look on Dad’s face when the cops explained what they’d read in Peter’s letter. He remembered coming home three days before, finding you and Shane and the broken window by the front door. Shane saying he rode his bike into it. He thought it seemed like a lie. Now he knew for sure. A man had broken in, a stranger in his home, after his baby daughter.

  I couldn’t see the coyote, but I sensed him, circling the perimeter of the utility box. I turned onto my side and inched my body toward the edge. I wanted to lay eyes on him, to show that I wasn’t intimidated.

  “Do you think it could be him?” I asked, since Shane wasn’t talking. “Maybe he can reach out from—”

  “He’s not a ghost. Shut up.”

  I didn’t really think this Believer was Peter. I’d recognize his voice. Peter couldn’t hide like that. He was stoic but raw, uncovered. That’s what drew me to him, his bare wounds.


  But I wanted to make Shane talk, and I knew he’d hate the idea of believing in ghosts.

  “I mean, anything’s possible,” I said.

  “He’s dead, Joss. He killed himself. You know that.”

  “Maybe he faked it.”

  “It was on the news.”

  At the edge of the box. Slowly, I looked over.

  The coyote looked tired, like he’d just run a great distance. He rested on his haunches, front paws splayed out at an angle, each panting breath creating a sucking concavity between the skinny ribs. Eyes trained on me, a satisfied snarl.

  “What are you doing?” Shane asked sharply. I snapped my head back, but not before I saw the coyote disappear, blinking back into the night.

  “I need water,” I said, prying my sticky sandpaper tongue from the roof of my mouth.

  “Why didn’t you just stop?” Shane asked.

  I was supposed to stop. After Peter, responsible parents Jay and Nina Wyatt confiscated my laptop and phone. I promised them. I promised the first therapist. I promised the New Mexico police, in a letter the first therapist made me write. I promised Peter, whom I pictured as a fallen angel even before he was dead. I promised myself. And I did stop, for a while.

  But then Jay Wyatt died. He and my mom were arguing about me, and he dropped dead. When Nina separated herself to grieve, I found that the second death gave back the freedoms the first one took away. She didn’t have the energy to discipline me, or do much of anything except bury herself in work. Then there was Max, George, James, all new, all full of promise and possibility, stories I could disappear into, ways I could ignore the crushing guilt.

  It was the only thing that helped.

  Shane and I sat in the dark, both unable to refer to our shared lexicon of inside jokes and half-formed memories, but also unable to say anything new.

  A car drove by, its headlights briefly illuminating Shane’s face and the hedge behind him.

  “Your mom’s home,” he said, moving to jump down from the box. He was mad. I didn’t think he should be, but I was afraid I’d warn him about the coyote if I opened my mouth.