Bombshell

by Rowan Maness

  Anna’s arms are covered in scrapes and she’s bleeding from a gash across her left cheek. Beyond that, there’s a disturbing blur surrounding her. The line where her skin meets the air is being depleted, erased.

  “You lied to me,” she’s saying. “You’re just like everyone else.”

  Believer had exposed Anna as Olesya, but the reveal of Max’s secrets was huge. Anna could remain hidden behind them, using his frantic guilt to evade interrogation.

  Max’s wife was taking a tray of fish sticks out of the toaster oven when she got a Facebook message from Believer saying, “Look at what your husband is doing.” Transcripts of chats. Pictures of Max.

  “Meg searched this name,” Max is saying.

  The name at the top of the Tumblr—JOSS WYATT—appears huge in the black space, letters like floating red barbs.

  “A teenage girl in Arizona.” Max’s voice trembles. “On the debate team at some Catholic school?”

  “I’m just as confused as you are,” Anna replies, a little too defensive. Her skin is see-through now. She’s melting like an ice cube, from the outside in.

  This is the last time she and Max will ever talk.

  • • •

  I closed Chat and began changing passwords—e-mail addresses, Facebook log-ins, every screen name I could remember. I deleted Anna’s profile on the dating site where she’d met Max. I deleted three others from the same site, including Emma’s, though George would be sure to notice its disappearance.

  I put a piece of washi tape over my laptop’s camera. The clock said MONDAY 2:55 A.M. and my room was completely dark except for the lights of the laptop and the lizard’s heat lamp. I’d left Shane and Kit outside hours ago, and responded to Max’s urgent calls.

  At first I’d tried to placate him. I layered new excuses on top of old ones. But Believer had done it, contacted Max’s wife. I couldn’t believe he was married. Even harder to believe was the fact that I’d missed it.

  I stared at a file, hidden in my English Reports > A Tale of Two Cities folder. It contained everything Max and Anna had ever said to each other. Downloaded e-mails, chat transcripts. All the mementos I’d saved in neat, organized batches. A Word document with Anna’s backstory obsessively outlined.

  Like a fucking serial killer, Joss, keeping souvenirs from dead people.

  Reluctantly, I dragged the file to the trash and lifted my finger.

  It felt like burning a diary. As soon as she was gone, I wanted her back.

  Good-bye, Anna.

  After, I looked back at the Tumblr. For the first time, I noticed an ASK BELIEVER button at the top of the page. I clicked it. The screen showed an empty text box.

  What do I say?

  I’ve already considered the possibility that this whole thing is a great karmic retribution orchestrated by the forces that control the give and take of the universe. That I deserve the public unveiling of all my secrets.

  You say I have victims. I don’t agree. Eventually Anna would have turned into a ghost. She would’ve slipped away from Max’s life easily. He’d have gotten over her. His wife would never have found out. (Unless you’re her, in which case, okay, sorry. You see, I didn’t know. . . .)

  You didn’t have to ruin his life. That’s sadistic. That’s more fucked than what I do.

  You know more than me (right now), but you underestimate the level to which I am connected to this beyond the files on my laptop.

  Can we have a fucking dialogue at least?

  —Joss

  I pressed the submit button before I could think of anything better, and closed the laptop. Bueller scurried in her tank, performing her nocturnal ritual of endless laps around the glass perimeter. I slid beneath my bedspread and logged into Rosie’s in-box with the new password.

  Dear James, I typed, after reading a while.

  Dear Jimmy Grace, my Old Jacket,

  Remember that Henry Miller I sent you, at the very beginning of this?

  My filaments are sensitive.

  There’s a lot I haven’t told you about my life, about what’s happening. Worse than the stalker guy, or ghosts, or you dating Gia age 27 who poses in front of lava lamps for her Tinder profile.

  I liked the guy tonight. He surprised me a couple of times, impressed me, made me feel good.

  But if you were waiting for me to realize how much I wanted you, the plan worked.

  I want to put a claim on you, to take you out of the world and keep you for myself. I want Our Thing to be where we live. I know it could protect us and make us stronger.

  I guess we have to meet for that to happen. So. Let’s meet.

  xx Rosie

  • • •

  “I can’t drive you to school today.”

  My mother handed me a cup of coffee, a preemptive peace offering.

  “But . . . who . . . ?” I managed, blinking the morning blear out of my eyes. “How?”

  “I’ve got to go the opposite direction, and I’m already late,” she said, stuffing her purse full of protein bars.

  “Who’s gonna drive me?” I asked her. Rhiannon and Mary-Kate lived too far away.

  “Why don’t you ask Shane?”

  “No, please,” I moaned.

  “Dare I ask: Why not?”

  “He’s so annoying in the morning. And all the other times. Why can’t you just drop me off?”

  “Deposition, honey,” she said firmly. “Eight thirty. Queen Creek. I should be on the freeway already.”

  “Mom, what if there was an earthquake right now?”

  “There aren’t any earthquakes in Arizona.”

  “Mom, what if there was a hurricane right now?”

  She ignored me, zooming around the kitchen and through to the dining room, where the table was covered with her work paraphernalia.

  “What would you do?” I shouted. “What if an airplane fell out of the sky and crashed into the house? Would you save me? Or would you just freak out? Remember when you made me and Dylan get into the bathtub because there was a tornado warning? You said tornados don’t happen in Arizona, too, but there was one.”

  She gathered her things and acted annoyed, but I knew she liked this game. When Dylan and my dad were around, we’d gang up on her until she ran into the garage to escape.

  I wondered if Rhiannon could save me.

  Me: Please say you can give me a ride

  Rhiannon: oof sorry, it’s Guin’s day for the car, my dad’s dropping me off

  Me: ughhhh x infinity

  “Oh, and don’t forget, I’m leaving for Tucson tomorrow.”

  “What?”

  “I told you yesterday,” she started, grabbing her keys from a dish full of unopened bills on the counter. “I’ll be gone until Thursday. Two nights.”

  “But what about the earthquake!”

  She smiled, and came over and hugged me. Her perfume and the roughness of her curly hair against my face brought on a sudden sense memory—waiting for her to come back from a weekend away with my dad, trying to be brave in front of the babysitter but almost crying, wanting desperately to touch my palm against her cool cheek. I used to do that every night before I went to sleep.

  I hugged her back, giving it a little more oomph than the usual stiff-armed squeeze, because I could see in the way she’d shuffled her papers and piled the dishes in the sink that it was a bad morning. She wasn’t feeling it. She wasn’t remembering that anybody cared about her. She didn’t say it ever, but I could tell. She was used to a level of affection that was suddenly, irrevocably altered.

  “You better leave me, like, at least two hundred dollars though, just in case the apocalypse comes while you’re gone.”

  There was a visible post-hug burst of energy to her movements now.

  “The apocalypse will not come.”

  “Mom! Please do not jinx it.”

  “There’s no such thing as a jinx, Joss,” she said, smiling.

  “It’s your fault I believe in it. You’re the one who sent me to Cat
holic school, where we drink blood wine and learn about plagues. You pray to Saint Anthony every time you can’t find your keys.”

  “That’s different,” she protested.

  “I don’t see how,” I said in a singsong voice.

  “See you later,” she said, disappearing through the door to the garage. I walked over to lock it, and before I could, she stuck her head back in.

  “How was your date? I’m dying to know and trying to seem casual.”

  “Not terrible.”

  “Ooh!”

  “Nope, too eager,” I said, pushing the door shut.

  Now I had to text Shane.

  Me: Ride please?

  Shane:

  Shane: You’re the devil

  Outside, the droning cicadas, the unrelenting sun, the cacophony of Monday-morning leaf blowers—I felt each one like a jab at my armor as I walked around the block to Shane’s house, moving slowly so I wouldn’t start to sweat.

  There are four different house models in my neighborhood. As I walked, I counted six of the same medium-size kind, seven of the other medium-size kind, three of the biggest, and one of the smallest. Shane’s house was almost directly behind mine, just a few lots down, and was one of the small ones. The yard was a little too unkempt, like always, and bikes lay scattered around a faded, netless basketball hoop.

  Shane was in the driveway, waiting with the engine running.

  At least I don’t have to say hi to his weird mom.

  “Hey,” he said when I got in.

  “Hey.”

  “Let’s do this.”

  We drove in silence, coasting through the exit gate, passing the first of a chain of strip malls.

  Sometimes it seems like changing my actual physical form is the only way I could ever really leave Arizona. Cars or planes wouldn’t get me far enough away. In these moods, I was sure that the world was the same everywhere, that no matter where I went, I would always be finding new arrangements of the same old things.

  Shane’s ten-year-old Ford Focus only had a cassette player. When he bought the car on his sixteenth birthday, I’d gone in search of tapes as a present—I looked at a zillion different places before finally finding a bin full of them for twenty-five cents each at the back of a Radio Shack.

  “I don’t care who knows it, and I am not being triple-reverse ironic, either, so don’t complain. But I love this song,” I said, turning up Green Day’s “Worry Rock,” the tape so worn that the vocals came out sideways.

  “It’s a fucking good song,” Shane agreed.

  We stopped at a red light and Shane air guitared the whole solo perfectly. I took a photo of him, eyes closed behind sunglasses, his Brophy tie loose around the neck of his rumpled uniform shirt, and posted it to Instagram.

  idiotblush worry rock with #ShaneTatumdoesnothaveinstagram

  “I could listen to that song a thousand times right now,” I said when it ended.

  We got on the highway and into some traffic. “Carpool lane, carpool lane!” I urged, and Shane moved the car cautiously, nosing through four lanes of giant SUVs.

  “Green Day got bad, though,” Shane said, like he’d just evaluated the entirety of Green Day’s catalog in his head.

  My phone chimed with a new text as I was scrolling through my Instagram feed, noting that Mae Castillo had started following me.

  Believer: No dialogue

  Believer: Look who’s next

  I couldn’t bear to.

  “Shane?” I asked.

  He kept his eyes on the road while I filled him in on what happened with Max. I was right. He’d already seen the Tumblr, had wondered what the photo of Max’s family meant.

  “I didn’t know he was married,” I said before he could respond to any of it.

  We pulled into the Brophy parking lot. I felt out of place. I was dealing with too many boys, being driven around by Kit and Shane, taunted by Believer, who seemed indisputably masculine, in love with James and unable to stop thinking about what Max might be doing. I needed Mary-Kate or Rhiannon, fast.

  “Of course he’s married,” Shane said, turning the car off, cracking a window so we wouldn’t cook ourselves.

  “Why ‘of course’?”

  “Because.” Shane sighed. “Everyone is lying on the Internet. Not to the extent you do it, but yeah. Of course the guy is married. Are you that surprised?”

  “That’s really not the point.”

  Shane scanned the parking lot, shifting uncomfortably.

  “Right,” he went on. “So this person—”

  “Believer.”

  “Believer,” Shane repeated, like the word disgusted him. “Whoever. They obviously have access to your computer. Or your phone.”

  “Does that happen? Is that a real thing?”

  “I bet it’s the guy’s wife.”

  “I thought of that. But Max said she was shocked. She needed to go to the doctor because her blood pressure was so high.”

  “Jesus,” Shane said. “You’re definitely going to hell.”

  He was joking, but I didn’t like it.

  “Maybe you’re Believer,” I said.

  “Chh,” Shane hissed, taking his sunglasses off. They left a little red dent on the bridge of his nose. He straightened and tied his tie, tucked in his shirt. A pile of cassette tapes fell off his lap, clattering around his feet.

  “Look,” he said. “I can probably figure out how to unblock the phone number.”

  “No,” I said.

  “I could trace the IP address from the e-mail—”

  “No,” I repeated. “Please don’t go all intrepid investigator on me like goddamn Tintin with a little pencil behind your ear.”

  Shane, answering the door with a Tintin comic book dangling from his hand every time I came over to ask him to come out and play.

  “You don’t want to find out who’s doing this?”

  “No. I mean, yeah, I do, obviously—”

  “Come on. Why are you telling me all this, then? If you don’t want my help?”

  He was looking out the window. I followed his gaze to Leah Leary, waving, walking toward us.

  “There’s something new on the Tumblr,” I said. “I haven’t looked at it yet. Could you look at it first?”

  “You don’t want my help.”

  “Shane,” I whined.

  “Nope. Sorry. I’m out.” He climbed out of the car, greeting Leah with a hug, wrapping the crook of his elbow around her neck. She pushed him away, giggling.

  When I got out of the car, Leah mentioned something about how she was joining my community service group in world religions. I couldn’t stop staring at a zit on her chin, covered with a pale pancake of concealer.

  “Oh, right,” I said. “Next week?”

  Leah laughed. I stared at her.

  “Oh,” she said, perkier than ever. “No. It’s today.”

  CHAPTER 12

  Dream Girl,

  I’m better in person.

  My friends say you aren’t real—yes, I’ve told my friends about you. Shown them your pictures. Read bits of your letters to them. Sung the praises of your beautiful face and your darling brain. They’ve seen me get lost on ideas before, but they thought you’d never agree to meet.

  So happy to throw it in their faces.

  Do you want me to come out to California? I could stay with friends. No pressure. Tectonic plates crashing against each other, that’s all. . . .

  Dream girl, muse. Thanks for saying yes. I know you think it might be better to remain here, like this. What if some molecule of a chemical I inadvertently exude triggers a fight-or-flight response in some corner of your biology that you don’t consciously control?

  I don’t get the 3-D either. It’s my enemy, the opposition to my animal desire for immortality, the corruptor of everything I love. I don’t know how or why these buildings stand, all over Brooklyn, thrusting up, asserting their solidity even though all their strength and height is just a tragic harbinger of their inevitable
decay . . . !?!?!

  I’m rambling. Sorry, I’m excited.

  Does it feel like you’re not experiencing anything fully, lately?

  That a part of you is missing?

  Tell me when and where. I’ll book a flight.

  Yours,

  James

  • • •

  I read the letter over and over, sometimes separating the words and savoring them individually, sometimes racing to each new sentence.

  He already knows my face. I can step into Rosie and maybe there won’t even be a difference. No more Believer. No more Joss Wyatt.

  “So was it fun?” Mary-Kate was asking. “Your date?”

  Mary-Kate, Mae Castillo, and I were driving to the nursing home in Leah Leary’s car, meandering through a part of the valley I’d never seen, a labyrinth of golf courses and senior communities, a sprawling geriatric oasis. Every car a Cadillac going ten below the speed limit.

  “I texted you,” I said, remembering just then that she hadn’t responded when I sent the SOS about seeing Mr. Lauren.

  “I don’t think I got it.”

  I twisted around to look at her in the backseat. Mae sat next to her with headphones on, apparently listening to a linguistics podcast, a bit of information I had yet to fully process.

  “We got twenty-one-plus wristbands. I felt like a complete adult.”

  “Isn’t Kit, like, twenty-six?” Mary-Kate snapped. She’d started the day annoyed with me—for forgetting both the trip and my paragraph of the written proposal we were supposed to have ready to give the nursing home coordinator. My brain was mushy, full of holes. How could I remember the birthdays of thirty fake personalities perfectly but forget one little assignment?

  “He’s nineteen,” I said.

  “That’s still old. But at least he’s real,” Mary-Kate said, typing rapidly on her phone. I wondered how angry she would be if I told her to stop staring at the screen and listen to me.

  “Trapped by my own hypocrisy,” I mumbled, turning around.

  “What?”

  “I’m very mature for my age,” I said loudly.

  “People have been telling you that since kindergarten. I think it’s given you a complex.”

  I slouched down, training my gaze on the watery shimmer on the horizon.