Bombshell

by Rowan Maness

  “Why’d I have to be born now?” I said out loud. My mom sipped her smoothie. She’d been watching as I took the picture.

  “This is so primitive,” I said, meaning the news and the war and the boring flatness of my place in it all, me sitting there taking pictures of a screen, sharing it on another screen, doing nothing to stop any of it, just perpetuating. Robot weapons? Sure. Perfectly acceptable.

  My mom reached out and tucked a strand of my hair back behind my ear.

  “I love you.” She smiled.

  When the thing with Peter was happening, my mom had known somehow. We kept getting in fights because she knew I was keeping something from her, and I kept denying it.

  When she said she loved me I almost spit it all out. How I was hallucinating, losing time, James and the plans we were making. The urge to confess all my secrets came from somewhere outside myself. The coyote, making a push.

  Shouldn’t she know? Why doesn’t she know?

  • • •

  Shane and I got roped in to meeting Dylan’s flight after school. I complained when Shane found me in the Xavier parking lot and told me the plan, but he reminded me that I used to love the airport. We’d beg our dads to take us there to eat gift shop snacks and people-watch.

  We were sitting in the international terminal, watching people exit customs through a bank of mirrored sliding doors. Dylan’s flight was delayed, and Shane and I passed the time by making up elaborate backstories for each person as they walked by, guessing where they came from, what their secrets were.

  “She’s just escaped a doomsday cult and is meeting her estranged sister at baggage claim,” I said, about a woman in ill-fitting clothes who looked exhausted and overwhelmed. “He’s a hugely famous stage actor in Spain, but here he’s nobody,” Shane said, of a short, handsome guy in designer sweatpants. “She’s a bartender in São Paolo.” “He’s a clone slash assassin. Oh my God, he is so obviously a clone slash assassin.”

  After a steady stream of professional-looking Japanese people in business suits, there was a lull. I checked my phone and noticed that Kit had liked my normal war Instagram post from that morning.

  “Are you going to do the driver’s ed thing next weekend?” Shane asked. “At school?”

  “No,” I said, stretching my legs out across the armrests of the empty chairs next to us.

  “Why not?”

  I pictured James and myself-as-Rosie walking through this same airport the Monday after meeting. Legitimate, breathless, walking hand in hand with synchronized steps. The two most in-love people in the security line. I had access to money, an account with a debit card I never used because it felt like acknowledging my dad’s death as something positive. Maybe we wouldn’t go back to his place in New York right away. After I explained that I’d been using an assumed name—because of the stalker. I’m sorry. I wanted to wait to tell you in person—I could make it up to him by buying us tickets to wherever he wanted.

  “I don’t know,” I answered Shane. “I guess I’m not really in a hurry.”

  “So you’re never going to drive?”

  “Someday, yeah.”

  The doors slid open and a big group came out.

  “This is our boy,” I said, glancing up at the arrivals screen.

  I thought Dylan would be the last one out. He never tried to get to the front of any line, never hurried, never rushed. Finding him gone without any warning was such a shock I thought he’d been kidnapped until he called and told us where he was.

  But he burst through the doors at the front of the pack, in the center of the chaos, a huge smile on his face.

  • • •

  “Well, yeah, but his epilepsy, that’s what sets him apart. It’s like, from his brain to his fingers is all this weird wiring—that’s why, personally, I think he can’t be touched. There’s absolutely no comparison—”

  I slid down onto the floor like liquid. The underside of Dylan’s bed was surprisingly clean. An obscure triptych of three random things—blue crayon, empty plastic water bottle with the label peeled off, one orange foam earplug.

  I wondered where the crayon came from. Wondered what might happen if I moved it a centimeter to the left—James getting hit by a taxi. An end to the normal war. My mom forgetting her phone at work.

  “You fancy yourself enlightened now,” I said to the room, vaguely aware I was interrupting whatever Dylan was going on about. “Because you went on a vision quest.”

  “Shane knows what I’m talking about,” Dylan said, flipping through his record collection, which he’d dramatically reclaimed from my room, along with the player.

  “I know what you’re talking about too,” I said, though I had no idea. “I agree with you.”

  “You agree with me about Neil Young being God?”

  “Why do you have to use that tone of voice? There’s too much conviction in it. I don’t like it.”

  “I feel like my voice is my normal tone of voice right now.”

  “You’re not doing it consciously, duh. I know that.”

  “What else do you know, Joss?” Dylan asked.

  “You know lots of stuff, don’t you, Joss?” Shane echoed, teasing me.

  We were all sitting in Dylan’s room. It was alive with us, no longer a dark, closed place like my dad’s studio. The window cracked open, Dylan impatiently skipping around to find songs on records, sometimes instructed by Shane, who was stuttering hypotheses about B-sides and liner notes gleaned from late-night Wikipedia spirals.

  We’d left the airport, gone through a Sonic drive-through as instructed by Dylan, and come home to get extremely stoned before my mom got off work. Before we did, Dylan took me aside and asked, “Are you sure? You’re okay to smoke?” and I didn’t even mind because I was so pleased he was there to worry about me.

  “I know that every time I’m in a group of two or more boys eventually they will end up talking about Neil Young,” I said.

  “Anecdotal,” Shane mumbled. “That can’t be true.”

  Dylan started telling Shane about Peru or Argentina, villages with doctors who consult ayahuasca-induced hallucinations as they would a medical textbook. I let him go on for a while before interrupting again.

  “I never did like earnest young men,” I announced, raising one finger in the air for emphasis. My voice seemed to echo off the walls, in the gap between songs on the album playing in the background.

  Shane and Dylan laughed hysterically.

  “You remember Joe Value-Pack?” Dylan asked me.

  “Yes!” I said, sitting up on my elbows, excited both by the memory and the feeling of sharing it with Dylan. I’d forgotten how nice it was just to be near someone who’d been around your whole life. If Dylan existed in the world, then so did I.

  “Huh?” Shane interjected.

  “He was this friend of my dad’s,” Dylan explained. “One of those survivalist, off-the-grid guys. He had a fallout shelter we went to once, a cabin up in Pinetop, with a million guns and a homemade solar generator. It was the raddest place ever.

  “When I went down to South America I thought I was going to get off the grid too, just go way out and never have to go to a Target again, you know? I thought about that guy a lot.”

  I reached under the bed and retrieved the empty plastic water bottle, handing it to Dylan.

  “I think this pertains,” I said, “to this wonderful story you are telling.”

  “Pertains,” Shane said, the letters of the word tumbling out of his mouth, floating up to the ceiling. He was holding Ferris, scratching hard beneath her collar, drifting tufts of her fur onto the carpet.

  “Copy kitten,” I told him. “Stop copy-kittening me.”

  “Guys,” Dylan said, stopping us. “Anyway, there I am on this commune in Argentina with all these German tourists, and I realized something. There is no such thing as off-grid. A person is a point on the grid. You can never get off. Nobody can.”

  We all went silent, reverent in the face of such a dee
p truth.

  “Joss knows how,” Shane said, looking at me.

  I shushed him.

  • • •

  James made the tree house even better this time. He’s good at this, like I knew he would be. I haven’t told him, but I’m not Rosie right now. I’m being myself, breaking that barrier.

  I wonder what is beyond the Dream Palace on this plane. Is this it? Nothing else? Or are there other gateways?

  Before I went to Rosie’s room, I walked the halls. Peeked into rooms. Some disintegration had occurred, but the structure was sound.

  James and I are together. I want to graffiti the walls with evidence. We were here. We existed. This was our place. No matter what happens when we meet in person, this can never be undone.

  CHAPTER 17

  Halfway through homeroom the next day, as everyone’s feet were tapping, impatient for the early dismissal, Believer texted me.

  Believer: Are you wondering who’s next?

  Believer: I can’t decide. There are so many to choose from.

  I glanced around the room from my seat in the back row. The girls were colorful islands, wearing bathing suits and cover-ups for field day. Out of the usual uniform white and plaid, our differences were highlighted. Suddenly I could see that each girl’s inner life must be as vivid as my own, and I winced at the overwhelming sadness of the realization. It was all so fragile, and I didn’t want to feel it.

  Mae Castillo scooted two desks over and sat next to me. She was eating a cup of yogurt, scraping at the last bit with a plastic spoon.

  “So,” she said, spying my hidden phone. “Are you going to go to prom?”

  “When I look into the future, I do not see me having fun at prom.”

  “Mary-Kate said you’d say that.”

  “That exact thing?”

  “Well, that you’d think it was dumb.”

  “I guess I’m getting predictable,” I said. “At least to her.”

  “I can’t decide if I like or hate being a teenager,” said Mae as she carefully examined the nutrition label of her now-empty yogurt.

  “I know exactly what you mean,” I said, watching her.

  “So,” I went on. “Does Mary-Kate hate me?”

  “She talks about you all the time,” Mae said. “You know what? If the yogurt people really want me to keep buying this yogurt, they should market it to teens.”

  “Oh, you mean, like cool, teen yogurt you can buy with your cool, teen disposable income?”

  Mae nodded. “Every day I wake up and I think to myself, ‘You know, I could really go for some yogurt. But it’s so uncool.’ ”

  “You need a yogurt that fits your coolteen lifestyle.”

  “It should be called something really coolteen. Like . . . Yog’ Jamz.”

  At that, I cracked, laughing loudly enough to jolt Ms. Munoz out of her nail-filing stupor at the front of the classroom. She gave us a look before going back to her happy place.

  “Yog’ Jamz!” Mae said, holding up the yogurt. “For coolteens only!”

  The two girls in front of us turned around.

  “Guys.” I smiled at them. “We should jam some yog’ before field day! It’s gonna be awesome!”

  With the specter of Believer looming over me, destroying connections and scrambling timelines, talking to Mae felt like a small victory. See, I can keep it together. If I pretended I was texting her, forging a tenuous alliance, it was easy to avoid thinking about the glitches sparking everywhere else.

  • • •

  The day started out sunny, but by the time homeroom ended, the sky was grey and the air was heavy and unusually humid for the desert in late April. My tank top clung to my skin and my toes slipped around in my sandals.

  I walked over to the Brophy athletic fields with Mae, and we found Rhiannon and Mary-Kate among the exodus of bikinied girls. Halfway across the parking lot, Trevor emerged from his hiding spot in Rhiannon’s car, joining us.

  The fields were set up with a stage, bounce houses and inflatable waterslides, rows of carnival games, and a dunk tank being filled by a hose extending from an unmarked white van.

  We met up with Shane and Leah Leary beneath a balloon archway and migrated to the outer reaches of the field, where five Slip ’N Slides were set up on the hill that separated the Brophy campus from the back of a strip mall.

  I took my shoes and top off and used them to hide my phone in an out-of-the-way patch of tall grass. Everyone else did the same thing, and we passed a bottle of sunscreen between us while we waited in line.

  Rhiannon, Mary-Kate, Mae, Shane, and I all got to the front of our lines at the same time. Student council members handed us inner tubes, and we stepped back to get a running start, flying down the hill in unison, sending up huge sprays of soapy water, Leah Leary and Trevor cheering us on.

  We went through the line another zillion times, in different formations. Rhiannon, Trevor, and I linked inner tubes and tumbled over each other in the soggy grass. Mary-Kate and Mae went down with Nora del Toro and Carmen Farrow, cartwheeling up to the slides and missing their inner tubes completely, sliding down sideways on their stomachs. Mae and Rhiannon danced to the bad ska band that was playing on the stage—“Someone’s brother,” explained the student council treasurer—and we all collapsed in a heap by the first aid stand.

  “Ugh, my feet are dirty. I hate dirty feet,” Mary-Kate said.

  I picked some grass out from between my toes.

  “Don’t complain, MK. You’ll ruin the field day fun.”

  “Did you just cop to having fun?” she asked.

  “So what if I did?”

  “Nothing,” Mary-Kate said. “I’m glad to hear it.”

  A group of Brophy boys came up to us, greeting Shane, apparently impressed that he was with a group of seven girls. I knew most of their names, but the only one I’d ever had any contact with was Evan Fairbanks. When Rhiannon and I wrote record reviews for the Xavier-Brophy newspaper, he’d written a letter to the editor complaining about my analysis of one of them. He followed me on Instagram.

  Somehow he wound up next to me.

  “Dylan Wyatt’s your brother, right?” I tried to overlook his rat teeth and his buzz cut. I really tried.

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “He’s legendary.”

  “Legendary for what?”

  “Stuff.”

  “Oh. He actually just got back from South America.”

  “Rad.”

  “Yeah,” I said, looking around for help, finding everyone else absorbed in their own conversations.

  Trevor said he wanted to try the sumo wrestling, so we all stood up and gathered our things. I tied my hair back and unwrapped the phone from my wadded-up tank top. Evan walked too close to me while I checked it for any new messages—I was surprised to see that the screen was unlocked and the texts from Believer were showing.

  At the sumo wrestling ring, we watched Trevor and Rhiannon fight it out, waddling around in suits that made them look like they weighed five hundred pounds. Trevor kept his sunglasses on and seemed to relish being pummeled into submission by Rhiannon over and over again.

  Mae and Mary-Kate went up after them, and everyone else disappeared, pairing off—Shane and Leah Leary, Rhiannon and Trevor, Nora and Carmen with their Brophy boy equivalents. I was left with Evan, and tried to avoid conversation by reading the e-mail James had sent that morning.

  Rosie,

  I’m looking at pictures of you. The videos. I’m lying in bed and it’s like you’re all around me. I know we’re so far above it, but the way all the dirty stuff fits into our thing is so good.

  Remember, you’re my guru. Making love to you—fucking you really well—will be like giving back—

  “So. You going to prom?” Evan asked.

  I laughed, looking up from my phone.

  “Sorry,” I explained. “That’s just the second time someone’s asked me that today.”

  I wondered if it would be different if Evan and I wer
e texting—it would be easier to overlook his flaws that way.

  “I know it’s probably not your kind of scene,” he said.

  I smiled at that. “You’re right,” I said.

  “So. Do you wanna go?”

  “What?”

  “With me. You want to? Clint’s having an after-party at his house.”

  “Uh—” I stammered. “Why do you want to go with me? You don’t even know me.”

  “Okay, never mind,” he said, and I was surprised to see his face redden. I felt bad, aware that I’d misjudged his sincerity.

  “It’s just—I have a boyfriend,” I said. Mae and Mary-Kate climbed out of the arena just at that moment.

  “You do?” Mary-Kate butted in.

  “Yes,” I said, urging her to follow along, scared that she wouldn’t get the message. “That’s why I can’t go to prom.”

  “It is?”

  “Yes,” I answered, through clenched teeth.

  “It’s not because you’re antisocial and you’re against doing anything normal because you think you’re so edgy?”

  Evan managed to slink away without saying anything. Mae stepped back, leaving me and Mary-Kate standing there.

  “That was bitchy,” I said to her.

  “I’m a bitch?” Mary-Kate questioned, indignant. “You couldn’t even force yourself to be nice to Evan for one second.”

  “I was going to be nice to him!” I snapped. “You interrupted!”

  “You were lying to him.”

  “I had to, a little,” I said. “I do have a boyfriend, kind of—”

  I trailed off, thinking Mary-Kate would ask Who? and I could respond by telling her about my love for James. Mae would disappear and it would just be us, and I’d explain how James and I were two parts of a strange whole, and she would understand completely.

  But the conversation turned, and everything Mary-Kate had been holding back came raging out of her.

  “You know what, I don’t feel like sitting around condoning your pathological lies anymore.”

  “Come on,” I said. “I didn’t want to hurt Evan’s feelings.”

  She wasn’t hearing me.

  “You don’t care about his feelings. You were lying for the same reason you always lie—because you’re addicted to the weird power it gives you over other people. And I’m tired of pretending I think it’s cute or smart or somehow more interesting than real life.”