Any Second

by Kevin Emerson

  September 13

  Someone finally laughed at her in AP biology lab.

  It had probably been going on for a while when Maya finally returned to the surface. How long had she been gone? Her fingers wrapped in hair just above her neck, each sharp tear like a firework in her sky.

  Three…two…one…

  She checked the clock: fifteen minutes since she could remember a damn thing about the surface world. And only now was her heart starting to calm down.

  That was a bad one. What had even triggered her? Try to walk yourself back through the stimuli, Renee had said. Go slow. Stay neutral. You’re just observing.

  Okay, one thought per breath: She looked at the floor. Carpets sometimes conjured the puke brown of the DOL, but these gray-and-white tiles were nothing like that. Mr. Garcia had been going over details of the phylum Annelida and the giant worm they were about to dissect. There had been that message from Vice Principal Linden: Excuse the interruption. Teachers, please dismiss members of the Boys and Girls blah blah something something. Before that: the bell—

  That was it. The fake-bell tone that sounded before an announcement. It was like the next-customer bell at the DOL. Close enough, anyway, that if it hit Maya’s brain at just the wrong moment, it could bypass the rational side, right to the primal center, and detonate the bomb all over again. It didn’t matter that she knew it wasn’t the same bell, or that she knew she wasn’t going to blow up in biology class.

  As if moments like seeing Eli or talking to Tamara weren’t fraught enough, there were also these sensory triggers that struck without warning. Others included the sight of anyone’s driver’s license (she’d still never gotten hers); the smell of grape lip balm (she hadn’t been wearing it that afternoon, but maybe someone nearby had?); the song “I’m Your Bad Idea” by that band Dangerheart (she was pretty sure it had been playing in the DOL).

  None of them set her off every time, but any one of them could. How many times had that bell rung so far this year without it being a problem? And then, boom. She was extra-susceptible today too: out of Serenitab and still two days from the doctor, plus no Dr. Pom, as she and Janice had been in different classes since lunch. Pulling had been the only way to survive the storm.

  Only now, her classmates had noticed.

  Maya looked behind her. Jefferson, Cody, and Stella, all eyeing her and whispering to one another.

  “You okay?” Janice asked beside her.

  “Fine,” said Maya.

  They sat on squeaky stools at a high black table. Between them was an aluminum tray with a layer of bright blue rubber stuff inside. Atop that, pinned at both ends, a long, thick segmented worm from Africa or something, striped yellow, white, and black. The gag-inducing smell of formaldehyde draped like a wet towel over the room.

  “Two soccer jocks and a field hockey slut,” Janice whispered. “The holy trinity of cruel.”

  Another whisper behind them, another little laugh.

  Janice twisted around. “Fuck off.”

  The three hyenas grinned.

  Maya’s pulse spiked, her face reddening. Apparently, the question had been: how long could high school teens keep from mocking someone who’d been through near-death trauma? The answer: just over ten months, twenty-two days. Maybe it would have been longer if she’d stayed at Garfield, where everyone really knew what she’d been through. It had been a good family, better than her own; that was the real bomb, her family, blowing up and landing her here.

  Didn’t these assholes have their own important shit to worry about? But that didn’t seem to be how it worked. Kind of the opposite.

  “You’ll need to be careful with your scalpels,” Mr. Garcia was saying. “We don’t want to damage the delicate internal structures, in particular the multiple hearts.”

  Maya checked her lap: a tangle of hair there. Hair on the floor too.

  She pressed the clump between her shoes—really by all standards a very productive session!—lifted it to her fingers, and stuffed it, along with the hair in her lap, into her shoulder bag.

  “Packing up so soon, Ms. Abrams?” said Mr. Garcia.

  She flushed. “Sorry.”

  Fresh snickers behind them.

  Mr. Garcia looked at Maya with a flat expression, like she was just another kid who he expected to pay attention. It was kind of nice, actually. Maya figured that she’d been a topic in the staff meetings before school started, and in most classes it felt like she could probably dance naked on her desk singing at the top of her lungs while dousing herself in mustard and her teachers would just calmly try to talk around her. Mr. Garcia acted like she wasn’t completely beyond hope.

  But I am, she thought. I so am. That said, science used to be her thing, and she wanted to prove it to him. Tried to sit still, just be here….

  “Stop.” Janice grabbed her hand, which had been making its way into her hair again, and guided it under the table and slid it between her thighs. Squeezed them together. “That’ll keep you busy,” she whispered with a smile.

  Maya smiled back but also checked to make sure Mr. Garcia hadn’t noticed.

  “Don’t worry about him,” said Janice. “He doesn’t know what you’re going through. Let Janice help.”

  Maya nodded. She moved her hand up and down between Janice’s legs.

  “Mmm.”

  With her free hand, Maya copied the diagram of the worm. The location of its hearts, its digestive organs.

  The door opened. Her head popped up, and she pulled her hand from Janice’s lap.

  One of their classmates, returning from the bathroom.

  “Relax, it’s just a door.” Janice tugged on Maya’s hand again, but Maya resisted, instead using it to spin her notebook sideways as she continued the diagram.

  Janice exhaled pointedly. She shifted her body and her shoulder bumped Maya’s. Lightly, but she still got the message.

  You don’t want me getting bored.

  Mr. Garcia talked for a little longer, and then they began the dissection. Janice pulled on the light blue latex gloves, snapping them loudly against her wrists. Maya put hers on quietly.

  “You okay?” Maya asked.

  “Fine.” Janice ran the scalpel down the length of the worm’s body. The skin slipped apart, revealing the creature’s gray insides. The classroom burbled around them, clichéd squeals here and there.

  Maya handed Janice a pushpin, which Janice used to stab the worm skin into the rubbery blue medium, holding it open. “I’m sorry I’m such a mess,” Maya said, handing her another.

  Janice pinned the other side of the skin. “What good am I if I can’t even keep you excited?” she muttered.

  “Oh, it’s not that. I just felt self-conscious.”

  “Well, that’s stupid.” Janice started running the scalpel back and forth beside the worm, carving an X shape, shreds of blue gel flicking this way and that. “Can I get a Serenitab?”

  “Sorry, I’m out.”

  The scalpel dug deeper. “Figures. When’s your next resupply?”

  “At the end of the week. I don’t get that many,” Maya added. “You could probably get a prescription, you know. It’s pretty easy, just talk about how depressed you are.”

  Janice shook her head. “I don’t need a prescription.”

  “Oh.” Maya flushed, trying to dig her thumb through the gloves and get at the wrecked skin around her index fingernail.

  Janice huffed. “It’s just my parents are still being assholes about school.”

  “What happened?”

  “So, I told them about my friend Abbye’s visit to NYU, how amazing it was. And they’re still like, It’s so expensive. They said I should think about taking a year off to earn some money, like I’m going to waste a year of my life because they’re being cheap.”

  “Maybe you can get a s
cholarship,” Maya said. She was taking next year off; the whole idea of applying for colleges had seemed like too much when she could barely handle school. Plus, they needed more money, and her grades had likely slipped out of scholarship territory at this point.

  “Don’t be stupid,” said Janice. “It’s not like I’m an Abbye.”

  “Yes, you are.” Maya hadn’t meant to sound stupid. “It’s just because it’s so far. Is there a good program that’s closer?”

  Janice laughed. “Nowhere closer is good enough.” The scalpel had started to scrape the metal beneath the blue medium. “It has to be NYU or Juilliard or what’s the fucking point?” Tears rimmed her eyes and she brushed angrily at them. “They make me feel so worthless, like my dreams are shit. It makes me want to die.” She lifted the scalpel from the tray and ran the edge of the blade across the back of her wrist. A thin white line.

  “Don’t say that.” Maya watched the scalpel, her heart rate rising.

  Janice sniffled. “You must feel that way sometimes. Like you’re trapped. Like it’s never going to get better.”

  “All the time.” There were moments, now and then, when Maya felt like she no longer even had dreams. Not about the future, anyway. Next year was supposed to be the beginning of the rest of her life, and yet Maya couldn’t picture anything.

  Janice smiled at her. “You’re the only one who gets it. Maybe that’s why we found each other. I think if I didn’t have you I might be dead already.”

  She carefully etched a ghostly white heart onto the back of her wrist, then the letters J + M inside it. Drew blood in two places. She moved the scalpel over to Maya’s wrist, the lethal tip whispering against her skin, starting the same shape.

  Maya put her hand on Janice’s, lifted it. For a moment, Janice resisted, the scalpel shuddering….Janice let go. Maya took the scalpel and laid it down. She noticed Mr. Garcia eyeing them, but he turned away.

  “It’s okay,” Maya said quietly, but her skin was prickling with swords, her hair wailing to be plucked. She swallowed hard, a metallic taste in her mouth. It felt like this conversation had been sucking them into some kind of darkness. Janice was so much stronger, had so much more going for her. If she couldn’t see a way out…

  “Oh, look.” Janice suddenly broke into a smile. She pried the worm skin farther open with her finger, revealing the line of ring-shaped hearts. “Do you think this means that worms fall in love harder or, like, each heart loves a different person?”

  “Hmm?” Maya’s thoughts staggered. Keep up! This is how normal people act. They get better. Unlike you.

  But did they swing this fast?

  “Maybe the five hearts mean you get five true loves,” said Janice brightly. “Of course, that’s not enough. Or you can love five people at the same time. I like that better.” She ran her rubber-coated finger over Maya’s hand. “Make that four. I’d need two for you.”

  “Ha.” Maya told herself to smile, instructed her lips to peck Janice’s cheek, and yet inside, she counted: Three…two…one…

  * * *

  ***

  “Walk me to one-acts rehearsal?” Janice asked at the end of class.

  “Ah, I wish,” said Maya. “I have an appointment.” She made a show of rolling her eyes.

  Janice huffed. “You always have appointments.”

  They walked out into the hall and kissed.

  “Are you sure you’re okay?” Maya asked.

  Janice waved her hand. “Peachy. I’d prove it to you if you’d just come down to the costume closet with me.”

  Maya swallowed a fresh bout of nerves. “I wish I could. Rain check?” She braced for Janice’s reaction.

  But Janice just grinned wickedly. “I’m going to hold you to that.”

  As Maya headed up the hall, her body unwound. Janice was a lot to handle. But wasn’t that unfair of her to think when she was so much more?

  Except it wasn’t just that: Maya had been lying to Janice. She did have an appointment…later. Right now, she had something she needed to do alone.

  She pushed through the busy halls to her locker, quickly changed her books, and made for the main entrance. With each step, her nerves wound tighter. She rounded a corner—

  There he was.

  Maya slowed and let the rush of kids flow around her. Had to get the timing just right. Eli was pulling books out of his backpack, and now his jacket. Weird that he didn’t keep it in his locker. He closed the door and started up the hall. Maya checked over her shoulder—for Janice? Yeah, for Janice—and then followed, staying a few groups behind him.

  Second time she’d done this. Yesterday after lunch, but the halls were always too crowded. And what exactly are you doing? Everyone would be so mad if they knew. Her parents, the principal, Renee.

  But it was that dream the other night. Nearly a year of the same old nightmares, bolting awake in a panic, her death fresh in her mind—and then something different:

  We did it, he’d said.

  Maya had written it down in her phone, and since then she’d looked at it so many times that she felt like Eli really had said it to her.

  They’d held on to each other and lived. Which made no sense because the bomb still went off around them. That’s because it wasn’t real. Yeah, but neither were all the other times she’d blown up and those didn’t stop her from losing chunks of time and hair and skin. And why a new dream now? Having Eli at school was supposed to make things worse.

  Whatever it was, she felt like she needed to tell him about it. She’d probably sound completely crazy. And how would he react? She wasn’t even sure if he’d noticed her in the halls yet….

  But still.

  Eli exited through the main doors by the office. Maya paused at the top of the steps and waited, watching him cross the parking area. He bypassed the line of school buses, didn’t head for the student lot either. So far, so good.

  Bright sun shone in her eyes on a sleepy fall angle, but still offered a faint warmth. Students rushed by her on either side, all the non-messed-up, non-seeing-explosions kids hurtling down the stairs, the afternoon before them full of possibility.

  Maya started down the steps. This is going to help. See? I’m doing something. Who was she talking to? Mom, Dad, Janice, Renee—all of them? But then why was she nearly hyperventilating, her fingers shaking and digging at one another in her pockets?

  Eli was on the sidewalk that paralleled the driveway, heading toward the school exit. Maya crossed the drop-off area. The tops of the maple trees along the drive were just beginning to hint at reds and oranges, their bellies still a parched green. That little note of decay in the air. Fall smell, one of Maya’s favorite things, and yet her shivers intensified because fall was the DOL blowing up—

  No. Stay here.

  Eli stopped at a bench along the drive, the tennis courts behind him. He sat, hunched in the baggy dark blue Seahawks hoodie he wore almost every day, his jacket in his lap. He slipped on big red headphones and tapped his phone.

  Maya crossed the deep green grass between the student lot and the sidewalk. Ow—she found strands of hair between her fingers. Dammit, hands, I thought you were in pockets! She tucked the hair into her jeans. It seemed gross to leave it in this lovely grass.

  She reached the sidewalk. Close now. Some girls on the tennis courts, but those green wind screens would limit their view. Nobody else around except buses and cars passing, but everyone would be in their own after-school world….

  Staring at Eli, and with every step she didn’t see the wolf mask, didn’t picture the DOL, didn’t blow up.

  We did it.

  She didn’t breathe either.

  Naked and knife-edged and aware. Heart racing, legs tingling, and yet she wasn’t drifting away, no Serenitab fog, no alcohol glaze. Instead, everything seemed immediate, like her senses were turned up to fu
ll strength: the slight breeze, the cobalt sky, the swish of the grass beneath her sneakers, the crunch of tires on the pavement, the spoiled banana smell of the trash can she’d just passed, the rotten exhaust as Brett Hornigan’s ironic AMC Eagle growled by.

  She felt exposed, no, pinned, like that worm to its blue medium, stabbed to the world at both ends, and with some of her hearts terrified and some hopeful but all of them pounding.

  Look up, she thought at Eli. I’m here.

  The pop of tennis balls being hit, the squeal of sneakers.

  Come on.

  A stereo behind her somewhere in the parking lot, the huge loping beat vibrating the stop sign just as she walked past.

  I’m right here.

  Pink gum plastered to the road, imprinted with tire tread. Leaf crunch beneath her sneaker.

  Fuck, she was terrified.

  But still not blowing up.

  So close now. Eli dead ahead, a fixed point. A certainty. If he looked up now, he would definitely see her.

  She felt a sting from her pocket—a cuticle torn open.

  Hey, she thought to say. No, it would be too loud. Just a little closer—

  “Why don’t you bend over for these balls?”

  Maya halted.

  A group of boys had appeared, prowling along the tennis court fence. One of them had stopped and pressed his crotch against the chain-link fence, motioning to the tennis player girls.

  A door banged open across the street. The football team, jogging out from their locker room, cleats clacking on the asphalt.

  Shit! Too many witnesses. But he was right there! The boy whose hand she had held and lived—

  That was just your stupid dream!

  But NO! Contrary to the games her brain played, it was also true. They’d held on and survived that day in the DOL. He’s the proof, she thought. Concrete proof that she was alive.

  So who cared about the people around them! What did they know? Maya started toward Eli again—

  Her phone buzzed. She almost ignored it, but it pulsed. Someone calling.

  She fished it from her pocket. The caller was identified by three skull-and-crossbones emojis: Tamara from Chalk. Maya had put the number in her contacts just to be sure she’d never answer. She gripped the phone, wanted to crush it, then silenced the call, shoved it away—