- The rabbits in the kitchen.
- The evil rooster named Fred that followed Rosemary Solar everywhere and was, according to Rosemary anyway, a goblin straight out of Lithuanian folklore.
Green Day was indeed playing softly in the living room. Rosemary Solar, in her early forties, sat on the couch in front of the TV, watching the emergency funeral slideshow she’d made several years ago in case either of her children died unexpectedly. Brown hair fell to her shoulders and she tinkled when she moved, her bird-boned wrists and fingers dripping with silver rings and good luck charms. The coins sewn into her clothing—at the hem, at the sleeves, stitched to the inside of every pocket with metallic thread—chimed like raindrops.
These are the things Esther considered the defining aspects of her mother:
- In her younger years, Rosemary had been a champion Roller Derby player called “The She Beast.” In Esther’s favorite photograph of her, she was in costume on the track and she looked almost identical to Eugene: the same dark hair; the same brown eyes; the same pale skin, unblemished by the freckles that covered Esther. It was uncanny.
- Rosemary had been married once before, when she was eighteen, to a man who left a thin “C” shaped scar hooked through her left eyebrow. The man’s name and fate were never mentioned. Esther liked to imagine he had suffered a long and painful demise shortly after Rosemary left him; perhaps he had been eaten by wild dogs or slow boiled in a large vat of oil.
- A horticulturist by trade, Rosemary had the ability to make plants grow with just a touch. Flowers seemed to bloom in her presence and bend toward her as she passed them by. The oak trees in the front lawn had listened to her when she whispered to them and told them to grow. There had always been a hint of magic about her.
This last point was what Esther loved most about Rosemary. She’d felt it ever since she was a child—even as the belief in fairies and Santa and letters from Hogwarts fell away, she still sensed some thrumming croon of power that emanated from her mother.
Esther thought of the magic as a tether. An invisible silver cord that bound their hearts together no matter the distance. It was what brought Rosemary into her bedroom after Esther had nightmares. It was what made the pain of a headache or a toothache or an upset stomach fade away with a palm pressed to her forehead.
Then the curse had come, like it always did. Peter had a stroke and retreated into the basement. Money got tight. Rosemary started gambling and, desperate not to lose, had slowly been consumed by fear of bad luck. The tether that bound mother and daughter had begun to wither and grow brittle and die. Esther didn’t love her mother any less, but the magic had started to degrade, and Rosemary had slowly but surely become thoroughly, gruesomely human.
And there were few things worse in this world than humans.
Rosemary sprung from the couch and pulled Esther into a strangled embrace, an unimpressed Fred tucked under her arm. The air around her smelled of sage and cedar. Her clothes carried the scent of mugwort and clove. Her breath held a faint hint of pennyroyal. All of these herbs were meant to ward off bad luck. Rosemary Solar smelled like a witch, which was what most people in the neighborhood thought she was, and perhaps how she liked to think of herself too, but Esther knew better.
“I was so worried,” Rosemary said, pushing her daughter’s damp hair off her face. “Where have you been? Why weren’t you answering your phone?”
Esther savored the touch, and the worry, and felt the desire to melt into her mother’s arms and let Rosemary comfort her, like she had when she was a kid. But the threadbare analgesic properties of her hands weren’t enough to make up for leaving her stranded, again, and so she pushed her away.
“Maybe if you’d picked me up like you were supposed to, I wouldn’t have been brutally mugged on my way home.” Jonah’s pickpocketing hardly counted as a mugging, but Rosemary didn’t need to know that. Sometimes, Esther liked to make her feel guilty.
“You were mugged?”
“Brutally mugged. You should have picked me up.”
Rosemary looked pained. “I saw a black cat.”
Not for the first time, Esther felt the sting of the strange push-pull sensation that had defined their relationship for the past few years. The pull that drew her in, made her want to cradle Rosemary’s cheek in her hand and assure her that everything would be okay. And at the same time, the push, this dark thing that leaked acid into her gut, because it wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair that this is what her mother had become. It wasn’t fair that all the Solars were cursed to live in such ridiculous fear.
“Go tell your father that you’re safe,” Rosemary said eventually.
Esther went to the dumbwaiter in the kitchen and found the pen and pad that lived there and wrote a note that read: I’m safe—please disregard any previous correspondence to the contrary. I miss you. Love, Esther. Then she rolled the note up and put it in the dumbwaiter and tugged the pulleys that would take the tiny elevator into the basement. Once upon a time, it might’ve been used to transport wood bound for the boiler; now it was used only for communication.
“Hello Esther,” echoed Peter Solar’s voice up the shaft a minute later. “I’m glad to hear you’re no longer missing.”
“Hi Dad,” she called back. “What are you watching this week?”
“I’m on to Mork & Mindy. Never saw it when it was first on air. Funny stuff.”
“That’s nice.”
“Love you, dear.”
“Love you, too.” Esther closed the dumbwaiter door and headed to her bedroom, the hundreds of candles in the hall hissing as drops of water flicked from her hair and clothes. The room looked somewhat like those fallout shelters in postapocalyptic movies where they store all the art from the Louvre and the Rijksmuseum and the Smithsonian, trying to save what they can of humanity. Most of the furniture once belonged to her grandparents: the black metal bed frame, the teak writing desk, the carved chest her grandfather brought from somewhere in Asia, the Persian carpets that covered most of the wooden floor. Everything she could salvage from their quaint little home. Unlike the rest of the house, which was bare and sparse apart from the taped-on light switches and lamps and candles, the walls of her room were covered in framed paintings and Indian tapestries and hammered-in bookshelves, the red wallpaper beneath barely visible anymore.
And costumes. Costumes everywhere. Costumes bursting from the armoire. Costumes in various stages of development hanging from the ceiling. Costumes pinned to three vintage dress forms; giant hoopskirts and shimmering black dresses and river-green strips of leather so soft they felt like melted chocolate in your hands. Peacock feathers and strands of pearls and brass pocket watches all showing different times. A Singer sewing machine—her late grandmother’s—draped with swaths of velvet and silk ready to be cut into patterns. A dozen masks slung over every bedpost. A whole chest of drawers devoted to makeup—pots of gold glitter and turquoise eye shadow and bone white face paint and liquid latex and lipstick so red it burned to look at.
Eugene usually refused to go in there because all the clutter made the room look darker than it really was, but also because the light switch wasn’t taped permanently on and could theoretically be switched off by a vengeful spirit at any time, if they were so inclined. (Vengeful spirits were of great concern to Eugene. They were something he thought about often. Very often.)
Esther put down her basket and started taking off her wet cape before she noticed a wraith standing by a heavily laden coat-rack in the far corner of the room. Hephzibah Hadid was half hidden by a cluster of scarves, wide-eyed, looking like a ghost who’d been seen by accident.
“Christ, Heph,” Esther said, clutching at her chest. “We talked about this. You can’t just silently lurk in here.”
Hephzibah gave her an apologetic look and stepped out of the corner.
For the first three years of their friendship, Esther had been leg
itimately convinced that Hephzibah was her imaginary friend. To be fair, she didn’t speak to anyone, and the teachers never called on her because she didn’t speak to anyone, and she just kind of floated around Esther and followed her everywhere, which Esther didn’t mind because she was a deeply unattractive child with few other friends.
Everything about Hephzibah was lanky and thin—lanky, thin hair; lanky, thin limbs; and she had that whole ashy haired, pale-eyed Bar Refaeli thing going on.
Before Esther even got her cape off, Hephzibah grabbed her and hugged her roughly—a rare sign of affection—before going back to stand in the corner and giving her a “What happened?” look. In the decade that they’d known each other, they’d gotten pretty good at nonverbal communication. Esther knew that Heph could speak—she’d overheard her talking to her parents once—but Hephzibah had busted her eavesdropping and hadn’t talked to her for a month afterward. Or hadn’t not talked to her, rather. Whatever.
“I got robbed by Jonah Smallwood. Remember that kid from Mrs. Price’s class who bamboozled me into having a crush on him and then disappeared?”
Hephzibah gave her a filthy look that she interpreted as, “Yes I remember.” Then she signed, “Did he bamboozle you again?”
“Yes, he did. Swindled me out of fifty-five dollars and stole my grandmother’s bracelet and my phone and a Fruit Roll-Up.” Hephzibah looked incensed. “Yes, I know, the Fruit Roll-Up was a real low blow. I, too, am incensed.”
“We’re still going to the party, right?” she signed. As good as they were at communicating as children, it became clear, as teenagers, that they might need a slightly more complex system than miming things out, so Hephzibah’s parents had paid for the three of them—Heph, Eugene, and Esther—to learn ASL.
Esther didn’t still want to go to the party. She hadn’t wanted to attend in the first place. Parties meant people, and people meant eyes, and eyes meant scrutiny, boring into her skin like judgmental little weevils, and being judged meant hyperventilating in public, which only lead to more judgment. But Heph crossed her arms and jerked her head in the direction of the front door, a gesture Esther interpreted as, “This is a nonnegotiable friendship request.”
“Ugh, fine. Let me get ready.”
Hephzibah smiled. “We should probably take Eugene,” she signed.
“True. If Mom goes out . . . There’s no way we can leave him here on his own.”
Not only could Eugene not stand to be in the dark, he also couldn’t stand to be alone in the house at nighttime. Things came for you, when you were alone—or so he said.
So Esther went to fetch her brother.
Eugene’s bedroom was the antithesis of hers: bare walls and no furniture apart from his single bed situated in the center of the room, right underneath the ceiling light. Eugene lay on his thin mattress, reading, surrounded by a dozen lamps and thrice as many candles, like he was at his own funeral. Which, in a way, he was. Eugene faded every night when the sun went down and was replaced by a hollow creature who moved quietly through the house, trying to soak up every particle of illumination so that his very skin burned bright enough to ward off the dark.
“Eugene,” she said, “do you want to go to a party?”
He looked up from his book. “Where?”
“Out at the old nickel refinery. There’ll be bonfires.”
Fire, as far as Eugene was concerned, was the only trustworthy source of illumination, and he worshiped it more than any caveman. He never left the house without his flashlight, spare batteries, a lighter, matches, kindling, an oil-soaked rag, rubbing sticks, a bow drill, flint, and several flame starters. He’d been able to build a small fire from scratch since he was eight, courtesy of the Boy Scouts. Eugene would be a great addition to any apocalypse survival team, if it weren’t for the pesky fact he couldn’t be outside without a light from dusk until dawn.
Eugene nodded and closed his book. “I’ll go with you to the party.”
Esther changed into a costume of Wednesday Addams, and then they went, the three strangest teenagers in town: a ghost who couldn’t speak, a boy who hated the dark, and a girl who dressed as someone else everywhere she went.
• • •
THE NICKEL REFINERY came into view an hour later, a castle of metal and rust, its insides coal-bright from the bonfire burning in its belly, shadows flickering across its glassless windows as teenagers danced around the flames like moths.
“Well, let’s go weird the place up,” Esther said as they walked toward the warehouse.
Artists held exhibitions out at the refinery sometimes, and avant-garde film screenings, and hipster couples went there for their wedding photo shoots, but mostly it was used by Banksy wannabes and high schoolers getting drunk on the weekends. A temporary chain-link fence had been set up across the entrance to the warehouse, like that would be enough to keep out a horde of rabid teenagers looking to party on the last weekend of summer break. Already the corner had been clipped with fence cutters and pried open. They were foxes sneaking into the chicken coop: they would always find a way.
Music spilled out from portable speakers. Laughter and chatter were amplified by the echoing vastness of the warehouse. About fifteen feet from the fence, Esther hit the force field. Heph and Eugene took five steps apiece before they realized she was no longer walking next to them. The two paused and looked back at her.
“You guys go ahead,” Esther said. “I’m gonna get some air here for a few minutes.”
Heph and Eugene looked at each other but didn’t say anything. Hephzibah didn’t talk so that wasn’t such a big surprise, but Eugene didn’t say anything either, because that would make him a gigantic goddamn hypocrite.
“Down your liquid courage and come find us,” he said eventually. Then he hooked his arm through Heph’s and they went inside.
“Okay, social anxiety,” Esther said to herself, opening one of the warm bottles of red wine she’d commandeered from her mother’s collection. “Time to drown.”
She took three gulps. The aftertaste was of something exotic and rotten, but she didn’t care, because alcohol was not consumed by teenagers because of its palatable qualities. It was consumed because it was a useful tool to make you cooler and funnier and less of a socially awkward mess.
The worst part was that anxiety didn’t just affect the way you thought, or the way you talked, or the way you were around others. It affected the way your heart beat. The way you breathed. What you ate. How you slept. Anxiety felt like a grapnel anchor had been pickaxed into your back, one prong in each lung, one through the heart, one through the spine, the weight curving your posture forward, dragging you down to the murky depths of the sea floor. The good news was that you kind of got used to it after a while. Got used to the gasping, brink-of-heart-attack feeling that followed you everywhere. All you had to do was grab one of the prongs that stuck out from the bottom of your sternum, give it a little shake, and say, “Listen, asshole. We’re not dying. We have shit to do.”
Esther tried that. She took a few deep breaths, tried to expand her lungs against the crushing tightness of her rib cage, which didn’t help much because anxiety was a bitch. So she drank some more wine and waited for the alcohol to go to battle with her demons, because she was a totally sane and healthy seventeen-year-old girl.
3
THE BOY AT THE BONFIRE
ESTHER WALKED back and forth along the mouth of the warehouse, balancing on a rusted beam fallen from the roof, occasionally glancing at the shadows cast long across the concrete by the flickering light of the bonfire. She thought about going into the party. She perhaps even wanted to go in. She stepped away from the beam and pulled open the hole in the fence and stood there, trying to force herself through. Find Eugene. Find Hephzibah. You’ll be fine. You’ll be okay.
But then a group of juniors stumbled drunkenly toward her and she let the fence close and scuttled away in
to the darkness like a startled raccoon. She couldn’t field questions about why she was out there because she had no good answer. How to explain to strangers that there was a force field around them, an invisible barrier that buzzed around people she didn’t know, that pushed her back?
So Esther climbed a set of rotting, taped off stairs that led to the second floor of the warehouse, wended her way through the labyrinthine halls, and dusted off a patch of floor to sit on. She took a long swig of wine and looked around now that her eyes had adjusted to the low light. Firelight punched through the holes in the floor. Eugene wouldn’t be able to survive for long in the room, both because the light was minimal and wavering and because others—presumably teenagers—had been there before, and they’d splattered red paint all over the walls like blood. The words GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT were repeated over and over again in finger-painted smears. Eugene would’ve had a panic attack and/or spontaneously combusted.
Esther was ever so fractionally braver, and perhaps slightly intoxicated, so she lay on her front next to one of the larger holes overlooking the party and drew patterns in the dust and watched a line of small black bugs crawl down her forearm to perch on her fingertips as she drank. She didn’t mind it there, on the peripheries, where she could watch from on high. Eugene was by the fire, also drinking a stolen bottle of Rosemary’s wine. Esther watched her brother for a little while, trying to understand how he fit into the strange social puzzle she couldn’t quite wrap her head around.
Eugene had an easy, mysterious popularity that baffled him as much as it did Esther. He should’ve been a prime target for teenage assholes: he was thin and kind of effeminate, he dressed like a weirdo, and he was deeply interested in things like demonology and religion and philosophy. He was smart, quiet, thoughtful, and gentle, and—perhaps above all—his name was Eugene. High school should’ve been a waking nightmare for him, but it wasn’t.
Daisy Eisen was trying desperately to flirt with him, completely oblivious to the fact that his gaze kept darting away from her to land on a statuesque black guy telling a story to a group of people on the other side of the flames. Esther watched him for a little while, watched his animated movements, the way he climbed up on an anvil to make sure everyone could see him, watched the way he took a drink in each hand and snatched sips as he told his wild tale. He moved like a shadow play, like an actor on stage in a century past. She could see why Eugene was mesmerized.
A Semi-Definitive List of Worst Nightmares Page 2
