Translucent

by Dan Rix

  Megan’s incredulous look told me to shut the fuck up. I did.

  Sarah continued, “Anyway, if the refractive index of a translucent material was nearly the same as air, light would pass through it and hardly bend at all. You’d barely see it, like this . . .” She rummaged around some more and pulled out a tiny crystal. “This isn’t glass, it’s cryolite—refractive index of 1.33, exactly the same as the refractive index of water. Now watch.” She leaned over the glass she’d been drinking from and dropped the cryolite into the water.

  The moment the crystal slipped under the surface, it vanished completely. Only a tiny hint of its outline remained visible.

  “Whoa,” I said.

  “Exactly. Now you can still see it a little bit because this is tap water, it’s got electrolytes in it, which changes the refractive index a bit. For comparison, here’s regular old glass.” She dropped in a simple lens. This one remained plainly visible, next to its invisible partner. “My guess is that substance you brought in is to air as this cryolite is to water, they have the same index of refraction.” Her eyes twinkled. “Shall we test my theory?”

  Megan and I glanced at each other. “Uh . . . okay.”

  She pulled the slide out from under the microscope, which she’d treated earlier with a droplet of our mystery fluid—the rest we’d already coerced into one of my old contact lens cases—and held it over the glass. “I’m guessing it won’t be invisible underwater.”

  She dunked the slide under the surface.

  We all leaned closer.

  And saw nothing.

  The slide appeared empty.

  “Hmm,” she said, pulling it back up. “Did it dissolve in the water?” She tapped the center of the slide, rubbed her fingers together and muttered, “No, still there.” She held the slide up to the light. “And whatever it is, the water hasn’t adhered to it. Now that is strange. So it’s not index of refraction . . .”

  “So what do you think?” Megan borrowed the slide from her and touched it herself, then stared blankly at her fingers. “What do you think it is?”

  “I’m not actually sure,” said Sarah, raising the water glass to her lips.

  I rushed forward. “No!”

  Megan saw too and shouted, “Don’t drink—”

  Sarah took a swallow and looked up. “What? It’s fine.”

  I shared a nervous glance with Megan. But when the grad student didn’t drop dead, I relaxed a little. I’d been wearing it on my finger all day. How bad could ingesting it really be?

  “Okay, here’s what I’m thinking.” Sarah took the slide from Megan and sealed it in a Ziploc baggie. “I’ll get this analyzed, and we’ll see what we’re dealing with.”

  “How are you going to analyze it if you can’t see it?” I said.

  “We’ll hit it with everything we got—electron microscope, electron microprobe, mass spectrometry, X-ray diffraction, X-ray fluorescence . . . something’s got to be able to see it.”

  It was now in two places—stuck to a microscope slide in a Ziploc bag, and somewhere at the bottom of an empty contact lens case. I reflected on this on Friday evening as I lay in my room, now starkly furnished with a mattress, a throw rug from the living room, and a pile of clothes.

  Like the prison cell I would soon live in.

  Two places.

  The contact lens case sat by my phone next to my pillow, where I could see it, check that it was still there. Guard it. I supposed I could keep track of it if it was just in two places.

  Why did I tell myself that lie?

  It wasn’t in two places. Not anymore. It was under my fingernails, caked into the tiny valleys of my fingerprint—I could feel the lingering tingle, the urge to rub it. It was pressed into the threads of my jeans. It was on Megan’s finger, too. In the physics lab at UCSB, and inside Sarah’s intestines. It was still in the meteorite, wherever they’d taken it, and on all the clothes and furniture the cleanup crew had removed from my room.

  And it was buried under eight feet of concrete in the San Rafael Wilderness.

  It was everywhere.

  No wonder they had rushed in like that to contain it.

  I couldn’t ignore the obvious anymore.

  The amount of this stuff on Earth was growing.

  Why can’t we see it?

  I rolled onto my side and stared at the contact case. I could touch it, I could feel it . . . so why couldn’t I see it? My hand went to the case and unscrewed the cap, and I raised the container to look inside.

  Nothing there.

  Invisible.

  I should have called Major Connor.

  Instead, I just stared down at it, my pulse drumming faster and faster. My body knew something wasn’t right here. Hands trembling, I touched the inside of the case. The fluid jumped to my fingertip and spread out, startlingly cool on my skin. Like picking up a contact lens.

  Put it in your eye, said a voice in my head.

  “Um . . . no.” I held it up to the light. Nothing there.

  But there was something there.

  The wetness bothered me.

  Put it in your eye . . . Then you will see.

  My hand inched toward my eye before I caught myself. No, Leona. Shuddering, I scraped my finger off inside the contact case, returning the liquid to the bottom, and quickly twisted on the cap.

  Liquid. Or was it a solid?

  It seemed like both at the same time. Slimy when you first touched it, then sticky if you rubbed it together . . . and finally rubbery. Like rubber cement. But when left alone, it melted back into a liquid.

  So weird.

  Someone out there had to know what it was. Determined to get to the bottom of this, I entered a search into my phone: invisible substance from space.

  Surprisingly, reputable sites popped up.

  Not UFO hack sites like I’d expected. These were educational articles from CERN, National Geographic, NASA. Starting from the top, I clicked through each one.

  Each article mentioned a prevalence of invisible matter permeating the entire known universe.

  They referred to it by a name.

  Dark matter.

  The hairs rose on the back of my neck.

  I sat up straight, my finger feverishly tapping through links, my eyes tearing across page after page to take in all the information. I couldn’t believe it.

  Yes, there was stuff out there we couldn’t see. Tons of it.

  We knew it was there because we could observe its gravitational effects. Apparently, galaxies were spinning way too fast. If you added up the masses of all the stars and black holes in a galaxy, it wasn’t enough to hold everything together. Not enough by far. Everything should have been flying apart.

  But it wasn’t.

  There was something out there that held everything together, something invisible. A bunch of it.

  In fact, what we could see through telescopes was only a fraction of the total mass in the universe. The rest—about eighty-five percent—was this dark matter stuff. No one knew what it was or where it came from. No one had ever seen it. They speculated that it wasn’t even on the periodic table, that it wasn’t even in the Standard Model—which included all known particles like electrons and quarks. It was something else.

  Something that had never been observed in any laboratory or particle accelerator.

  And it wasn’t just hypothetical. Its existence was accepted without question as one of the greatest mysteries of cosmology.

  What the hell? So this was a real thing, and people weren’t getting up in arms about it? They should have been talking about this on the news, at school, in church! An invisible substance that filled our whole universe that we knew absolutely nothing about? That sounded like a big deal.

  I felt lik
e I was being watched.

  I straightened up, instantly alert, and heat raced up the back of my neck. My eyes darted to the corners of my room, the bare walls washed in light.

  Nowhere to hide.

  A slow, shaky breath filled my lungs.

  My door hung open a crack, the hall outside pitch black. My eyes strained to see what lay beyond.

  Nothing there.

  Just my own paranoia.

  A cold sweat clung to my palms, which I wiped on my jeans. My gaze flicked to the contact case.

  Dark matter.

  Was it watching me?

  A suffocating silence hung over me, and suddenly, I didn’t want to be here, I didn’t want to be in the same room as it—

  My phone buzzed, making me flinch.

  I had to stop doing that.

  Megan calling.

  “Yo, what’s up?” The calm in my voice pleased me.

  “I know you’re not going to like this,” she said, “but I have an idea.”

  “I don’t like it,” I said.

  She took a deep breath. “You know that cute guy in your English class?”

  I screwed up my eyes. “Andrew?”

  “You know how he’s throwing a party tonight?”

  My lungs seized up. “No, Megan.”

  “Everyone’s talking about it,” she said. “Come on, it’ll be good for us. We need to get out. We need to be around other people.”

  “I’m not going,” I stated.

  “What are you going to do instead, huh? Mope at home all night? You can’t keep doing that.”

  “I don’t care. I can’t be around other people. I just can’t, okay? Don’t pressure me on this.”

  “You made it through school.”

  “Yeah . . . barely.”

  “No one thinks it was you,” she said.

  “It’s a party,” I said, growing feverish at the very thought. “Everyone’s going to be staring. I’m going to freak out and do something stupid, and then they’re going to know. They’re going to know it was me. They’re going to know I did it. Besides, I don’t have any clothes.”

  “What the hell was all that stuff we bought last weekend?”

  “Megan, I’m not going.”

  “I just pulled up to your house. Listen—” The honk of her car drifted in.

  “You ass,” I said.

  “You coming?”

  “Why don’t we just watch a movie or something, hang out just you and me. Like summer.”

  “I want to go to Andrew’s party.”

  “Have fun.” I hung up.

  The silence rushed in like ice water, and I threw myself down on my bed, frustrated at everything. Before she’d called, I had planned on reading a little, doing a little homework, maybe snuggling up with a warm glass of milk and honey and watching a Disney movie. Now that sounded pathetic.

  Thanks, Megan.

  Maybe a party would help me move on. It was either that or spend Friday night alone. My parents were out at some UCSB lecture and wouldn’t be back until late. They’d probably grab drinks with friends afterward.

  So I was alone.

  It was embarrassing. My parents had a better social life than I did—

  You’re not alone.

  My body stiffened. The words had just popped into my head. My voice, but silkier, as if someone else had spoken them. Slowly, almost fearfully, I turned and stared at the contact lens case.

  The dark matter.

  It was here with me. I wasn’t alone.

  That realization made me sick to my stomach.

  Fear crackled in the air, and the ceiling light flickered.

  “Screw this.” I snatched up my phone and called Megan back, already fleeing my bedroom, and when she answered I blurted out, “You win. I’m coming.”

  Chapter 8

  “I shouldn’t have come,” I whispered, edging closer to Megan and doing my best to ignore the predatory stares following us up the tiled steps to the front door of Andrew’s Riviera mansion, presided over by palm trees swaying against the night sky. “I never should have come. This is stupid. This is so stupid.”

  “Will you shut it?” she hissed.

  “We’re so stupid. We’re so fucking stupid.”

  “You’re stupid,” she said.

  I risked a glance behind me and saw a bunch of guys I didn’t recognize glance away and sip their red cups, and panic wrenched my heart. “They were staring at me . . . they were all staring at me.”

  “They’re staring at us,” she said.

  “They know.”

  “Because we look hot.”

  Okay, maybe.

  In the car I’d thrown on wedges and a silky black shirt with an open back. Megan had done my makeup.

  I shouldn’t have come.

  This was so stupid. Just a little get-together, my ass. This had to be half the school. What the hell, Andrew?

  We slipped through the front door into a brightly lit foyer. The light made me want to shrink. More eyes flicked in my direction, and my heart began to pound, my face flushed, I started breathing fast.

  I couldn’t be here.

  “Leona, sweet, you made it!” Andrew materialized out of the packed living room and gave me an awkward side hug. “There’s a couple kegs in the back. They’re almost tapped out, though.” He leaned in close, fumigating me with his beer breath. “But I got some Grey Goose upstairs in my room. Can’t pass that out to just anybody, you know what I mean? Come on, I’ll get you guys some—” He grabbed my hand and pulled me toward the stairs.

  Alarmed, I glanced back at Megan, who shrugged, as if to say, If you want to.

  I couldn’t do this.

  I shouldn’t have come here.

  He thought I was a normal girl. And when he found out I wasn’t, when he found out what I’d done . . .

  The thought terrified me.

  A door opened and a drunk girl stumbled into the foyer, emerging from a bathroom.

  Salvation.

  “Be right back—” I tugged my hand out of Andrew’s grip and veered into the bathroom before anyone else did, locking the handle behind me. Slumping against the door, I caught my breath, and the prickles of anxiety slowly ebbed from my limbs.

  At the sink, I splashed cold water on my face.

  I could do this. I could be normal.

  You have to act normal, or they’ll know.

  Just go with it.

  My reflection lurked somewhere in my periphery. Tentatively, I raised my head to look myself in the eye, and for a split-second, I did. For a split-second, my haunted face stared back at me.

  And I couldn’t bear the sight of it.

  YOU MURDERED HER!

  I gasped and flinched away. I had to leave. Now. Get out. Fumbling with the handle, I yanked open the door and staggered out into the crowd, going into full panic mode. I shoved toward the door. Elbows jostled me, I stumbled, tripped.

  Someone caught me, stood me back up. Andrew’s face swam in front of me. “Leona—” One look at me and his voice faltered. “Whoa, you okay?”

  “Let go . . . let go!” I broke free and ran to the door, to freedom.

  I never made it.

  A guy stepped in from outside, blocking the doorway. The porch lights outlined his blond hair like a halo and contoured the sharp jut of his cheekbones. I froze.

  Emory Lacroix.

  He stood there a moment, scanning the party, and then sauntered in, hands stuffed in a letterman jacket.

  And then our eyes met.

  Over the last two months, I had learned to carefully control my expression, maintaining a look of cold indifference so as not to give myself away. Bu
t this time I wasn’t ready. Staring at Emory Lacroix, I had no defenses.

  And he saw.

  In that instant, he saw right through my skin like I was translucent.

  Maybe if I had acted calm and said something like, Hey, Emory, I could have played it off.

  But I wasn’t calm.

  I took one look at him and I ran.

  He followed.

  I made it to the back door and had it halfway open, a sliver of freedom, before his weight crushed into my back and our combined weight slammed the door. I whipped around, darted to the left. His palms thudded into the wood on either side of my shoulders, trapping me between his arms. I went right, ducked out from underneath him. He caught me around the waist and shoved me back against the door, held me immobile by the wrists, panting heavily in my face.

  “Who killed my sister?” he growled.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said.

  “I think you do. I think you know something, but you’re too scared to tell me.” He glanced behind him, then hustled me into a back room—a tiny office—and slammed the door behind us, shutting out the sounds of the party. “Who killed her?”

  I swallowed hard and backed away from the door. My butt hit the edge of a desk, which I grabbed to steady myself, nudging aside a group of picture frames. They began to tip over like dominoes. I swung and tried to right them, but my jerky hands wreaked havoc among the frames. Finally, the whole bunch cascaded to the floor with a crash of broken glass.

  I inhaled sharply, suddenly woozy.

  “Maybe you can break some more stuff,” he said, nodding to a rack of blinking servers behind the desk. “Those look expensive.”

  I ignored his taunt and stooped to clean up the mess, grateful to have an excuse not to look at him.

  He watched me the entire time.

  As I picked up glass shards, my heart tugged in two different directions, galloping uphill. Part of me urgently needed to run, but part of me didn’t want to let him out of my sight. Part of me craved his nearness, as if to see just how close I could get to the raging fury in his heart before I got burned. Part of me wanted to stay and atone for my sins, and that part craved that he would guess the truth. That maybe I wouldn’t have to confess . . . maybe he would just know.