Translucent

by Dan Rix

  Just empty rooms. Night outside. In a window, I glimpsed my own ghostly reflection and nearly had a heart attack.

  Suddenly, I didn’t want to be alone.

  Hands trembling, I dug out my cell phone and called Megan. Maybe she could come over after her thing, or maybe I could meet her at her house.

  Phone pressed to my clammy cheek, I listened to one ring . . . two rings . . . three rings . . .

  My heart felt sick. She was busy. She’d told me she was busy. She wouldn’t pick up. Should I call my parents? No use. They would have their cell phones turned off in the lecture hall.

  Before it went to voicemail, I lowered the phone, dread pooling in my stomach.

  Another sound pricked my ears.

  A faint buzzing. From the living room.

  Huh?

  I raced back into the living room and paused in the doorway, panting. My eyes honed in on the source, the couch, and I went after it like a bloodhound. The cushions, wedged down between them. Coins, popcorn kernels . . . and a smartphone.

  It was buzzing.

  I stared at the camo case, my unease growing, and flipped it over to see my own picture on the screen—an incoming call—before the call went to voicemail.

  The phone fell silent in my hand.

  Megan’s phone.

  I set it on the coffee table, feeling hopeless. It must have fallen out of her pocket last time she was over. Now I couldn’t call anybody.

  But wait . . .

  I had texted her a few hours ago to see if she wanted to hang out. She had texted me back—on this phone—saying she was busy. What was it doing here?

  A door slammed.

  I jerked upright, startled. Then I heard footsteps in the dining room. There was someone in the house—a burglar—and they were walking brazenly into the living room.

  My pulse took off into the stratosphere. I watched the doorway, waiting for a shadow to appear. The creaking footsteps came closer, and closer, and closer . . . so close they sounded like they were in the living room, then inside my head. I backed up, bumped the couch, and scuttled around to the wall, slid along it. The footsteps crossed the living room, gaining speed, coming straight at me.

  My breath froze in my throat.

  There was something else in the room with me.

  I saw nothing.

  The footsteps pounded closer, and I shut my eyes, wincing against an attack. The footsteps stopped abruptly, leaving only silence. My own thundering heartbeat. My eyelids opened a crack. Nothing. No sign of it. Gasping, I glanced around the room.

  I was alone.

  What the hell? I exhaled slowly and slid to the floor, every nerve buzzing with adrenaline. No one here, no one here, no one here.

  Just me, just me—

  From out of the empty air spoke a silky voice. “Leona, it’s me . . . Ashley Lacroix . . . remember that night you murdered me?”

  I screamed.

  Chapter 10

  I will always remember that night.

  A thousand times I’d replayed it in my mind, wishing I could go back and undo it, rewind all the way to that sudden impulse to shake Megan awake and say those six words, “Want to go for a drive?”

  “Drive . . . drive . . . ?” Her eyes focused, then widened. “You can drive!” She shimmied out of her sleeping bag.

  The clock on the Blu-ray player read 12:40 a.m.

  July 1.

  “But if your parents catch us, you’re taking the heat,” she said.

  “They’ll never know.” I grabbed my keys, already sliding on my shoes. “It’s so crazy that I can actually do this now . . . legally. I can drive off in the middle of the night without anyone’s permission.”

  “Road trip,” she said, grinning.

  “We’re definitely planning one tomorrow.”

  Outside, hands shaking with excitement, I slid my key into the ignition and started the Corolla. The engine purred, and a bunch of instrument lights came into view. The sight made me giddy.

  My own car.

  And as of yesterday, I had a license.

  “I can’t believe they bought you a car,” said Megan, voice tinged with envy.

  “Hey, they said if I got straight A’s last year, they’d buy me a car.” I pulled into the street, taking it slow at first. I’d aced the driving test by being careful, and still had all those bad habits.

  “So we’re saying fuck you to the probationary period, right?” said Megan. “You know, no driving anyone under twenty-five for the first six months?”

  “Oh, come on. No one follows that rule. I don’t even think cops know about that rule.” I hit the accelerator, and the mighty Corolla revved up and pressed me back into my seat. Dark houses whooshed by.

  “It’s a Corolla, Leona. Not a Corvette.”

  “I’m going to take it up Foothill, see how fast this baby can go.”

  “Mind if I pack a bowl?”

  “Go ahead.” I drummed the steering wheel, feeling a rising thrill as the needle climbed past thirty, then forty. I had a license . . . holy shit, I actually had a license! I turned onto Foothill Road and floored it. The black asphalt curved away from me, completely deserted at this hour, hardly any stoplights. With some reluctance, the car crept up to forty-five. Bright white paint stripes slithered out of the night, gleamed in my headlights for a moment, and vanished behind me.

  Freedom.

  Next to me, Megan extracted weed from a plastic bag and packed her pipe, then held a lighter flame up to the bowl. Instantly, the smell of marijuana filled the car.

  “There goes the new car smell,” I muttered.

  “I’m christening it.” She handed me the pipe, which I waved away.

  Trying to smoke less these days. But the smell of marijuana conjured up old memories. “Actually, why the hell not?” I was feeling good.

  I took the pipe from her, plugged the carb hole, and inhaled. The smoke burned deep in my lungs, but I held it in, then let it out slowly with only a small cough.

  We passed it back and forth, and the high crept up on me like sleep until I lost track of my own thoughts.

  Instead, the needle of the speedometer occupied a great deal of my attention.

  Fifty miles per hour.

  The purr of my new car brought out my sense of daring. “Let’s see how fast this baby can go,” I said. The pedal bottomed out under my toes, and the car raced around a curve.

  A red light glowed ahead.

  “Leona!” Megan shouted.

  I slammed on the brakes, and the car shuddered to a stop just shy of the line. “Brake check.” I peered left, then right. Two abandoned residential streets. No one about.

  The light turned green, and we glided forward.

  The needle climbed past forty, then fifty, then sixty. The car began to lean around the curves, barely holding on. All I could focus on was the thrill, nothing else.

  “Let me get another hit,” I said.

  Megan offered me the pipe again, but this time I missed the handoff. The glass struck my fingers and bounced from my grip, tipping hot ashes into my lap.

  I shrieked and tore my eyes off the road, swerved a little as I swatted at the red coals burning through my jeans.

  “Crap . . . sorry,” she said.

  The coals tumbled onto the upholstery, leaving back welts. “You idiot,” I gasped, frantically snuffing them out. “You spilled coals all over my new seats.”

  She leaned in to help. “Sorry, sorry, sorry . . .”

  I checked to make sure we were still following the curve of the road, then began picking the coals out one by one, ignoring the burns.

  Megan sat up. “Uh, Leona . . .”

  “No more smoking in my car, okay?”
<
br />   “Leona, Leona . . . STOP!”

  I jolted upright and squinted out the windshield, just as a figure materialized out of the night, bathed in the glow of my headlights.

  An angel . . . white skin, long blonde hair, white robes.

  Just standing in the middle of the road.

  I crushed my toe into the brakes.

  The car slowed, and my insides were thrown forward . . . followed by the sickening realization that I wasn’t going to stop in time. My headlights blazed over her.

  Not an angel.

  Just a girl in pajamas, eyes wide open, staring straight ahead in some kind of vacant trance.

  Then . . . WHAM!

  The sound of metal impacting flesh.

  A sound I would never, ever forget.

  The ghost of Ashley Lacroix.

  She had come for me.

  I stared at nothing, just my empty living room, lost in mind-numbing horror. An invisible hand closed around my neck. I closed my eyes and shrank back against the wall, waiting for death.

  But the hand didn’t squeeze.

  Instead I heard laughter, and the hand let go.

  The voice changed. “Leona, I’m kidding!”

  And now I recognized it.

  Megan.

  In that moment, my brain did one complete cycle, connecting all the dots at lightning speed. Her text earlier saying she was busy, her cell phone wedged between the cushions, the spare key swinging on the hook, Megan rubbing her fingers together at some point—it grows in the presence of human tissue—the way it could be stretched around objects like the eraser, the nail, rendering them invisible.

  Dark matter.

  She was wearing it.

  “Megan?” I gasped. My eyes darting around the room, unable to glimpse even a hint of her outline.

  A line of skin appeared in thin air, hovering five feet off the ground. It widened into a nose, a cheek, an eye, then a grinning mouth, as she peeled back the dark matter. Her hair came loose next, swinging freely. She extracted her arms from an invisible sleeve, then went to work on her shoulders as if shimmying out of a very tight leotard.

  She got down to her collar bone, and hesitated. “Can I borrow some clothes?” she said.

  I gaped at her floating head and shoulders, mesmerized. “What?”

  “I’m naked underneath. That was the only way it would go on. It doesn’t go on over fabric very well.”

  “Yet you brought your cell phone?”

  “I made it invisible too, but then you called, so I unwrapped it and—”

  “Buried it between the seat cushions, I know.” I fetched her some clothes, and she peeled off the rest.

  Finally, dressed in a T-shirt and sweats, her skin bright pink like she’d just showered, she unstuck the last bit of dark matter from her pinky toe and rolled it into an invisible ball between her fingers. “You still have that case?”

  “How much is there?” I said. “In your hand . . . how much did it take to wrap you?”

  “It’s not even that much,” she said, holding it up. “Like a marble’s worth. I just started pulling it down my arm, and it kept stretching and sticking to my skin. I thought it would break, but it didn’t.”

  I got the contact lens case, and she deposited her droplet of dark matter in the bowl for the left eye. Next to mine. Right and left eyes.

  Mine and hers.

  “And you could see?” I asked.

  “It’s invisible, of course I could see.”

  “That doesn’t even make sense,” I said, folding my arms. “If light’s passing right through you, then it can’t be hitting your eyeball.”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know, I’m not a physicist.”

  “That was really, really mean, Megan.”

  “Yeah, it was supposed to be funny . . . sorry.”

  I rolled my eyes. “In what universe is that funny? Making yourself invisible and pretending to be the girl I murdered? How is that fucking funny?”

  “You are so missing the point,” she said. “Did you see that? I was invisible. I was invisible, Leona. We can make ourselves invisible!”

  I shook my head. “Don’t ever do that again.”

  She sighed and shook out her hair. “Why did I have the feeling this was exactly how you’d react?”

  “I’m serious, Megan.”

  “Okay. I’ll knock next time and ask for candy. Trick-or-treat.”

  “No, don’t put it on,” I said firmly. “Don’t touch it, don’t play with it. Don’t look at it. We don’t know what its chemical properties are, so we don’t know what it does to skin. Look at you. You’re all pink. That’s a sign of irritation. It was irritating your skin.”

  “Oh come on, I have skin creams that do worse.”

  “How can you be so cavalier?” I said, my voice rising. “This stuff—whatever it is, dark matter or whatever—it’s not normal.”

  “You’re just jealous,” she taunted.

  “I’m not jealous.”

  “Yeah, you’re jealous. Because I came up with the idea first.”

  “You’re jealous,” I said hotly. “The fact that you even thought I would be jealous means you’re jealous. That’s psychology, for your information, Megan.”

  “Leona, I was invisible. I was invisible.”

  “So go rob a bank. See if I care.”

  “Wow, you are jealous,” she said.

  “I’m not jealous,” I spat. “I’m . . . I’m angry. Because you’re being stupid and reckless, just like at the beginning of summer, and that’s why we hit her in the first place, you fucking stoner.” The words tasted like acid, and I regretted them immediately.

  Hurt flashed in her eyes. “Oh, now we’re blaming that on me? Now we’re blaming the whole thing on me?”

  “Megan, I didn’t mean that. I’m sorry.”

  She turned away, and I thought she might cry. But Megan didn’t cry. Megan never cried. “It’s too late. You already said it.”

  “Megan . . .” I touched her arm.

  She shook me off. “I just wanted to have something that was my own,” she said softly. “It’s like this with everything we do. You’re crazy and you jump right into danger and then you own it, and it’s like I’m just your dumb sidekick. And I finally do something first, I finally do something brave, and you take a big dump all over it.”

  “Megan, I’m sorry,” I begged.

  “I actually feel like I was meant to wear this stuff. Just having it on makes me braver, it feels like I’m wearing a shield. I don’t know, there’s this connection . . .” She looked up. “It feels like I’m a superhero and this is my suit.”

  Her words gave me chills. But before I could respond, a buzzing from the couch distracted us.

  Megan was getting another call.

  “Get it,” I said. “It’s probably Sarah.”

  “No, it’s my sister.” She took the call. “Hey.”

  Her sister’s tinny voice hissed from the other end. Something about her tone set off alarms in my brain, even though I couldn’t make out the words.

  Something was wrong.

  “Yeah, we saw her just a few days ago,” said Megan. “Why?”

  I edged closer.

  “What?” Megan’s face went into shock, and she turned her back to me. “When? Oh God . . . yeah, no . . . thanks for calling.”

  She ended the call, her expression troubled.

  “Everything okay?” I said.

  She stared blankly at her phone. “It was about Sarah.”

  A quiver ran through my heart. “Is . . . is she okay?”

  “No, she’s . . . she’s . . .”

  “Yeah?” I croaked.

  Finally Megan look
ed up at me. “She’s dead.”

  Chapter 11

  “How?” I said, surprised at the calm in my voice. “How did it happen?”

  “They think she was poisoned, and that’s it . . . that’s all they know. She died in the hospital . . .” Megan trailed off, and we stared at each other for a second.

  Then our eyes widened.

  “The dark matter,” I breathed.

  “She drank it,” said Megan.

  A terrible lump rose in my throat. “Wait, wait, let’s just think. Maybe it was something else.”

  Another girl dead, because of us.

  I couldn’t bear it.

  “She dipped it in her cup and drank it,” Megan said. “We tried to stop her, but she drank it.”

  “Let’s just think, let’s just think,” I said, running my fingers through my hair and down the back of my neck. “We just need to think.”

  “We tried to stop her, right?”

  I looked at Megan. “It didn’t . . . it didn’t do anything to you, did it?”

  Her face paled. “I wore it.”

  “But you’re fine, right?”

  She shook her head, a haunted look coming over her eyes, which slid to the pink, puffy skin on her forearms. She touched her wrists, leaving white spots of discoloration.

  “Megan . . . you’re fine, right?”

  “I don’t know!” she cried.

  “We all touched it. Maybe it’s only if you ingest it. I mean, you only wore it for a little bit, right?”

  Her terrified gaze met mine. “I put it in my mouth.”

  “What? Why?” My jaw fell open. “Why would you do that?”

  “I had to,” she said. “When I stretched it over my face, it’s like having a plastic bag over your mouth. I couldn’t breathe. I kind of freaked out, and I couldn’t get it off, and I accidentally inhaled it. It’s weird, it coats the inside of your mouth, and you feel it crawling down your throat, and then you can breathe again. Because it has to coat everything.”

  “You inhaled it,” I said in disbelief.