by Dan Rix
“Not on purpose.”
“Did you swallow it?”
“Yeah, I probably swallowed some too.”
My gaze went to the contact lens case, now capped, then back to Megan.
It was inside her.
In her throat, in her lungs, in her intestines.
“You’re so stupid,” I said. “You are so stupid.”
It’s inside you too, Leona.
“I don’t want to die,” Megan whimpered.
I reached for my pocket. “We have to call Major Connor.”
“No!” she shouted, grabbing my hand.
“Megan, we need to call him.”
She hesitated. “Okay. Call him. But don’t tell him I put it on.”
“No, I’ll let you tell him that yourself.” I dug out my phone, and almost dropped it. “Eugh, it’s sticky . . .” I passed it to my other hand, clutching it through my shirt, and wiped off my fingers, which felt like they were coated with honey. “How’d it get on my phone?”
Don’t tell him.
I jammed my thumbnail into the power button. The screen stayed black. “What the hell?”
“It’s always been on your phone,” said Megan.
Don’t tell him, Leona.
“Shut up.” I battled what felt like sticky tar, but only managed to spread the contamination to my shirt. “What is this crap? Why’s it so sticky? It was slippery before . . . Screw this.” I carried the phone to the kitchen, yanked out a trash bag, and dumped the phone. Next I yanked off my shirt, rolled it into a ball, and discarded it, then washed my hands with soap and water and went for the cordless.
Megan came and stood next to me, looking uncertain.
I dialed the cell number on the business card, but my finger halted at the last digit.
You need it, Leona.
Don’t tell him.
I shook the weird voice out of my head and pressed the last digit.
Major Rod Connor answered after two rings. “Connor here.” The deep voice of authority.
“Hi, uh . . . Major Connor . . . it’s Leona. Leona Hewitt.”
A pause. Did he even remember me? Why would he remember me? He probably visited fifty houses a day—No, he’d visited mine and Megan’s.
No one else’s.
Ours were the contaminated ones.
Finally, he cleared his throat and said, “Leona.”
“And Megan!” Megan shouted toward the receiver.
“Shh!” I said impatiently, shooing her away. “I was calling . . . we were calling because . . . because . . .”
I met Megan’s gaze. She was chewing her fingernails.
It can make you invisible, Leona.
You need it, Leona.
“Because what?” he said. An eagerness in his voice. I pictured him leaning forward at his desk in the Space and Missile Systems Center.
It reminded me of my conversation with Emory.
They’re not destroying it, they’re collecting it.
“Um . . .” I swallowed. “Never mind.”
And I hung up the phone.
Good, Leona . . . very good.
Megan stared at me. “You didn’t tell him.”
“I don’t know. Something didn’t feel right. Just . . . I don’t know. Let’s just try to contain it ourselves until we figure this out.” I yanked the cordless phone out of the wall socket and dumped it in the plastic bag, then headed back to the living room. “Come on, everything we’ve touched, it’s got to go . . . before this stuff leeches into our bodies and kills us.”
“Did you touch the remote?” Megan asked.
“I don’t remember,” I said.
“Did you watch TV?”
“I think so.”
“Then you touched the remote.” She threw it into a full bag, which she tied off and piled in the corner of the living room.
“I watched a movie, not TV,” I said, wrestling the couch cushion that had butted up against Megan’s phone into too-small a trash bag, like wrestling a whale. It brushed my bra.
God damnit.
Now I’d have to ditch that, too.
“The Blu-ray remote . . .” Megan dangled a second remote over a fresh trash bag and released it with relish. “Gone.”
I had started on the second cushion, but paused to watch her, wiping sweat off my forehead. She got to put it on, and I hadn’t.
Why hadn’t I thought of it first?
She flicked her hair out of her face and sprayed Windex on the glass top of the entertainment center, where the remote had been sitting, and wiped it down with a paper towel.
Connor’s men had had hazmat suits, paint remover, power saws.
We had napkins and Windex.
“You’re going to have to take a shower, too,” I said. “And then we have to do your house.”
“I know,” she said. “I’m not stupid.”
“I never said you were stupid.”
“Yes you did,” she said. “You said, ‘You’re so stupid. You are so stupid.’ That’s what you said.”
“I didn’t mean it.” I yanked the bag over the edge of the cushion, but too hard. It ripped. “You’ve called me stupid before too, you know.”
“Yeah . . . how about we not do that anymore?”
“Deal,” I said.
“And put a shirt on. You’re making me jealous.”
“You should be,” I teased back. “Actually, I don’t have any left.”
“Oh, how convenient, you little skank.”
“What’d you touch when you came in here?” I said.
“The doorknob.”
“I’ll get my dad’s toolbox,” I muttered, ditching the impossible cushion.
“And get bigger bags,” she said. “Those big black garbage bags.”
I made a detour to my bedroom on the way to the front door. Nothing much in there to contaminate, thankfully. Just the rug, which I grabbed, and The Great Gatsby—which I was happy to destroy.
And my backpack.
And my bedding.
And my remaining clothes.
Who were we kidding? This was going to be impossible.
I dragged on a tank top and ventured outside to the toolshed, where the cold nipped at my skin. The night sky tugged at my gaze. Somewhere up there, filling the huge voids between those billions and billions of stars, was a whole lot more of this stuff.
“The spare key—” I plucked it off the hook on my way back to the living room and tossed it in Megan’s growing pile of soiled paper towels. Then I went to work on the front door, unscrewing the doorknob and latch and extracting the dead bolt. I dumped the brass pieces in one of the new garbage bags.
The door swung on its hinges, no longer able to latch. Which meant we’d have to drive to Megan’s house with my front door swinging wide open.
“Do I have to clean my car?” said Megan.
I glanced up. “You drove here?”
“I wasn’t going to walk a mile butt naked,” she scoffed.
“I thought you had your special superhero suit on?”
“Shut up.”
“So if I was out there, I would have seen your car cruising along without anyone in the driver’s seat. That’s what you’re telling me?”
“Driverless technology. Google has it.”
“Was it hard to drive without being able to see yourself?”
“It’s weird looking down and not seeing your own legs. You feel like you’re floating. Why?” She gave me a knowing look. “You want to try it?”
“No,” I sad quickly. “I’m just curious.”
“Might as well get it over with,” she grumbled, scrubbing at the hardwood floor, “so we
don’t have to do this all over again.”
“What, you don’t think I’ll be able to resist?”
“Leona, you’re addicted to risk. I’m just trying to keep up and win a round. I know you won’t be able to resist.”
That shut me up. I heaved the rug into a bundle and stuffed in in a garbage bag, dark thoughts swirling through my brain.
“What movie did you watch?” she asked.
“Beauty and the Beast,” I muttered.
Megan slid the Blu-ray case from the collection and dropped it into the trash, which overflowed at her feet. She stared at it. “This feels oddly familiar.”
“What?”
“Cleaning up evidence when we should be going to the police.”
I stilled at her words. “This is different.”
But what she’d said hung uncomfortably in the air, drawing out the silence between us. I had to fill it. “Was your sister sad about her?”
“They were like best friends,” she said.
“It might not have been us,” I said. “I mean, it might not have been dark matter . . . that killed her. Who knows, maybe it’s not dangerous to living things.”
Megan swatted her loose hair and breathed out a sigh. “If only there was a way to test it, so we knew whether we had to get rid of it or not.”
I shook my head grimly. “It’s no use. We can’t possibly get it all. By now, we’ve touched everything in house. Let’s just put this stuff back and . . . I don’t know, we’ll keep an eye on it, see if it spreads. I don’t want my parents to freak out.”
“A test . . . ” Megan’s eyes brightened. “Why the hell are we even doing this? That’s a way better idea . . . a test.”
“That is so creepy,” said Megan, leaning over her bedroom terrarium, which contained Salamander the garden snake. The creature slithered around the bark chips, oblivious to its tail being gone—invisible, actually—and the fact that we were looking at a cross section of its reptilian stomach. “Well, if we ever need an X-ray . . .”
She had used an eyedropper to administer a drop of dark matter to its tail.
“Maybe making an invisible snake isn’t the best idea,” I said.
“It’s a garden snake, Leona. Completely harmless.”
“Until it slithers down your throat in the night and chokes you.”
“Yeah, because that’s exactly what snakes do. They crawl down your throat into a pool of stomach acid. Real smart.”
“Just saying.”
As the dark matter spread across the snake’s skin, the creature shrank before my eyes, giving the impression it was dissolving into nothing.
“Did it do that on you?” I asked. “Spread like that?”
“Yeah, once you coax it a little bit, it kind of gets the idea and keeps on spreading.”
“You’re talking about it like it’s alive.”
“So?”
“Stop that. It’s disturbing. It’s like Sarah said . . .” I stumbled over her name, my throat tight. “It’s like that grad student said. It’s in some kind of state where it has zero viscosity. The molecules or whatever it’s made of aren’t very attracted to each other, so it naturally spreads out. It’s just physics, okay?”
“Suit yourself, Einstein.”
By now, Salamander was just a disembodied green head zigzagging around the terrarium. We were seeing the quivering cross section of its neck now.
“He’s like, all muscle,” I said.
“It’s a she,” she corrected.
I gave a chuckle. “I always kind of thought a snake would be hollow. They’re not.”
“Obviously.”
“At least he doesn’t look like he’s in any pain,” I observed hopefully.
“She.”
“Why’d you name it Salamander?” I said. “It’s a snake.”
“Yeah, well, I wanted a salamander.”
“Clearly.”
“Don’t be mean,” she said.
We continued to watch, hovering over the terrarium. Then Salamander was just a tiny forked tongue, flicking in thin air. Then nothing. Woodchips continued to scoot around in its wake, the only clue to its presence.
“Now what?” said Megan.
“Now we wait, see how long it takes for it to drop dead.”
“She’s not going to drop dead.”
“That is so weird. I can’t believe you actually wore this stuff—” One of the fake plants up on a rock flicked to the side . . . climbing. “Close the lid, close it,” I said, my voice frantic. “I don’t want that thing in my bed.”
Megan rolled her eyes and slid the screen shut. “It’s a garden snake.”
“Yeah, and it’s invisible.” I watched the glass, my whole body tense, and only when I saw the bark stir at the bottom did I let myself relax.
Still in its cage.
“She committed suicide,” Megan said when I climbed into her car after school the next day. “That’s how she died.”
I knew instantly she meant Sarah, and a disturbing chill went down my spine. For some reason it didn’t surprise me. “Why?”
“No idea. The police found a note in her lab desk . . .” Megan rubbed her face as she pulled out into the mad Friday afterschool rush, parents gridlocking the intersection and cutting each other off to pick up their kids first. “It mentioned my sister.”
I sat in silence, my brain processing too slow. “Did it mention us?”
“Why would it?” she said, throwing me a sharp look.
“We were some of the last people to see her alive. What else did it say?”
“Don’t know,” said Megan.
“Huh.” I gazed out the window, feeling unsettled.
“So basically . . . I don’t think it was the dark matter,” Megan said firmly, as if that settled the matter. She nodded to herself, staring straight ahead. “I think it’s safe.”
“I thought she was poisoned?”
“Not by dark matter.”
“No, yesterday you said she was poisoned.”
“I don’t know everything, Leona. I’m just going by what my sister tells me, okay?” She accelerated up the onramp onto 101 South.
“Turn around,” I said suddenly. “We need to go see her.”
“Her grave?”
“Your sister. We need to see the note.”
Megan gave me a sideways glance. “Why?”
“Because she was happy,” I said. “The last time we saw her, she was happy. She was excited. She was talking about a Nobel prize.”
“Who cares, Leona? It wasn’t us.”
“I’m not saying it was us,” I said hotly. “I’m just saying it’s weird.”
“Isn’t that what guilty people do?” said Megan. “They get obsessed with the victim. Isn’t that what you’ve been saying this whole time?”
“Megan, turn around,” I ordered. “We’re not running away from this too.”
She slammed the steering wheel. “Fine!”
So we exited the freeway and got back on heading north, toward UCSB and her sister’s apartment in Isla Vista.
“What is dark matter, anyway?” said Megan.
“Here, I’ll look it up on Wikipedia . . .” I pulled out my phone, navigated to the page, and started reading. “Dark matter is one of the greatest mysteries in modern astrophysics. It cannot be seen directly with telescopes; evidently it neither emits nor absorbs light or other electromagnetic radiation at any significant level . . . yada yada yada . . . dark matter is estimated to constitute 84.5% of the total matter in the Universe.”
“Wow. That told me absolutely nothing,” said Megan.
“That’s because they don’t know what it is,” I said defensively.
“How can t
hey know about it and not know what it is?”
“Look, there’s the elements, right?” I said, trying to explain it to her. “Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen. Everything on earth is made out of elements, which are made out of protons and neutrons and electrons. Everything that we see on earth that has mass is made out of those things. But dark matter, it has mass, but it’s not made out of those things. No one knows what it’s made out of, or if it’s even made out of anything. That’s why it’s so weird.”
“Huh,” she said.
“Look, it says here . . .” I scanned the article for the line I’d read earlier. “Here—‘According to consensus among cosmologists, dark matter is composed primarily of a not yet characterized type of subatomic particle. The search for this particle, by a variety of means, is one of the major efforts in particle physics today.’ See, no one knows what it is.”
“Apparently, you do,” she said mockingly.
“I’m just saying it fits the bill, okay?” I said wearily. “It’s invisible, and it’s made out of something no one has seen before. That’s what Sarah said, remember? She said it was brand new physics.”
“Yeah, whatever,” said Megan.
The rest of the fifteen minute drive passed in tense silence.
Isabelle Barker met us at the door to a dilapidated two-bedroom apartment overlooking crashing waves, which she shared with seven other girls—two bunk beds in each room.
Isabelle accepted her sister’s hug gratefully. “Hi Meg . . . Leona.” She rubbed her puffy eyes and waved us inside, and I felt a pang of guilt.
Would it be like me losing Megan?
I couldn’t fathom the thought.
Inside, trash bags and red cups littered the stained carpet, which reeked of day-old alcohol.
“Leona has a question for you,” Megan said rudely, nodding to me with crossed arms. “Leona?”
Her insensitivity earned her a glare. “Uh, yeah . . .” I coughed, and cleared my throat. “When did you hear about it?”
Isabelle sniffled. “Yesterday. I . . . I still can’t believe it. She’s, she’s . . . she’s gone.”
I swallowed hard. “How did she . . . you know . . . how did she kill herself?”
