Dark Parties

by Sara Grant

  “It’s not what you think,” I blurt. But it’s exactly what she thinks.

  She glares at me. “How could you?” she says again so quietly I can barely hear her, yet her words boom in my ears. Her anger has given way to tears. Her whole body is shaking. She looks from Braydon to me. She staggers between us and springs forward. She falls, spitting gravel with her feet. Braydon and I rush to her, but she’s up and running before we can reach her. She races out the gate. The sun has dipped behind the horizon and the last light is slipping away.

  I grab Braydon’s arm. “Let me go.”

  He nods.

  “What have we done?” I ask myself more than him. I don’t realize until he pulls away that I was digging my fingernails into his arm.

  “We can’t help how we feel,” Braydon says, eyes still fixed on the last spot we saw Sanna.

  “But we can help what we do.” The urge to kiss him was overwhelming, but there were a million tiny choices between my thoughts and actions when I could have stopped. I should have stopped. One selfish moment and I’ve lost my best friend.

  I run though the gate and strain to see which direction she went. I see her, still running, pumping her arms and kicking her legs as hard as she can. The look on her face when she discovered us kissing is emblazoned on my brain and will never, ever be erased. As I stretch each stride as far as my legs can go and swing my arms in high arcs, I know that I have ruined my relationship with Sanna forever. Even if she can forgive me, she will never forget. Even if she can forgive me, I can never forgive myself.

  My lungs are burning and my legs are slowing from a sprint into a jog and then to a walk. I clutch the pain in my side. In the half light of dusk, I can make out a blur on the road ahead of me. Sanna is still running.

  I force myself to keep moving through the pain. I’ve got to reach Sanna. I’ve got to make her understand.

  Sanna’s slowing, and I’m gaining on her. She’s walking now in brisk, wide strides.

  I stop when I’m in touching distance of her. “Sanna,” I say, but she doesn’t stop, doesn’t turn around. “Sanna,” I repeat, keeping my distance.

  “Leave me alone!” she shouts.

  “Sanna, please, talk to me,” I call to her.

  She whips around and glares at me with hard, cold eyes. “So talk.”

  But I can’t. I can see Sanna clearly, but everything around us has faded to black. My skin prickles with fear. The darkness threatens to devour me.

  “Talk.” She takes a step toward me. “Talk!” she screams, and pushes me in the chest. The force of her propels me back a few steps, but she keeps coming. “Talk!” she screams, and shoves me back. “How could you?” She beats her fist on my chest. I wrap my arms around her, but her fists still pulse against my chest.

  “I am so sorry.” I don’t know what else to say. I repeat it over and over. She is sobbing into my shoulder. I am terrified of this nothingness that surrounds us and of losing Sanna.

  Slowly her cries subside. “Why?” she whispers in a voice drained of any energy.

  I shrug.

  She reinflates and pushes me away. “Why, Nev?” she asks again, somehow regaining her strength.

  “I’m sorry,” I say to the cracked pavement beneath my feet.

  “Oh, I know you’re sorry.” Her tone is hard. “He’s everything to me. You’re my best friend for God’s sake.”

  “It just happened.” But we both know that’s a lie. Nothing just happens. Car crashes take two people making a series of decisions that will end in a collision. Even death takes a final breath and a surrender.

  “You’ll have to do better than that,” she says, her glare burning into me. “Is this the first time?”

  I shake my head.

  “God!” she shouts, and her voice fills the darkness. “Are you two seeing each other?”

  “No!” Pure hatred is radiating from her. “No,” I say louder. “We accidentally kissed in the dark.”

  “At the Dark Party? Is that what you mean? You’ve been going behind my back—”

  “No, it’s not like that. We kissed and… I don’t know… we felt something for each other.”

  “You felt something for each other.” She mocks me.

  “It’s hard to explain.”

  “Try.”

  “We’ve tried to stay away from each other—”

  “Oh, you’ve tried,” she cries. “Seems like you two suck at that.”

  “We didn’t mean to… we just…” I give up. There is no explanation. “We never wanted to hurt you. It meant nothing.” It meant everything.

  “Then why did you do it? How could you take Braydon away from me?”

  “I haven’t taken anything from you.” It takes all my energy to say, “You can make up with Braydon. You can forgive him.”

  She stares into the darkness for a long time. “I intend to try. I love him, Nev.”

  I take a huge breath. Maybe this can be okay with time. “Can you forgive me?”

  She sort of smiles and, for a second, I think everything will be okay.

  “Sanna?” I prompt when she doesn’t respond.

  “No,” she says quietly. “I will never forgive you.”

  I shatter into a thousand pieces.

  “I hate you. I never want to see you again.” She speaks each word clearly. The words seem to reverberate in the silent night air. She walks away.

  “Don’t leave me, Sanna,” I say, feeling the darkness closing in. She keeps walking.

  I’m frozen with fear. I hear a low rumble. Suddenly Braydon is beside me on his motorcycle. “Are you okay?” he asks.

  “Go make things right with Sanna.” I hug myself.

  “Neva, I don’t want Sanna.”

  I back up so that he can’t reach me. He’s balanced on his motorcycle, and he has to turn at an awkward angle to see me now.

  “Go!” I shout. I run in the opposite direction—away from Braydon and Sanna.

  The roar of his motorcycle draws my attention. I watch Sanna climb onto Braydon’s bike. She wraps her arms and curves her body around him. They ride away. A sliver of the moon is breaking through the projected clouds. The light seems to reflect in the pavement, illuminating a path through the darkness.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY

  I walk for minutes, hours. I don’t know. The patter of my feet on the pavement is the only sound. I think I can see a real star glinting off the Protectosphere. It’s only a dot of light. My grandma said that in the right light, if you focus your eyes, you can get a glimpse of what’s behind the Protectosphere. One night like tonight, she took me outside. The moon was only a yellowing, hazy crescent barely visible through the Protectosphere. We laid on our backs in the wet grass. She led my finger to the fuzzy spots of light in the night sky.

  Skywriting with my finger, she’d say, “That’s a star. And another. There’s another.” She said her grandma used to call them by name. “And there”—she looped my finger in a circle—“can you see it? It’s just there.” I told her I could. But I hadn’t really seen the stars. I’d always thought we’d imagined them together. I wanted to see them, so they were there. We’re told that the Protectosphere is clear, but Grandma always said that the sky’s not as clear as it was when she was a little girl. She said the real sky is endless. I never understood endless. Everything in my life has limits. But tonight in this darkness, I’m sure I can see real stars. And tonight I almost understand a place without end. I’m in an endless night with no job, no friends, and no future.

  Two round points of light pierce the darkness. They grow bigger like eyes getting wider and wider. The light swallows the darkness until I am bathed in light. I squint and shade my eyes. The lights stop in front of me.

  “Neva Adams, is that you?” the light seems to ask. I wonder if this is death coming for me. I would go with death tonight.

  The light is extinguished and I see the shape of an old electric car, much older than the one my dad has. A figure emerges and
comes toward me. “Neva Adams?” it asks.

  I nod.

  “You’re to come with me.” A man in a police uniform seems to materialize from the dark. “I’ve come to take you home.” He opens the passenger-side door.

  “How did you find me?” No one except Sanna and Braydon know where I am.

  “Get in the car and I’ll take you home.” His voice is low but not unfriendly.

  I don’t know how he found me. They must be watching me. The thought doesn’t scare me anymore. I am a rag doll, just skin and stuffing, no brain or backbone to hold me up. I could disappear into the night forever. No one would know why or how. I get into the car. I don’t care.

  He starts the car and we take off toward the City. “It’s not safe for a girl like you to be walking alone at night in the middle of nowhere,” he says, as if he knows what lurks in the dark. The hum of the road and the officer’s deep voice lull me to sleep.

  “Neva, wake up.”

  I wake with a start and scramble away from the man in black. I am surprised to see that we are parked in front of my house. I hop out of the car. He drives off almost before I am on the sidewalk. Dad’s car is not parked in the driveway. My house is dark. When I go inside, I call out for Mom and check every room. She’s not home either. I try not to let my imagination lead me anywhere that has me adding my mom’s name to The Missing.

  I notice a blue envelope on the hall table with my name and address printed clearly on it. I don’t recognize the handwriting. That’s strange. I don’t usually get mail. Almost nobody does anymore. I’ve heard the government plans to phase out paper mail in a few months. The envelope is pieced together with tape. Names have been crossed out. Overlapping labels reveal its history.

  As I walk to my bedroom, I slip my fingernail under the freshly applied tape. I pull out a postcard. The picture on the front is like something from Dad’s ancient history books—the ocean and sky are a crystal blue and the sand on the beach a sparkling white. It’s as if they have airbrushed the Protectosphere out. You can’t see the red glow at the water line, warning you to stay back.

  I flip the postcard over. “Time to soar, my little snowflake!” is written on the back. The hairs on the back of my neck prickle. There is no signature, but I know who it’s from. Everything in me swells with renewed hope. It can’t be. But I need it to be, more than ever. I turn the card over in my hands, searching for more confirmation.

  My grandma sent me this. I don’t know how, but she did. Tears collect in my lashes. She is alive! I laugh and cry, overwhelmed.

  In the bottom corner is tomorrow’s date and a time. There’s no meeting place. I suppose she had to be careful. The message says, Time to soar. I know where she’ll be, the place she taught me to fly.

  I’ve received a message from my long-lost grandma. Maybe she wasn’t erased after all. Maybe she ran away. Maybe she’s been hiding for the past ten years. I can’t believe it. It’s what I’ve wished for. She will help me clean up the mess I’ve made of my life. She’s cast a bright light in my darkest hour.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-ONE

  I’m standing on a pedestrian bridge in the middle of the river in the center of the City in a bubble that protects me from the outside and the outside from me. The bells of the big clock tower chime eleven times. I count the off-key notes one by one. No one knows how to fix them anymore. Bellsmiths, or whatever they might have once been called, were reassigned to socially necessary tasks. So, every hour on the hour, the clanking flat tones ring out to remind us that all is not well.

  Grandma and I came here after Grandpa died. We stood here with artificially generated wind in our faces and our arms open wide as if we had wings. She explained that if we only looked up and out that we could pretend we were flying. So we stood there, touching the fingertips of our outstretched hands. She would bring me here whenever I needed to talk or she wanted to tell me more of her secrets.

  Now I tilt my head upward. A flock of birds is flying overhead, twisting and untying themselves as they glide high above. I raise my arms, hoping Grandma will come soon and fly with me. But after a few minutes, I feel silly. My arms begin to ache and the illusion of flight is gone.

  There is a group of school kids walking hand in hand across the bridge. Two men in business suits rest against the opposite rail and talk quickly as if they each already know the dialogue they will deliver. Farther down, a couple is kissing. I scan the length of the bridge. There is no one who could be my grandma, unless she’s disguised as a teenager wearing roller boots, vibrating as she rolls over the metal grid floor. I haven’t seen roller boots for a while. Sanna used to have a pair until she sold them when she was ten to bail out her brother when he got arrested the first time he ran away from his guardians.

  I check my watch. Nearly fifteen minutes have passed. Worry stirs my insides. Could I have been wrong about the location? The postcard said, Time to soar. This has to be the spot. It just has to. I’m getting warm. I unzip my gray sweater and tie it around my waist. I rub my snowflake necklace between my fingers. Maybe Grandma will recognize the necklace if she doesn’t recognize me.

  I try to remain calm. I practice what I’ll say to her. I think of all the things that have happened since she left. She’s going to show up. She’s got to. But with every passing minute, I begin to doubt. No one else—not even my mom—knows that this was our special place. No one but my parents know she used to call me snowflake.

  Sanna and I are supposed to meet Senga and Carson at noon at the Square. I haven’t decided if I’m going to go or not. I don’t want to see Braydon, and I’m sure Sanna doesn’t want to see me. I thought maybe Grandma and I could go together. I started to call Sanna a hundred times this morning. I picked up the phone and even dialed the first few numbers, but I couldn’t go through with it. Even if Sanna would talk to me, I don’t know what else I could say.

  Grandma is thirty minutes late. What if I missed her? What if she was at the other end of the bridge waiting for me? What if this was a trap to catch my grandma, and I’m the bait? What if the police spotted her and remembered her from years ago when they erased her? I pace in an ever-widening loop until I have walked the length of the bridge three times. The businessmen, the only constant occupants of the bridge, start to stare. One even asks me if I’m okay. “Yeah. Yeah,” I say, but I can’t focus on him because I’m searching for her. I keep walking.

  I’m so busy looking behind me that I walk right into an old man. He grunts and his cane clatters to the floor. The force of our impact causes him to lean against the rail.

  “I’m so sorry,” I say, picking up his wooden cane. He straightens his brown tweed jacket with lighter brown patches on the elbows. It takes a few seconds before he reaches for his cane. He smiles, giving his wrinkles wrinkles. He’s bald. The sun is bouncing off his skin and I can see tiny hairs scattered across the surface of his scalp. You don’t see many men this old anymore.

  “That’s all right, young lady,” he replies, but I can see it’s not. He rests his hand over his heart. He is taking slow deep breaths and I watch his chest rise and fall.

  “Would you like to sit down?” I ask, but then I scan the bridge and realize that there’s nowhere for him to sit.

  “Yes, that would be nice.”

  I wrap my arm around his shoulders. “You could sit on the top of the stairs or I could walk down with you and we could sit on a bench by the riverside.” We are already walking toward the stairs.

  “Ah, a chat by the riverside would be lovely,” he says.

  I hesitate at the top of the stairs and look around one more time. My grandma’s not coming. I choke back my disappointment. It’s as if I’ve lost her all over again.

  “Something the matter, dear?” he asks when he feels me resist.

  “No, I’m sorry.” We take the first step down together. “It’s just I was waiting for someone and she never showed.”

  “Oh, that’s too bad,” he says, and takes the next few steps m
uch quicker. “You need to be careful,” he says when we reach the bottom.

  “I’m sorry. I really am. I wasn’t watching where I was going. I hope you are okay. I—”

  He squeezes my hand to stop the flow of apologies. He’s got deep brown eyes with the same sparkle Ethan used to have. “I think I’m being watched.”

  Great. Not only am I not seeing my grandma today, but I’m stuck with some nutty, paranoid old man. I try to pull away, but he squeezes my hand tighter. “I knew your grandma,” he whispers.

  My knees buckle and I lean into him to regain my balance. He’s a rock and doesn’t budge under my weight.

  “Walk me over to that bench. Let’s take our time.” We shuffle forward. “When your grandma left, I was supposed to go with her. But when the time came, I just couldn’t. I was too scared. I was so stupid.” He smiles his warm wrinkly smile. “She talked about you all the time.”

  “You sent me the postcard?”

  He nods. “When she left, she gave me the postcard with instructions to mail it to you when the government renovated the Protectosphere again. I’ve just learned that plans are already underway and the renovation will begin soon.”

  Maybe that’s why the police are twitchy, like Sanna’s brother said. Maybe it’s also somehow connected to Senga and Carson’s resistance. Maybe it’s why my dad had all those meetings. I want to stop and take it all in, but he keeps coaxing me forward.

  “She wants you to join her.” He slowly lowers himself onto the bench.

  “Join her where?”

  “Out there.” He points skyward. “Outside the Protectosphere.”

  I plop down on the bench next to him. Is he for real?

  He pulls me close. I’m surprised by the iron grip. “In four days, meet at the Capitol Complex at midnight.” He pauses and looks around.

  “Here.” He slips an envelope from his jacket pocket into my hand. He holds my hand with the envelope close to his chest. “Do not read this now. Hide it. Find somewhere safe to read it, and then destroy the letter. It’s from your grandma. She trusted me and so can you.”