I could have kissed him right then. Instead, I let myself smile and said, “Thanks.”
Gabriel continued handing out beers, one after another like cookies at a blood drive until Abandoned Nova Brigade’s first song galloped from the crackly speakers and everyone’s attention turned. I held my post next to him. Sometime after our set Lynn had vanished, and I hoped she was sleeping—in the loft, maybe, or out in someone’s car—but I couldn’t deny that without her, I felt like I didn’t belong.
I leaned toward Gabriel and yelled into his ear. “I think I’m going to go.”
“It’s still early,” he argued.
I shrugged, and gave him a hug. “I’ll see you around, all right?”
“Yeah, okay,” Gabriel said, sounding genuinely disappointed. “I’ll see you.”
I squeezed him one last time before letting go.
Outside, the sky was that dusky shade of purple it becomes when there are too many lights and a thick, low-hanging shroud of smog—the kind of sky that never feels dark enough. I headed down the parking lot toward my mother’s car, pulling out my phone to text Nick. I wish you were here, I would say. Or, I still mean every word I said. Then I remembered my phone was broken.
I’d only just rounded the corner when I became aware of voices—or, more accurately, a single voice. I couldn’t make out what she was saying but I quickly recognized the sharp strain of her tone, the note of panic. Only once before had I heard Lynn’s voice rise with such reckless distress: the day her father came back from the dead.
Guided by the sound, I crept closer. I hid in the shadows and crouched behind cars until, finally, I spotted her. She was facing away from me. I couldn’t see who she was talking to so I snuck forward, careful to remain in the dark, and there, visible over the hood of the car, stood Luke.
“Just tell me why,” she said. Her voice was high-pitched. Unstable.
“We’re not together,” Luke said sternly. He dragged on his cigarette, smoke writhing up from his fingers. “We haven’t been for months.”
“That hasn’t stopped you from sleeping with me.”
My heart detonated. Luke’s mouth moved in response but my ears had become clogged with hot air. I leaned farther over the hood, my face dipping into the brume of light as I struggled to hear.
“Do you have feelings for her?” Lynn demanded.
He flicked a speck of tobacco from his lips before saying, “No.”
“Why, then?”
“Why does it matter?”
“Because I love you,” she cried. “Don’t you fucking get that?”
Some small aversion unsettled Luke’s face, and I knew he didn’t love her back. Maybe he had at some point, before they’d been consigned to whatever they were now, a secret played out in parking lots and the back rooms of parties. But it was obvious as he glanced up, to the side, anywhere other than Lynn, that all he wanted now was an escape. Though I knew I should leave, I didn’t.
That’s when his eyes caught mine.
I can’t imagine he wanted to look at me then for as long as he did. Everything would have been so much easier had his eyes bounced off me like a ray of light, but they stuck, pinning me behind the hood of the car. Before I could react, Lynn whirled around.
In that instant, I hardly recognized her. Her cheeks were glistening, wet in the dreary gleam of the streetlights, the black of her mascara smearing down her face. On her lips, a small, uncertain parenthesis had formed, and a dangerous swirl ravaged the edges of her eyes. This was not the same person who floated into Roger’s classroom on my first day at Santiago Hills, mysterious and indomitable and everything I wished I could be. She was just another infatuated, vulnerable girl. She was just the same as the rest of us.
Maybe I only understood all of this later, after that instant had crashed against the walls of my memory so many times that it finally became smooth and clear. All I know is that when I look back now, I still see this moment, this single second before I ran the rest of the way to my mother’s car, in painfully sharp relief: the entirety of our friendship crumbling right in front of me.
But I guess that’s not true, either. The collapse had begun long before this, and I didn’t do a single thing to stop it.
Over a week passed before I saw Lynn again. She wasn’t in front of the library in the mornings, or lounging in the heart of the pine cluster during lunch. She didn’t show up to choir class, either, and after a few days Roger asked me if I knew why she’d been absent.
“She’s sick,” I told him, because it seemed better than admitting I had no idea where she’d been, if she’d be back, if I’d ever know these things again.
He eyed me curiously, waiting for elaboration. “Must be pretty bad to keep her out this long.”
I shrugged. “The flu. It’s been going around.”
“Well, send her our best, will you? We hope she can join us again before the school year’s over.”
From the smooth levity of his voice, I knew he didn’t believe me. Still, I told him I’d pass along his regards.
Then, the following Monday, she was back. I didn’t know until choir, and even then I didn’t notice right away. In her absence, I’d become one of the first people to enter the classroom every afternoon, not knowing how else to occupy my time. It was only as Roger began checking off his roll sheet and said, “Ah, Ms. Chandler. Welcome back,” that I realized she had slipped into the classroom, taking a seat in the back corner closest to the door.
She offered a brief smile in response to Roger’s comment—proof, I guess, that she was present. She seemed paler somehow, sunken, and I wondered if maybe she’d really been sick. I waited for her to look at me. Eventually, I had to turn back to the whiteboard.
At the end of class, after the bell rang and everyone began scurrying from their seats, I shoved my notebook into my backpack and sped toward Lynn, determined to catch her. But Roger called out first.
“Ms. Chandler,” he said across the bustle. “A word?”
I waited outside the choir room as the seventh period bell echoed and students disappeared into classrooms, the locker room, the emptying parking lot. The sky was blazing, bright and dimpled with tufts of clouds. To the north, intricate plumes of gray smoke billowed. It was fire season again, always, and though that small conflagration appeared to be controlled, my thoughts were not; they’d drifted so far that when Lynn finally blew through the door, charging straight past me, for the first few seconds I just stood there, dumbfounded.
Then I ran after her.
“Lynn,” I yelled.
Somewhere, a car alarm started wailing. Lynn kept moving.
“Lynn,” I called again. “Wait!”
She stopped, turning around so fast that I nearly rammed into her. “What? What could you possibly have to say?”
A lump climbed up the back of my throat. “I didn’t know.”
She laughed—a sharp, razor-edged sound. “How could you not know?”
“You never said anything.”
“I know you’re a smart girl, Susannah, but you act so goddamn dense sometimes.”
The harsh stab of her words twisted in my stomach and I said nothing.
“I’ve seen the way you watch everything, studying us, making all these little notes in your head.” She tapped on her forehead. “But of what? What is it you see? Because we both know I’m not that good of an actor. The only person you’re fooling is yourself.”
“But that’s not—” I began, voice creaking. Lynn was wearing her favorite pair of sunglasses, the big round ones with the tortoiseshell frames, but I had none that day, no protection, and my own eyes felt hot and blurry in the sunshine. If I only had my sunglasses, I thought, I could block out the light, stop the tears, shield myself.
“I never would have—” I tried again, but the words still broke. I wasn’t even sure I believed myself anymore.
Lynn sighed. “Look, I don’t think you meant to hurt me, okay. I know no one is loyal anymore. No one is faithful.
I should have known you’d be no different from the rest of this fucking city. That’s on me, I guess.”
I didn’t want to cry—would have given anything to stop it—but I felt like I was falling, whooshing past reality into a place where I had no control. My voice was a whisper, lost somewhere else in the air. “Please don’t hate me.”
Lynn crossed her arms. “I’m not going to spread rumors behind your back and try to ruin your life, if that’s what you’re worried about. But you fucked up, and I’d rather not be anywhere near you right now.”
As if to stop me from following her, she put out a hand. The gesture summoned a swell of anger from somewhere inside me. She was not the only one who had been wronged.
“So that’s it? You get to be mad at me but I’m not allowed to be mad at you?”
Even through the tint of her sunglasses, I could feel the intensity of her stare. “For what?”
“For pretending your father was dead.”
She cocked her head to the side and regarded me with a vague sadness that I soon realized was something far worse: pity.
“I don’t owe you anything anymore, Susannah,” she said. “So I’m sorry your dad went and crashed his car into a telephone pole, but you’ve got to realize that your life is not the epicenter of the universe.”
Heat flooded my face. I said, “He doesn’t love you.”
I didn’t mean for the words to shoot out the way they did, had not meant them to sound so cruel. But I think I knew, even in that split second before the words left my mouth, that they would only come out mangled. And right then, everything inside of me felt mangled. So I said them anyway.
Lynn’s body tightened, face constricting in a callous half smile. “And I suppose you’re going to tell me he loves you instead?”
“No,” I said. “There’s nothing between Luke and me. There never was.”
But she wasn’t listening anymore.
Sometimes, I still marvel at what came next. She didn’t scream, pull my hair, or make me bleed. She didn’t pretend everything was fine and wage war against me when my back was turned, reinventing me as a traitor, a slut, a thief. In the end, Lynn just coughed, or laughed—some final, caustic sound of offended disbelief—and then she walked away.
I don’t know how long I stood there staring at the space where she had been before I heard my name, spoken with such gentleness that at first I thought I’d imagined it.
“Susannah?” Roger said again. “Are you all right?”
A moment passed before I found my voice. “No,” I said. “I’m not.”
A few minutes later, I found myself sitting in Roger’s decades-old SUV—a boxy, silver thing with a dented back bumper and leather seats time had marbled with cracks.
“Do you want to talk?” he asked as we curved onto Chapman Avenue.
I shook my head, nailed my eyes to the window. The Santiago Hills perched brown and dry in front of us; to the right, an upscale Mexican restaurant with a wide patio draped in pink bougainvillea was setting up for dinner. I took note of every business we passed, a weak attempt to reroute my mind. My body had stopped convulsing but the tears continued to push up through my eyes.
After a minute Roger said, “Shall I put on some music?”
I didn’t answer. He flipped on the radio. Ahead of us, a light changed to yellow.
If we’d sped through the intersection like everyone else, I might not have felt the urge to speak, might have let the weight of the past few months slip by. But the car glided to a stop, and all of a sudden I was too conscious of Roger driving me home, the unbearable silence as we idled. Around us, the air had turned taut and fragile—like a guitar string tuned too tightly.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“It’s no trouble at all. It may be a little unorthodox, but it’s hardly out of the way.”
“I mean, for what I said. For before.”
From the corner of my eye, I could see that his mouth hung partially ajar. He must have known what I was referencing, but he didn’t reply. The light turned green.
“I was really upset,” I said.
“It’s okay,” he said.
“It’s not.”
Behind us, a car tapped its horn. Roger shifted his foot to the gas and we began moving again.
I said, “No one tells you how to keep living.”
“You’re doing the best you can.”
My bottom lip trembled. I tilted my head against the warm window. “I’ve messed everything up.”
“I’m sure that’s not true,” Roger said. “Anything worth fixing can be fixed.”
His voice held such conviction that for the rest of the drive, I let myself believe him.
“Well, here we are,” Roger said when we pulled up to my house. His foot was on the brake but the engine still rumbled. At the end of the driveway, my mother’s car glimmered in the sun.
“Aren’t you coming in?” I asked.
He tapped his fingers nervously on the steering wheel. “I should probably head home.”
“She wants to see you.”
“I’m just not sure if it’s a good idea right now.”
“When, then?” I said. “When else?”
For the first time that afternoon I turned to fully face him, and I was not surprised to find Roger looking away. I’d seen myself in the side-view mirror while we were driving and knew how I must have appeared to him then, a crazed, hormonal teenager with my red-webbed eyes and swollen lips. He must have been embarrassed to see me like that.
“Do you know why I was so upset that night?” I said. “It’s not because I thought you were trying to replace him, or because my mom has feelings for you.” I paused, wiping away the new stream of tears that trickled down to my jaw. “I was upset because she was happier than I can remember seeing her in a really long time.”
Roger shook his head and tried to say something, but I pressed on.
“I’m done now,” I said. “I’m done being the reason why my mother is unhappy. I’m done punishing her for living, even though my father isn’t, and I’m done punishing myself. So, please, just—come inside.”
Roger gazed up at the house, eyes flickering across the brickwork and wide windows. As the lines on his face softened, I sensed the familiarity he felt with this place.
He took a deep breath. “Okay.”
Inside, sunlight slanted through the back windows, fanning a haze of amber light across the tile floors. A faint aroma of citrus hung in the air. My mother must have been cleaning. For a moment, Roger and I stood in the front entryway, both unsure of what to do next. I called to my mother.
“In here,” echoed her voice.
I led Roger toward the kitchen. “I brought someone with me,” I said.
My mother was hunched over the sink, scrubbing ferociously at some object I couldn’t see. Her hair had been bound in a messy ponytail, and streaks of sweat colored the back of her T-shirt. Without turning around, she said, “Is that Lynn?”
Her assumption caught me off guard, and I didn’t know how to answer. She glanced back over her shoulder.
“Oh,” she gasped when she saw him. She turned off the faucet and spun around. Water dripped from her hands to the floor as she smoothed her hair, her dirty T-shirt.
“Hi,” Roger said.
“Hi,” she said. Behind her, tiny soap bubbles waltzed through the golden air. “What are you . . .” She broke off and her eyes oscillated between us, uncomprehending. “What happened?”
“Roger drove me home,” I said, as though it were that simple.
“You didn’t call,” she said. “I figured Lynn was driving you.”
“We kind of got in a fight.”
My mother’s head fell to the side. “Oh, honey,” she said, walking toward us. For those few seconds, her eyes didn’t leave me. It didn’t matter that Roger—a man she had loved, might still love—was standing at my side. She cupped my face in her cold, soft hands. “I’m so sorry.”
When my mother wr
apped her arms around me, my mind whirled back to that earthquake all those years ago, and the way she’d protected my body with her own as we crouched in the doorway of our old house and waited for the world to stop shaking. So much had changed since then; foundations had cracked and split, relationships had frayed. But some bonds, I saw now, were stronger than friction.
My mother’s hands remained on my shoulders. “Do you want to talk about it?” she asked.
“Not really.”
She touched my hair. “Remember that whatever seems like life and death now will become trivial in time. I promise you that.”
I nodded, but “in time” was too abstract to comfort me. Even if after a year, ten years, what transpired between Lynn and me began to feel like some petty, childish rift, that wouldn’t change the fact that I had lost her, that I had lost almost everyone I cared about. I tightened my lips to keep them from quivering.
My mother turned to Roger. “Thank you,” she said. “For being there.”
“It was no trouble.”
His gaze had been fixed on the floor, perhaps in an effort to give us some semblance of privacy, but when my mother spoke to him, he looked up. It’s true what they say: sometimes, a single glance can express far more than any number of carefully conceived words. They both smiled, shy and unsure, their eyes darting away and back, away and back. The energy was kinetic between them.
“Can I get you something?” my mother finally said. “Coffee? Tea?”
“Tea would be great,” Roger said.
My mother filled the kettle and rummaged in the cabinet. “What would you like? We’ve got green, Earl Grey, chamomile, cinnamon apple—”
“Earl Grey.” Roger took a step forward. “Please.”
I began backing out of the kitchen. “I’m going to start on my homework.”
“Oh, Suz, before you go—” My mother turned back, motioning to the island. “You have some mail.”
Uncertainly, I approached the counter where a mound of envelopes waited. Some were short and thin, some were tall and fat. I shuffled through the few on top. All were addressed to me.
“Apparently our change of address overlapped, and these were all sent to the old house. I’m sure you’ve been waiting for some of them.”
The Midnights Page 30
