A Line in the Dark

by Malinda Lo

  You’re such a fucking liar.

  It was sent at 2:21 a.m.

  My heart thuds. I hesitate, and then I delete it.

  IT’S GOING TO BE A WHITE CHRISTMAS. THE SNOWSTORM from a couple of nights ago was followed by a blizzard that has blanketed Massachusetts under a foot and a half of heavy white flakes, and another storm is coming after this one. The news is a constant stream of weather reports with meteorologists trying to tamp down panic that this is going to be as bad as it was a few years ago, when it snowed almost constantly for over a month and didn’t fully melt until June.

  I flip through the channels, skipping past soap operas and talk shows and cooking shows. Every once in a while I glance at my phone to make sure I haven’t missed Angie’s call. A familiar face flashes by on the TV, causing me to backtrack to a local news channel.

  “—girl has been reported missing. Police say that Ryan Dupree was last seen on the night of December sixteenth during a party she attended in Marblehead.”

  The picture of Ryan has to be a yearbook photo, because she’s posed in front of a mottled gray backdrop wearing a prim, flowered dress, her blond hair spilling loose over her shoulders, a fake smile on her face.

  “Ryan is a junior at Pearson Brooke Academy in East Bedford, but her family lives in Atlanta, Georgia,” the newscaster says. “Her parents, who are currently unable to travel to Massachusetts because of the weather, have released a video appealing to their daughter to come home.”

  My phone rings, making me jump. I grab it, but I don’t recognize the number. I toss it on the couch beside me, disappointed.

  The news cuts to a video of two adults standing in the sunshine in front of a sprawling brick house. The warm sunlight is at odds with the expression of rising despair on the woman’s face as she addresses the camera: “Ryan, if you’re out there and you can hear this, please know that we love you and we miss you. Please come home. Whatever caused you to do this, we forgive you. Please come back.” The woman’s voice cracks, and she presses a hand over her mouth as she tries not to cry. The man puts his arm around her shoulders.

  The voice-mail alert dings on my phone. Surprised, I pick up my phone, but I’m distracted by the scene on the news. Now it shows a reporter standing in front of the Pearson Brooke sign, the coat of arms half buried in a snowdrift. “East Bedford police say that Ryan’s suitcase is also missing from her dorm room, which suggests she may have run away on her own. School officials are asking anyone who might have seen Ryan Dupree to call them immediately with any information.”

  When the report ends and the announcer moves on to the weather, I mute the TV and listen to the voice-mail message.

  “This is Officer Steve Carroll of the East Bedford Police calling for . . . Jessica Wong. I understand you were at a party with Ryan Dupree on the evening of December sixteenth. Ryan has not returned home, and I’d like to talk with you about the last time you saw her. Please give me a call back.”

  Officer Carroll sounds tired, even a bit grumpy. With the TV silenced, the house is unusually quiet. Jamie and Justin are upstairs, and Mom and Dad are still at work. I rub my fingers over the throbbing pulse in my temple. My knee jitters.

  As I reach for my phone, it rings again. This time it’s Angie.

  I KNOW WHAT KESTREL’S ENDGAME IS. IT COMES TO ME IN the middle of the night while I lie awake, sleepless, listening to my sister’s even breathing in the bunk bed over my head. When Justin’s home, I have to move out of my room—which used to be his room—and back into the room I used to share with Jamie. If I were in my room, I would get up and turn on the light, but I can’t do that now.

  I have to leave. I slide out of the bottom bunk and grab my sketchbook and pencils from my backpack. I open Jamie’s bedroom door quietly and tiptoe into the hall. The floor creaks as I walk past my room; the light’s out underneath the door so even Justin must be asleep finally. I pad down the stairs on bare feet and go into the living room, where I turn on one of the lamps beside the sofa. It’s chilly down here, and I wrap myself in a blanket. Settling into one corner of the couch, I open my sketchbook and flip to the back, where I’ve written a list of ideas for the rest of the Kestrel story. I jot my notes down hurriedly, trying to keep hold of that tenuous connection between what I saw in my head and what I’m scribbling with my pencil. When I finish, I read over my notes. I’m really excited by my new idea for the end, but it still feels incomplete. I’m missing something, but I’m not sure what. I flip back through my sketches and examine what I did earlier.

  I left off on a scene with Raven and Kestrel together. Kestrel has come to Raven’s dorm room to ask her why she’s been following her. Raven doesn’t want to admit the truth—that she thinks Kestrel is doing too much black magic. In one panel, Raven and Kestrel are face-to-face, eye to eye. I need to figure out what they say to each other, but I’ve drawn a blank. I’ve spent a long time sketching these two girls. Raven’s in a tank top and pajama pants, her long black hair hanging loose over her bare shoulder. Her mouth is parted as if to speak, but the dialogue bubble over her head remains empty. Kestrel’s in jeans and her bird T-shirt, her wavy hair pulled back in a ponytail, one eyebrow arched in expectation.

  I could leave the dialogue bubble empty. The thing I want to do—the thing that makes my skin tingle in anticipation—is to draw them kissing. This was never in my original plans for Kestrel, but the more I’ve worked on the comic, the more it seems to lean in this direction. Kestrel and Raven are drawn to each other and simultaneously repelled by that attraction. They’re supposed to be competitors, not girlfriends. And, of course, there’s Laney.

  She’s in the hallway outside the half-open door, watching.

  If Kestrel and Raven kiss and Laney sees them, all hell will break loose. Laney won’t be able to hide her jealousy from Kestrel anymore. Kestrel will have to face the question of how she really feels about Laney. Their friendship could be ruined. I created these characters, but as I stare at the image I drew in my sketchbook, I realize I don’t know how Kestrel feels. She and Raven are a matched pair. They’re sexy together, like a real comic book. She and Laney, though, feel unbalanced to me. Laney will always be the odd one out.

  Frustrated, I flip to a blank page. I start to sketch Kestrel and Raven walking through the woods, a scene I’ve already planned out. One of the Warden’s jobs is to patrol the grounds around Blackwood Hall School, but because he’s been injured recently, he sends Kestrel and Raven out instead. Some students have seen wolves in the woods, and the Warden suspects it’s because Kestrel’s spell drew supernatural predators to the hollow—a kickback that Kestrel didn’t anticipate. On the left panel, I draw Kestrel and Raven walking down the trail, with Raven in the lead, her hair flying out in a black flag behind her. Kestrel follows, her gaze on Raven’s back, her forehead furrowed into an expression of distrust. On the right panel, half hidden by tree trunks and shadows, I sketch the suggestion of wolves, teeth bared.

  Kestrel and Raven don’t know that Laney has followed them. She has also heard about the wolves, and because she can’t protect herself with magic the way Kestrel and Raven can, she brings a weapon with her. In a close-up on Laney, I draw her shoulders hunched defensively, her eyes trained on the ground where Kestrel’s and Raven’s footsteps have left a trail. Normally I think of Laney as a dorky sidekick, but as I shade in her shock of short hair, I begin to see her differently. She’s stocky but powerful, and she may not be gifted with whatever magical talents Kestrel and Raven have, but she isn’t stupid either.

  I put a gun in Laney’s hand.

  ON NEW YEAR’S EVE, ANGIE COMES OVER TO WAIT FOR the ball to drop on TV. This is the third New Year’s Eve we’ve spent together, but I was surprised she wanted to do it this year. Jamie’s at a sleepover at a friend’s house, Justin went out with some girl he insists is not his girlfriend, and my parents went to bed at ten o’clock, so it’s only me and Angie on the couch. We make hot
fudge sundaes with cherries, but Angie eats barely a third of hers.

  “Is something wrong with it?” I ask.

  “Sorry, I’m just not that into it. I keep thinking about . . .” She pulls out her phone, but there are no new messages. “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay. How’s Margot?”

  “She’s fine. She had to go to some party with her parents in New York.”

  “Is she there?” I point at the screen full of revelers wrapped in scarves and hats, screaming up at the lights of Times Square.

  “No. She texted me a picture. She’s inside somewhere. It looks like a ballroom or something.” Angie holds out her phone and shows me a selfie of Margot blowing a kiss at the camera. Behind her is a huge room hung with chandeliers and holly garlands, full of old people in suits and fancy dresses holding champagne flutes.

  “Looks boring.”

  “Yeah.” Angie takes her phone back but doesn’t put it away.

  We watch TV in silence. I keep an eye on the countdown clock, wondering what will happen at midnight. Angie’s only a few inches away from me. She has taken off her shoes, curling her legs up on the couch. If I scoot toward her the smallest bit, we’ll be touching.

  At three minutes till midnight her phone rings. It’s Margot on FaceTime. It looks like she’s standing in a closet, because there’s a rack of coats behind her.

  “Hey!” Angie says, sitting up straight as she answers. “I was thinking about you.”

  “Hi,” Margot says, smiling tightly. “Hi, Jess.”

  Angie glances at me. “Sorry, I’ll be right back.” She gets up and takes the phone into the kitchen, leaving me alone.

  I watch the ball drop by myself. I hear the low murmur of Angie’s voice in the next room, and Margot’s tinny response. I gaze at the brown murk of Angie’s sundae on the coffee table. I want to throw it against the wall and see the liquid drip down like shit onto the matching carpet.

  When she returns, the phone is in her pocket. It’s eight minutes into the New Year. I’m staring fixedly at the TV, where they’ve switched to Key West to show the drag queen dropping in her shoe. Angie sits down next to me, curling her legs up again. Then she lowers her head onto my lap, stretching out.

  I freeze. She snuggles into me like a cat, oblivious to the shock that paralyzes me.

  “I’m so tired,” she murmurs. “I just want to go to sleep right here.”

  Her hair is spread over my legs, her cheek on my thigh. I gingerly touch her upper arm. The wool of her sweater is soft under my hand. “You okay?”

  She takes a deep breath, relaxing against me. “Happy New Year, Jess.”

  SINCE OUR HOUSE IS ONE OVER FROM THE DEAD END where Ellicott Park cuts off the block, I have a clear view from the living room window of the two cop cars parked with their rear ends angled into the street. One guy in uniform stands outside the car on the left, talking into the radio on his shoulder. His breath steams out into the frigid air as he turns his head, eyeing the neighborhood. Dirty snow is piled everywhere, practically turning the sidewalks into tunnels. Standing a short distance away is a jogger wearing neon-orange running shoes and a thermal jacket marked with reflective stripes. He has a black dog on a leash, who keeps sniffing around the cop.

  A gray sedan streaked with slush and dried mud drives past my house and parks behind the police cars. A guy in a charcoal wool overcoat climbs out of the passenger seat, and then an older woman wearing a knee-length blue down jacket gets out of the driver’s side. He looks like he’s going out to some fancy dinner, and she looks like somebody’s mom. Neither of them is wearing a uniform, but the cop goes to meet them and acts like they’re in charge. The jogger hovers nearby while his dog approaches the guy in the overcoat, who squats down to pet him.

  Another vehicle pulls up behind the gray sedan: a white van with block lettering on the side that reads MEDICAL EXAMINER. The guy in the overcoat goes to meet the driver of the van, and as he walks he glances toward our house. I back away from the window, but I think he sees me.

  —

  The young guy in the overcoat is Lieutenant Kyle Griffin, and the older woman in the mom-issue parka is his partner, Detective Lieutenant Donna Cardoni. They rang the doorbell midway through dinner, and after Dad let them in, he made Jamie go up to her room while the rest of us—Mom, Dad, Justin, and me—squeezed onto the living room sofa, sitting across from the two detectives.

  Griffin has a face straight out of the Boston suburbs: slightly asymmetrical with a crooked mouth and a dimpled chin; close-cropped brown hair that was probably redder when he was a kid; blue eyes. He could’ve been the older brother of any number of Irish-surnamed kids at my school. It takes me a while to realize that although he looks like he was born five miles from here, he doesn’t have a Boston accent. Cardoni does, and she sounds uncannily like Angie’s mom. She even looks a little like her: the pudgy chin; that tired look in her eyes; the ugly coat; and thick-soled shoes.

  “We’re sorry to interrupt your dinner,” Cardoni says. “As you may have seen from the police vehicles across the street, we’ve been investigating a situation in Ellicott Park. Earlier today a jogger and his dog discovered the body of a young woman in the woods. We believe she may have been there for as long as two weeks, since right before the first big snowstorm that hit before Christmas.”

  Mom tensed up when Cardoni said the word body, and now she puts her hand on Justin’s arm as if to assure herself the body isn’t his. She asks, “What happened?”

  Cardoni says, “We’re not certain yet, ma’am, but we’re investigating this as a homicide.”

  Mom gasps. “Is it safe here?”

  “I understand your concern, ma’am. This is a very unusual discovery, so I think you and your children are safe, but I would understand if you want to take precautions, particularly for your youngest upstairs. Maybe don’t allow her to play outside unsupervised for a little while.”

  “Do you know who died?” Dad asks.

  Cardoni’s gaze flickers in my direction. “We have some leads, but right now the victim is still unidentified. I can tell you the victim is a teenage girl.”

  “Is she from here?” Mom asks.

  “We’re not sure,” Cardoni says. “We’ve only begun to investigate. One thing that would really help us is to get all of your contact information. We’re talking to all your neighbors—everyone in the neighborhood—to ask about what they’ve seen and heard in the past few weeks around here. Since you folks live right across the street, anything you remember might turn out to be very useful.” Cardoni looks at my father. “Can we start with you, sir? What’s your name?”

  “Of course,” he says. “Anything to help. My name is Peter Wong.”

  “And what’s your occupation, Mr. Wong?”

  “I’m a pharmacist. At Walgreens.”

  As my dad speaks, I notice that he has a grain of rice stuck to his chin, probably from dinner. The sight of it makes me redden in embarrassment, and I look down to hide my face. The blue velvet-like fabric of the sofa has faded and thinned on the armrest next to me, leaving a lighter-blue bald patch where elbows have rubbed it for as long as I can remember. I put my arm on the armrest in an effort to hide the bald patch, but once I notice it, I can’t stop noticing everything else about our living room that screams cheap. The living room carpet is regularly cleaned, but that can’t disguise the fact that it’s an ugly shade of shit brown. The coffee table that divides us from the detectives—who are sitting in mismatched plaid armchairs Mom found at a garage sale—has a wood veneer that’s peeling up at one corner. The only new thing in the room is the TV, and in the context of the rest of the house, it looks completely out of place. Dad got up before dawn on Black Friday to fight his way through holiday shoppers at the mall to get it. At night he and Mom watch Chinese TV on it, piped in through an internet streaming box that Uncle Dennis brought back from China.

>   I hear Mom tell them her name and occupation—Esther Wong, medical assistant—and her accent, always more apparent than my dad’s, seems unusually strong tonight as she over-explains her work hours, her commute, and when she’s at home. It’s obvious that she’s freaked out by the detectives, but she still wants to make a good impression by answering every question in as much detail as possible. She’s trying too hard, like she often does, overcompensating for her accent and for not entirely understanding how things work here. Like when we had a bake sale in elementary school, and everybody else’s mom brought cookies and cakes, but my mom brought fried rice. Or how when she learned some kids gave their teachers gifts at the holidays, she showed up with a tacky box of Ferrero Rocher from Walgreens—sale sticker still attached—rather than a gift card to Target.

  When the detectives move on to questioning my brother, I’m relieved.

  “I’m a sophomore at MIT,” my brother says in response to Cardoni’s question.

  “He’s going to be an aerospace engineer,” Dad says proudly.

  “He’s very smart,” Mom adds, patting him on the knee while he stiffens. “Full scholarship!”

  Cardoni looks suitably impressed, asking Justin, “Are you home for the holidays?”

  He looks uncomfortable. “Yeah. I got home a few days before Christmas.” He’s gotten thinner over the past semester, and I wonder how hard he’s working to maintain his grades. Mom and Dad might praise him in front of strangers, but at home, they constantly push him to do better.

  “Do you happen to remember the date you returned?” Cardoni asks.

  “The . . . twenty-first, I think. Yeah. I remember the roads were still pretty bad after that first blizzard.”