I don’t totally follow, and I’m tempted to leave the conversation at that, but I’ve already started, and you can’t stop a haircut halfway through. “I don’t want that either.”
“Wow, okay. So you just, what, don’t want to be friends or something?” Jayden laughs, but his voice is strained.
“Um, obviously I want to be friends.” He’s not getting it, and I need him to get it. We talk all the time—why are we so bad at communicating? “I just don’t want to be like, ‘Yep here we are, two parts of a friend group, such excellent pals.’”
“And . . . that’s different from saying you don’t want to be friends? Or you don’t want to spend as much time together?”
“Yes, it’s different! I’m saying I want to spend more time together! I’m saying I want to be your friend and also date you!”
Dead silence. It’s like I’m holding my chopped-off ponytail in my hand all over again, the breeze on my neck freezing cold.
“You don’t have to say anything! I just wanted to tell you!”
“No that’s . . . I want to say something.”
“Well you don’t have to.”
“Well I want to.”
“Okay. Go ahead.”
Jayden grunts, kicks his feet in the water. He lifts his hand off the lip of the pool, first moves it toward my face, then pulls it down so it settles where the tips of his fingers barely touch my hand. “Um, yes?”
The touch already stopped my heart. Nothing else can surprise me. “Yes what?”
“Yes I want to date you?”
“Oh.” Oh. “Yes. Good.” Jayden wants to date me. It makes no sense and also it’s the only thing that makes any sense. I should probably say something with more syllables, but I can’t find the right words, so I flip my hand palm-up and curl my fingers tightly around Jayden’s. This works even better than texting him as a way to calm my spinning brain. Finally, I can speak. “Why didn’t you say anything? Or invite me to prom?”
“I was afraid you’d say no.”
There’s a lot I could say, but it all feels extremely unimportant compared to the brown of Jayden’s eyes and the flop of his hair and the electric touch of his fingers on my palm. The yard feels like a snow globe, air thick and liquid and swirling.
“We’re, uh, we’re not going to make out at Brandon’s house party, are we?” I ask breathlessly.
Jayden laughs. “No, uh, not unless . . . we definitely don’t have to.”
“Just because there are windows everywhere.” I gesture with my free hand.
“Yeah.” He pulls his hand away, and I shift to get it back.
“And I’m not super into PDA.”
“Yeah.” He grins at me, squeezes my fingers.
“And, no offense to Jayla and Dodge, but I’d rather tell them about us than show them.”
Jayden snorts, leans to bump my shoulder.
There’s a lot more I could say, but instead we sit in silence and it’s the perfect kind of different.
Hour 26: 8 a.m.
My eyes blur staring out the car window. I’m so tired. We spent the night playing ping-pong, Mario Kart, and one frustrating half attempt at Monopoly with twelve people. I’m not usually a fan of all-nighters, and Jayla even less so, but nobody wanted this experience to end. Thankfully, one jolt from Jayden’s coffee-brown eyes is better than any real source of caffeine.
The party got a second wind at dawn when everyone stood at the windows cheering that we made it, which was when Brandon’s dad woke up and made waffles and very politely suggested that people take their breakfasts to go. We weren’t sure how a Lyft driver would react to Suka, so Roger woke up his younger brother and convinced him to come pick us all up. Jayden carried my heels out onto the street because I refused to put them back on.
“How long have we been awake?” I ask, watching stop signs speed past, catching the morning light. I only meant for Jayden to hear me, but my sense of a whisper has been destroyed by loud music and lack of sleep.
We told Jayla. And Dodge and Roger, earning another round of high fives. Everyone was less surprised than we were. Which means we can now hold hands in the car, which is a new and exciting development that I will more fully appreciate when I am less sleep deprived.
“You were up really early, right?” Dodge asks. “So more than twenty-four hours.”
Jayden squints into the air, a crease wrinkling his nose and the dark hollows under his eyes. “It’s got to be close to thirty hours.”
“Oh my god.” Roger twists around from the passenger seat to stare at us. His eyes are wide. “How are you still alive? That’s like, three days!”
In the pause that follows, Suka stretches across the back seat, her paws snagging on the fabric of my skirt. Then Jayla says, “Wait . . .” and the whole car bursts into bubbling laughter, the sound as golden as the slanted sunlight and as warm as the puppy head snuggled in my lap and Jayden’s hand in mine. And as the car moves forward, I catch a glimpse of how we might be over the next four years, and it’s different and exciting and perfectly unexpected.
Missing
by Kathleen Glasgow
In the beginning, there were four: Dorsey, Angie, Kate, and Kim. They all attended Wellington High, an unassuming brick building in the middle of an unassuming town that bled crisp red and orange leaves in the fall, delivered postcard-perfect snow in the winter, warm and soft rain in the spring, and summers filled with lemonade and lakes and broken hearts at the county fair.
Oh, and Lissy. Lissy was there, too, but it was easy to forget Lissy. Everyone always forgot about Lissy. Mouse, the girls whispered at Lissy’s school. Freaky little mouse.
When Kate opened her front door, backpack slung over her shoulders, she wore an irritated expression.
“Lissy’s coming,” she told her friends.
The three girls peered at Kate’s little sister, who was shrinking against the wall of the tiny apartment. The apartment smelled like unwashed clothes and over-boiled pasta noodles, the kind that come in a cardboard box.
Dorsey held up a finger, the nail as bright as blood. “Absolutely not.”
Angie said, “We can’t take a little kid.”
Kate said, in that same flat voice she’d been using for the past year, “My dad got called into a shift. I have to take her.”
Kim said, “Why can’t your mom—ow!”
Dorsey had elbowed her sharply. Kim looked at the ground, realizing her mistake. No wonder the apartment smelled bad, but still: Kate’s dad should have stepped up by now. It had been a year. She looked around Kate to Lissy. Lissy’s pants were frayed at the hems and too short, showing her knobby ankles. Her hair was choppy, like something done in a kitchen with sewing shears. Kim frowned. A girl’s life was hard enough and Lissy’s dad was sending her out looking like that?
“Okay, then,” Dorsey said, and sighed. Dorsey was big on sighs. “But I’m not watching out for her.”
“Fine,” Kate answered. She snapped her fingers.
Lissy pushed herself off the wall and squeezed by her sister and went to stand with the older girls in the hallway.
It’s funny, Kate thought, as she locked the door to the apartment, how quickly everyone forgets when a mother has died.
Dorsey’s car rattled on the old road. They were heading to the outskirts of town, where hills rose and fell like breath and the trees stretched out like hands with very long fingers. Dorsey cracked her window and lit a cigarette.
“That’s so disgusting,” Kim said, rolling down her window.
“I can’t go home smelling like smoke,” Angie said, cracking her own window. “My mom will kill me.”
“Calm down,” Dorsey said. “Let me live my life.”
“You won’t have one if you keep smoking,” Kate warned.
Lissy said, “I saw a commercial on television and
the woman smoked and her cancer spread all through her face skin and they had to take it all off. She’s lopsided now.”
Lissy was sitting on Kate’s lap. Kate dug her nails into Lissy’s thighs, pressing through her thin jeans, and it hurt, but Lissy refused to let her sister know it.
Dorsey took a deep drag on the cigarette and threw it out the window. In the rearview mirror, her eyes were glossy and dark. Lissy looked away from them. She found Dorsey mean and eerie, with those eyes that seemed to see you and not see you at the same time.
“Fun fact,” Dorsey said cheerfully. “The place we’re going? They put women in there just for smoking. Punished a whole lifetime just for a moment of pleasure. Can you imagine?”
No one wanted to.
They sat in the car. The Bedford Lunatic Asylum for Women loomed before them, a vast, ornate gray building, like something out of a book about castles. It seemed to glow against the bleakness of the night sky. It was September. Rain drizzled slowly down the windshield.
“The night is dark and full of terrors,” Dorsey whispered.
She turned abruptly in her seat and shouted, “Boo!” The girls jumped. Lissy whimpered but stopped when she felt the sharpness of Kate’s nails again.
“Why is it so big?” Kim asked. “I mean, how many crazy women could there have been back then?”
Dorsey was all business, checking her backpack for supplies.
“That’s the thing,” she said. “Most of them weren’t crazy. They put you here for the stupidest, most sexist reasons. Like not wanting to do your husband. Or reading. A woman was put in here for reading novels. Her husband thought books were giving her too many ideas! So he called a doctor and the doctor was, like, why are you reading all the time? And the woman got angry, because whose business is it if she reads a damn book, so in she goes, never to come out. The records called it intellectual aggression, whatever that means.”
Angie sucked in her breath. She’d finished four books just this week. “I’d be in here, for sure,” she murmured.
Dorsey looked around the car at all of them.
“All of us would,” she said. “Angie for getting big ideas from books, me for complaining about my bad periods, which, by the way, was called being ‘menstrually deranged,’ and Kate for excessive grief.”
Kate flinched.
Kim said, “What about me?”
Dorsey thought for a moment. “Probably for liking sports too much. As in, not being ladylike.”
Kim shrugged. “You have a point.” She looked down at her nails, painted a glossy pink, a color that made her inexplicably happy. She liked pink nails and she liked to run fast and she wondered why those things weren’t allowed to coexist.
“What about me?” asked Lissy.
“No one cares about you,” Kate said, opening the car door and shoving her sister off her lap and out into the dark.
The ground was cold and wet, seeping through Lissy’s thin shoes, and she shivered.
Dorsey got out of the car and slung her backpack over her shoulder. Her voice was determined. “Let’s go.”
She started walking, then stopped when she realized they weren’t following. She turned to face them.
“Come on,” she urged. “Stop being such babies. It’s midnight and the GhostConnector only has six hours of battery life.”
Dorsey’s smile was a shiny, electric thing that made Lissy’s spine shiver.
Dorsey . . . was Dorsey. A planner. An idea-haver. A schemer. When they were ten, it was a lemonade stand, only the lemonade had a little extra kick courtesy of Dorsey’s parents’ liquor cabinet. “They won’t miss it,” she’d promised the girls. “My dad has me mix his drinks all the time. It makes people goofy.”
But Dorsey must have poured too much in by accident—or maybe not, who could know with Dorsey—because they soon had quite a crowd of older kids lining up. It was kind of funny until a neighbor noticed a bunch of teens stumbling around in the street and the vomit splattered in her rosebushes.
When they were twelve, it was selling a contraption she called “The Bust-Master,” a thick rubber strap guaranteed to increase your breast size within three weeks. She made quite a bit of money at first, and then a lot of enemies when customers’ chests remained stubbornly uninspired after weeks of exercises. On and on, until this.
“We’ll be famous,” she’d said in her room one night, telling them about the GhostConnector, a strange device she’d ordered online. “We’ll go find some ghosts, record them, tell their stories, and splash it everywhere.”
They were sitting on their sleeping bags, pumped full of Cheetos and Sprite and several hours of Real Housewives on the giant flat-screen in Dorsey’s room.
“But why?” Angie had asked.
“Why not?” Dorsey answered. “It’s wrong that women were locked up for life for the worst reasons. Most of them weren’t even ill. They just weren’t acting the way men thought they should act. Also, it will be fun. And cool. Let’s do something. We never do anything.”
“Do you even believe in ghosts?” Kim had asked her. She was doing scissor kicks. She was the fastest sprinter on the Wellington track team and determined to sprint her way out of their town to a good college.
“I do,” Dorsey had answered proudly. “My grandmother came to me once. Out at her old place by Pelican Lake two summers ago. I woke up and saw this weird shape at the foot of my bed.”
“Oh my god,” Kim said. “That’s scary.”
“Did your grandma say anything?” Angie asked. She felt a little sick.
“Yep,” Dorsey answered. “She told me to goddamn stand up straight. That’s how I knew it was really her. Old bat.” She was sitting on her windowsill, blowing smoke out into the night.
Kate had felt anger surging within her, listening to Dorsey. It wasn’t fair that Dorsey would get a visit from her grandmother, a woman she claimed to despise, when Kate’s own mother, whom she missed so much it made her bones ache, remained resolutely silent. Once, a few weeks after the funeral, Kate had even tried a Ouija board, her fingers trembling as she placed them gently on the wooden planchette, whispering and waiting, her heart like a bird with a broken wing in her chest.
Where are you? she’d whispered. Come back.
Nothing had happened. Kate threw the board against the bedroom wall, which roused her father from his chair in the living room, where he watched television late into the night. In the dark room, he picked up the cracked board and looked at Kate, his face shifting into something that made the fluttering bird inside her go still.
“Stop,” he’d said. “Please stop. She’s not there.”
He didn’t notice Lissy, hidden in her blankets on the bed on the other side of the room, watching.
Kate heard him drop the board in the trashcan in the kitchen. He went back to his chair and the sound on the television got louder. Kate went to bed and cried.
It had been a whole year without her mother and still the wound inside her would not heal.
At Dorsey’s, Kate had jammed herself in her sleeping bag, pressing her face against her pillow. Death was unfair in so many ways.
“I don’t care,” she’d told them, her voice muffled. “Whatever. I’m in.”
They stood in front of Bedford. The sign said Providing Succor for God’s Helpless Children and was in remarkably good shape, only a few letters worn and faded. The asylum had been closed a decade earlier, Dorsey had told them, and they’d transferred the last fifteen or so patients out of state.
“Why isn’t this place boarded up?” Angie asked. The glass on Bedford’s windows was mostly intact, though dirty, save for a few broken panes.
“They’re starting development in a few weeks and will probably put up fencing then,” Dorsey said. “Turning it into condos. It does have a great view of the lake.”
They all turned to look at Ca
scade Lake. The moon gleamed on the surface.
Lissy watched the water ripple. She found it transfixing. She and her mother had taken a paddle-boat ride once, on another lake outside of town, on a day when Lissy had a doctor’s appointment. She was always quieter than usual after the doctor, because they asked her so many questions, and made her do strange things, like draw a house, or play with small plastic dolls, and her mother always took her somewhere nice after, like for ice cream, or a movie. On the paddle-boat day, they had a few hours before Kate would be home from school. “Just us,” her mother had said, conspiratorially. “No fussy Kate. Just me and you and the water.”
Before it fell out, her mother’s hair had been smooth and soft, a dark brown cape that tickled Lissy’s cheeks when she bent to kiss her.
Lissy watched the lake, a hot feeling spreading in her chest. They’d had a good day, that day. Maybe one of the last ones, before her mother had to stay in bed all the time.
Dorsey continued in her raspy voice. “My dad says the fear of ghosts is probably what keeps most people out, so there isn’t really a need for security. They’ll lock it up soon, though, so we need to do this now.”
Dorsey’s father worked for the city. None of the girls knew exactly what he did, only that Dorsey had excellent clothes, a big two-story house, and a kidney-shaped swimming pool with a slide.
“Look,” Kate said, pointing.
To the right of the hospital was a spindly-looking iron fence with a gate that hung off its hinges. Headstones and crosses poked out of brush and weeds.
“Oh,” Angie said nervously. “I guess . . . they buried them here.”
“It doesn’t look very big,” Kim said. “I mean, should it be bigger? When did this place open?”
Up All Night Page 19