All the Things We Do in the Dark

by Saundra Mitchell

  Bang.

  PREVIOUSLY MENTIONED: I DON’T CUT CLASS.

  Not previously mentioned: Jane’s making it impossible for me to concentrate. Everything in the lab is glittery, glassy bright, and I see her everywhere. Curve of a beaker, width of an Erlenmeyer flask, stretch of a test tube. It’s like a house of mirrors, but the only reflection I see isn’t mine.

  Trying to ignore her, I turn my school iPad landscape-wise, and type my notes faster. The problem is, there’s glass between me and canvas, so I see her there, too. She lifts her chin and waits. Raises an eyebrow and waits. Huffs a sigh that lifts her shoulders and waits.

  So I raise my hand and ask to go to the nurse. I never ask to leave, so Mr. Fancher doesn’t quiz me. I won’t have to claim, out loud, that I have cramps or lie that I have a migraine or pretend to try to barf. I gather my things and slip out of chem silently.

  I’m not sure where to go. Like a marble fired into a pinball machine, I move erratically through the empty hallways. Into the bathroom? No. Mirrors in there, and I already feel Jane staring at me from behind (even though there’s nothing there when I turn around). No library pass, so the media center is out.

  Briefly, I’m ashamed of myself. That I got to eleventh grade and I have no idea how to cut a class successfully. I’m more ashamed when I walk into the clinic and wait at the nurse’s desk while she talks on the phone.

  “I was in chem, and I started feeling sick,” I say when she hangs up.

  The nurse takes down my name, the class I vacated, and checks my temperature. It’s normal, of course, but I think the combination of chemistry and sick are more powerful than 97.8 degrees on the little ear poky. She allots me a cot in the back of the clinic, where the overhead light is turned off.

  It’s not dark back there, just dim. She even pulls the curtain, after encouraging me to lay down and rest awhile.

  Hospitals have a smell, acrid and antiseptic. But the school clinic just smells like the school, with a hint of clean laundry thrown in (the cot sheets, I’m guessing). Lying down, I actually close my eyes and try to rest for a minute. It feels less dishonest if I do as I’m told. Plus, I bet she checks on me soon. Probably to catch me on a cell phone or otherwise enjoying my time away from class.

  So it’s not until I hear her talking to Jacob Cassy about his insulin pump that I pull the phone from my backpack. Gingerly, I hold it by its edges. The powder is smeared; an electric quaver ripples through my chest. Fear, anxiety, but they’re not necessary. Right on the screen, the pseudo Greek key design remains visible in Mineral Basics Translucent Medium.

  “Do it,” Jane says.

  There she is, crammed onto the cot with me. In a cleft just the size of a fallen log, pressed, compressed. She makes a noise like, Well? So I look around; I listen.

  There’s the sound of an open phone line on speaker. Then numbers beeping, then ringing. When someone picks up, the speaker cuts off. The nurse asks for Mr. Cassy—

  “Hurry up,” Jane says.

  She has reason to be impatient. He could be coming back to her anytime. He could be back there now. She urges with a cold breath against my ear. “Do it.”

  I sweep my finger over the pattern, and the phone squawks. It sounds like a loudspeaker, a fire alarm, an Amber Alert. Obviously, I started the pattern from the wrong end, but I really can’t get caught at this. The nurse will take the phone; I’ll be sent back to class.

  (Will my parents be notified? I don’t know! I’ve never been this far down the screwing-off-at-school well before.)

  The volume doesn’t want to turn down without being unlocked. Cradling it against my chest to muffle the sound, I start the shape over. The screen goes completely dark.

  Fear flashes over me, inverse blue, like the afterimage of lighting. All the things that could be going wrong careen through my head: security-shutdown-findmyphone.

  Instead, the screen clears. Apps appear. The wallpaper coalesces: it’s not Jane’s body. Thank god, thank Ishtar, thank whoever. It’s just vectored swirls of color that drift into space. It’s ordinary, so ordinary. The same apps anyone has, that I have, dot the screen at random. Killers use Discord chat, too.

  My stomach gurgles. An acid lash spins in it as I waver between Gallery and Mail. Gallery or Mail, Mail or Gallery . . .

  If he has a murder scrapbook, I don’t want to look at school. I shouldn’t look at it at school—

  The gallery opens with a quiet swoosh. Three albums take a few seconds to load. It feels like forever—a long brittle strand of terrible possibility. And then, the images.

  First, I find last night’s album. A snowy wood. A couple of rocks that jut up at odd angles. Then, Jane’s grave, still closed, still snow covered, from every angle. It looks like I ruined his plans to get more intimate with her.

  Good.

  The album from the night before last is blurry taillights and unfamiliar vehicles. A big muscly car in a dark green or black bears a Maine license plate out of focus. It might be inside a garage; it’s hard to tell. Next, a police car in a freshly shoveled driveway, inches of snow gathered on the hood.

  Finally, an album of screenshots from Discord. Pieces of conversations: 1LostMarble and ArcanePriestess talk about her crashing with him. ArcanePriestess is excited to get there. She’s gonna meet OhWeeOh tonight and be there tomorrow. And then, one screen with 1LostMarble asking her, Are you there?

  Are you there?

  AP, are you okay?

  Another screencap, from a conversation with OhWeeOh. 1LostMarble asks: Did AP make it there? I haven’t heard from her.

  Me either, replies OhWeeOh.

  I’m worried, 1LostMarble says. She was supposed to be there, right?

  OhWeeOh never responds.

  Glancing back at Jane, I ask her with a murmur, “ArcanePriestess?”

  She smiles from the glass in the AED cabinet, her expression curious and unreadable.

  There’s nothing else in the gallery; nothing on the SD card, either. My fingers skate across the screen. What’s weird is that there are screencaps for the Discord chat in the gallery, but the app itself is wiped clean. No log-in, no channels, nothing. With a frown, I choose Mail.

  The inbox is empty.

  Sent: empty.

  Drafts: empty.

  Trash, Archive, Folders: empty.

  So I touch Compose, and I send myself a test mail. My phone vibrates almost instantly in my pocket. I open it; return address is 1LostMarble@gmail.com. No school address. No real name.

  The SMS app is buried in the background, and except for a couple of notifications from the cell carrier, that’s empty, too. No bookmarks in the browser, no groups in WhatsApp; it’s just weird.

  It’s the creepiest phone I’ve ever looked at. It has signs of life but no soul.

  Swiping from screen to screen, I find Minecraft—murderers play sandbox games—and Waze (how to get a mutilated corpse from point A to point B without getting stuck in traffic). On the last page, there’s an unfamiliar icon. It looks like a microphone—maybe something for taking notes?

  When I touch it, the top half of the screen is blank. The bottom has a keyboard. Sitting up, I lean over the phone and carefully touch a few letters. Hi there.

  “HI THERE,” the phone says loudly.

  It’s almost a natural voice, and it scares the crap out of me. I shove the whole thing under the thin cot pillow and collapse on top of it. Just in case, I throw my arm over my eyes, because that looks more like resting than coffin-armed stiffness. My breath rattles in the sudden silence.

  There are so many nightmare reasons to have a digital voice. It could murmur, “You wanna see something that feels good in the summer?” My stomach coils; my body remembers. His hands reach up from beneath the pillow to grasp my arms. Behind me, Jane sighs at me—look what I went and did.

  I bolt upright. Catch my breath.

  Whatever. I text everything to myself. Pictures, chats, screenshots of all the screens. I don’t know what I’m going to u
se them for. I just know I want them. And I know that I keep coming back to that digital voice. I feel dirty and watched, and it lingers the longer I play with the settings.

  This phone is a poison pill; I shove it in my bag. I repack my boxes. Tape them up tight. Turn out the light.

  When the nurse peeks in to ask how I’m feeling, I say, “Off.”

  That is the absolute truth.

  Everything’s frozen and nothing hurts. It’s not even the kind of cold that burns; instead, it’s a cold like silence.

  All the things that live in her sink into hibernation—the bacteria, the bodies-in-bodies, royal ascents stunted because the queen is dead but the ice is thick.

  She is snow white with a black mask. She is sleeping beauty without a kiss.

  Summer blowflies don’t fly in the winter. They don’t seek spaces for eggs and future generations, and the beetles turn away, too. Their hard-shelled eggs wait for warmth, for moisture, to spring open and send forth raspy, rattling carapaces full of hunger.

  (They’d love those gouges left by the knife. Doors thrown wide open to insects who crash and bash their way into flesh recently closed tight to unwelcome visitors.)

  Early winter is her gift. It covers her, again and again. Dropping temperatures reset her clock. Crystals form in the tips of her fingers and the tops of her toes.

  Raccoons have fingers and toes, too. They have sharp noses and sharp curiosity. They have tenacity. It’s not hard to peel the wooden shell off the delectable treat that lies inside.

  No, it’s not hard for masked Procyon Lotor; they can crack crayfish and crabs, mollusks and eggs.

  Peeling away a bit of rotting wood to get to the luscious ladyfingers inside is nothing.

  Nothing.

  BASICALLY, I ATTACKED SYD AS SOON AS SCHOOL WAS over.

  And by attack, I mean I aggressively walked up next to her and said, “We’re getting pizza.” And then, also aggressively, I walked beside her toward the parking lot until she relented.

  “Zoey’s or Chi-Town?”

  Shooting her a patented look, I make her answer that question herself. Zoey’s is the only decent pizza in town. It’s New York style, with the bubbly crust and giant slices that beg to be folded in half. Chi-Town is this weird deep dish-slash-thick crust that tastes like old olive oil and questionable refrigeration.

  Once we’re in Syd’s car (actually, still the stepdad’s Jeep), I buckle in and then brush her hand away from the radio. We don’t need a soundtrack for this conversation. In fact, music would just make it easier to drift away from the hard stuff—suddenly I’d sing a line, and then she’d say, “I love the way he finds the rhythm in the words,” and before you know it, we’d be talking about the ancient reconstructed instruments that archaeologists are teaching themselves to play. Have you ever heard an epigonion? If not, you’re seriously missing out.

  (Just like that. That’s exactly how it usually happens.)

  “Okay,” I say as we pull out of the school parking lot. “I’m not talking about feels. I’m talking about observations here, agreed?”

  From behind her blue aviators, Syd cuts me a look. “Agreed.”

  Twisting my hands around the seat belt, I try to find the right place to start. And there is no right place. I could go all the way back to summer, when we were apart and she got a tattoo without telling me about it. But everything, right now, is an exercise in what-causes-what. I’m going to stick close to home. Immediate.

  “I didn’t imagine you blowing Hailey off this morning,” I say. Facts. Not feels.

  The sound Syd makes is nauseating. It’s like the gargling of a lugy; after she takes a sharp, clearing inhale through her nostrils. But then, she says, righteously, “We were obviously doing something, and she just sits down.”

  Also factual but layered with meaning. I acknowledge; I nod. “We were, yeah. But it didn’t look like we were doing anything important. I mean, we were sitting there looking at a phone.”

  “And that cutesy little trick with the face powder,” Syd continues. The speedometer rushes above the speed limit, then drops heavily. Cruise control. “Like, does she have dinner with Detective Dad and solve crimes? ‘Taco Tuesday? That’s for plebes. We have Forensics Friday!’”

  I relax. Not because I like what I’m hearing. Just because I kind of understand this. This is a Syd I’ve met before. When something barbs her skin and drags and irritates until she has to rant it out of her system. And I could see being ticked off that Hailey swept in and solved the problem when Syd was still working on it.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, but I’m not accepting responsibility. I’m commiserating. “You were this close to getting it.”

  “Yeah, I was. It would have been cool, too. I was going to breathe on it. Fog the glass.”

  Syd pulls the lid off her black mittens, exposing her fingers. The pale blue curves of her nails dance along the steering wheel. They move like they’re testing the leather, pressing in deep to leave furrows before moving on. Sometimes, she does that to her knee when we’re watching movies.

  The heat rises quickly in the SUV, and I scramble to turn it down. For some reason, it just feels better to keep an edge of cold on my skin. It soothes me.

  “So that’s today. But you messed with me about her the first day it snowed.”

  “I told you it was a joke.”

  “Right,” I say sympathetically. “But I kinda don’t believe you.”

  Syd opens her mouth but says nothing. Instead, she slams on the brakes. The belt across my chest locks, and so do the tires beneath us. We slide on slushy, slick asphalt—rushing up on the bus stopped in front of us. A crush of panic deflates me; I squeeze my eyes closed before impact.

  No impact.

  We thump back in our seats. I open my eyes, and we’re stopped pretty close to a black-and-yellow bumper but only close. We sit high enough off the ground to see the people inside the bus trading seats and talking and carrying on like nothing just happened. For them, I guess, nothing just did.

  “Fun,” Syd says, shaken.

  “Super best mega fun,” I reply.

  When we move again, Syd doesn’t set cruise control. “Look, I don’t know why you’re so touchy about this—”

  “Because you’re being a weirdo,” I say. Briefly, I consider checking my digital cats. Then I decide that staring at the road nervously will definitely help us arrive safely. “I talk to other people all the time”—not explicitly true—“and I don’t get this from you.”

  Turning things around on me, Syd says, “Okay, well, maybe there’s something you want to tell me?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like you like her,” Syd says. She doesn’t have to look over the sunnies. I know she’s goggling at me, her own private sideshow. “And you won’t admit it. Even to me, and we tell each other everything.”

  That’s what I thought, my brain replies. My lips offer up, “I don’t know what you’re—”

  “Oh god, yes you do. If you had seen yourself in the library, you’d be like, ‘Ooooh, Syd, that girl is stupid over Hailey Kaplan-Cho.’ Heart eyes for days. You were knock-kneed and cross-eyed and so into her.”

  My face gets hot. I open the window. “I don’t think that’s what I looked like.”

  “And there it is,” Syd says, dropping her hand on the gearshift for emphasis. “The denial. How long have I known you?”

  “Forever.”

  “For-ever, Ava. And you’re crushing hard and won’t even tell me, so what am I supposed to think? Like, does Hailey not like me or something?”

  “After this morning, probably not.”

  “Okay, let’s not talk about feels,” Syd says, reflecting me with a slightly hard edge. “Let’s just go back to the original question I asked, that you’ve been cagey about ever since. Do you like her?”

  That is what it is, isn’t it?

  I hadn’t opened that box. That one is marked Pandora and pressed down the deepest. Lying to myself and dancing around
it and letting it happen without telling myself what was happening—

  Or maybe I don’t know what is happening.

  Or maybe I know and I don’t.

  “It’s complicated,” I tell Syd. I’m shocked at how teary I sound. The emotion sprang up on its own; it’s too late to smother it. “I think I do? But I don’t know how to like a real person. And she hasn’t asked about—” I gesture at my face. “Yet. And what if she does? I think it would kill me. But what if she already knows? Her dad’s a cop, and he was there. . . .”

  Pulling in by the dollar store, Syd drops the car into park. Her sunglasses come off, and there’s sympathy behind the tightness of her brow. “And so what? I don’t tell people about breaking my arm in fourth grade.”

  “It’s not the same.”

  “Kind of,” Syd announces, turning to me. “Kind of it is. That’s not you. That’s not, like, the definition of you. It’s irrelevant if you want it to be.”

  God, it’s so hot in this car. I roll the window down the rest of the way; I stick my face out of it like a dog. We’re not moving, but the cold slaps my cheeks. It fingers down the back of my coat. I need it. I really need it. “It’s easy for you to say.”

  “Because I’m easy?”

  She’s joking. She tosses it out there like bait; she waits for me to gulp it down.

  “You’re not afraid,” I finally say. “You’ve made out with people and hooked up and done stuff, and I . . .”

  “No, I get it.” Unbuckling her seat belt, Syd leans over the console to catch me by the shoulders. “But you’re hiding from yourself, Noodle. And lying to yourself and lying to me. And I can’t deal with that. I can take anything but that.”

  The maelstrom in my head quiets, just a bit. The fire recedes, held off by a wide-open window and the cool weight of Syd’s gaze on my face. There are things there, other things going on in her head that I can’t read or sense or hear.

  “We went driving,” I say.

  Syd slides back to her seat. “And?”

  “We held hands.”