Syd doesn’t believe me. Every angle of her face says so. “How?”
“I took a Lyft to her house,” I spit out. “Do you wanna see the receipt?”
For a moment, it looks like she’s about to say one thing. Then her expression flattens, and she raises her hand. “Know what? Never mind. Whatever.”
“You should be happy for me!”
“Well, I’m not,” Syd says. When she pushes off the wall, she rolls her eyes. “Pretend I didn’t ask.”
How dare she.
How. Dare. She.
All the arguments flow like lava, fire on the tip of my tongue. She’s a liar too, she lied first, about the tattoo, she’s lying about Hailey, she’s lying to my face, and stealing all the moments from me that I surrendered willingly. But I don’t say any of this; it moves too fast. I can’t catch a single thought. Not a good one, anyway.
“Look, I’m sorry it didn’t work out with Meghan—”
“This has nothing! To do! With Meghan!” Syd shouts.
Now people do look. A ripple passes through them; it wavers with anticipation. Fight, fight, fight. I shrink; Syd doesn’t care about making a scene, but I do. I’m already that girl.
People have been waiting for this girl to crack for years. It’s an idle hobby, bets unconsciously laid on the odds. Vegas spread: Will Ava lose it completely? Broken, traumatized, damaged people have to. That’s what they think; it’s the rules. It’s even coverage. Nobody gets out alive—
(And here’s the thing: they’re not completely wrong. Finding out that one pinkie in the wrong place can send me back to the worst moment of my life—that’s damage. Knowing I have to have a masturbation strategy in case my thoughts veer back to that—damage.)
(keeping a dead girl in the woods so no one will touch her)
(keeping a dead girl in the woods so no one will touch her, Ava)
I admitted it before—I’m broken—but I think everybody’s broken in one way or another. Mine’s written on my face and underneath my skin and deep in my brain, and things aren’t always okay. But you know what?
Sometimes they are. Sometimes I’m fine. Maybe even most times. So all these people peeping to see what’s going to happen next in this prizefight, that’s their brokenness.
They want bread and circuses and blood. They want glasses of wine thrown in somebody’s face; they want to watch somebody stare into the camera and say they are not here to make friends—
Well, they’re not getting that today.
Deliberate, I straighten up and clutch my bag. “Okay, then, when you’re ready to quit lying to me about what it actually is, hit me up.”
Something moves in me; it makes me glide. It keeps me off my knees; it lifts my head high. I walk away from my best friend, the best (mostly only) friend I’ve had all my life.
I don’t look back, because I’m angry and you know what? I don’t care what the world thinks. I don’t care about the narrow gap that girls’ feelings are supposed to fit in. I’m not sugar and spice and everything nice. I’m a human being—
I’m allowed to be angry.
IT’S HARD TO BE ANGRY AND ELATED AT TURNS. It all mashes into chaos, and I let moody take over. It’s easier to be depressed about all the things that are wrong. It takes no effort at all, and Jane totally gets what I mean. Sitting on the edge of my desk in World Literature, she scuffs her nonexistent boots on the floor.
The room is dull and airless around her; one fluorescent bulb in the back ticks. It doesn’t flicker. It just shifts from greenish light to greyish light, back and forth, unceasing. Jane swings her legs in time to it, listening to Mrs. Mendoza read dramatically from Ophelia’s monologue in Hamlet.
Usually I like stuff like that, but today, it’s getting on my nerves. Look at this beautiful lady who destroyed herself: Doesn’t it make you feel bad for her boyfriend?
Our online book even has a gallery linked from the poem: a flood of wispy, watery women floating eyes wide open into death. It’s supposed to be so beautiful, the way there’s nothing left of her.
Jane twists to look back at me, her grin wry. “It’s so cool the way girls die so dudes can have feelings.”
Startled, I turn my FriXion marker over in my fingers. Until now, Jane has been whispers. Vague need. Now she’s breaking down Shakespeare in the middle of Mendoza’s class? I almost say something. Almost. Before the first sound gets out, I strangle it.
Nobody can hear her, but I’m pretty sure everybody can hear me. The school isn’t so small that people are talking about the fight I had with Syd. But they would definitely talk about the girl with the scar chatting with invisible friends
(twenty-five bucks the basket case loses it by thanksgiving)
in English. Pulling the cap from my marker, I reply with long, lazy strokes along the edges of my color-coded, bullet-pointed notes. Ophelia. Psyche. Lot’s Wife. Batman’s mom. Every woman on Supernatural ever. Dead, dead, dead. The marker swishes easily in my hand as I unearth them.
Bad boys fall in love and reform just in time for their girlfriends to drop dead of cancer—beautiful, tragic cancer that never has puking or dementia or anything less aesthetic than a silvery tube of oxygen in a perfectly upturned nose. Or maybe she suddenly gets hit by a car when she’s out for a bicycle ride in the rain. Or the pixie dust runs out of her manic dream state, and she commits glorious, meaningful suicide.
Fiction is greased with girlflesh and movies built on our bones: we are the reformers, the sanctifiers, the blood sacrifices. It’s only sensible. That’s how the world was built, too. Wars are waged on our backs, and no one talks about it. Nobody talks about the brothels in the concentration camps.
Comfort Women stay comfortably hidden outside our textbooks. Joy Division is just a band name now. Historians gloss over rape in the pure white plantation houses, as if Sally Hemings ever had the opportunity to say no, as if her yes could mean yes when the man asking owned her.
Boudicca had to die, Anne Boleyn had to die, Ankhesenamun had to die, Marie Antoinette had to die.
Jane flicks her thumbnail with her forefinger. “I’m right there with them. The jolly rocks in some dude’s spank bank. Just a memory. You think I’m a good one?”
My stomach roils, and a wet cotton weight fills my lungs.
I’ve always known, in my head, that he was out there somewhere. But even in the deepest folds and shadowiest synapses, I’d never, ever wondered if he thought about me. If he still used me. Not until now.
Dragging a hand over my mouth, I fall out of synch with the class. I don’t hear Mendoza anymore. It’s just me, just Jane. Just the scuff of her boot against cold linoleum. Just the cold weight of her skin next to the heat of mine. I have no idea who she really is; I haven’t even tried to look.
I’m as bad as they are. And since we’re supposed to have our iPads out, nobody notices when I slip out of our textbook app and into a search engine. Missing teen maine, I type, then click on News so I get everything recent. And recently, there are about 92,100 results. In .35 seconds, Google found 92,100 stories, and they’re everywhere. Minot and Saco, Bangor and Harpswell.
As I scroll, their faces drift by. Some surprised, some open, some selfie perfect. The titles tell stories in quick reverse: Skowhegan woman still missing, Westbrook teen found safe, search continues for Gardiner girl. All of these people, gone, returned, lingering somewhere between.
My Jane isn’t there. I think I’d recognize her, I really do. Even though her face is distorted beneath the tree and the snowpack, I smooth out her creases with my mind. I see her, after all, sitting right here with me. She reads over my shoulder avidly, humming under her breath. I can’t make out the tune. It’s familiar, but it won’t name itself.
As the humming burrows into my brain, I try a new search: Aquarius tattoo missing woman Maine. I get nothing and garbage, but six or seven links down, I find the Wikipedia List of Unidentified Murder Victims in the United States. There’s a Wikipedia page.
The bell g
rates on my nerves when it rings. I shoot from my chair and scoop all my stuff into my arms. No time to stop; no time to pack up. There’s the slightest chance I’m freaking out. No, a pretty good chance, because I have a list of murder victims with no names, and I know there are websites full of missing people who are hopefully alive.
(funny funny funny I haven’t tried that hard—at all—to find out who she is)
(oops, there goes a box flying open—)
I have Jane; I have her. Fine. I admit it. And I’m keeping her off both lists, for my own stupid, selfish reasons. Reasons I can justify less and less. Months and days and weeks have passed since I found her (just days, barely plural), and she’s starting to fill up so much space, I breathe for two.
Jealousy or madness—tick a box: it has to be one of them. No, possessiveness; possession. Jealousy is different, but I can’t weigh out the reasons why just now. An oily slick fug coats me as a thought, fully-formed, escapes.
What I’m doing is wrong.
I squirm into the hallway, through the door past a couple of my classmates. I don’t know if I’m going to my next class or to the library or what. I’m just going, moving fast. Head down.
Turning up the main stairwell, I keep my shoulder to the wall and walk as fast as I can. I have a skeletal plan: locker, rearrange brain boxes, proceed. I never make it to the first step of the plan, though. When I hit the first floor landing, I see a face and I stop dead.
He’s here.
The boy from the woods, from the Red Stripe. He’s here.
I have found that my body also can keep silence.
—CASSIUS DIO, ROMAN HISTORY
But if there is any further injury,
then you shall appoint as a penalty life for life,
eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise.
—EXODUS 21:23-25
1LOSTMARBLE STANDS IN FRONT OF ME, HANDS shoved in his battered jacket.
(i will find you)
Right there, in the open, in the full light—it’s definitely him. He trembles like the skin of a drum, tight and ticking and dangerous. He doesn’t belong here, and no one notices.
Guests are supposed to go through the office. The doors are supposed to be locked from the outside during the day. What if he had a gun? Wait, what if he has a gun?!
He senses me—lifting his head and staring into me. It doesn’t matter that we’re surrounded. His gaze cuts through the crowd—a hot knife, some thin ice. He shoves off the door and walks straight for me. People crash into him and bounce off his shoulders; he doesn’t care. He doesn’t stop.
If I run back, I’ll be trapped in the basement. Run forward, and it’ll be right into his arms. So I do the only thing my adrenaline lets me think of doing.
I swing my backpack hard to knock him off balance.
Girls’ cries flutter to the ceiling like startled birds. My shoes squelch when I run past him. Protests fly up, because I’m not careful. I don’t keep to the wall and keep my head down. Suddenly, I take up space when I never have before. Interesting, space, because running in the halls is a good way to get called out by a teacher.
Let them, let them, I figure because if I get hauled away, I get hauled away from him. He’s behind me. I know he is; it’s too loud to hear his footsteps, but I hear them. They fall hard. He reverberates—a stick that crashes against a cymbal.
I should run to Syd, I think. No, I shouldn’t. Things aren’t okay. I should run to Hailey, but no, I shouldn’t, because things would be ruined and I can’t let them get that way. To the Dean’s office, to the parking lot, to the chem lab, with all its deadly possibilities.
Too much thinking. The Arts hallways swallow me up, and I’m past all the twists and turns I know well. Out of desperation, I fling myself at the double-tall, double-wide doors of the school auditorium. The left one holds. The right
(Things I Can!)
crashes open, and I stumble into the wings of the theater. Weights and ropes and pulleys stretch toward a distance ceiling. My boots clop on the old wooden floor. Velvet (maybe velvet—I don’t know—thick! Thick!) curtains ripple when I shove past them, onto the stage. Only the aisle lights gleam in the dark, landing strips that lead back into darkness.
Halfway across, I realize I don’t know what’s on the other side. It could be cinder-block wall, all the way to the catwalk for all I know. This is not my place. I’m not safe here. I’m—
“S-ssstop!”
His voice is a high tenor hiss. He grabs me, and this time, I don’t slip away. The force jerks me back. My bag and iPad and everything fly from my hands. Clattering across polished wood, the iPad turns on. The stage glows with manga fanart from Hamilton: A dot Burr with his pistol level, A dot Ham with his pointed at the air.
I’ve lived all the life I really remember in the After. Countless times, I’ve fantasized about what I’d do if it happened again. If someone came at me. I’m so practiced in daydreams.
Thumbs in eyes. Teeth through flesh. Banshee screams like daggers and tender bits mutilated. Always, always, his body hits the floor. I stand victorious, and no one ever touches me again.
And that’s just not what happens.
Twisting, I struggle, and the sound that comes out of me is a warble. Snapping my teeth, I bite nothing but air. I think I’m saying, “Stop, stop,” but maybe it’s him. Tears sting my cheeks and clog my throat. It’s going to happen here. Again. A hundred feet away from the Ceramics Studio. A hundred feet from safety.
“S-ssstop,” he says. Definitely him; he wraps his arm around my shoulders. I’m pinned to him. Stretched on his chest, arched back like a martyr waiting for the arrows.
“I don’t have your phone,” I garble; I’m drowning on myself. “I gave it to the police.”
He shifts behind me. His body moves against mine. I feel him, too much of him, the angle of his hips and the heat from his skin and his arm pushing between us. Oh god, he’s on me he’s touching me he’s—
This isn’t supposed to happen again, plan or no plan, this can’t be happening again! My heart is full of hate and fight, but I have no strength. Or maybe I have strength, but he’s too strong. (Stronger than me; stronger than Jane. She ended up dead in the woods. Where will he bury me?)
He moves but not against me. There’s silence, and then the theme song from Doctor Who starts to play. Tinny notes tinkle from inside my bag. His phone is ringing.
Haltingly he says, “It’s not . . . what . . . you think.”
I want to tell him he’s proving that like a boss. Instead, I warble, and it’s just a hopeless, helpless sound. Humiliating, useless.
The same door we crashed through swings open. Light spills across the stage. Salvation! My heart pounds so hard, I’m dizzy and my stomach lurches.
“I don’t know what’s going on in here,” some unnamed teacher says, annoyed, “but if you make me come in there to find out, you’re going to be sorry. Get to class!”
DO YOU REMEMBER WHEN I TOLD YOU ABOUT THE GUY who followed me home after? How he insisted on talking to my mom? How he told her what he saw, and the next thing I remember after that is Police-ER-Rape Kits-Superglue?
I hate him.
More than I hate the guy who raped me. The Good Samaritan, I wonder about him.
I wonder what he saw.
How long he watched.
Why he didn’t call the police.
Why he didn’t yell out the window, “Leave that girl alone!”
Whether he stopped to think about whether to follow me afterward and that’s why he didn’t show up until I’d already been home ten, fifteen minutes (crying and yelling at myself for crying and trying to hide the crying because I didn’t want my mom to notice something was wrong—)
(Because I did wrong: I talked to a stranger. I talked to a stranger, and a terrible thing happened, and that made it all my fault.)
(Grade school logic. Not real logic. Just the logic of church and
school and PSAs and guest speakers who happen to be police officers who are trying to help prevent One More Crime and those haters of girls previously mentioned: no matter how old or how young you are, no matter how bulletproof the story, there’s always a way to blame the victim.
Why did you wear that dress? Why did you go to his room? Why did you let him buy you dinner? Why didn’t you say no? Why didn’t you say no better? Why were you out that late/on that side of town/drinking/toking/hitchhiking/smoking/hooking up with somebody you met online? Why did you talk to the stranger?
WHY DID YOU TEMPT THE BAD MAN?)
—and he showed up at the back gate and insisted. He made me get my mom. He wouldn’t go away. He didn’t take no for an answer, and yeah, probably he shouldn’t have, but there were other things he shouldn’t have done, either. Like watching. Like waiting. Like closing the barn door after the horses.
I hate that man.
And I hate the teacher at the door, because she doesn’t wait. She doesn’t frog-march us, me and Jane’s murderer, out of the theater. No questions, no realization that I’m a legitimate student at Aroostook and he’s a homicidal outsider trying to take me out under their roof. No write-ups, no detention slips. Just a vague threat and vanishment.
The only good to come out of this moment is that 1LostMarble lets me go. Abruptly. And I end up stumbling away from him. Freedom still feels like a trap. I wrap my arms around my bag and spin toward him. To attack, to scream, to—
He’s looking at his freaking phone and texting somebody!
Except, then a mechanical voice scrabbles up between us. A program, like the one on his other phone, the one in my bag, says for him, “I need it. It has all my evidence.”
Revulsion crawls up the inside of my rib cage. “You mean your souvenirs?”
Another long pause as he types; he holds up his mobile again. “I didn’t hurt her,” it says. His face, frustrated and insistent, agrees, “She was my friend.”
All the Things We Do in the Dark Page 13