by Sophie Davis
Once I was dressed and ready, a quick glance at the clock told me that it was entirely too early to leave. It was a downfall to getting ready alone; it didn’t take nearly as long without the extra antics. Grabbing my drink, I plopped down in the velvet armchair next to the window. I crunched on the ice, a habit my mother detested, while ruminating over the fact that I was the epitome of all dressed up with nowhere to go. Sure, the party had started thirty minutes before, but it was entirely too early for me to make my entrance.
I had been in kindergarten, only six years old, when I first learned the value of being fashionably late. One Saturday I was supposed to go to a birthday party in the afternoon that was also a sleepover lasting through the night. My nanny’s car broke down on her way to work that day, and by the time the whole thing was sorted out, I was beyond late. Sniffing back tears and thinking of the fun I’d surely missed, I was startled by the greeting that welcomed me. It was like the enthusiasm a shiny new toy brought, no matter the number of other toys already in one’s possession. Except I was the shiny new toy. All of the girls came running when I finally made it there, hugging me and saying how thrilled they were to see me. I’d even gotten to sleep in the place of honor, in the trundle bed right next to the birthday girl’s.
I hadn’t been to a party on time since that day. And now it wasn’t just the thrill of someone new arriving that caused the same reaction; most people had already had a few drinks by the time my friends and I arrived, and it made their delight even greater.
Of course I also had other motives for arriving later than everyone else. At the beginning of the night, when alcohol hadn’t yet begun to loosen people’s inhibitions, it was always so awkward. Those who possessed the status to be invited to the parties I attended but were socially inept behaved in one of two ways early in the evening, both equally uncomfortable. They either approached, eager to start a conversation but having nothing at all to say to me, or they just lingered nearby, in a way that made it obvious they were just waiting for me to begin an exchange. A late arrival completely sailed past these awkward moments, getting there just in time for the fun to start.
Sitting in my armchair, contemplating how long I should wait to leave and whether I should call the other girls to see if they wanted to ride over together…that was the last thing I remembered from that night.
There’s this thing about this place. No one wants to be here, no one. Even those who belong here, who chose this end, are full of regret.
Sure, it’s comfortable here. This is not the place of fire and brimstone and screams of agony. No, ours is a realm of quiet misery. We despair because nothing ever changes. NOTHING. And we can do nothing to change that. Many of the new residents try, unable to accept that they’ve reached the end of the line. Those are the ones who suffer greatest. This existence is like a knotted necklace chain; the more you pull, the tighter the noose becomes, choking you with unyielding frustration. Or like being in a straitjacket; you can resist and struggle all you want, but you will only succeed in bringing pain and exhaustion. That may be the better metaphor because here resistance is futile. The more you try to change what happened, the more you fight it or refuse to accept it, the more depleted you’ll be when you finally slump down in defeat.
On occasion, you hear whispers of encouragement; pull the right piece of chain, learn the magician’s secrets, and you can free yourself. But only those who’ve just crossed the threshold still possess what is required to believe these promises. Hope. The rest of us, some who’ve been stuck here for a lifetime already, know the truth; hope is despair. At least Dante was warned upon entering Satan’s realm; those who pass that way are lucky if only for being told about it up front. For the rest of us, abandoning hope is a lesson only learned after we are broken and defeated from trying to change our fate.
After that, well then comes the monotony, every day a carbon copy of the previous one. I mean, it’s not as though we are confined to a tiny claustrophobic space. Still, freedom is a mirage. We might as well be locked in a room with no door at all. Or wandering a garden where the surrounding hedges conceal electric fences behind their landscaped perfection. Once here, you’re trapped. This is the end of the road, the last stop on a one-way train. Color, choice, life, hopes, dreams, beginnings; all come here to die.
Here is calm, tranquil, and never anything more. No problems, no surprises, nothing that kept life interesting. Here is simply…simple. Existence is simple, being is simple. There is nothing to do here, except to be. And to think. It allows my brain to remember. Others are not so lucky. They chase the past, the before, like a dog does his tail, and they never catch the end – that important event that brought them here. Painful as it is, I have caught my past. Or maybe more accurately, it has caught me. I see it all so clearly, that is the one gift this place has given me.
On better days, a glimmer of gold brightens the grey and white canvas that has muted the world, and I dare to want. To want a glimpse into a life that is not mine. Like Ebenezer, I am able to watch, to hear, but never interact. Breaking through … it's harder than I imagined.
But I feel that forbidden hope when I think of her. I don’t know why her, it wasn’t a cognizant decision on my part. I simply closed my eyes and saw her light, the single illuminated peg stuck in the black construction paper backdrop, that’s how I found her.
Is it fair for me to ask this of her, to finish what I started? Of course not. But nothing in life is truly fair. There are only haves if have-nots exist as well. For someone to star in a show, there must first be an audience. Our roles have become reversed, she and I. She is the understudy I never knew existed, now destined to inherit my spotlight. I’ve written the script, handed it over, and will do my best to direct the show. All I ask is that she read the lines, improvising where necessary and committing fully. I just hope she understands. She must understand.
“It’s not like a dead girl wrote this from beyond the grave or something,” I mumbled under my breath. I was inexplicably more nervous than the occasion called for.
But who had written it? And when? The still air of the empty apartment was fraught with tension as if someone held their breath in anticipation. But I was surely alone. Finally, after what seemed like a million possibilities flashed through my mind, I picked up the envelope and removed the contents.
The paper felt thick and rough between my numb fingers, hands fumbling to unfold the pages. I paused for a last moment of uncertainty. The two words printed on the envelope were a clear invitation, but I still felt intrusive. Were they an invitation to me? To someone else? To anyone else?
“Only one way to find out,” I said to the empty apartment.
Finally, when I could find no more reason to delay, I unfolded what appeared to be a piece of ordinary printer paper with a creamy sheet of stationary on top. The penmanship was exquisite and identical to that of the journal entries. Lark Kingsley had definitely written this.
If you are reading this, then something has happened to me. What, you may ask? I cannot say. The possibilities are endless. Secrets rule my world; the kind that chase you to the ends of the earth and beyond the gates of Hell. If you are reading these words, one of them has caught up with me.
In that case, I need you to finish what I started. I implore you, please don’t turn your back. It took a lot to get this here, to get you here. I promise that you will understand by the time we are done. You don’t know me, but you alone are my only source of hope.
They say the truth shall set you free. It is probably too late for me, but I am not the only one who seeks freedom. The world needs to know what lies beneath the surface, the blood that hangs around their necks and drips from the ears. To you, this may seem a tad dramatic. I promise you it is not.
Follow my lead, walk in my shoes, spend a DAY in my life, and you will understand.
The last part was printed, the letters appearing almost engraved from the writer pressing down with the pen. Though the loops and scrolls were absent from
that line, it was definitely written with the same hand as the rest of the note.
She was right; I did find her words more than a tad dramatic. Still, images of society women with torn earlobes and slashed throats played in my head. I saw them dancing around a ballroom in their beautiful gowns while fat drops of crimson trailed their every step like a bloody line of breadcrumbs, a juxtaposition of macabre and opulence.
I shook my head. I seriously needed to stop reading The Great Gatsby before bed, I thought. I set the letter down on the kitchen counter, running my fist over the sheets to smooth the creases, and read it again for some sort of double meaning. I felt as though I was missing something. Clearly Lark wanted my help. Well, help from someone, at least. I wasn’t sure whom she anticipated finding this letter, but it couldn’t have been me. Maybe a family member. Except it didn’t sound like correspondence with a parent. Or really anyone close to her. Given the plea for help, it was almost as if she knew a stranger would be reading it. I should call the police and tell them about the apartment, I thought, give them the letter. Let them handle this – whatever this was.
I reread Lark’s letter a third time. She had secrets? Could she be any more vague? Every teenager had secrets. I hid all sorts of stuff from my parents. Lark’s “secret” was probably the boyfriend I’d read about in her journal: Blake Greyfield, the love of her privileged life. From the little I’d read, it appeared as though she kept him at a distance. She’d never even introduced him to her friends – the Elite Eight. Who names themselves like that?
But how bad was it really if her parents had found out about Blake? I mean, had they forbidden her from seeing him again? Because I seriously doubted the punishment for dating an unsuitable boyfriend was death or imprisonment, even on the Upper East Side. I considered the other details of her life I knew about. She wasn’t overly fond of her supposed friends. None of her journal entries blatantly said this, but it was easy to read between the lines. Blake aside, Lark rarely seemed to confide in her friends about anything. They were more like passing acquaintances than the tight-knit group they purported to be. Unfortunately, outside of Blake, Lark didn’t confide much in her journal either. I hadn’t actually read that much, just a couple of passages. Maybe the good stuff was at the end.
Considering the letter ended well before the end of the page, the second piece of paper seemed superfluous. When I looked at it though, I understood its purpose, sort of. It was just a sheet of regular printer paper, and instead of cryptic messages about following her lead and all that nonsense, it was a train ticket. According to the URL at the bottom of the page, it had been purchased at www.amtrack.com/ny-dc. The e-ticket was for one passenger, Lark Kingsley, departing New York’s Grand Central station on September 23rd, destination: Union Station, Washington, D.C. At the bottom of the page in blue pen was a series of alphanumeric characters. I wondered about their significance for only a moment. It was probably just a confirmation number that Lark had scribbled on the first available surface.
After I’d removed the second piece of paper, the envelope was still unusually heavy. I upended the envelope and a strange-looking key fell onto the countertop. It was orange plastic on one end with a flimsy metal loop. The other end, the key part, was the length of my pinkie and silver with tiny, sharp teeth. I picked it up and turned it over in my palm, examining it from every angle. It looked strangely familiar, as though I’d once seen the orange part somewhere, though I couldn’t begin to imagine where.
Okay, I thought, and tucked it into my pocket. Then, I turned my attention back to the two pages.
After a fourth read-through of the letter and another scan of the e-ticket, I decided against calling the authorities. A tiny niggling of guilt tugged at the corner of my brain, arguing against my choice. Her parents were looking for her. Hell, the country seemed to be looking for her, as if she was some lost heir to a nonexistent throne. But this wasn’t Anastasia we were talking about; the country wouldn’t crumble without her. Just in case her secret was bigger than Blake, I didn’t want to betray her confidence. Even without actually knowing her, I felt like Lark Kingsley was not the type of girl to ask for help lightly. She wanted someone to crack open her treasure trove. I just hoped it didn’t prove to be Pandora’s Box.
I really did want to help Lark. Why? I don’t know. Somewhere between reading her inner thoughts, discovering her apartment, and finding her letter, I’d come to think of her like a crazy distant relation. I felt a kinship to her that I couldn’t explain. But her letter was so cryptic and vague, I had no idea what I was supposed to do. I decided to mull it over awhile before taking any sort of action.
I left Lark’s plush apartment with a head full of strange and disturbing thoughts. The more I pondered her words – which I had memorized by now – the more convinced I became that her secret was huge. A closet boyfriend wasn’t the type of thing you worried might lead to your disappearance, and Lark clearly knew something was going to happen to her. More than that, she’d made a contingency plan. The girl had left a letter and a train ticket in an apartment she’d rented under an assumed name.
Since I was no closer to solving Lark’s problems than I had been before finding her letter, I decided to try and solve one of my own. I needed a job. My own time in D.C. would be short-lived if I didn’t secure steady income, and fast. Like I’d told Asher, I was unqualified to do much of anything. Wandering the streets of D.C. in search of Help Wanted signs seemed like the best course of action. Maybe someone desperate for assistance would take pity on me and overlook my lack of experience and references.
At the U Street Metro Station, I purchased a Smartrip card and loaded it with twenty dollars. That should allow me plenty of travel fare, I thought. I knew little about D.C., but I’d heard that Dupont Circle, Adam’s Morgan, and Georgetown were three neighborhoods known for their nightlife and restaurants. Since those were the most likely places to employ someone who just walked in, I searched for them on the Metro Map hanging behind scratched and yellowed plastic. The first two were on the red line while the third was not metro accessible – the Station Manager informed me of that fact when I asked why Georgetown wasn’t on the poster of dots and colored lines.
Once on the platform, I was pleasantly surprised to see an electronic sign indicating the next red line train was arriving in one minute. I took that as a good omen and resolved to spend the next sixty seconds appearing as if this weren’t my first time on a subway.
I glanced around nonchalantly, taking in the handful of others on the platform. An olive-skinned boy in his late teens stood near the edge, wearing Beats headphones that made him look as if he belonged in a recording studio. Apparently he thought he was in the booth, too, because he was wagging his hand back and forth while mouthing the words, exactly like Kanye in a music video. A well-dressed man in an impeccably cut charcoal gray suit and red power tie was standing awkwardly under the arrival sign. He looked out of place and clearly felt that way too. He kept loosening his Windsor knot as though the fetid air was making it difficult to breathe. When he caught sight of me staring at him, he stopped and eyed me curiously. I gave him a little half-smile, embarrassed he’d noticed me watching him but figuring it was best to just roll with it. He didn’t smile back. I wondered if he thought I was hitting on him. Gross. The guy was old enough to be my grandfather with his cap of snow-white hair.
The lights on the platform flashed in my peripheral, drawing my attention from the strange man – politician, I decided. Probably trying to show his constituency he was one of them while secretly praying for his air conditioned sedan with a young intern and martini in the back. Air whooshed in, humid and stale, from the darkened tunnel at the far end of the station. Strands of dark hair flew into my eyes, obscuring my vision for a brief moment, and then the train pulled to a stop. The doors slid apart, and I boarded the car directly in front of me. I’d just slid into a window seat in the mostly empty car when a mechanical voice said, “Doors closing.” Before they did, the suit-we
aring man thrust his arm between the doors and stepped aboard.
We weren’t the only two on the car, but he made me nervous. The way he kept looking at me as if he knew me had me itching to get off as soon as possible. I tried not to look in his direction. He was seated facing me but several rows away. His gaze weighed me down like wet clothes. I kept my head turned to the window, pretending the dark concrete walls just on the other side of the glass held my rapt attention. Every time I did glance in his direction, I found him watching me.
I decided to get off at the next stop. Part of me knew I was being paranoid. There was no way this guy knew me, and he probably wasn’t even looking at me. I was sitting next to a copy of the Metro map hanging on the train’s wall, so maybe he was actually looking at that. Or, if it was me, maybe his intentions were anything but nefarious. I’d seen the news before, heard the stories of the Beltway insiders and their lecherous ways. Except, his attention seemed too focused for that. It was like Lark’s paranoia was contagious or something. I was letting her cryptic letter go to my head.
The next stop turned out to be Chinatown. I further realized how ridiculous a conspiracy theorist I was becoming when the man didn’t follow me off the train car. Maybe it was all this time I was spending alone. Limited human interactions were causing my brain to fabricate silly scenarios about perfectly nice, and probably mundane, people.
The moment I stepped off the escalator and back outside, my senses were assaulted. The signs all around the station told me I was in Chinatown, both the literal ones for the metro, and the huge oriental arch over the busy road immediately in front of me. This proved to be quite the busy neighborhood. There was a crowd gathered outside the metro station listening to a man in a long, colorful robe wax poetic about the End of Days right next to a street band playing buckets like bongo drums for money. The place was teeming with people.