by Cara Martin
We were doomed.
8
FOR DAYS I LEFT Tanvi alone. I hoped the damage we’d done would blow over if we gave each other space. When I couldn’t stand to wait anymore and broke the silence, my calls and texts went unanswered. Every time she ignored me felt the same. Anger fed my organs. It circulated at the speed of light, infecting every scrap of tissue in my body. I couldn’t stop its path.
Tanvi had inverted her old ability to vanish, using it against me. My rage festered at how easily she’d made me disappear. I wasn’t innocent. But neither was she. “You’re in love with Ashish,” I ranted into her voicemail, following a slew of other groveling messages pleading with her not to give up on us. “You’re probably together with him now. If you wanted out, you should’ve just said so in the first place instead of turning everything around and blaming me.”
But every time she ignored me the anger petered out, leaving me empty. Every teenage girl in Tealing could’ve straddled me, her hair falling around my face, cordoning me off from the rest of the world while she kissed me until my lips were bruised, and it wouldn’t have stopped me from wanting Tanvi back. The rage and emptiness chased each other around in a shrinking circle, Tanvi at the epicenter, shutting her eyes and making me fade to black.
While my mom was out on her route one night, Natalya dropped by with a container of sweet potato chili Keion had made. My sister had her sympathy face on from the moment she bumped into me in the kitchen. “I told myself I wasn’t going to say anything, but Mom’s worried about you.” Natalya bit her lip as she closed the fridge door. “She thinks something’s up with you and Tanvi. Is she right?”
I shrugged. “We’re taking a break. Things were getting complicated.”
“Complicated how?”
“It’s nothing to worry about, okay?” I held my shoulders straight, lightening my tone. “My love life is my business. Not something my family can fix. But I’ll be all right. I’m not pressing any panic buttons. This is what high school’s like, remember? Nothing lasts.”
“But you two seemed so good together.”
I’d thought so too. I needed Tanvi back in my life. I needed her, but she was fine without me.
Once my sister had gone, I jerked open my bedroom closet’s sliding door, pulling a fistful of hangers aside. A border of empty space — no man’s land — gaped between my blue-checked button-down shirt and a black suit jacket that I’d nearly outgrown. I stepped into the chasm, aiming high. Launching my foot savagely into the wall, the crunch of sheetrock echoed in my lungs. A long shudder of relief.
I stood back, breathing raggedly. The vaguely foot-shaped hole stared accusingly at me from the wall. I hastily repositioned my clothes in front of it, listening for Mom’s footsteps on the stairs. When I didn’t hear them, I knew I was in the clear.
I could patch it later. She’d never know.
I should have steered clear of Tanvi from the beginning. If it weren’t for the dream, I would never have approached her outside the movie theater. She would’ve remained a stranger. A pretty girl I spotted from the Ghims’ lawn once instead of a knot that tightened every time I picked at it, a problem I couldn’t solve and only knew how to aggravate.
When I crawled into bed that night — a half-written English class Frankenstein essay on my desk — the dream had begun to seep into the edges of my consciousness. Darkness lurked just beyond my eyes, beckoning me forward. This time I went willingly, ready to see Tanvi, ready to tell her all the things I couldn’t say to her while awake because she wouldn’t listen to me anymore.
But the dream didn’t care what I had to say. It unfolded the same way it usually unfolded. Stopping in the middle of things, like it had begun. Dreamless sleep fell in after it. Then things that would vanish from my mind the moment I woke up, my cellphone ringing in the near blackness of my bedroom.
Tanvi’s name illuminated the screen. It had been eight days since she’d done anything but try to get rid of me, and I winced and answered, needing to hear from her but afraid of what she might say.
“Hi,” I rasped. “What time is it?”
“Early. Two minutes to six.” Tanvi’s voice rippled in my ear. She’d been crying. Something I’d heard only often enough to recognize the distinct timbre of her pain. “Listen, I know we’ve been a war zone lately, but I need to talk to you for a minute.”
My gratitude fused with guilt, my tone as gentle as a sheet of fabric softener. “It’s okay. We can talk. There’s no excuse for what I did. I miss you. I’m sorry about every—”
“Not that,” she said. “Not now. It’s Alice. She called me.”
“What do you mean?”
“I know how that sounds, but you can see it on my phone log. Her number is right there.”
“Somebody must have been assigned her old number,” I theorized. Alice had died eight months earlier. The loss wasn’t fresh anymore, but Tanvi carried it with her like a scar, and the mind and the heart played tricks. Especially late at night.
“You don’t understand.” Tanvi’s teeth chattered over the phone line. “She spoke to me. I was having a dream. About you and me. It was horrible. The kind of nightmare you have when you’re a kid. The phone woke me up and —”
The ghost of a centipede slithered up and down my spine, running for its life. Under the blankets, goosebumps sprouted from my arms, panic rising. “What kind of dream?” I interrupted, although I already knew the answer. We ran, and never escaped. Each time, we failed.
Tanvi had had the dream at least once before — the night we’d first been together — but then instantly forgotten it. Now it was obvious that my silence about the nightmares hadn’t protected her. The dreams wouldn’t allow themselves to go unacknowledged any longer.
From the supposed safety of my bedroom I imagined I heard something being dragged across the ceiling. My spine tingled, my fingertips turning a raw, frosty purple.
“It doesn’t matter,” Tanvi said dismissively, her speech slowing and turning deliberate. “The point is, Alice was on the phone when I answered the call. I heard her voice. She told me, ‘When the time comes, don’t let the darkness inside you.’ Then she said, ‘I love you, Zia.’”
That had been her Aunt Alice’s running joke. Calling Tanvi Zia when technically Alice was the aunt in a relationship that functioned more as cousins.
“Are you serious?” I asked.
“It was Alice’s voice, Misha.” Tanvi had grown eerily calm. “I called the number back. It’s out of service.”
A beat of silence reverberated in my ears. “I’m coming over.”
“Okay,” Tanvi said slowly. “I’ll be sitting on the steps out front.”
I shoved my bare feet into running shoes. Pulled a hoodie on over my T-shirt, cold sweat gathering on my lip like a phantom moustache. Phone cradled in my hand, I sprinted down to the garage in the sweatpants I’d slept in.
With every step I moved further away from understanding. Last summer the nightmares were new. They’d never stopped, and now they were plaguing Tanvi too. Her dead aunt had supposedly called her from a telephone number that was out of service. Alice’s message to Tanvi echoed in my brain as I raced toward Newtown Creek. A useless, unspecific warning. Meant to scare Tanvi, maybe. But why?
The sun was rising. By the time I reached Margate Avenue, crimson clouds lit the sky. I got out of the car, feet pounding along the pavement that delivered me to Tanvi’s door. She sat on the top step in blue flannel pajama bottoms, her leather jacket buttoned up to her clavicle and both of her hands wound around the back of her neck. “Here,” she said, breaking her pose. “See for yourself.”
The phone log corroborated everything Tanvi had said. At 5:51 a.m., a call had come in from Alice. I dug my own phone out of my hoodie and punched in her number. “We’re sorry,” said the same automated female voice who tossed out an apology any time a call couldn’t
be connected, “the number you have dialed is not in service. Please check the number and dial again. This is a recording.”
Tanvi stared knowingly up at me while I pulled the phone away from my ear. “Nobody there,” she declared confidently. “The number doesn’t belong to anybody anymore.”
I handed back her cell. “Someone must have faked it somehow. Hacked the line.” It was the only idea that made any logical sense.
“Come on, Misha. I know Alice’s voice. You think I’d be fooled that easily? It was her. And what she was saying was intended directly for me.” Tanvi’s eyes glowed with impatience. She’d expected more from me, even after Katrine. She expected me to accept the truth when I heard it; she had no way of knowing I was trying to shield her from something that neither of us could guess how to deal with.
I glanced at Tanvi’s polka dot ankle socks and then the sharp curve of her cheekbones. The countless times I’d rested my hands there tugged at my ribs, tightening my chest.
“If it’s genuine, what do you think her message meant?” I asked.
Tanvi shook her head, her dark hair reflecting light from the rising sun. “The darkness … I don’t know. Darkness is the opposite of light. It’s hopelessness or evil. But Alice said ‘when the time comes,’ like it’s a test for some point in the future. Or maybe something bad is going to happen to someone close to me.”
“If it really is a message from Alice, she wouldn’t want you to think like that. She wouldn’t say something intending to torment you.”
Tanvi’s fingers streaked across her forehead, the nails she kept trimmed short leaving miniature marks on her skin that dissolved while I watched. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”
“I need to tell you something.” The confession twisted in my throat. It would be hours before the sun burned away the crisp morning chill. I folded my hands into my armpits, fighting the cold. “I’ve had a dream about us too. A recurring dream. We’ve been running from something — I never know what. But it’s coming through the dark. We’re in a clearing, surrounded by tall trees, and we’re beaten up and bleeding.” I stopped and held my tongue, unable to tell her I’d known her face longer than she’d known mine. It was too late. That confession should’ve been made months ago, or not at all.
Tanvi’s head dropped, her eyes tumbling the furthest, falling into a rabbit hole where impossible things occurred and wouldn’t let themselves go unnoticed. “It sounds the same,” she agreed. “I hardly ever remember my dreams. I probably wouldn’t have remembered tonight either, except the phone call pulled me out of it in the middle. But it sounds the same. It was so dark, and we were alone and terrified.” One of her hands crunched into a fist, her mouth tensing. Had it been a month earlier, I would have seen Tanvi’s wisp of an exhale in the winter air. “I don’t understand. What does it mean?”
“I have no clue.” My arms were restless from wanting to hold her. All this time I’d kept quiet about the dream, never imagining it could bring us together.
“How come you didn’t tell me about the dream before?” she asked.
“Because it sounds crazy.” I peered dazedly up at the sun, wondering what kind of twisted game life was playing and how long we had before Tanvi’s parents discovered us outside. Not long enough.
“What happens afterwards?” Tanvi’s chin quivered as she met my eyes, her expression neither distant nor intimate.
“There is no afterwards. That’s as far as it goes.”
Tanvi shook her head, as if rejecting the nightmare and its hopeless scenario. “Do you think the phone call from Alice has something to do with the dream?”
I found myself nodding and shifting my weight between my feet. “It sounds like whatever happens, she doesn’t want you to give up.”
Tanvi rose rapidly from the step, her arms curved in toward her chest, maintaining her body heat. “I think so too,” she said, suddenly reaching out to brush the back of my hand. Her eyes held on to me longer. “Thanks for coming over. You were the first person I thought of after Alice’s call. Hearing from her completely threw me. I called you on impulse, and then wasn’t sure whether I should’ve. But you’ve listened to me talk about Alice so many times.”
“I’m glad you called. I’ve been wanting to see you. We need to talk.”
“I don’t know what we need,” Tanvi said wearily, our earthbound problems elbowing their way back into the picture. “But for now I really have to go. My mom and dad will be getting up soon. If they —”
“Right.” I took a half step back, like I could afford to wait for her because we had all the time in the world and however things worked out would inevitably be for the best. Over the past few days, my barrage of angry and heartbroken texts and phone messages had worked against me. If I came on too strong again, the negativity could cement in Tanvi’s mind. I had to want her back with less urgency than she wanted me. “Call me later?” I said lightly.
“I will,” she promised. A strand of her hair fell forward, partially obscuring one of her eyes, as she bobbed her head.
Mentally, I swept her hair aside, gently sliding it back behind the slope of her ear. Mentally, I leaned into her and kissed her goodbye.
We understood each other. We made each other happy. It was too much to give up on. Hadn’t Tanvi proven that by reaching out to me? And hadn’t I proven it by rushing over to her house when most people still had their heads buried in their pillows?
I turned, hearing the Mahajans’ front door close behind me while I walked back to the car. All day I kept my phone so close to me that it was practically another organ. Lungs, liver, kidney, cellphone. The morning and afternoon were hopeful. Evening less so. At Central Foodmart, I touched my phone in my pocket every ten minutes, feeling phantom vibrations against the top of my leg. I snapped at a customer who criticized my grocery-packing skills. He responded, “Young people these days know nothing about customer service. Just do it the way I’m telling you to without complaining about it.”
Gritting my teeth, I replied, “Sorry for the misunderstanding, sir.”
When Tanvi finally called later that night to tell me she’d thought long and hard about us, I wouldn’t accept her decision. Alice and the dream had complicated things for her, and she still had feelings for me, but when it came down to it, we couldn’t trust each other. We needed to be apart. That’s what she said.
First, I begged for another chance. Like a dog that will sit, fetch, roll over. Lick your hand in apology and whine for forgiveness.
Second, I called her names. Things I’d never called a girl before.
Third, when Tanvi screamed back at me over the phone and then hung up, I didn’t hesitate. I didn’t kick another hole through the wall. I didn’t slam my fist into anybody or pick a fight. The refrigerator remained unharmed.
There are so many ways to hurt someone. You’re practically spoiled for choice.
But I didn’t have to think about how with Tanvi. Not even for a second. I flicked through my phone, finding what I needed within moments and shamelessly releasing it to the entire world.
9
WE’D PROMISED EACH OTHER no one else would see the photos. I meant it at the time. Back then, I was someone Tanvi could trust, and we’d only been kidding around, striking funny poses and acting up for our phones. That January afternoon in her bedroom I’d snapped at least twenty images, Tanvi naked except for her favorite bracelet in each one. She took almost as many nude photos of me. Afterwards Tanvi made me delete all of the images on my phone but one, so I asked the same of her. We deliberated over which photo each of us would be allowed to hold on to.
Tanvi wouldn’t let me keep any of the sexiest images of her. The digital photo I was left with was from her belly button up. Her hands cup her bare breasts like a pushup bra, her nipples exposed as if they’re being offered to whoever might want one. The pose and uncovered skin made it a sexy photo to
o. But only from the neck down. Tanvi’s tilting her head, sticking her tongue out of the side of her mouth and pulling a goofy cartoon character expression with her eyes.
I logged in to Tanvi’s Snapchat and Instagram accounts and immediately loaded the image, tagging a dozen male names from among her followers. She only had two passwords that she used for all her social networking sites — the process couldn’t have been simpler. For a caption, I added, “The 34Cs are getting heavy. Anyone want to hold on to them for me for a while?”
Tanvi would take the photo down the instant she saw it. One of her friends would tell her about it, or someone would flag the image. Then it would vanish. But not before a handful of people gawked at Tanvi naked from the waist up, analyzing the quality of her breasts.
The thought was more satisfying than kicking any wall.
At first.
For a few minutes I sat back and watched the likes and comments roll in, disbelief that I’d followed through and posted the photo battling with a burning seed of regret.
“Is this for real or Photoshopped?” someone asked.
“Sweet rack, TV! Happy to handle it for you any time.”
“Yo, you got a full-body nude pic for us?”
“I can think of some other things I can do for you while we’re at it!”
My phone rang furiously in my hand. The landline sprang to life seconds behind it. Text message notifications crowded frenetically onto my screen. Reverberations of guilt throbbed inside my skull as I felt gloomier by the second. The pressure spread out along my forehead like mutant beating wings.
Delete. Delete. Too late, I realized I couldn’t do this to her. With a couple of clicks, I made the photos disappear from all of Tanvi’s accounts. But deleting something after six minutes wasn’t the same thing as never posting it to begin with.
With my mom out on an evening shift I had the house to myself. I switched off the landline, powered off my cell, and went dark. For the next hour and twenty minutes, my life was as quiet as an abandoned graveyard.