“Stop it,” Vivian said. “I’ve already decided, weeks ago. It doesn’t feel right anymore.”
“But, Vivian—” Beck said.
“Enough, Beck,” Vivian said. “If I can let it go, you can, too. I’m going to stay here with my mom, and you aren’t going to change my—for the love of God, Cassie!” Vivian turned and shouted over her shoulder at the van. “Please move on to the next song.”
Cassie started the same one over again.
“You know she has to get it out of her system,” Beck said. “Remember when it was that one Adele song for six weeks?”
“Oh my God, I had that song stuck in my head for months. My dreams had that song in them.”
“My grandpa knew the lyrics because I sang it under my breath so much.”
“Aww, poor Grandpa.” Vivian laughed.
“He never minded anything Cassie did,” Beck said.
“Or any of us,” Vivian said. “He’s a saint. A grumpy mechanic saint.”
“True.”
Beck spray-painted a figure in one corner of the maze. A girl. She was small, trapped in a thicket of twists and turns. And in the center of the maze, Beck made the monster. The Minotaur, tall and beastly, searching for the girl.
Beck painted one last line, sealing them in together.
The maze had no way out.
She’d been left in there on purpose, as bait. A meal. Something to appease the creature so it didn’t question the walls built around it. Cassie was always interested in Greek myths, and this one had been special to her, but even more so in the last year. Something about being lost, and stuck, had resonated with Cassie.
Of course, it made sense to Beck now. If only she’d realized sooner. Cassie didn’t have the words to ask for help. So she told stories. It had been Cassie trapped all along. And there were no bread crumbs or strings to show her the way out.
It took another half hour of touch-ups before she was satisfied with the mural, climbing off the ladder and tugging down her mask.
She stood back from the wall with Vivian, looking up at the maze.
“It’s amazing,” Vivian said. “We’ll have to swing by in the daylight to get a good photo of it.”
“That’s fine,” Beck said. “We’ll be careful.”
“What should I call this one?” Vivian asked.
“Just the name again,” Beck said. “Ariadne.”
“Can I tell you a secret?” Vivian asked, leaning closer to Beck.
“Of course,” Beck said, matching Vivian’s whisper.
“I really wish Cassie couldn’t push that damn button.”
Beck stood in the doorway of her grandfather’s room.
It was just past three in the morning, and Beck was sneaking back in.
Checking on him at night had become a habit of hers since his diagnosis. She’d slip into his room anytime she awoke in the night, sometimes in a panic, the fear waking her, convincing her he was already gone.
Now it was almost inevitable, nearly every night, that panic. At least tonight she’d skipped the waking part and could collapse in her bed after checking on him.
It was the same way he used to check on her when she first came to live here.
It was like in the shop. The sicker he got, the more work she took on. It was a role reversal, slow and steady. From care receiver to caregiver. Grandpa didn’t know that Beck knew he used to check on her every night, too. He’d stand there in her doorway for a moment, making sure she was still there. Making sure she hadn’t slipped away in the dead of the night the same way her mother used to do, chasing parties and Beck’s dad. Chasing that forever until it killed them in a drunken car wreck, and Beck was sent to live with a grandfather she’d never met.
He hadn’t even known Beck existed until the authorities called him. And then they became each other’s whole world. But now he was sick. Now it was Beck who worried about someone leaving.
The doorway wasn’t close enough, so Beck walked over to the bed, laid her hand gently on his back. She waited until he drew a few deep breaths before retreating.
Beck opened her bedroom window. She would have texted Vivian, to figure out a time, early, to go get a good photo of the mural for their social media posts, but her phone was out in the van, playing Cassie’s new favorite song on repeat.
It could wait. The paper might even cover this mural, too, and give them a photo to use.
Beck curled up in the deep-set window seat in her bedroom, tugging an old throw blanket over her bare legs. She could hear Cassie’s music, faintly, from where Betty was parked next to the sunflower field that ran right up to the edge of Grandpa’s property.
It was a pretty song, Beck had to admit.
She fell asleep listening to it, knowing that Cassie was out there, listening, too.
Cassie
Ariadne memorized
the Minotaur’s labyrinth.
She learned the steps
and then followed her feet,
through the darkness
to safety.
Then she taught the others,
and saved them, too.
Philosophers call it
Ariadne’s thread.
It means you have exhausted
all your options
to figure out a problem.
It means trying
each and every logical path,
keeping track
of your failures,
until you find the answer.
It means
you are deliberate
in the way you
seek a solution.
Like how my friends
are being deliberate,
sure-footed,
in how they help me.
In poems, Ariadne is
the softhearted one,
as though saving lives
is some kind of weakness
or fatal flaw.
But I think maybe Ariadne
understood survival
in a primal way.
Knew that if she lost track
for one moment in that maze,
she would be lost to it, too.
I spend a whole day thinking
about liminal spaces.
A liminal space could be
a train,
or a bridge,
an elevator,
an airport,
a bus,
or the bus terminal.
They are the in-between,
the road and the journey,
but not the destination.
A space you occupy only
temporarily.
I think of the wings
of the stage, dark
and full of whispers,
where we still felt that distance
from the audience.
I remember the moment
right before I stepped out,
the moment I thought,
What the hell am I doing?
What if it all goes wrong?
But then I followed my feet
in the darkness,
took that last step
despite all of that fear,
and out in the lights
my whole world
transformed,
and so did I.
Onstage,
I was somehow
more of myself.
Onstage,
I found my voice.
It’s strange, the things I miss.
Little details of my life
I barely even noticed
but now yearn for:
the feeling of the summer
sun on my shoulders.
Breathing in the scent of
sunflowers in July,
those stage wings and
the whispers of friends.
I think maybe the labyrinth
was a liminal space, too.
Ariadne leading lost ones
through the darkness, safe
as long as she remembered<
br />
to follow her feet.
And I wonder if maybe now
I am a liminal space, too.
There is something wild
and vulnerable about a
temporary existence.
And there is something
wild and vulnerable
and, of course, temporary
about me.
Vivian
VIVIAN WOKE TO A HAND ON her shoulder, gently shaking her awake.
“V. V, wake up.”
She opened her eyes to find a concerned Matteo. His curly brown hair was falling into his face as he leaned over her. Vivian panicked and sat up fast, cracking her head against his with the movement.
“Shit,” she said, hands flying up. She placed one on her own head and the other found Matteo’s bruised skull. “I’m sorry.”
Then she realized where she was. In the ambulance, on a shift. She fell asleep on the ride back to the station from the hospital. Dammit.
“I’m so sorry, Matteo. I swear that won’t happen again.” Vivian reached for her coffee, gone bitter and cold, but it would still do the trick to wake her up a little more. It had been a long night, first painting with Beck, and then they’d stayed out even later just to spend all the time they could with Cassie.
Now it was only 4:30 p.m. and she was passing out on her shift.
“It’s no problem, V. But are you okay? You called off a shift, and you’re falling asleep the moment you stop moving.” Matteo’s words didn’t sound annoyed so much as concerned. Like Vivian calling off work and falling asleep wasn’t impacting him—even though she knew it was. “You look exhausted. Like fucking wiped. Pale and sad. Like a vamp—”
“If one more person compares me to a vampire, I’ll scream,” Vivian warned, and Matteo snapped his mouth shut.
Matteo parked the ambulance and Vivian didn’t wait even a second before swinging open the door and climbing out. If Vivian knew anything, it was how to run. Besides, Vivian didn’t have a good excuse for Matteo to explain how tired she was, and her brain was too tired to make something up on the spot.
Oh yeah, well, my best friend who was the victim of a school shooting—remember Cassie?—well, she’s back as a ghost and we’re working on a vengeance plan to help her find closure and move on, only that plan is fundamentally based on vandalism and public shaming of the multibillion-dollar company that controls this town.
Vivian stopped just short of running into Matteo. He had circled the other side of the ambulance, meeting her around the back. He placed a hand on her shoulder and waited for her to meet his eyes.
“Hey, V. It’s me. I’m not going to hound you. I’ll just say this: I’m here for whatever you need. I know . . . I know how much you’re hurting. I miss her, too.”
Matteo had always been a good friend.
Which made it harder to lie to him.
“I’m just not sleeping well,” Vivian offered instead. A lie by omission. She was getting good at those. “But I’m fine.” Big lie. “It’s just nightmares, and I’ve been assured they’ll fade with time.” So many lies.
Matteo and Vivian had grown up together in a lot of ways. Their mothers were good friends—both single moms, and they helped each other out, sending Matteo and Vivian back and forth down the block of row homes they both lived in. They’d shared birthday parties, rides to school, even their grandmothers. They both wanted to be doctors.
They had so much in common. Until now. Because Matteo was still planning on leaving for college in six weeks, and Vivian wasn’t.
And because Matteo’s mom worked for Bell Firearms. Vivian didn’t know how to talk to him about that, either. He hadn’t been there in that room when it happened. And he could say he understood, but he didn’t. No one did.
It wasn’t like Vivian hadn’t tried. She had gone back for her final exams. They’d set up a Saturday in May for her and the other seniors who had been in the room that day. Six of them. They had been allowed to finish their classes from home, but they had to do exams in person.
The moment Vivian had sat down at that desk, her hands began to shake. She couldn’t stop glancing at the door, waiting for chaos to strike. Her brain knew logically that she was safe, but her body didn’t.
She panicked. And left.
And it didn’t matter to her, when Principal Ewing had reached out to her, saying that they were passing her anyway. That she was graduating with her class. That she would keep the title she’d worked so hard for: valedictorian.
It didn’t matter because Vivian didn’t know how to sit in a classroom anymore. Didn’t trust herself not to panic again. She wasn’t the same person as before. The one who tried hard. Who decorated her room with awards and trophies and track medals, like those things mattered. The one who had all of her dreams right at her fingertips—all of the hard work and planning she and her mom had put into her future. The one who had two best friends to lean on.
The things that had once meant everything to Vivian meant nothing now.
Vivian pulled out her phone after saying goodbye to Matteo—she had a stream of messages from Beck.
Check the account.
Look at the numbers.
Vivian logged in to the social media account she had made for the murals.
Her fingers froze over the screen. It was working.
“Cassandra” had hundreds of comments. It had been shared by an organization advocating gun control. By a podcast about violence against women. By a congresswoman.
The numbers were climbing as she watched.
For the first time in a while, Vivian felt that little thrill of anticipation. The one she always felt when she’d done something she set out to do. That feeling of overcoming the odds. Of winning the race.
It felt like she was setting the world on fire, making it burn with all the hurt that she had locked away inside of herself. It was the only thing shaping her anymore. The only thing that was now bringing her back to herself after being trapped for so long. Finally, Vivian felt a flicker of recognition. For that part of herself that was new and foreign, the part she hadn’t been able to accept or understand, so it had frozen her in place for these long months.
Vivian had thought it was grief, that feeling that had consumed her all this time.
But she’d been wrong.
It was rage.
Beck
BECK HAD THREE HOMES IN THE town of Bell.
Her grandpa’s farmhouse.
The barn where he ran his mechanic shop.
And the art supplies store on Main Street in town.
Beck had been sneaking art supplies before she found it. A tube of paint from the art classroom. A paintbrush from her teacher’s desk. But then she got caught, and Grandpa took her to the art store. From then on, all of her birthday wish lists had been canvases, watercolors, oil pastels.
Beck had never been religious, and though her grandpa attended church every Sunday, he said it was because it had been important to Beck’s grandma, so it made him feel closer to her. Beck understood that, because painting made her feel close to her lost mother, too.
The art supplies store was the closest thing to a church—a sanctuary—that Beck had known. She could spend hours inside, examining bristles and testing out new paints. She’d been friendly with the owner, Ruth, for years, on a first-name basis since Beck was just thirteen. Beck got along better with adults than kids her own age. Her therapist had told her that was common in kids who experience neglect or trauma. Your brain had to be wired like an adult, she’d told her. You became the caretaker.
Not a very good one, Beck had thought at the time.
Beck parked Betty on a side street, tucked away from the storefront. They had just swung by the high school for a few photos of their mural, and Vivian was busy as ever, posting the next mural on social media.
“How’s that going?” Beck asked, leaning over. “Wow. Shit.”
Vivian had the first mural post up, checking its progress. It had a thousand c
omments. And over five thousand likes.
“It’s going . . . really well,” Vivian said. “These comments were all Bell residents at first. A lot from friends at school. But it’s spreading. The gun control groups I tagged shared it, too.”
“So . . . it’s working.”
“I think so?” Vivian shrugged. “People are talking about Cassie. About Bell. Listen to this.” Vivian pulled the headphones out of her phone and hit play.
“. . . series on gun violence, focusing on the town of Bell, and the school shooting that occurred there last year. Like so many incidents of public and mass shootings, this one was driven by an abusive relationship. It’s a facet of violence we don’t dig into enough.”
Vivian hit pause.
“What is that?” Beck asked.
“A podcast. It’s called We Can Be Heroes, and it’s about violence against women. Listen to this description. ‘Every week I interview survivors of violence, harassment, and assault. Our guests are welcome to remain anonymous, or not. And they are invited to name names, or not. Always at their discretion. This is a show that, in its infancy, was called a “libel lawsuit waiting to happen”—but last week was heralded by the Times as a “revolution against gender-based violence” when our podcast hit a milestone of twenty-five thousand downloads per episode.’”
“And she’s talking about Bell?”
“She’s in Bell. She interviewed the sheriff about Cassie.”
“And?”
“And he’s an ass. We knew that. But this podcast has a huge audience. Last year it got some bank CEO arrested for harassing his assistant, all because of an interview she did. She’s literally out to take these guys down. And she shared our mural post with her followers.”
“Feels weird to have someone on our side,” said Beck.
“Yeah, it does.”
“Okay, I’m going in. It’s hot today, so I’ll leave Betty running, for the air.” Beck didn’t add the other reason she wanted the van on. In case they needed to get away fast. Beck didn’t think the police were really concerned yet. But they would be soon. And they’d be looking for anyone buying a shit ton of paint.
“Mm-hmm,” Vivian murmured from the passenger seat. She had a notebook in front of her and was writing furiously. “Based on how much paint you used for the first mural and for the maze, we will need . . . at least twelve for the next one.”
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