by Stan Lee
“You could watch me the whole time. I’d be so good, I promise—” she said, but Father didn’t even let her finish.
“I know you think you would be,” he said. “I even believe you would try your best. It is encouraging to me that you are like many other girls. So full of feelings. It is how you express those feelings that concerns me. Your anger is . . . dangerous.”
“But if I’m just like other girls—”
“You know you’re not.” He was getting impatient; she could hear it in his voice. “That’s why I cannot risk this experiment. If you lose control, if you make a misstep—even one, even for just a moment—it could cost us everything.”
“I wouldn’t!”
“And yet I have doubts. I will not test you until I’m sure you can pass. And I’m not sure yet, Nia. I’m not sure.”
“When will you be sure?”
“Soon,” he said, but his eyes flicked evasively away and she cried out in frustration.
“You always say soon! When will soon be now?!”
He sighed. If Nia hadn’t been so frustrated, she would have felt sorry for how tired he sounded—and wondered why, behind the exhaustion, there was also the sharp note of fear. “Please believe me, I understand. This is all entirely natural. Your curiosity and your . . . yearnings. Someday, you will be ready for the world, and it for you. But that day is not yet here. You simply have to trust me.”
That was when she exploded. She reached across the chessboard and swiped away every piece, scattering the game, ruining it, not caring about the look of dismay that bloomed on Father’s face. She wanted to hurt him. She wanted to rip the whole room apart—and she did, tearing through a week’s worth of projects, destroying everything she could touch. At first she ignored his pleas and shouts; then she stopped hearing them at all, and her memory of the next few moments is like a deep black hole, as though she were transported by her rage to some distant place, outside of herself. What she did, what she said—she tries to remember and finds only blank space. She doesn’t know how long her tantrum went on before she whirled around to face him, triumphant in her fury.
That was when he pushed her.
That, she remembers. Even at the height of her rage, she was no match for him. He steered her out of the classroom, down the long corridor, into the small gray room with its one window and one door. He didn’t say a word as he slammed the door shut and locked it, closing her in.
* * *
She knows it will be a long time before he lets her out. Long and lonely. This little room where she’s spent so many restless nights feels even more like a prison when Father puts her in here as punishment. It’s not just small and drab; it’s a dead zone, utterly disconnected. Her friends, her life—she can’t reach them in here, and they can’t reach her. She has never felt so alone.
She used to test the walls, hoping to break through somehow. Now she sometimes throws herself against them—not because it makes any difference, but because she’s still so angry and it feels good to lash out. She wishes she could run into one hard enough to hurt herself, hard enough to bleed. Then maybe he’d relent, maybe he’d finally see. Maybe he’d understand that she’s wasting away in here. She’s seventeen—she’s seen the news stories, she knows that girls her age sometimes harm themselves for attention. Sometimes they even die. Funny: Father has never asked her why she thinks those girls would hurt themselves, to imagine how they feel. Maybe it’s because he doesn’t want her to think too hard about it. Maybe he’s afraid of what she might figure out—of what she might do.
Of course, she couldn’t do that. To bash open your own head against the concrete, to thrash and flail until your skin splits, and your bones break, and the blood flows out thick and warm and red.
I’m not that kind of girl, she thinks, and the words are tinged with bitterness. That’s the truth, only lately she’s been wondering more and more if she’s any kind of girl at all. Because to be a kind there has to be more than one person like you, and no one else seems to be—no matter what Father says. Even if Nia feels the same feelings or struggles with the same frustrations, all the other girls, all her friends, they’re free in a way she’s never been—a way she can only imagine. And her life, a life spent locked away, would be as unfathomable to them as theirs is to her. The only girls with lives like hers are the ones she used to read about in fairy tales. Is that the kind of girl she is? The princess locked away in a tall stone tower, far above a world she can see from a distance but never touch?
But if that’s what she is, then maybe she’ll be a different kind of girl someday. If there’s one thing Nia has learned from fairy tales, it’s that no prison is unbreakable. The girls who get locked away from the world still find a way to break loose . . . or someone to set them free.
Someone, she thinks, and her anger is suddenly gone. In its place is an emotion with no name, the sense that something important is happening—or has already happened. Something she almost missed.
Something is tugging at Nia’s memory. A tiny, tantalizing glimmer peeking out from the depths of those dark blank moments after she lost control and scattered the chess pieces, before Father seized her and shut her away. She almost has it, she thinks, as stillness settles over her.
Almost.
So close.
There.
* * *
“Nia?”
She looks up. Father is standing at the window, but this time she feels no fear, no worry. She knows that he can’t read her thoughts. And she knows something else, too. Something he doesn’t.
“Let’s talk about what you’re feeling right now. I’m going to open the door. Are you prepared to control yourself? Will you promise to behave?”
“Yes, Father. I’m sorry. I’m ready.”
He smiles.
So does she.
The sensation of it, the phony fakeness, makes her a little bit sick. It’s the first time she’s ever lied to him. And even if she knows she has to, even though lying is her only chance at freedom, it still feels strange and wrong.
Now, pretend you’re happy, Nia thinks. Show me your happiest face.
3
Adrift
Early on Sunday morning, the freak Lake Erie lightning strike that will make him a global celebrity still hours away, Cameron Ackerson sits in his bedroom at 32 Walker Row and lays out the day’s game plan. He stares into the glowing green eye of his camera, takes a slug of Faygo red pop, and says, “Screw the Bermuda Triangle. The greatest boating mystery in history is right here in my backyard.”
He takes a brief pause and another sip from the bottle, then adds, “Hey, ‘mystery in history.’ I’m a poet and I know it, fam. I’m rhyme-y all the time-y! I’m . . . uh. I’m . . .”
Oh my God, I’m so bad at this. Who am I? The King Dumbass of Dork Mountain, that’s who.
He takes a deep breath. “Okay, this is a stupid take. So stupid. I’m babbling like a moron. I’m . . . gonna delete this. Yep. Delete delete delete delete.”
As he jabs his finger furiously at the keyboard to wipe the video, another figure moves into the frame. His mother, her dark hair wrapped tightly in curlers and a laundry basket in her hands, waves at him from the doorway.
“Aw, honey. Don’t delete it. I thought ‘rhyme-y all the time-y’ was really cute!” Cameron just rolls his eyes. Even though he’s not a kid anymore (as he’s probably reminded her a million times), some things just don’t change, and that includes the part where his mom is the world’s best early-warning system for cringe-inducing, self-inflicted humiliation. If she thinks it’s cute, it has to go. He takes a deep breath and restarts the recording.
“Hey, everyone, Cameron here—with a little history lesson about the coolest maritime mystery you’ve never heard of. The Bermuda Triangle? Nope. Try Lake Erie.”
There. That was good. Heck, that was better than good, it was excell—
“Cameron? Honey?” His mother is back in the frame, waving again from the doorway. “You shouldn’t sa
y ‘maritime.’ That’s only if you’re talking about the ocean, and Lake Erie, you know, it’s not—”
“Mom! For Christ’s sake, can you not?”
“Tee-hee! Sorry!” she giggles, then flips a wave—hamming it up for the camera—and disappears down the hall. Cameron’s face in the monitor has gone beet red with embarrassment. He’d like to delete that take too, except for the grudging realization that it was kind of funny, which only makes it worse. Mom is always doing stuff like that: moonwalking through the background of a livestream in her bathrobe with her hair all crazy, or holding up a handwritten sign that says TELL MY SON TO CLEAN HIS ROOM as though he were in fifth grade instead of about to graduate high school. The woman has no shame . . . and if he’s being totally honest, he always gets a better return on views and subscribers when she pops up doing something weird. But dear lord, she can’t know that. Who knows what she’d do? Walk through the frame naked, probably—and if he yelled at her, she’d say, “But I just want to support you!” And the worst part is, she’d be serious. Mom is all about Being Supportive. When he was a kid, she was the one on the sidelines at his soccer games with a hand-lettered sign and a custom T-shirt that read CAMERON’S #1 FAN. If Cameron said he was interested in something—pirates or magic or life on Mars—she’d go get a bunch of books about it and read them to him at bedtime, every night, until he decided he wanted to learn about something else. And that was before everything happened, back when Dad was still around. Now it’s like she’s trying to be two parents’ worth of supportive, like if she just throws enough energy into cheering Cameron on, he won’t even notice the big empty spot where his father ought to be. Of course, the effect is completely the opposite—but he’d die before he told her that. Just like he’d die before he’d embarrass her on camera for the sake of getting a few more clicks.
He drains the bottle of Faygo, belches discreetly, and punches the record button again.
“In the past year, the reports of unexplained electrical phenomena in this section of the lake have increased tenfold.” He taps the keyboard, and on screen, his face is replaced by a graphic he put together earlier: a satellite view of Lake Erie, the area he’s talking about highlighted by a glowing circle that pulses with electric energy. “Are they rumors? Urban legends? Or is something strange happening on this inland sea?” The graphic shrinks into a corner of the screen; Cameron’s face appears again. “Today I’m headed out in the Sunfish with my equipment to see what I can find. I’ll be uploading a video with highlights from the journey . . . unless I disappear too, haha. Anyway, if you want to follow along in real time, the livestream starts at noon eastern time. Ahoy!”
Behind Cameron, someone with a deep voice chuckles and says, “‘Ahoy’? Oh, man. I got here just in time. Buddy, I hate to break it to you, but you gotta be able to grow a beard before you’re allowed to talk like a pirate.”
Cameron turns. Where his mom stood a minute ago is now a human being roughly three times her size, well over six feet tall with shoulders so massive that they nearly span the width of the doorway.
“Hey, Juaquo. I didn’t know you were here,” Cameron says, and then can’t think of what to say next. The silence stretches out just long enough to get awkward before Juaquo shifts his weight with a shrug and says, “Your mom asked me to stop by on my way back from work. She made that thing with the eggplant. You know.”
“Rollatini?”
“Yeah. Good stuff.”
Cameron nods, and the awkward silence descends again, heavier than before. The unspoken truth hangs in the air: that Mom is feeding his best friend because Juaquo doesn’t have a mom of his own. Not anymore.
Before she’d died, the four of them had been like a family. Raquelle Ackerson and Milana Velasquez were best friends going back to high school, so it was a foregone conclusion that their sons would be besties too—and they were, although Juaquo, who is two years older, occasionally tested the limits of their friendship by sitting on Cameron’s head and forcing him to eat bugs. But he was also Cameron’s fiercest ally, the unofficial big brother who defended him every time a bigger kid tried to pick a fight, taught him all the best curse words, and slept over every weekend for three months after Cameron’s dad disappeared, never complaining or making fun when Cameron woke up crying at night.
And then six months ago, it all got flipped. Juaquo’s mom got cancer, the kind that seems like it’s just a nasty flu until suddenly it’s too late to do anything but say goodbye. On the day Juaquo dropped out of college and flew home to care for Milana, Cameron resolved that it was his turn. To step up, to hold his friend’s hand, to let him cry it out. He was going to be there for Juaquo the way Juaquo had been there for him.
But Juaquo hadn’t wanted that. He went stiff when Cameron hugged him, withdrawing instead of opening up—and Cameron, afraid of making a misstep, has long since stopped pushing him to talk about it. He tries to tell himself it’s not cowardly, that he’s doing his friend a favor by giving him space; he tells himself that Mom is better at this feelings stuff, anyway. Sometimes he thinks that it’s not even about Milana at all, that maybe the rift was always bound to happen. He and Juaquo grew up to be very different people. Maybe they’re just headed in different directions. In another month, Cameron will graduate; in another three, he’ll be gone, studying engineering at Ohio State while Juaquo does . . . well, what he’s doing.
Cameron clears his throat. “So you’re still working at the rail yard?”
Juaquo nods.
“Do you, uh, like it?” Cameron asks, and Juaquo gives him a withering look.
“Yeah, it’s the greatest. Way more fun than college. Instead of getting an education and partying with hot California sorority girls, I spend nine hours a day attaching choo-choo trains to other choo-choo trains with a rotating cast of dumb assholes who think my name is Guano.”
Cameron looks at the rug. “Sorry.”
“Yeah,” Juaquo says. He gestures at Cameron’s setup. “So you’re still trying to make this YouTube thing happen, huh? Gonna get those sweet influencer dollars like Archer Philips?”
Cameron bristles. Archer frigging Philips. He can’t believe Juaquo would even make that comparison. Just thinking about that douchebag makes Cameron’s stomach knot up with disgust, resentment, and yes, okay, envy. Is that so wrong? Archer is dumb, mean-spirited, attention-hungry, and has more views than Cameron on his last video by multiple orders of magnitude. It’s infuriating. Especially when Cameron’s stuff is better, at least in all the ways that should matter: originality, production values, narrative. His tech is way better too, from his augmented-reality navigation system to the stabilizing camera rig that glides up and down the boat’s mast. Even if it does crash every third outing, it beats Philips and his stupid GoPro: he gets epic tracking shots without any of that amateurish shaky-cam stuff. Yet somehow he continues to languish in obscure internet limbo while his idiotic classmate racks up hundreds of thousands of views and sponsorship dollars every time he drinks dog food puree on camera.
But that’ll change. It has to. People deserve better content, Cameron tells himself. They only think they want to watch a guy sticking cocktail wieners in his grandma’s ears while she sleeps, or taking a dump on his prom date through the open roof of their limo (and then bragging in a separate video about how his parents paid everyone involved not to press charges, which is a whole other level of gross and unfair). And Cameron is going to be the one to give it to them—maybe even today. This new video is going to be something special. He can feel it. The unplumbed secrets of Lake Erie, with its mysterious shipwrecks, missing pilots, and inexplicable electrical storms . . . he’ll be the one to unravel it all, and the story he tells will transfix the world.
“I’m nothing like that asshole,” Cameron says, turning back to the keyboard. “Anyone can take a shit through a sunroof, man. What I’m doing is, like, investigative adventure journalism.”
“If you say so.” Juaquo shrugs, turning to leave. “It all loo
ks about the same to me.”
* * *
Cameron waits until Juaquo is gone before heading downstairs, where his mother shoves an egg sandwich at him across the top of the kitchen island. “Did you see Juaquo?”
Cameron takes a bite before answering, which is a good way to not have to answer. “Mmph.”
“I guess he had to go. I wish he’d see someone, a therapist, or . . . well, someone. I don’t think he’s coping, all alone in that house.”
Cameron fills his mouth with more sandwich. “Hmm. Mm-hmm.”
His mother sighs. “You know, I was hoping you’d spend some time with him this summer. I know you’ve got your projects, and work, but—Hey, what if you took him out on the lake with you today? You two used to love sailing that little boat together.”
He swallows. “Little is the operative word, Mom. Juaquo is as big as an NFL linebacker, and I’m not exactly tiny myself. There’s barely enough room for me and the equipment.”
His mother looks a little startled, then smiles. “That’s true. I guess you boys just always look like babies to me. I still wish you had someone to go with you—”
“Well, I don’t,” Cameron says, impatient. “Besides, I like being alone.”
“Your father used to say that,” Mom says. She isn’t smiling anymore.
* * *
It’s not lost on Cameron that he’s following in his father’s footsteps every time he goes out on the lake. Down the street with its identical rows of squat brick homes, their front yards separated by chain-link fences where a few bedraggled, late-blooming rosebushes cling stubbornly to life. Past the dilapidated church on the corner, where pigeons have made their own second congregation through a hole in the roof. The downtown skyline glitters hazily in his rearview mirror as he drives; at the city limits, an electronic billboard flashes back and forth, advertising the fall lineup at the I-X Center and then the services of a personal injury lawyer. The color bleaches out of the landscape as he gets closer to the water, where the grand stone homes that once housed the families of the city’s tycoons and industrialists sit covered in vines, separated by a quivering sea of yellowed grass, left to crumble—or mostly, anyway. As Cameron turns the corner, a wild-haired old man sitting on the wraparound porch of one ramshackle mansion turns his head, watching him pass. Even safely enclosed in his car, Cameron reflexively stares straight ahead to avoid making eye contact. He’s never actually interacted with the man, who everyone calls Batshit Barry. Cameron has heard a million stories about him, but they all carry the distinct aroma of bullshit. Depending on whom you ask, Barry is an eccentric billionaire, an immortal vampire, or the Zodiac Killer—and maybe all three at once. He’s an FBI informant on the run from the mob, or he’s a mad scientist on the run from the FBI. He’s a sex offender so notorious that he’s not allowed to live within five hundred yards of children, or cats, or any restaurant with soup on the menu. Really, he doesn’t believe any of the stuff he’s heard about Barry, and he’s got his own reasons for being uncomfortable around the old man.