by Leah Raeder
At that moment I just wanted the old us. I wanted to go back to how things were before that night. When we went to art exhibits and comic cons, rode trains across the city so we could sit shoulder to shoulder and scuff our sneakers and talk, moved in together because not seeing each other every day was unbearable. Then we hooked up with people we didn’t love so we could break up and console each other, cuddle on the couch in pajamas and watch Netflix all day, as friends. Just friends. The pretense wore thinner until one day, we stopped pretending. Then we were best friends with benefits.
That was my naivete. There was a reason it didn’t work out.
“Okay.” I stood and cupped her shoulders. “Just friends. But you’re still my prince, always.”
The look in her eyes made me shiver. It seemed so sad.
We couldn’t really go back to square one. Couldn’t undo our closeness. It was mixed-up forever, one part friendship, one part something else. So I put my arms around her, and though she stiffened she let me hug her, then returned the embrace, softening. No words needed. Just her head on my shoulder, and her cheek to my cheek, and her heart against mine.
—7—
No sign of Blue for days. It bothered me more than I cared to admit.
I idled in my chat room, half-assing a striptease, waiting for him. These other guys with their monotonous, simplistic needs began to bore me. Show me your pussy. Pull the tie tighter. Moan my name when you pretend to come. So mundane. I felt like an animal in a cage being stared at by other animals, all of us anonymous, mindless, interchangeable.
I used to take comfort in the mindlessness. In switching my brain off and going to town. Now I zoned out, thinking of a boy who made me feel different. Who made me laugh and feel smart and sexy and irresistible. He wanted to fuck me, but he wanted my mind, too, in a way that was both unsettling and exhilarating. These other guys didn’t come close.
My viewer count dipped. They sensed my disinterest.
Finally I logged off and went downstairs. Ellis sat alone in the dining room, the pale blaze of her laptop painting only her face and hands, like some apparition reaching out of the darkness. I touched her and her knees banged the table.
“I need your help¸ spaz,” I said.
“With what?”
“Reconnaissance.”
She squinted. “Is this about Max?”
“Nothing gets past that big brain of yours. Come be lookout while I poke around.”
“Inside his house?”
“Objections?”
“He has a gun. You don’t break into the house of a gun owner.”
“He’s not going to shoot us. I’d bet my life on it.” I squeezed her shoulder. “Max is looking into those reports for a scapegoat. He doesn’t want it to be a suicide—he wants to blame someone else.”
And he knows, I thought. That I’m holding a secret.
But so was he. If I found his out first, maybe I could keep mine.
Elle’s brow creased.
“Just trust my gut on this,” I said.
In the skiff she tried to convince me to turn back. I rowed steadily, ignoring her protests. But a few hundred feet out, my right arm lit up like a live wire and I had to stop and grit my teeth and listen to Ellis count my breaths. In, hold. Out, hold. I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from crying, filled my mouth with the sweet tang of pennies. Don’t see me like this, I thought. Don’t see me diminished.
Then we sat side by side and rowed in tandem. Somehow, it was perfect: my strength, her dexterity, our hands and hearts falling into one rhythm.
Peaks Island rose before us, a black skull protruding from vexed water. Whitecaps skittered over the surface like agitated thoughts, swelling, smashing, dissolving into sizzling foam. Off in the distance lighthouses trailed skeleton fingers across the sky. We dragged the skiff up the shore over seashells and glassy pebbles. Something bolted through the trees, a zipper of noise ripping through the underbrush and dying as abruptly as it began. We stared at each other, the whites of our eyes glowing palely.
“Just an animal,” I whispered.
In the woods she took my hand. The darkness had that hallucinatory Ernst quality where shadows swirled and twisted and everything became a face if you looked at it too closely. Elle’s hummingbird pulse fluttered against my palm.
We split up at the house. I called her phone and left the line open.
“There’s a light on.” I circled to the west. “First floor. Living room, I think. Try to look in from the porch.”
“Okay.”
“Car’s here. So’s the boat. He’s either inside or on foot.”
Scrapes and creaks from the phone. “Laptop in the living room. But I don’t see him now.”
“Stake it out. Maybe he went to the bathroom.”
“Okay.” Her voice was breathy, nervous.
Max’s forty-foot cruiser yacht stood parked on a trailer behind the garage. I climbed the stern ladder and monkey-walked down the gunwale till I reached the garage roof. Then I scrambled up the shingles, fingertips skidding over asphalt tiles. Below me the ceiling timber moaned. I crouched beneath a second-story window.
“Vada? You okay?”
“Yep. How’s the stakeout?”
“No sign of him yet.” She paused and I heard the frown in her voice. “There’s something weird about . . .”
I set the phone down on the windowsill, dug my nails beneath the frame, and heaved. Pain fired up my shoulder like a gunshot. Grimace. Breathe. Again.
“. . . sort of creepy. Maybe we should . . .”
Again. The frame screeched.
“Vada? Are you there?”
Finally the sash flew upward, rattling. I snatched my phone and slipped into the house. “Sorry. Putting you on speaker. Be quiet a sec.” I flicked on the flashlight app.
Before me was a teenage boy’s bedroom: captain’s bed with tartan quilt, a row of baseball caps on pegs, band posters—Queens of the Stone Age, alt-J. Wicker hamper frothing over with dirty clothes.
Going on eight months, and Max still hadn’t touched them.
I snapped pics, then went to the desk.
“Vada—”
“Shhh.” Ryan’s phone was nowhere to be seen. In a drawer I found a laptop with a sliver of charge left. I flipped it open but it asked for a password. Of course. Two accounts populated the log-in list: Ryan and Skylar. “Elle, can you get files off a hard drive if the laptop asks for a password?”
“Yes, probably. But listen, there’s something—”
Her voice was too loud in the stillness. I turned off speakerphone. “Hold on a second.”
Quick search of other drawers: no phone, no photos, nothing but school notebooks and assigned paperbacks. Max had already gone through it all.
“Can you hear me? Vada?”
“What’s up?”
“We have to go. Where are you?”
I tilted my head, listening. Feeling the darkness. Tasting it. Stagnant summer air, vibrating with suppressed energy, like the inside of a hive. “Second floor. Ryan’s room.”
“Get out. Get out of the house now.”
The skin on my back stretched canvas-tight. “Why?”
“His laptop. It’s showing webcam feeds. There are cams all over the house. He’s watching us.”
Through the floors, the buzzing air, I sensed the shift of weight. Of movement.
I tucked the laptop under my arm and ran for the window, floorboards squealing under my heels. Then I was outside and sliding down the shingles, kicking tiles loose, chips flying, skin grating off my ankles and knees. At the roof’s edge I leaped, blind, onto the boat below. I struck the hull and buckled and rolled over the prow, hitting the ground hard, but kept rolling, absorbing the shock. The laptop spun across the dirt. Hands gripped my shoulders and I clawed at them wildly.
“It’s me, it’s me.”
Elle hauled me to my feet. I fetched the laptop and kept running for the trees.
We crashed through the brush
and froze, stumbling together. Ellis put her hands on me. Shadows stirred around us, black dye swirling in darkest violet.
“Did he see us come to the house?” I said.
“I don’t know. What did you take?”
“A laptop.”
“Great. Grand larceny.”
“Worry about it later.” Below my knees I felt a crawling, festering heat, abrasions meeting air. “We need to get out of here.”
This time she took my hand and led me through the woods. When I stumbled she caught me, braced an arm around my waist. We skirted lit houses. At the shore she pushed the skiff out solo and made me get in to avoid the salt. Then she shucked her button-up shirt and tossed it to me.
“Clean those cuts. I’ll row for a bit. The current’s with us.”
“Ellis—”
“Come on. While I’ve still got adrenaline.”
She made good on her word, taking us out swiftly. She rowed till her arms trembled, her hair and tank top pasted to her skin, gluey with sweat. Red strands trickled over her temple like blood. Once we cleared Peaks she let the oars collapse. For a while we drifted, the water enameled with starlight and hurling itself at the hull before shattering like ornaments, jet and chrome disintegrating into glitter.
I joined her for the final leg, and when we finally reached the shore of Chebeague we were both exhausted and silent. We glanced at the beach house, shook our heads. Staggered through the trees to the big oak. In her kitchen she boiled water and I let her clean me up because looking at the peppery flecks of asphalt ground into my skin made me dizzy. Memories surged to the surface like kicked-up sediment. The reek of gasoline and tequila. Headlights splintering the rearview. Glass and bone sticking through human meat.
“Vada,” Elle said, “stop looking. Drink this.”
Vodka, crisp and icy as glacier runoff. I gulped it down and felt like I’d swallowed a frozen sword. It soothed me.
The abrasions weren’t that bad. I was being a baby. It was just tough to look at my own blood. I kept thinking, What will I lose this time?
Ellis dropped sopping crimson towels in the sink without batting an eyelash, like some wartime nurse.
“You’re sort of a badass,” I murmured.
“You’re sort of crazy. But brave.”
“Recklessness isn’t brave.”
“Recklessness makes you act. Bravery is following through.”
We eyed each other a moment, thinking of other things. Other times I hadn’t been brave.
She left to fetch supplies from the beach house. I drank more vodka and thought about how a man with a gun scared me less than telling my mother I’d fallen for my best friend.
Ellis returned with clean clothes, spare hard drives, and a plan.
“I’m going to clone the data from Ryan’s laptop. Then we’re putting it back. Well, I’m putting it back. While he’s out of the house. You have a different role.”
“What’s my role?”
She eyed me grimly. “You’re the decoy.”
* * *
I stayed the night at Elle’s. By tacit agreement—I glanced at the couch; she pulled some pillows down from her loft bed—I curled up and let her work in the kitchen while I dozed, fuzzy-brained and lead-limbed with vodka. Sometime in the wee hours my phone pinged with an email.
thinking of you. like i do every night.
you and your friend.
i’m jealous of her.
of anyone who sees you off cam.
anyone who touches you.
i think about your skin. obsessively.
i want to be inside it, like your ink.
and deeper.
i want to feel you. i want to fill you.
are you thinking of me, morgan?
—blue.
of fucking course I am, I began, then realized sending it from my phone would reveal my IP, my geolocation, and I trashed it.
I peeked over the couch. Ellis sat on a kitchen stool, shoulders hunched, working on the laptop. Candleglow bled through her seersucker shirt as if she wore a fairy wing, turned the flyaway wisps of her hair into little filaments of electric light. Guilt churned in my gut, hot and queasy.
Here I was, thinking filthy thoughts about my Internet crush, while Prince Ellis, my real friend and maybe-whatever, sat ten feet away, fixing my mistakes.
Vada Emery Bergen, scumbaggiest friend ever.
* * *
In the morning I found Elle sprawled across the counter, sleeping. I tucked her in on the couch. She struggled to speak through yawns.
“Max is meeting me for lunch,” I said. “You’ve got time. Go back to sleep.”
Most of my abrasions were superficial and already scabbed over, ruby filigree lacing my skin. The worst I’d suffered was a plum-black bruise on one thigh. In the kink camworld, bruises and scabs were commonplace.
I sat beside Ellis and brushed her hair from her eyes. “Poor tired thing.”
She mumbled something unintelligible.
In another lifetime, I’d have grabbed my notebook and pencils and sketched her. The sleeping prince in her forest cottage. Now I could only trace her bones with my fingers, etch the lines in memory.
Recuerdo, el corazón.
I kissed her forehead and left.
Max had responded to my text with a time and place in the Old Port. I took the ferry to the mainland. On the way over, I watched the waves.
Ellis explained to me once how light is both a particle and a wave. Think of what happens if you drop pebbles in water, she said. Their ripples overlap. Some cancel out, some double up. Colliding ripples create an interference pattern, a dizzying web. But light was both the pebble and the wave. It was a point and also a probability. The same way she was both a friend and more than a friend and when we collided, we made an interference pattern.
The Old Port on a late-summer morning: fishing boats thronging the wharf, nets full of sun-sequined bass and traps swarming with lobsters, all those feelers and claws writhing, insectile. Cooks haggled with fisherfolk and threw live animals into trucks. The air was so wet and briny it seemed obscene. Like if I dabbed at it with my tongue, it’d be a lewd act. I loved Portland like this: rough hands dredging up shellfish and clams and all the weird pale meat of the ocean, that bizarre underworld spilling into the hard sun. Tourists flooding on and off ferries, the water a perfect Yves Klein blue. I sat on an iron stanchion and watched the catch come in, listened to the thud and slap of meaty tails on the dock.
Capturing this used to be my life. All those nights I’d stayed up while my hand cramped, my shoulder a ball of agony, feverishly drawing because a vision was in me and would not forfeit possession of my body till it had emptied every last demon ounce of itself through my fingers—gone. Now all I could do was take a photo, flat and hyperreal, devoid of imperfection, of guts and pain and nerve. Of me.
I got to the café early and chose a corner seat.
Max arrived soon after, and while he stood in a hot white bar of sun at the door, I stared. He wore a tailored summer suit sans tie. His tan turned his eyes searing blue.
“Vada,” he said warmly. “You look beautiful. May I?”
I nodded, not trusting my voice. He sat and ordered two beers, smiling the whole time.
“It’s funny,” he said, rolling up his shirt cuffs. “I was about to ask you to dinner. You beat me to the punch.”
“This isn’t a date.”
“Date?” His smile turned patronizing. “You’re a bit young for me.”
“I wasn’t too young the other night.”
He held my gaze. “I’m sorry about that. I crossed a line.”
“What line?”
“We’re friends. I’d like to keep it that way.”
“Friends don’t secretly record each other, Max.”
“Friends don’t break into each other’s houses, either.”
Well, shit.
The waitress set two sweating amber bottles on the table. Max raised a toast.
�
��To a beautiful day, and a beautiful woman with her whole life ahead of her.”
The bottle shook in my hand. I put it down without sipping.
Max watched me as he drank, his eyes glimmering like the sea refracting sun. I waited till the waitress took our orders before I began.
“Look. I thought we were actually friends, Max. I opened up to you. Trusted you. Was this whole thing some sick game? How long have you been recording me?”
“A few months.”
Nausea twisted in my belly. “Why?”
“First, it’s a home security system. I have a lot of valuable assets on my property.”
“Why were you recording me?”
He reached across the table. When his hand covered mine I was so shocked I let him. Light touch, but enveloping.
“This may sound strange, and I don’t expect you to understand. But when you’re around, I feel like a parent again, in some ways. As if my life isn’t so pointless.”
“Parents don’t record their kids for jerk-off material.”
His hand lifted. “It’s nothing like that. All I wanted was to hear your voice.” His eyes drifted past me. “It’s good to hear a familiar voice sometimes. The house is so quiet now.”
Our food arrived. I felt too unsettled to eat, but made myself take a bite of the lobster roll. Tangy lemon butter, sweet meat breaking on my tongue. Memories flooded back. When we first came to Maine, Elle and I had gone on a lobster roll rampage, trying them at every diner we could find. She made a chart and graded them. Such a nerd. I teased her, and sketched her in ballpoint on napkins stained with Saturn rings of ale. She saved the napkins. She saved every sketch I ever did of her.
“Are you that vain?” I said, mocking.
“I’m fascinated by the way you see me.”
“How is that, pajarito?”
She spun the napkin around. “Look.”
It was a quick thumbnail sketch, the shadows hatched with tiny crosses. Her head turned in profile, her short hair and sharp jaw making her boyish.
“When you draw me, your hand sees this. But your eyes see something different.”
“What does that mean?” I said, but she took the napkin and pressed it into her notebook, leaving me in the booth, bewildered.