A Neon Darkness

by Lauren Shippen

  “No, I don’t.” I shake my head. “And I shouldn’t have to tell you that.”

  “Maybe the electricity rewired things a bit,” Indah suggests, looking at Neon. “It’s happened before.”

  “Excuse me, what?”

  “Chill,” Neon says. “It’s temporary. A lot of abilities are based in the brain, so sometimes my little light show gets in the way. Neurons and all that shit.”

  “Okay, seriously, who are you guys?” I say, exasperated, scooting to the edge of the couch. “How do you—I mean, how many people like us have you met?”

  “A fair few,” Neon says. “Indah here is our little bloodhound.” She tilts her head toward Indah and smiles big. Indah just rolls her eyes.

  “Explain,” I demand.

  “I’m not like you,” she begins. “I’m not an Unusual. Or, at least, not in the strictest sense.”

  “Okay…,” I say, urging her along.

  “But I can sense you guys,” she continues. “I’ve always been able to. That’s how I first knew about Neon, and then she introduced me to Marley and we picked up a few more along the way, though mostly it’s just the four of us now. Well, when Blaze is around at least,” she finishes darkly.

  “A few—what—who’s Marley?” I have a million questions and I can’t tell which one is most pressing because they aren’t answering before I can ask and it’s been so long since I’ve had to closely examine my own wanting process. Sometimes wants battle themselves, but usually one rises to the top, and then most of the time things just happen.

  “Oh, you’ll meet Marley,” Neon says. “And probably others too, eventually. But what I want to know is: Why couldn’t Indah sense you?”

  Neon pierces me with her dark brown eyes, leaning forward again and pointing her cigarette-laden hand at me. I guess it’s better than a hand covered in electric current.

  “I don’t know.” I shrug. “I’m clearly new to all of this.”

  “You’ve never told anyone about what you can do?” Indah asks.

  “No,” I say automatically. “I mean, there are a few people who … no, no one knows.”

  “And I’m guessing you’d like to keep it that way?” Indah prods.

  “What, you think it’d be a good idea to up and tell people that you have the power to get them to do what you want?” I say mockingly. “How exactly would that conversation go?”

  “I think that’s why,” Indah tells Neon, pointing at me. “If he didn’t want me to sense it and his power works the way it does…”

  “Then his need to hide what he can do would trump your sensitivity.” Neon nods.

  “You guys really have been around the block about this, haven’t you?” I ask, unable to keep the drop of awe out of my voice.

  “It’s not all that different from an empath ability,” Indah explains. “I mean, no, it’s very different in terms of outcome, but—”

  “Yeah, you could say that we know a thing or two,” Neon finishes for her.

  “Jesus,” I sigh, collapsing back into the cushions. “This is…”

  “A lot?” Indah guesses.

  “Yeah.” I huff a laugh. “Yeah, this is a whole goddamn lot.”

  Indah and Neon smile softly at each other and then at me. It makes me feel less alone and suddenly I need to know.

  “Am I…,” I start. “I’m gonna be okay, right?”

  “Yeah, kid.” Neon slaps my knee and it makes me hate the “kid” a hell of a lot less. “You’re gonna be fine. You’ll be back to normal in no time. Or, at least, your version of normal. Sorry I overloaded your circuit board there.”

  “That’s okay,” I say, and mean it. “I’m just … you guys are cool with what I do?”

  At that, they look at each other again, this time smile-less.

  “It’s definitely more … unique than we’ve encountered before,” Indah says carefully. “But if all you’re using it for is to get free booze and stay in some swanky hotel, then…”

  “Then screw the fat-cat capitalists,” Neon says, grinning. “Let’s have some fun.”

  * * *

  “Robbie, I just don’t understand what’s wrong with you.”

  My mother is crying and I don’t know how to make it stop. I want it to stop. Why won’t it stop?

  “What do you mean, Mom?” I ask, tears gathering at the corners of my eyes. I’m too old to cry. I’ll be in sixth grade in two months and middle schoolers don’t cry.

  “There’s something not right with you, Robbie,” she sniffs. “Your father and I love you very much, but you’re scaring us.”

  “I don’t mean to scare you,” I say, tears running freely down my cheeks. She usually brushes them away. Why isn’t she brushing them away?

  “I know, baby, but then why did you make your father do that?” she pleads, and I wish that she would reach out and pull me into her arms instead of standing several feet away from me like I’m something toxic she’s afraid to touch.

  “It wasn’t my fault.” I shake my head. “I just wanted my Frisbee.”

  The tears are coming in full force now. I try to push them down, cry silently. I don’t want to wake my dad, upstairs napping in his bed with a broken leg.

  “It wasn’t supposed to happen that way,” I whisper. “I just needed him to get my Frisbee.”

  “But why did you make him jump off the roof?”

  * * *

  “Rob, this is Marley,” Neon says, gesturing toward the genuinely terrifying figure next to her. I have a heart-stopping moment where I think it’s the tall man from the party the other night. But after the initial double take, I realize that Marley is tall, yes, but broad shouldered and built. His blond hair is cropped close to his skull, making his unsmiling face strangely sharp in comparison to his impressively beefy frame. Add the extreme paleness of his skin to all that, and the result is like looking at the corpse of Frankenstein’s monster.

  “Hey, man,” I say, shaking his enormous hand. “Robert Gorham. It’s good to meet you.” I want to bite back the words—the stupid Midwestern manners They instilled in me crawling their way out before I can come up with something cooler, more casual.

  But for some reason the awkward, out-of-place politeness makes him smile, just a bit, and he keeps his eyes on me as he says to Neon:

  “Where’d you find this one?” His voice isn’t what I expected. Instead of low and gruff, it’s strangely smooth and slightly higher than mine.

  “At Lubitsch,” Indah says.

  “Ha, figures. You even old enough to drink, kid?” Marley asks before his face twitches and he course corrects. “I’m—I’m sorry.” He sounds genuinely apologetic and I see Indah tense out of the corner of my eye.

  “Down, boy.” Neon lifts her eyebrows at me and I glare.

  “… What just happened?” Marley asks, squinting between us.

  “What do you mean?” I blink innocently and Indah shoots daggers at me. I want her to chill out, but all my energy is focused on Marley. On impressing him, figuring him out. I don’t have desire left to spare for Indah.

  “Robert here is one of us,” Neon tells him.

  “‘One of us’?” I echo. “You mean, he’s also…”

  “Marley’s the first Unusual I ever met,” Neon explains, smiling up at him. Marley returns her gaze and something in him relaxes.

  “Yeah.” He nods. “We met years ago when we were both a lot less in control than we are now. We helped each other through it all, shared all our secrets. We’re family.”

  He says it all without hesitation, my ability slowly sinking into him.

  “What can you do?” I ask.

  “See pasts,” he says simply.

  “What?”

  “I can see into people’s pasts,” he sighs, like he’s just telling someone about his boring accounting job or something. “Not like time traveling or anything,” he clarifies. “But I get these little visions—well, full-on audiovisual hallucinations, really—that show me bits of someone’s past.”
>
  “What,” I say again, this time less of a question. Nervousness rises in my throat and my eyes flicker to the door, ready to escape at any moment.

  “Give Rob a sec,” Neon says, grinning. “He’s still new to all this.”

  “Doesn’t seem that new.” Marley rubs the back of his neck with his massive hand. “Whatever you can do, seems like you know your way around it. Is it … like, a truth serum thing?”

  “Wait,” I say, deflecting, “you could tell I was doing something to you?”

  “I mean, I think so?” he says. “I don’t normally tell complete strangers everything about myself.”

  “That was you telling someone everything about yourself?” I scoff. “You said, like, three sentences.”

  “He’s normally very reticent,” Indah quips from the kitchen. “Marley, lend me a hand?”

  Marley obeys, moving around the island separating the kitchen and living room. He joins her as she creates some sort of drink concoction that, having spent the past few weeks drinking with Indah outside of Lubitsch, I know is probably too strong to legally serve to bar patrons. Neon and I enjoy being her guinea pigs though.

  We’re in Neon’s apartment, a space that’s casual and haphazard in the way that Neon can be. Tonight, Neon is wearing her typical getup. Black leather pants, black tank littered with safety pins, black biker jacket, black combat boots. The only color in her whole ensemble is the bursts of blue at the ends of her hair and the edges of her eyes. Like a neon bar sign in the middle of a dark night.

  “Wait a second,” I start, a thought occurring. “Neon isn’t your real name, is it?”

  “You’re just figuring that out now?” She snorts.

  “No,” I say, rolling my eyes, “I assumed it wasn’t your real name but it’s—it has to do with the electricity, doesn’t it? And Marley … ghost of the past?”

  I turn to Marley as I say this and he smiles, showing all his teeth. My stomach twists at the unexpected sight—it should be menacing, this towering man grinning, but instead, like his voice, it’s soft and genuine and at odds with everything else about him.

  “You got that pretty fast, kid,” he says. “Neon’s is obvious but it can take people a second to put two and two together with me.”

  “I like to read,” I say with a shrug, and Marley smiles bigger and nods.

  I smile back, warmth spreading through me at Marley’s approval. And he called me “kid.” So I’m not working my mojo on him. He’s impressed because of me, not what I can do.

  “What does ‘Indah’ mean?” I ask, raising my voice over the clatter of the cocktail shaker in her hand.

  “‘Beautiful one,’” she says after a moment, pouring the contents of the shaker into three glasses.

  “I don’t get it,” I say. “I mean, not that you’re not—I mean … it’s accurate.” I can feel my face heating but Indah laughs her big laugh and I think it’s okay.

  “Isn’t it just?” Neon says dreamily, gazing up at Indah from her place on the couch.

  “It’s my real name, Rob,” Indah explains, handing me a glass of something cold and slightly pink. I take a cautious sniff of it and, yup, definitely one of Indah’s more lethal creations.

  “We don’t think I’m actually an Unusual,” she continues. “I’m just sensitive to them. As far as I can tell, I don’t have any other abilities and I’m not sure sensing people with abilities really counts as an ability itself. So I’m like the … caretaker of this ragtag group of weirdos.”

  She sits on the arm of the couch and brushes at Neon’s cheek as she says this, Neon still gazing up at her lovingly.

  “Jesus, this is efficient,” Marley says from the kitchen.

  “What is?” Neon says distractedly, stroking her hand up and down Indah’s denim-clad leg.

  “His ability,” Marley expands, moving around the island and back into the living room. “I’ve never heard Indah explain any of that that quickly. But you wanted to know, didn’t you?” He directs that to me, and I can’t find judgment in his voice.

  “Yeah.” I nod. “Yeah, I wanted to know. I’m … curious. About how all of this works.”

  “All of what?” Neon asks, tearing her eyes away from the “beautiful one” to focus on me.

  “This,” I say, waving my hand over the three of them. “Like … what do you guys do?”

  “You’ve seen what we do,” Neon says. “We drink—well, not all of us—we go to concerts, we find other people like us when we can. Is there something we’re supposed to be doing?”

  “No, not at all.” I shake my head. “I just … I haven’t met a lot of other people who just live their lives and don’t have to worry about all that other stuff.”

  “What other stuff?” Marley asks.

  “You know—family, work, I don’t know … taxes…,” I say eventually, uncertain what real people do in life.

  “You think we don’t worry about that stuff?” Neon laughs sharply. “Of course we do.”

  “Rob, you met me at my job,” Indah reminds me.

  “Well, yeah, but you’re…” I trail off. She lifts her eyebrows in challenge and I decide I’m close enough to her that she’s not going to get mad at me. “You’re not one of us, not really. So you have to work.”

  “Yeah, so do we, bud,” Neon says, waving her hand between herself and Marley. “I work in a bike shop. This”—her fingers spark blue—“comes in handy when you’re fixing faulty engines.” My mind flashes back to the spiky-haired woman at the house party, the one who said she works at the shop with Neon, and I curse myself for not asking for more information, for not interrogating that woman for every bit of information she has on Neon and what Neon has said about me.

  “And I do security at bars—sometimes I bounce at Lubitsch actually—to pay for classes,” Marley says. “I’m pre-law.” He smiles again, the paleness of his cheeks warming.

  “Oh,” I say, a little dumbfounded.

  “Yeah, not all of us can hop from place to place not worrying about money or any other damn thing,” Neon says, leaning forward to grab her smokes from the coffee table. “Just because we’re special doesn’t mean we don’t have to pay rent.”

  “It does for me.”

  “Well, nice to be you then,” Neon teases, lighting her cigarette. I’m hypnotized by the way her lips wrap around the cigarette, the glow of the flame from the lighter reflecting in her brown eyes.

  “Those things will kill you, you know,” I say, tearing my eyes away from her and nodding toward the pack she’s dropped back on the table.

  “Not you too,” Neon groans, rolling her eyes.

  “Thank you, Robert,” Indah exclaims. “I’ve been trying to tell her for two years and all I get is an eye roll and, yep, that.” She lifts a hand to Neon’s middle finger and Neon just grins around her cigarette.

  “Marley’s on my side,” Indah continues. “And now with you, maybe the three of us can work on her.”

  “Blaze never minded,” Neon says, exhaling.

  “Blaze had too much fun trying to light your smokes from across the room,” Indah retorts. “You still haven’t painted over most of the burn marks!”

  Indah sweeps her arm around the apartment and I follow her hand. Now that I’m looking, there are several black streaks scattered on the walls of the living room. My eyes roam over the room with more intent and I see that the corner of the rug is singed.

  “Blaze … I’m assuming he’s one of us?” I ask, things starting to snap together. Us. I love hearing myself say that, love the way it feels on my tongue, love this easy rapport we’re falling into. Like we really are an “us.” Like I belong somewhere.

  “Pyrokinetic,” Neon says, nodding. “Pretty powerful, too. But, god, he hates it. That’s why I let him experiment in here, even if it means the place smelling like a firepit all the time. Anything to make him see how cool what he can do is.”

  “So when you said you thought he was just blowing off some steam…,” I say, hoping my awe d
oesn’t show through the question. The way they’re talking about all of this, about being Unusual, makes it seem run-of-the-mill. But my brain is reeling with possibility, with the idea that there are people who can electrocute you, set fires, see your past.

  “He does that sometimes,” Indah says. “He gets so fed up with his power, with being an Unusual, that he’ll go away for a little while, get some flames out at a lake or in the desert. Somewhere no one can find him and where he won’t do too much damage. But he’s never been gone for this long.”

  “I’m sure he’s fine, babe,” Neon says soothingly. “We always knew there was a chance that he would leave one day and not come back. It’s not like Southern California is the best place for someone who sometimes accidentally starts fires. And if the whole thing with Cory really set him off … maybe he needed to go a lot farther and bigger this time.”

  “I guess that’s true,” Indah concedes. “I just wish he’d take the time to call, to let us know that he’s all right.”

  “If this is something that he does a lot, then why were you so freaked when I left in the middle of the night?” I ask Indah. “It doesn’t sound like he’s actually missing.”

  “I just…” Indah sighs. “I had a bad feeling. And with you being new in town and only eighteen, I panicked. I don’t like not knowing where people are.”

  “What’s the worst that could happen?” I ask lightly.

  “Like Neon said, Alex—Blaze—hated his ability most of the time. Sometimes I worry … well.” Indah looks down at her feet and Neon squeezes her leg.

  “I worried he’d kill himself,” Indah blurts, and Neon flinches.

  “Damn, Indah, no need to sugarcoat it,” Neon says, withdrawing her hand.

  “No, I didn’t—” Indah blinks in surprise before turning her eyes toward me. “Robert.”

  “What?” I shrug.

  “You can’t—you can’t do that.” She shakes her head. “You can’t just use your ability on us for everything. If you want to know something, you ask.”

  Indah has scolded me before, chastised me in the way an older sister would, but this is the first time I’ve heard real bite in her voice. With the mention of suicide, the mood of the room shifts and suddenly it doesn’t feel like an “us” anymore as much as a “me” versus “them.”