A Neon Darkness

by Lauren Shippen

  Behind the couch, Marley inhales deeply and crosses his arms. He’s staring right through me, and I take a few steps back, feeling claustrophobic and out of control. I don’t know how Marley’s ability works, what exactly he sees, but I want to do everything I can to never find out.

  “It’s not like I mean to,” I say defensively. “It just happens—I can’t control what I want.”

  “Can’t you switch it off?” Indah demands.

  “Can you guys switch yours off?” I counter. “As far as I know, the only thing that benches me is having a couple hundred thousand volts pushed through me, and I don’t exactly want to replicate that experience.” I nod to Neon and she scowls.

  Eventually everything went back to normal, but being shocked by Neon was the first time since I was ten that I was just … a completely normal person. Sure, sometimes when I’m tired or drunk or whatever, it can be harder to control, and I’m still turning over the whole experience with the tall man in my head, but Neon’s electrocuting me straight-up put me out of commission. It was terrifying and weirdly liberating but there’s no way I’m letting it happen again.

  “Listen, Rob, we’re your friends,” Neon says, standing. “But you can’t go prying into our heads.”

  “I don’t get why you guys are freaking out about this,” I groan, trying to keep my attitude casual in the hopes it will spread. “Clearly you have some stuff about your friend you need to talk about—”

  “Don’t,” Neon interrupts, and there’s a brief spark of blue around her shoulders. “Blaze is our business, not yours. Yeah, we worry, but he’s probably somewhere getting the flames out and decided to take a detour and just forgot to up the minutes on his phone. It wouldn’t be the first time it happened.”

  Ours. Not mine. Theirs. That stings more than I know what to do with, so I just cross my arms, mirroring Marley in stance and scowl, my heart beating painfully in my chest.

  “I’m telling you, there’s something different about this, Nee,” Indah calls from the couch. I don’t know if my ability is still working on her or if she’s just choosing to be up-front. “I can feel it in my gut.”

  “Then we’ll keep looking for him.” Neon turns to her, raising a hand gently to Indah’s cheek. “I promise. I’m not gonna let anything happen to that kid.”

  “Sounds like it might not be up to you,” I jab pettily. “If he’s gonna off himself, there’s nothing you can do about it.”

  There’s a beat of shocked silence before Neon rounds on me, her mouth opening, hands sparking, when suddenly—

  “Leave off, Neon,” Marley calls out. “It’s a sensitive subject for the kid.”

  “What are you talking about?” I growl.

  “I can see, remember?” His eyes narrow at me in a challenge that makes my blood boil.

  “Don’t—” I choke on the word. “Don’t go looking in my past, Marley.”

  “Not so fun, is it?” he says coldly. “Being on the other side.”

  My breathing becomes shaky as he stares me down and I know, I just know, that he can see it all.

  “You mean…,” Indah starts, her voice soft and pitying.

  “It’s none of your goddamn business,” I bark, but Marley doesn’t flinch. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Indah and Neon go still.

  “Sometimes you still wish you had,” Marley snaps back before his mouth slams shut, his eyes widening. Without meaning to, I’ve shut them all up, but in that moment I don’t feel a lick of guilt about it.

  I don’t know how he can know that, don’t know how he could read that in my past, but I feel a sob rising in my throat and I can’t bear to be around these people—standing silently, staring into me—any longer.

  I slam my unfinished cocktail on the coffee table and walk out of the apartment without saying another word.

  * * *

  Marley tries not to look, he really does. He knows it’s invasive, knows he doesn’t have a right to peer into people’s private lives like that. He’s seen more in his twenty-five years than most people see in a lifetime and he doesn’t relish the idea of seeing more. But sometimes an emotion, an experience, is just so strong that it rises in front of Marley’s eyes unbidden.

  He didn’t mean to look into the newcomer’s past like that. He didn’t want to see all the darkness and sadness within this odd stranger. But before he could stop it, he saw the inky blackness of water, strong hands holding someone down, the desire to stop existing. That taste lingered on his tongue—lingers around Robert too—not strong enough to drown in, but so steady and persistent that it reminds Marley of waterboarding. And that brings up more ugly ghosts from the past, flooding his senses until drowning doesn’t seem like such a bad option.

  * * *

  I tried once. Just once.

  It was a month after my sixteenth birthday—a month after I left Ithaca, Nebraska, and never looked back. And because I didn’t know shit about the world, I went north and discovered that Montana in March is one of the worst places you can be. Spring still hasn’t come and there’s absolutely nothing to do. I’d been on my own for years, been living with my ability for years, and I was just done. I hadn’t figured out how it could be fun yet. I’d only ever used it to hurt people, even when I didn’t mean to.

  The next logical step seemed to be hurting myself. Get someone else to do the deed. Suicide by murder. Except the thing about my power—the fly in the ointment—is that I have to actually want it. I’ve wanted a lot of terrible things in my life, but the end of it just wasn’t something I could muster up enthusiasm for.

  I never tried again.

  * * *

  Screw those guys. Screw Neon and her seductive confidence, Indah and her kindness, Marley and his hard-edged/soft-cornered personality that I barely got to know. I don’t need them to take over this city. I don’t need them to find more people like them.

  I need to leave the Sunset Marquis. Management hasn’t made any kind of noise, but being in a hotel is too public. Getting up close and personal with the equivalent of the Ghost of Christmas Past has made me squirrelly about my own. I don’t want to be easy to find.

  I don’t bother checking out. I leave the meager possessions I did have in the room—consider it my tip to the staff. However, I do kindly ask the valet to please bring out my black 1967 Plymouth GTX—a nice convertible I spotted pulling into the hotel the other day. I’m sure whatever douchebag musician is staying at the hotel has plenty of other cars they can use. I have a little trouble navigating the boat-sized car out of the hotel’s tiny driveway. After all, it’s not like I ever got my license. All my driving experience has been, well, experiential. No taking the family car out for a spin with my dad in the local grocery store parking lot. Like everything else, I did this on my own.

  I think about driving west—actually seeing the ocean I came here weeks ago to see—but Indah lives nearby and Neon’s on the east side, and there’s something in me that doesn’t want to be far from them. I don’t know yet if I’m going to go back to Lubitsch. The thought of seeing them again makes my skin crawl. I don’t want whatever pity or judgment or platitudes they’re going to have for me.

  But they’re also the only people on the planet—other than Them—who truly know about me and what I can do. And they didn’t reject it, or me, out of hand. Maybe I don’t have to throw them out entirely. It’d be good to stay close.

  I hear the Hollywood Hills are nice.

  PART TWO

  THE HILLS

  “Three … two … one … Happy New Year!”

  Raucous cheers come from around me as the tune of “Auld Lang Syne” starts blasting. People around me gather one another into hugs and kisses as they celebrate the arrival of 2007. I see a woman I was speaking to earlier kiss her boyfriend passionately, watch as he dips her until she laughs into his mouth. We had talked about a whole bunch of nothing—the polite conversation of two strangers at a party—but she was wearing a flowery perfume that reminded me of Indah’s, and she touche
d my arm as she laughed at something I said. I find myself wishing she was kissing me instead of the anonymous man with his arms around her. But she’s all the way on the other side of the room, so she keeps laughing, swaying in the guy’s arms, as I stand alone in the cool January night air.

  Another year gone by, the march of time beating unflinchingly forward, and it doesn’t matter that I’m standing on a balcony that overlooks the Hollywood Hills, surrounded by bright and shiny people at a party I invited myself to. It doesn’t matter that I’m in a house packed full to the brim with bodies. I’m alone.

  I try to take comfort in that. Alone is better. Safer. The Hills have been a good place to lie low. Finding out that there are other people like me threw me for a loop that I’m still getting through. I’ve always been careful about not being found out, but I never had to think about it too much. How can people suspect you of something that shouldn’t even be possible?

  But if there are other people out there—other Unusuals—then that calculation becomes a bit more complicated. I typically try to steer away from complicated, but I haven’t wanted anything as much as I want to find more people like me, like the friends I almost had. But I don’t know where to start, so as a caterer with a tray of champagne glasses passes through the balcony doors, I quickly swipe one and try not to think about the Unusuals I already know and how they might be embracing each other in celebration, having forgotten all about me as quick as the woman who smelled like flowers.

  * * *

  Today marks three months in LA and I think I’m really starting to get the swing of things. I’ve got a spacious house—I think it would easily qualify as a mansion; it’s certainly the biggest house I’ve ever stayed in or seen in real life—on the top of a steep hill and the Plymouth is still purring like the enormous cat it is.

  Every morning I wake up. Well, sometimes I’m up before noon. I get up, eat breakfast, lunch, whatever, and go for a quick jog around the neighborhood. I tell myself it’s because I want to get a look at the area, learn who lives there, but if I were honest with myself, I might admit that being in a city full of beautiful, fit people is starting to get to me. I think of Marley’s broad shoulders and look at the way a leather jacket I got on Melrose Place hangs off my chubby frame and feel like I’m playing dress-up. Trying to be someone I’m not. Trying to be the person other people see, the person I want other people to see.

  In the past, I’ve been anxious around neighbors. When people get used to seeing you, they start to ask questions. Questions inevitably lead to even more questions, and the re-upping of convincing someone there’s nothing to see here is exhausting.

  But in LA, people don’t care. They see an eighteen-year-old driving around in a fancy car and they assume I’m the newest Hollywood heartthrob or the son of some exec. Hell, most of the neighbors are famous themselves and have no interest whatsoever in having chitchat with the Joneses down the street. It’s perfect for lying low, for surviving, but pretty imperfect for having a life.

  I’m starting to feel that restlessness again. I thought maybe trying to live life normally would be enough of a departure to keep my mind occupied for a while, give me space to come up with a plan to find more Unusuals. But now that I’m all settled in, no plan has magically appeared in my head. The house is mine for the foreseeable future—I signed a yearlong lease—and I changed out the plates on the car, so I should be good for a little while. I’ve never stayed in a place. Not since Nebraska.

  * * *

  There’s a knock on the door. If it were my parents, they wouldn’t knock. They have a key. They have the key. I never used to carry around a key. For the past week, I’ve had to. I went through every drawer in the kitchen before finding the spare.

  The stranger knocks again. I assume they’re a stranger. I suppose it could be a neighbor. Mrs. Henshaw from down the road—maybe her dog got lost in the cornfield again.

  I creep toward the door, avoiding the windows that look out onto the porch. When I get to the front door, I press my ear against the wood, listening for any indication of who it might be.

  The next knock is right against my ear and I fall flat on my back.

  “Hello?” a woman calls. “Is anyone in? It’s Ms. Crane from the school.”

  Shoot. My guidance counselor. I knew the school would eventually get suspicious but I wasn’t expecting a home visit.

  “Hello?” She knocks again. “Is anyone at home?”

  I want her to leave. I want her to leave and forget about me.

  She does. And she stays gone. Even when I don’t want those things anymore.

  * * *

  I don’t know if it’s the LA lifestyle, the loneliness I refuse to acknowledge, or the nightmare about Ms. Crane weighing on my mind, but when I pass a therapist’s office with “Dr. Crane” on the placard, I find myself walking in. Thirty minutes later, I’m in the middle of my first—and almost certainly my last—therapy session.

  “This is something I see a lot with my clients,” Dr. Crane says sagely, leaning back in his fashionably modern chair. I should have expected a Hollywood therapist to be unfazed by my bemoaning the restlessness born out of getting everything I want, but his casual approach still bothers me. I’m not the typical Hollywood kid he assumes I am—I’m extraordinary. He should realize that.

  “Achieving our goals can be a terrifying thing,” he continues. “We expect to feel a sense of accomplishment, a sense of satisfaction, but getting things we want can leave us wanting more if we’re not focused on wanting the right things.”

  “What does that mean?” I sigh, frustrated. “I don’t want more, or the wrong things. I have everything.”

  “But it doesn’t sound to me like you do have everything you want,” he says, tilting his head in what I’m sure he thinks of as an inviting gesture.

  “I don’t think you understand,” I say flatly, trying to spell it out for him. “Anything I want, I can have. That’s the way it’s been for almost ten years and it’s never going to change.”

  “But the friends you made—you don’t have them.”

  “What makes you think I want that?” I snap, my cheeks heating.

  “The way you talked about them,” he says, leaning forward on his elbows. “You said you’d never met people so interesting. Are you saying you don’t want to see them again?”

  “They’re…” I fish for an excuse, for a reason to argue with him. The past twenty minutes have been like this—I’m trying to control the conversation, control him, but I don’t know why I came in here, what I want from him, so he keeps getting the upper hand. But I don’t want to use my ability on him, don’t want him to acquiesce the way everyone else does.

  “They’re dangerous,” I say finally. “They can find out things about me that I don’t want them to know.”

  “You think they wouldn’t like you if they found out certain things?” he suggests.

  “No, it’s not that,” I say, not certain if that’s actually the truth. “I just like to control what people know about me.”

  “You like to control other people,” he says simply.

  “What?” I snap, nervous. “That’s not true, I don’t want to control people. I’m not a bad person.”

  “I never said you were,” he says soothingly. “It doesn’t make you a bad person to want your friends back. That’s a very human thing to feel.”

  “I’m not human,” I mutter, not meaning to, and he blinks in surprise.

  “Of course you are, Robert,” he says.

  “It’s supposed to be easy, isn’t it?” I ask quietly, half-hoping he won’t hear me and we can just move on.

  “What, being human?” he asks.

  “Everyone else makes it look so easy,” I say. “People know how to talk to other people, how to connect, how to be a person. No one ever taught me that. The rules don’t apply to me so I never learned.”

  “Who says you can’t learn now?”

  “Because the rules still don’t apply,” I
explain. “They’re never going to. And no one understands that, no one understands that the things I’ve done, the things that have happened to me, are out of my control.”

  “We all feel this way, Robert,” he says. “We all feel as if no one will ever understand us—”

  “Listen, Dr. Crane,” I say, scooting forward on the couch, suddenly irritated, “there’s a lot you don’t understand about me. You think you get it, think you know what kind of person you’re dealing with, but you don’t know anything. You could never really understand me. The only people who could were—”

  My voice stops itself as Neon’s and Indah’s faces rise in my head. Suddenly sitting here in this office feels like a terrible waste of time, like an indulgence beyond the mansions and the cars and fancy meals. I don’t need to talk things through with some quack; I need to go back to the people who actually can understand.

  * * *

  “Another?” the bartender asks, and I nod and give a wobbly thumbs-up. I shouldn’t have another. I have had several. And then several more. But it’s expensive and free and this bar stool is strangely plush, the wood warm beneath my arms, and I think maybe I’ll just stay here forever. I chickened out on my way back to Bar Lubitsch, stopped over at a different bar instead, and started strategizing about finding more Unusuals. But that wasn’t enough of a distraction from thinking about Dr. Crane’s saying the one thing I wanted was my “friends,” and now … well. Now I’m very drunk.

  “You all right, man?” he asks, setting down the drink next to my head. Oh, I put my head on the bar. That’s why he’s asking. Not because he genuinely cares. But because he doesn’t want some drunk teenager passed out on his bar. Not that he knows that I’m a teenager. But still.