Indah was wrong. Neon’s power is one of the most dangerous she’s ever seen. But Indah has never felt threatened by it. For her, the most dangerous thing is that lopsided smile.
* * *
I hear the whoosh of the corn stalks before I see them. I’m running through the fields, chasing something. The stalks are high and I’m surrounded by them on all sides. The only sounds I can hear are the crinkling of the ground beneath me and the whisper of the plants as I brush past them.
“Robert!” my mother calls from far away. I’m running, running, running, running, farther and farther, faster and faster. I’m miles from her. Leagues. Light-years.
“Robert!” she calls again, somehow closer than before. This is a game we play. I go running, my parents come chasing. They always find me.
The sun is setting and the moon is hiding. It’s growing dark, the stalks so high I can’t see the stars.
“Robert!” She’s so far away now and I’m not sure I can get back to her. Her voice is coming from all sides and from no side at all. If I stop running, I’ll be lost in the dark. So I keep running.
“Robert!”
I snap awake to find Indah’s face hovering over mine.
“Robert, you were, like, thrashing around, I wasn’t sure—”
I sit up on my elbows, swinging my legs to the living room floor.
“God,” I groan, “what is it about sleeping on your couch that gives me nightmares about my parents?”
“Your parents?” Indah sits down next to me and I put my head in my hands. “Sorry,” she says, backpedaling. “Sensitive subject?”
“No, it’s—my head,” I moan into my hands. Now that the adrenaline has worn off … “Goddamn, what did I drink last night?”
“The whole bar as far as I could tell,” Indah says dryly.
I just groan again, words too difficult to form.
“Come on.” Indah gently pats me on the back. “Let’s get some food into you.”
* * *
Two hours later and I’m clawing my way back to feeling a little bit human. I am never drinking again.
“I’m never drinking again,” I say aloud to Indah, who is lying on the ground next to me. After pouring me into her car and picking up breakfast burritos while I sat in the passenger seat and tried not to throw up, Indah took me to Barnsdall Art Park, handed me an enormous bottle of water, and told me to “lie in the sun, motionless, like a cat, until the pain stops.” I don’t love being told what to do—as I’m the one who usually does the telling—but, goddamn, she was right.
“People always say that,” she says into the sky, eyes closed behind her sunglasses.
“Yeah, well I mean it.”
“What spurred the great binge-drink of 2007 anyway?” she asks, turning onto her side and propping herself up on her elbow to peer down at me.
“Nothing.” I shrug, my shoulders digging into the grass. “It was just something to do.”
“And what exactly have you been doing these past few months, Robert?” Indah asks, unable to keep the sharp edge of judgment out of her voice.
“Oh, you know, just using my horrible ability on unsuspecting people,” I snap. “The usual stuff.”
“Don’t give me that, Robbie,” she says, and I barely stop myself from flinching. My ability is dulled by the hangover, my innate distaste for the nickname buried somewhere it can’t reach Indah. “You’re the one who reacted badly,” she continues, narrowing her eyes at me. “We were just trying to get used to what you can do and you decided to paralyze all of us and storm out. You never even gave us a chance.”
“I didn’t have to,” I say, closing my eyes to the sun above me and the heat of Indah’s stare. “I could see how things were going to play out. You would have turned on me eventually.”
“Have you ever told anyone about your ability before?” she asks.
“No,” I admit begrudgingly. “But, c’mon, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out how most people are going to react.”
“We’re not most people,” she retorts. “We’re exactly the kind of people who are going to understand. We’d understand all of it,” she finishes pointedly, and the specter of talking about what Marley saw makes me snap.
“Please,” I scoff, throwing her a look, “just because you can sense people like us doesn’t make you one of us.”
The pain in my head flares again as silence rings between us.
“Wow,” Indah breathes after a moment. “You really have no idea how to be someone’s friend, do you?”
That stings more than I’d care to admit, so I just turn my eyes away from Indah and resist staring directly into the sun.
We lie there in silence for the next hour or so—at first tense, then slackening into something less loaded as Indah drifts in and out of sleep and the sun starts to dry the alcohol out of me—until Indah abruptly sits up and proclaims that it’s time to go.
“You’re too pale to be sitting out in the sun for too long,” she elaborates.
“Where are we going?” I ask, climbing gingerly to my feet.
“Are you still at the Sunset Marquis?”
“Not exactly.”
The look on Indah’s face as we pull up to my house is one I’ve never seen from her before. Part disgusted, part impressed.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” she murmurs under her breath, and then, louder, “This is your house?”
She spins around to look at me, hands clenched on her steering wheel. I shrug.
“You are a piece of work, Robert Gorham,” she mutters, shaking her head but unable to keep a small smile from blooming across her face.
* * *
Marley is having a bad day. And when Marley has a bad day, there’s only one person in the entire world he wants to talk to.
“Neon, let me in,” he calls, pounding on her apartment door. He should have texted her before showing up out of the blue—things have been tense between them since Blaze went AWOL and they had that weird scuff-up with the new guy, and Marley feels like he’s not automatically entitled to her space anymore—but he’s out of minutes, with no money left to buy more this month. Maybe he could have called her from the library pay phone, but he didn’t think of it in his urgency to see her. Marley really just needs Neon to let him put his head in her lap while she runs her hands over his buzz cut.
“Neon!” he shouts louder, and finally, finally, Marley hears the click of a lock.
“What?” she snaps before the door is even open. “What the hell do you want, Marley? I was sleeping.”
Marley pushes past her and flops onto the couch—now that the door is open, he has free rein. They’re family, after all.
“I completely bombed my midterm,” he moans toward the ceiling, head leaned back on the cushions. “I just really can’t go back to my horribly empty apartment and think about how I can’t call Blaze to come over and how he’s normally the one that does flash cards with me and how the fact that he wasn’t there to do that this time meant that I failed and that’s the least of our worries because the kid hasn’t called in two months and I’m pretty sure he’s dead.”
Marley doesn’t really mean to say that last bit.
Marley is having a really bad day.
* * *
Much to my surprise, Indah stays the night. She sleeps in one of the three bedrooms that the house has. One slightly higher on the sloped plane of the house, overlooking the tops of trees, sunlight always streaming in in the mornings. I played Goldilocks for the first two weeks after I moved in, sleeping in each bedroom for a few nights at a time, trying to find the one that was juuuust right. Indah’s room—somehow already her room even though she’s only slept in it for a few hours—was my nightmare for exactly the reason that it was her dream.
“Rob, that bedroom is a dream.” She yawns, walking into the kitchen, still sleepy and even more pliable than usual. Something in me softens at the sight. I like how comfortable she seems in my space, how comfortable she seems with me
. Not at all afraid.
“Really?” I ask. “I couldn’t stand that room. Too much sunlight.”
“You’re crazy,” she says. “Waking up to natural sunlight is such a luxury. If I could do that every day, I just know I’d be a better person. But no, my bedroom window just looks out onto a brick wall.”
“Indah, you work at night,” I argue. “Don’t you sleep until noon like the rest of us?”
“Is that why you don’t like that bedroom?” she laughs. “Because you’re sleeping until noon every day?”
“I’m a nineteen-year-old who doesn’t need to work or go to school and gets to do whatever he wants. Of course I’m sleeping until noon every day.”
Indah just laughs some more again, and that’s its own kind of sunlight.
“Wait,” she says, interrupting her own laughter, “did you have a birthday?”
“Oh,” I say dumbly. “Yeah. It was last week.”
“Oh, Robert,” she breathes, and I can hear the apologies, the platitudes coming, and immediately change the subject. I’m not ready to tell her how I spent my nineteenth birthday eating a grocery-store cake and letting the darkness close in on me because I was too paralyzed to get up and turn on the lights once the sun went down.
“Want an omelet?” I offer, turning away from her to open the fridge, and also so I don’t have to look directly at her bright, pitying face. I’m feeling soft and vulnerable, and on top of all that, I’m still embarrassed about trying to kiss her the other night. She hasn’t said anything about it and I sure as hell am not going to, so I want to make sure we steer as far away from serious subjects as possible.
“You cook?” she asks skeptically.
“It’s one of the few things I actually know how to do,” I admit, rooting through the fridge for the eggs, ham, and veggies. “When you live ten miles from the nearest grocery store and your feet can’t reach the pedals of a car, you learn how to fend for yourself. I can make about fifty different recipes just using corn.”
I close the refrigerator door to find the light of the sun snuffed out. Indah is looking at me with an expression I’ve never seen on her. The pity is still there, but also what seems like genuine, delighted surprise at my sharing something of myself unprompted.
“How do you feel about Denver?” I ask, deflecting again, uncertain how I managed to move from pathetic birthday to tragic backstory. I focus all my attention on wanting her to not ask about any of it. So, of course, she doesn’t.
“Never been,” she says, a flicker of annoyance flying across her face before it smooths over. She’s starting to notice the moment my ability finds its way to her. But then, of course, the knowing washes away with the annoyance and she continues like nothing happened. “Why?”
“Denver omelets,” I say, tossing the ingredients on the counter, and Indah’s eyes light up, pleased. I put a pan on the stove and light one of the burners, the motions second nature.
“So,” I say as I start cracking eggs into a bowl, “who were you talking to this morning?”
My heart beats faster as I ask, not wanting Indah to think I was listening in on her conversation. But as I crept into the kitchen to make coffee, I could hear a low murmur coming from her room. I want to know if she called Neon, if she and Marley know that I’m back in their orbit now.
“What?” Indah asks, and I turn around to see genuine confusion on her face. I’m about to clarify, tell her I overheard her without making it sound creepy, when it seems to click for her.
“Oh.” She nods. “I was praying.”
“What?”
“Praying,” she repeats. “You know, that thing that people of faith sometimes do…”
“Oh, right,” I say blankly. “Praying. Of course.” I turn back to the eggs, wanting her to say more. And, lo and behold:
“Five times a day,” she continues. “It’s hard to pull off sometimes at the bar, or to get up at dawn, what with my hours, but I do my best.”
“Five times a day?” I ask, aghast, turning back to her and leaning against the counter behind me.
“Yep.” She smiles, unfazed by my bug-eyed expression.
“So you pray five times a day, you can’t drink, but you don’t wear the … the—” I make the clumsy gesture I made when we first met, all the more humiliating in my sobriety.
“The hijab?” Indah quirks an eyebrow at me and I’m horrified to find myself blushing. “No, I don’t. I used to, but I haven’t for a long time.”
“Why not?” I ask.
“Let me guess,” she starts, staring me down. “You think that Islam is all about oppression and terrorism and—”
“No, no, of course not,” I hurry to say. “I don’t think you’re a terrorist. I mean, I never thought that. Ever. You don’t even look, you know…” I trail off awkwardly and now Indah is the one with the red face, but I have a feeling it’s not because she’s embarrassed.
“Good lord, Robert,” she says, jaw tightening. “Are you saying I don’t look like a terrorist because I’m not Middle Eastern?”
“No,” I say, floundering, “no, I just meant … well, because you’re … you know…”
“I’m what?” she says, and I want to shrink back into the countertop and disappear. I’m trying—trying to understand, trying to learn more about her—but I’m terrified to ask.
Indah sighs heavily before inhaling deeply and flatly giving me all the information I could want.
“I’m Indonesian, I was raised in a very religious household and departed from it pretty strongly when I was a teenager. No hijab, drinking, smoking, a lot of stuff that’s haram—that means ‘sinful, forbidden,’” she explains before I have a chance to ask. “Then I moved here and grew up a bit and reconnected with my faith in my own way. I still pray, I don’t drink, but I also work in a bar and have sex with women, so, you know, my faith is not the same as a lot of Muslims’ faith.”
I swallow, childishly self-conscious at the mention of sex, and nod like I completely understand. After a moment, I pour the eggs into the now-hot pan, the sizzling filling the awkward silence between us.
“You know,” Indah continues after a moment, the same tightening in her voice that I heard last night, “if you had just asked—actually had a conversation with me about it—I would have told you all of that. In my own way. My own time. You didn’t need to use your ability on me.”
“I can’t control it, okay?” I say sheepishly, but her eyes flash at the excuse.
“Is that really true, Robert?” she asks.
“I … I don’t know,” I answer truthfully.
“That’s not good enough, Rob,” she says, shaking her head. “It doesn’t—it’s confusing and scary when that happens, don’t you get that? It feels like going into a trance.”
“It does?” I ask, horrified at the idea that she can feel it. “Well, I don’t—I don’t always notice when it’s happening. I just—I wanted to know more about you, so…”
“So I gave you the CliffsNotes version of something incredibly personal and private.” She’s scowling at me now, arms crossed as she leans back in her chair.
“Yeah…,” I say, mad at myself for opening this can of worms and wishing we could just move past this thorny subject. But my curiosity about Indah overrides my discomfort.
“How does it work for you?” I ask, a direct question for once.
“How does what work?” She narrows her eyes at me suspiciously.
“The thing you do,” I explain. “You said you know when someone is an Unusual. How does that work?”
“I don’t really know,” she says, shrugging. “I’ve always been this way. My grandma always said I was touched by God.”
“Do you think that’s true?” I ask, dubious and completely out of my depth. They believed in God, so when They left, They took Him with Them.
“I think that there’s a reason I can sense people like you,” she says serenely. “I think it’s part of my purpose. Neon, Marley, and Blaze—and now you—I thi
nk it’s my job to protect you all. To love you.”
My throat tightens at her words, so close to coming right out and saying that she loves me, specifically. I focus on the stove in front of me, completely unequipped to respond to Indah’s certainty and goodness.
“It feels like God,” she continues softly, answering my want for her to keep talking so I don’t have to. “I’ve thought about trying to seek them out—go around and try to find more Unusuals—but you can’t seek out faith. Faith finds you. Just like you did.”
She smiles warmly at me and I’m filled with a deep need to touch her, to be touched by her, wrapped in her arms and soothed. But after the disastrous kiss attempt, I don’t know how to want it well, so I want for her to change the subject instead.
And she does. We move on, like nothing ever happened. We cook and eat and talk about what she’s been doing the past few months—more of the same, it sounds like—and we avoid all the heavy subjects. Indah seems to have forgotten all about my clumsy invasion of her private life, because she brings up Neon completely on her own.
“We were supposed to get lunch today,” she tells me. “It’s both of our days off, so…”
“Date night?” I ask. “Or, rather, date day, I guess.”
“I don’t know,” she sighs. “She’s been spending a lot of time with Marley recently.”
“Don’t the three of you always spend a lot of time together?” I ask, still baffled by the dynamic of the group. I’m baffled by the dynamic of any group, having never really been in one myself, but one that contains a whole bunch of Unusuals seems like it would be even more complicated.
“Yeah, we do,” she says, nodding. “Marley and I have never really clicked though. He’s a nice guy, and really reliable, but … I don’t know,” she finishes, looking sad.
A Neon Darkness Page 9