A Neon Darkness

by Lauren Shippen

  “I see a lot of people like you,” she explains, answering my unexpressed confusion. “Young people who are a bit lost.”

  “I’m not lost,” I say automatically.

  “Why did you come over here?” she asks.

  “Curiosity.” A simple answer. A lie. A lie I tell myself when I don’t know what the truth is.

  “Do you do a lot of things out of ‘curiosity’?”

  Her face is still open. There’s no heat of judgment in the question, though it does sound like she sees through the lie.

  “Would you like to go for a walk?” she asks after I don’t answer.

  So that’s how I find myself walking through a park with Francine. She’s not the hippie guru that I thought. She’s a doctor, a therapist, who runs meditation as a hobby, trying to bring a degree of mental health practice to people who can’t pay for it. She seems to be one of those nauseatingly altruistic people who sees the good in everyone, so once I’ve got the basics of who she is, we don’t talk about her anymore. I’m not sure if it’s because I don’t want to—I don’t have the patience to hear all about her good deeds and kind heart—or if it’s because she’s a therapist and talking about other people is what she does. But either way, we end up talking about my new roommate situation.

  “He’s just hard to live with,” I sigh. “I know it’s not his fault, but he’s … destructive.”

  “Hm,” Francine hums. Every other sound out of her mouth is a hum. It’s irritating, but I still find her less annoying than Dr. Crane. “Why do you say it’s not his fault?”

  “It just isn’t,” I say, willing her to take my word for it so I don’t have to try to explain Unusuals.

  “How do your other roommates deal with the destruction?” she asks, the difficult question successfully evaded.

  “They don’t seem to mind it. They just feel bad for Blaze and, like, coo over him.”

  “You sound bitter,” she says.

  “Yeah, well I am bitter,” I say, realizing it’s true. “Blaze gets a free pass because his ability hurts him, but it doesn’t matter that I also can’t control what I do—I don’t have a choice—but I still get chewed out for using it sometimes. It isn’t fair.”

  “Ability?” she asks. Whoops. So much for avoiding the explanation.

  “Just … Blaze and I are both special, okay? We all are. And that’s great, it’s amazing that they all understand what it’s like, except they only understand halfway. They know what it’s like to be different but … but…”

  “No one understands what it’s like to be you,” she says, nodding her head.

  “Yeah…” I’m surprised. Surprised by her insight, by this whole conversation. I didn’t realize how much Blaze’s being around was bothering me, how replaceable I’ve felt since he’s come back. I tell Francine as much.

  “Have you told your friends that you feel this way?” she asks.

  “God no,” I snort.

  “Why not?” she asks, like the suggestion isn’t ludicrous.

  “I don’t want to be proven right,” I mumble, looking down at my feet. Talking like this to a woman I know I never have to see again, whom I could make forget this conversation ever happened, makes it easier to admit the things I have a hard time even admitting to myself.

  “You think they’ll reject you if you need something?”

  “I think they’d reject me if I let go.”

  “What do you mean ‘let go’?”

  I don’t know how to explain it to her. How to explain the deep-seated fear that if I stopped using my ability for even a moment, the Unusuals would wake up to the person I really am and realize that they don’t actually want to include me in their little family after all. They would stop wanting to take care of me, spend time with me, learn about me.

  “It’s easy to feel like a burden to our loved ones when we have emotional needs that aren’t being fulfilled,” she tries.

  “It’s not that … my needs are being met.” It’s an automatic response, but I’m not sure it’s true. I’m not sure it’s ever been true. “I have—I have everything,” I continue, an echo of talking to Dr. Crane. “I know I’m not a burden because I don’t want to be, but I don’t understand how—”

  I groan in frustration.

  “He’s a mess! Blaze is a mess and out of control and they still love him and want to take care of him and—and—they searched for him. He left and they never stopped looking. But if I slip for a millisecond, that’s the end of it. They leave and they don’t come back. They forgive him for disappearing, for the drugs, for setting their lives on fire, but I got left behind and I—I—”

  “Do you forgive yourself?”

  “What?”

  “Do you forgive yourself?” Francine asks again, voice blank. I stop walking and look into her eyes. Her expression is as flavorless as her voice. She’s not asking the question. I’m asking the question through her, and suddenly we’re not talking about Blaze or the Unusuals anymore.

  I don’t answer her. We stand in silence, my heart beating against my rib cage as the desire to run away and hide rises up in me. Her face stays blank as she turns her back on me and walks away, back to her real life, already forgetting all about the strange boy she tried to talk to in the park. I watch her go, wondering if there’s anything good that stays good once I’ve touched it.

  When I get home, there are new scorch marks on the ceiling. Marks that can be scrubbed away, painted over. I wonder if there’s a way to do that to my past. To Them. Cover Them in white paint until I forget the black mark was there to begin with.

  * * *

  Marley is worried.

  It’s something that Marley is extremely good at—he’s had plenty of practice. He worried when his grandmother, the person who had taken care of him for so many years, got sick. He worried about having enough money to pay for school. He worried about closing his eyes and seeing other people’s ghosts behind his eyelids.

  Marley is good at worrying. And he’s especially good at worrying about his friends. And that’s what’s keeping him up now, staring at the ceiling of the bedroom he’s only been in for a few months, in an apartment he can’t quite remember why he moved into.

  Blaze hasn’t told them the whole story. Marley knows this because Marley has seen it. When his friend’s arm went up in flames, Marley started seeing double. On one side, Blaze in the present, calmly looking at the fire expand from his hand. On the other side, Blaze from another time strapped down, entirely ablaze, screaming, screaming, screaming. Screaming in a way that Marley had never heard from another human being. Screaming in pain. Screaming in fear. And behind this past Blaze, this version of the young man being tortured, was a tall man. The Tall Man. Isaiah.

  Marley is very, very worried.

  * * *

  “We still need to find him.”

  Marley’s voice is hushed and uncharacteristically sharp as I click the front door shut.

  “I know,” Neon hisses, “but how do we go about doing that exactly? This isn’t some shady dealer that Blaze got in too deep with—this guy is dangerous.”

  “I know, Nee,” Marley whispers. “That’s exactly why we have to find him.”

  I’m tiptoeing from the front door to the living room, where the voices are coming from. It’s dark and quiet in the loft. Marley and Neon are standing by the window, leaned toward each other, the glow of a streetlamp illuminating their tense faces.

  A plank of wood creaks below me as I take another step and their heads snap in my direction. I see both of their shoulders drop as they realize who it is.

  “Oh,” Neon breathes. “Hey, Damien. Where’ve you been?”

  “Out,” I say vaguely, hoping to build some intriguing mystique around myself, desperate to find new ways to keep the Unusuals interested in me. In reality, I was sitting at the bar at Indah’s new workplace, drinking free drinks and making sure that the more sauced patrons didn’t bother her. “Where’s Blaze?” I ask, deflecting.

&nb
sp; “Sleeping,” Marley says. I flop on the couch and look up at them expectantly, waiting for my desire to be part of their conversation to do its work.

  There’s a beat where they both stare expectantly back at me and then I feel a little click in my brain—a rope latching on to a dock—and they sit down, Marley in an armchair, Neon on the couch next to me.

  “We need to find the Tall Man,” Neon tells me.

  “Isaiah,” Marley says, correcting her.

  “Right, Isaiah.”

  “Why?” I ask. “Blaze is safe. We know what Isaiah looks like, we can protect him.”

  “Can we?” Neon asks. “You said it yourself: both times you met him, you didn’t think your ability was working on him. What if that’s true for all of us?”

  “What, you think he’s like … immune to Unusuals or something?”

  “Maybe,” Marley says calmly, nodding like he’s talking about torts or whatever dumb law thing it is that he’s always going on about. “We know there are people out there who aren’t Unusual but relate to them somehow—maybe he’s like Indah, but the exact reverse. Not overly sensitive to Unusuals, but resistant to them.”

  “And that’s the point,” Neon continues. “If he is immune to everyone, not just you, then we might all be in danger. Sure, Marley is strong—”

  I see the tiniest smile twitch at the corner of Marley’s mouth and a blush bloom on his cheeks.

  “—and I know my way around a fight, but if I can’t use my electricity, we’re fucked.”

  “You really think he’s going to come after us?” I ask incredulously. “He asked about Blaze once and hasn’t come back around. He’s probably moved on.”

  “Or he’s lying low. Waiting for his moment,” Marley suggests darkly.

  “Plus,” Neon sighs, “what if he still has the others?”

  “What others?”

  “I’ve seen some stuff,” Marley says quietly. “In Blaze’s past. He was being experimented on. Tortured. And he wasn’t the only one. I wasn’t sure at first but … I think … I think it’s a pretty big operation.”

  Hearing Marley sound uncertain is always like having cold water dumped on my head. And now he’s sounding scared and it’s like that cold water is filled with spiders.

  “So what do we do?” I croak.

  “Blaze and I are going to go back to the warehouse he woke up in tomorrow,” Neon says. “Start there. And then maybe … maybe we’ll have to go out to the desert. He thinks that’s where he was being held.”

  “The desert is pretty big,” I scoff. “Trust me, I’ve driven through it.”

  “Then I guess we better get going,” Neon snaps, and I see blue flash through her eyes. Neon may not have my ability, but as always, she has her own special magic that convinces anyone of anything, even me. Especially me. If Neon says “jump” and I say “how high,” maybe she’ll want to stick around and watch me leap into the sky and pull down the moon, just for her.

  * * *

  “So you haven’t been around very much, huh?” I ask.

  Indah and I are in the kitchen, cooking dinner for the rest of the group. No one’s home at the moment. It’s the first time we’ve spent more than a few seconds in the same room in the past week or so and I want to know why she’s ignoring me.

  “What do you mean?” Indah asks, looking at the vegetables in front of her instead of at me.

  “I mean,” I sigh, “that we haven’t done anything fun lately.”

  “Do we normally do fun things?”

  “Yeah, of course. That time in the park, all the times we’ve drunk together, this.” I gesture to the veritable feast around me.

  “We don’t drink together,” she says.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I’ve just been busy, that’s all.” She shrugs, flipping her hair—the ends now blue instead of pink—off of her shoulder, revealing the tattoos underneath. I find myself staring at them, drinking in her figure like a thirsty man who’s come across water. There are the vines, delicate and intricate, that climb up her arms, like she’s a tree, a home for other blooming things. The vines fan out when they reach her shoulder, ending in gossamer pink flowers that look like they’re swaying in some invisible wind.

  “Did you get a new one?” I ask, noticing a bright pink flower on her back, blooming over the place where her spine meets her neck.

  “Mm-hm,” she says noncommittally.

  I haven’t used my ability much on Indah recently. We’re friends, we have a rapport, and most of the time I don’t need to. But I can feel myself getting frustrated with her vague answers, can feel the want pushing out of me and on to her. I know my friends don’t like it when I use my ability on them—and I don’t like it when they use theirs on me—but they usually don’t even notice. A little push to get Indah to talk to me won’t hurt.

  I let the want out.

  “It’s a Mirabilis jalapa,” she tells me. “A flower from Indonesia—from the province my family is from. I haven’t been there but I’ve been saving up money to go.”

  “You have?” I ask, surprised I haven’t heard about this until now.

  “Mm-hm.” She nods. “I probably shouldn’t have spent some of that money to get the tattoo but … I don’t know, I wanted to do something just for me. Living here with everyone, it’s nice, but it wasn’t my choice.”

  My stomach starts to sink and Indah just keeps talking.

  “I keep thinking that I’m gonna say something, do something, call my old roommates and tell them I’m moving back in, but then I come back to the loft every night and suddenly I want to be here again. And I wonder if it’s just that I forget how nice it is to be around everyone—to see Alex safe and getting better—or if it’s because you want me here. And then I leave to go to work and things start to clear up, but I can never fully get out of the fog.”

  “Why don’t you ever call him Blaze?” I ask abruptly, desperately wanting to get out of this conversation before I have to examine what she’s saying too closely.

  “Because it’s not his name,” she says, easily going along with the subject change. I exhale in relief before continuing, keeping the engine of the new subject moving, pulling us away from a topic that could tear us apart. Indah said herself that it’s nice to live here with everyone. She just gets muddled sometimes; I’m sure that’s just a natural side effect of being around my ability all the time. Everything’s fine.

  “Well, Neon and Marley aren’t real names either,” I point out, voice forcefully light. “And you use those.”

  “Those are self-selected,” Indah explains. “When they first met, Neon and Marley were bonded by what made them different. They went from being alone—from being dangerous freaks—to being a unit. I think they wanted to separate those two parts of their lives. The time before they met, when they were still Sarah and Jason, and the time after they met, when they could finally be who they really are: the electric girl and the boy who sees ghosts.”

  “I can understand that.” I nod absentmindedly, reeling from hearing Neon’s and Marley’s “real” names, which suit them so much less than their chosen ones. “I don’t like to think about my life before I met all of you.”

  Indah hums maddeningly vaguely and I realize something.

  “You don’t really ever call me Damien,” I say. “Is it just because Neon gave me the name, like she did with Blaze?”

  “Not exactly. With Alex … he hates his ability. He always has. I think there’s a real chance that he always will. And as much as I would like him to accept who he is, love himself without any qualifications, I’m never going to force someone to grapple with a quality about themselves that scares them. Sometimes I worry that the name ‘Blaze’ is just a torturous reminder of everything Alex can’t control. I don’t want to rub it in.”

  I think about the look on Blaze’s face when he was flambéing fruit the other day and think that maybe Indah isn’t entirely right. He seems to enjoy his ability, when he can control it.
But then I remember his expression as the fire grew out of his control—the fear mixed with a quiet resignation, a look of abject disappointment as his worst feelings about himself became manifest.

  “Is that what you think about me?”

  “I don’t know, Rob,” Indah says, and the want for her to be honest is so raw and desperate I know she’s telling the truth. “I think your ability scares you like Alex’s scares him, but you’re not hurt by your power. It isn’t trying to destroy you. It makes things easier for you, makes things better. But you’re still scared of it.”

  “I just don’t know the limits of it, that’s all,” I say, deflecting.

  “And doesn’t that scare you?” Indah asks. “Do you want to be someone who tames the world around you?”

  “My ability is nothing like Blaze’s,” I say defensively. “It can’t destroy buildings, it can’t kill people.”

  “That you know of.”

  “I’ve always hated the name Robert,” I spit, avoiding Indah’s unspoken question. “I like the name Damien. It doesn’t matter that someone else gave it to me. It fits.”

  “But, Robert,” Indah says, my name pointed like an arrow, “if that were really true, then you’d want me to call you Damien. But I don’t. So what does that tell you?”

  * * *

  I’m having a good dream, for once, when I feel someone violently shaking me awake.

  “Damien,” someone whispers. “Damien, wake up!”

  I open my eyes to see Neon right above me and think for a second I’m still dreaming, but then I clock her freaked-out face and I scramble to sit up in bed.

  “What the hell?” I croak, rubbing at my eyes.

  “You need to get up,” another voice says, and I look around Neon to see Marley standing in the middle of my room.