A Neon Darkness

by Lauren Shippen

  “Why?” I moan.

  “Blaze,” Neon breathes, and the terror in her voice is enough to launch me out of bed.

  As I hastily pull on pants and a T-shirt, feeling self-conscious all the while about Neon and Marley’s seeing me in my boxers (eerily similar to my dream in all the wrong ways—and thank god Indah is closing tonight, I couldn’t handle all three of them), they catch me up.

  “We got a call from the LAPD,” Neon tells me. “Blaze has been arrested.”

  “Again,” Marley adds.

  “What?” I ask, my head still fuzzy. “Why?”

  “Why do you think?” Neon says. “Arson.”

  When we get to the police station, the officer on duty gives us the full story.

  “Your pal in there caused quite a lot of damage,” he says around a piece of gum in his mouth. “We think he must have had a bomb—he blew out the windows of a bar. No casualties, thankfully, just some burns, but the Feds are on their way.”

  “The Feds?” Marley gulps.

  “Alex Chen is already in the system for multiple counts of arson,” he tells us. “This was an escalation—an act of terror. That’s above our pay grade.”

  “Oh my god…” Neon leans her hands on the counter separating us and the officer and puts her head between her arms, her hair hanging down and hiding her face.

  “You’re gonna let him go,” I say to the officer, and I feel Neon’s head snap up to look at me. “You’re gonna let him go and call whoever you need to call to make sure that Alex Chen is never arrested again.”

  “Why would I…,” the officer starts to chuckle, and then, the familiar smoothing over, the well-known blank face of someone who’s starting to comply with what I want.

  “Damien…,” Marley warns.

  “It’s okay.”

  “This isn’t a free drink or someone else’s car,” he says through gritted teeth. “This is the law.”

  Despite what he describes as his “morally dubious” ability, Marley is the consummate law student, often seeing things in stark black and white. I ignore him, looking to Neon instead for support. She’s peering at me, her expression unreadable, before she says:

  “Do it.”

  Marley starts to protest, but Neon lays a placating hand on his arm and I get to work. Moments later, Blaze is coming out from the back, careening directly into Neon’s and Marley’s arms in a tight group hug that no one bothers to include me in.

  “Thank you, man,” he says to me when he’s extricated himself from his worried friends’ grasp.

  I want to tell him I didn’t do it for him—that I don’t actually really care if he goes to jail or not, if he lives or dies. Trying to track down Blaze with the Unusuals was a lot more fun than actually finding him. Now that he’s back in our lives, he’s a nuisance, pulling focus onto himself and leaving me out in the cold, taking my spot in my friends’ warm embrace. I did this for us, because we already have a dangerous armed man on our tails and we don’t need the cops on our backs either.

  But I don’t tell him that. I just nod.

  “You guys should go,” I tell them. “I need to stay here for a little bit, just to make sure everything’s clear.”

  Marley nods, his arm around Blaze as he starts to steer him to the door.

  “I’ll wait with you,” Neon says, giving the go-ahead to leave to Marley and Blaze with a nod of her head, and my heart surges. She’s choosing me over Blaze, choosing to sit in a police station for a few hours—the last place I think she’d want to be—so that I don’t have to be alone. Neon and I haven’t had one-on-one time in a few weeks, and sitting side by side with her under the grim fluorescent lights makes me feel more special than manipulating a police officer to wipe a slate clean ever could.

  Blaze might be a thorn in my side, but tonight, he actually proved himself pretty useful.

  * * *

  Alex and Marley go to the warehouse, and it’s just like Alex barely remembers—damp and too cold for LA, a slightly burnt metal smell barely covering the stench of human waste. Alex sees Marley flinch. He may look tough and imposing, but Alex knows Marley wouldn’t be able to stomach half the stuff that Alex has seen. Just the other night, Marley got a glimpse of something in Alex’s past—something from the past that Alex can’t remember—and promptly went to the bathroom to throw up.

  They wander through the run-down building, stepping over discarded needles and the occasional junkie. Alex’s heart bleeds for these people, with vacant eyes that he’s so familiar with. He wants to take them all home, care for them, pull them out of the hole that he himself is still trapped in, but he knows that he’s in no position to be anyone’s savior. He’s barely scraping through each day himself.

  “Anything look familiar?” Marley asks softly.

  “This whole place looks familiar,” Alex says. “It looks like every other shithole I’ve ever had the misfortune of waking up in.”

  Marley doesn’t laugh at that, his mouth a thin, tense line.

  “I don’t think there’s anything here,” Marley admits.

  “I told you,” Alex says. “If it hadn’t been for all the stuff you’ve seen, I’d be half-convinced that the whole thing was a drug-induced fever dream.”

  “One that lasted for months?”

  “Weirder things have happened.” Alex shrugs casually.

  “No they haven’t.” Marley is clenching his jaw as he stomps past Alex and toward the hole in the building that used to be a door. Alex watches him go, his back like a bucket of ropes, and wonders what he did to get friends so fiercely protective of him, even when it seems like all he’s capable of is fucking up.

  * * *

  Blaze is noticeably grateful to me over the next few weeks, going out of his way to smile at me or pay me a compliment. I still haven’t warmed to him, but the effort to include me makes his near-constant presence at the apartment more bearable. Everyone is at the apartment more, per my unvoiced request. Even though I’m confident that I was able to erase Blaze’s record entirely, I still think it’s important for us to lie low for a little while. With the investigation of the Tall Man stalled—Marley and Blaze having found nothing at the warehouse or on their trips to the desert—I’d rather just pretend that he and the LAPD don’t exist.

  I also do my best to put the conversation with Indah as far out of my mind as I possibly can. I don’t think she meant it—that she didn’t want to live here. Because every single night for the past week, she’s taken shifts with later starts so that she can be home to make dinner with me. She teaches me some Indonesian dishes that her mom taught her, and when we’re not doing that, we’re trying strange recipes we find in Blaze’s former roommates’ old cookbooks that they left behind.

  We have all our meals together in the living room, everyone bright and laughing. Blaze eats like he’s a starving man and each meal is his last. Color starts to come back to his cheeks, the circles under his eyes lightening each day. He even stops spontaneously combusting, using his ability only occasionally to light candles or Neon’s cigarettes.

  “Don’t you remember that?” Marley laughs, his smile broader than I’ve ever seen. This whole time I assumed that Marley’s natural state was buttoned-up and judgmental, but the past few weeks of lightness have made me reevaluate that assumption.

  “I swear I don’t!” Blaze is almost crying with laughter on the couch, Indah and Neon curled into each other next to him, giggling. I didn’t know that Neon giggled.

  “I swear to god,” Marley chuckles, “everyone thought you were part of the show. They just assumed it was pyrotechnics.”

  “Why would anyone think that an All-American Rejects show would have pyrotechnics?” I ask incredulously.

  “I still can’t believe that you guys went to see All-American Rejects in person,” Neon teases. “You’re such dweebs.”

  “Whatever.” Marley rolls his eyes. “You like Fall Out Boy.”

  “You do?” I gasp, faux-scandalized.

  “I
like the way Patrick Stump sings!” Neon shouts, hitting Marley on the arm.

  “Can you even call it singing?” Blaze says. “It’s, like, incoherent screeching.”

  “Says the guy that went through an entire screamo phase,” Indah quips.

  “At least I don’t own every single Black Eyed Peas album,” Blaze teases, pointing a finger accusingly at Marley.

  “Now, wait just a minute—” Marley starts, and the group explodes into laughter and shouting.

  I lean back in my chair—one that Marley brought home randomly one day, saying that we didn’t have enough seats for everyone and making my heart feel warm in a way I didn’t think was possible—and just watch, basking in the glow of the evening.

  There’s nothing I want in this moment; no influence is being exerted over these people. All I want is for it to be like this always: the five of us together, in this loft, eating a dinner that Indah and I almost burned down the kitchen making, teasing each other for our music tastes. The conversation with Francine, the fear that none of this is real, washes away. That’s all it was: fear, lingering in Their stead. But my Unusuals aren’t like Them—they do understand. They laugh with me. They accept me.

  I’ve been to so many different places in this country, seen all kinds of cities, met all kinds of people, and nothing compares to this ratty downtown Los Angeles apartment. Forget the Grand Canyon: this is the most beautiful sight I’ve seen. This is home.

  * * *

  I really didn’t think that I’d be coming back to the desert.

  I’ve got the window on the Plymouth rolled down, the hot air sweeping in and swirling my floppy hair around. I should get it cut. I never think much about my appearance—only ever getting new clothes when mine get worn, only cutting my hair when it gets long enough to be annoying—but my dark bangs have started to hang over my eyes and I’m constantly swatting them out of the way. Maybe I could get Indah to cut them—I know she dyes her own hair, so maybe the skill translates.

  “What’re you thinking about?”

  I turn my head to Marley, folded into the passenger seat. Only Marley could make the Plymouth seem like a toy car. His hair isn’t at all bothered by the wind—I don’t know how often he has to shave it to keep it at such a close buzz.

  “Hair,” I say, turning my eyes back to the road.

  “Huh?”

  “I need to cut mine.”

  “I don’t know,” he says, “you kinda rock the shaggy look.”

  “I do?” I turn to him again, involuntarily grinning at him. He grins back and it just makes me smile bigger.

  “Yeah,” he laughs. “Fits with the name too. Damien, the emo boy.”

  “Shut up,” I groan, and he laughs harder. Marley has been laughing a lot more recently and it always feels like winning something.

  “What about you?” I ask. “Why the perpetual buzz?”

  “Just got used to it, I guess,” he says, and I see him rub his head out of the corner of my eye. “Used to have really long hair—down to my shoulders—and they made me shave it all off in basic.”

  “Basic what?”

  “Training.”

  “What?” As is often the case with Marley, I feel like I’ve missed several steps. His steady, reliable personality is a comfort at times, but the reticence that comes with it can be maddening.

  “I was in the army,” he says.

  “What?” I repeat, now feeling like I’ve missed an entire mile of steps. “How the hell did I not know that?”

  I look briefly away from the road in front of us to see him shrug.

  “Dunno,” he says. “You never asked.”

  “When were you in the army?”

  “I enlisted when I turned eighteen,” he tells me.

  “Why?” This boggles my mind. Marley is very law-and-order, I guess, given his aspirations, but he’s very much not a rah-rah patriotic type. When he does talk about school, he spends most of his time complaining to all of us about the flaws in the American justice system. I have a very hard time picturing him in the military.

  “Didn’t have anything else to do. My grandma died my senior year of high school and she was the one who took care of me.”

  “What about your parents?”

  “I’m like you,” he says, and doesn’t elaborate. I know he’s being kind to me—or else answering my constant, latent desire to never talk about my parents—but I’m certain in that moment that he’s gotten the gist of my situation by looking into my past. That would bother me, except Marley isn’t judging me for it—he’s saying he understands, and I didn’t even have to go through the awkward trouble of saying anything out loud.

  “Right,” I say, wanting him to continue but afraid to ask. The want must be strong, because Marley proceeds to tell me everything I would have asked about, and plenty of things I wouldn’t have.

  “Yeah, so, I needed money and a job and a place to live after graduation. My grades were good enough to get into lots of colleges but no one was gonna pay for it. It was just after 9/11, and there was a recruiter at my gym, so … I joined up. I even liked it for a while. It was nice, you know? Having three square meals a day, people telling me what to do, a built-in community. I didn’t think my thing would be a problem—it didn’t happen that much, and I’d mostly gotten used to it, enough that I didn’t wig out when it happened.

  “But then the war started and I got my orders. Iraq. I’d been hoping to climb up the officer ranks, avoid seeing any actual fighting. I’m smart, I think I would have been good at it, but it doesn’t matter how smart I am looking the way I do. People always think I’m gunning for a fight—they see me, see my size, and assume that I’m a bruiser. But I’m not. I’ve never liked fighting. So when I got over there … it was bad. Really bad. I—”

  Marley stops himself and swallows. I can’t tell if he’s stopping himself from sharing something he doesn’t want to share or if I really don’t want to hear about whatever gruesome things he saw or did over there. I have such a clear image of who Marley is in my head and I’m not sure I want to have that shattered.

  “Well … eventually things got so rough that I had to get out,” he continues. “Things were bad enough for me, but then I started seeing everyone’s past, and, well … I saw a lot of death. A lot of really horrible violence. Things that were happening to my unit, things they were doing, things the army was doing to itself … you know the expression FUBAR?”

  I shake my head.

  “‘Fucked up beyond all recognition,’” he explains, jaw clenching. “The army has a specific shorthand, just for that phrase. Because everything always is. Everything is FUBAR, especially inside the army, and when I think about what we did—”

  He swallows.

  “Then I started seeing things that weren’t even there,” he continues quietly, “things that weren’t an echo of someone’s past. I was hallucinating, for real, haunted by everything that we were—”

  He stops himself again and I’m relieved.

  “It just got to be a lot,” he finishes simply. “Luckily, I got shot—”

  “You got shot?” My head whips to look at him. “Luckily?”

  “Everyone I knew was getting stop-lossed—some guys still are. This isn’t an easy war to get out of, Damien.” He gives me the Marley Serious Eyes—a look we’re all very familiar with that tells us we need to pay close attention to whatever Marley is saying.

  “I know that,” I say petulantly.

  “So, yeah, it was lucky,” he says. “I don’t know that I would have gotten out of it. And it all turned out okay—the military is paying for college and will hopefully help me get financial aid for law school. But I…” He trails off for a moment, before swallowing and whispering: “I still have nightmares. The things I saw … the things I did. That never really leaves you.”

  “Jeez,” I say, turning back to the road.

  “Yeah.”

  “How long were you in combat?” I ask after a moment, not wanting to linger in t
he silence.

  “Two years.”

  “Jeez,” I repeat.

  “Mm-hm.”

  It seems that’s all there is to his story—or, at least, all he’s willing to share. I keep staring at the road, turning over the new information in my head. It explains a lot, I think, about the way that Marley is—stern and serious so much of the time. He’s been relaxing over the past few weeks, seems to loosen when he’s with people he knows, but there are still times when he goes blank and tough. Today is one of those times. He’s barely cracked a smile all day, at least until he started teasing me about my hair. And it’s not like this impromptu errand has been a barrel of laughs—we’ve gone driving a few hours out of LA in search of more clues about where Blaze was held. But the desert is big and it’s like looking for a tan-colored rock in, well, the desert.

  Marley and Blaze have been going on these trips for the past few weeks, routinely knocking off every major road out of LA that leads into places barren and hot. I gifted them with a car—just a basic Camaro—for the purpose, but it backfired on me a little. They haven’t gotten closer to finding Isaiah, who becomes less scary in my head the farther I get from the encounter at Lubitsch. After all, in both of our weird encounters, he never actually did anything to me. The result of this effort has been that Marley is spending a lot more time with Blaze than he is with me. So I volunteered for this particular drive.

  It reminds me of Marley and I looking for Blaze, playing detective, which now feels like another lifetime. We have a nice rhythm, the two of us, and I missed it. I know that Blaze was technically there first, but I staked my claim in his absence and I’m not going to give it up without a fight.

  We drive along in a contented silence and my mind begins to wander to what Indah and I might make for dinner tonight. We got a new tablecloth for our big table, blue like Indah’s ocean painting on the wall. The dining area is quickly becoming my favorite place in the world; I’m not even bothered by the fact that I stare at a painting of the ocean instead of the real thing. Months and months in Los Angeles, and I keep moving farther and farther away from the Pacific but closer to something I never thought to want.