A Neon Darkness

by Lauren Shippen

  A breath is punched out of me as I collapse back into the armchair and try to pretend that I didn’t just say all that. I want Neon to forget, but there’s still a faint buzzing underneath my skin that tells me it won’t work. Does Neon’s power make me want to speak? Does the electricity somehow loosen up my lips?

  I hear the flick of Neon’s lighter and tear my eyes from my lap to look at her. She’s lighting another cigarette and peering at me over the flame, silent and unreadable. I swallow and stare back, waiting for her to talk so that I don’t have to.

  “Fuck, dude,” she says simply, pocketing the lighter. “That is some gnarly stuff.”

  I just nod my head, pursing my lips and resisting the urge to run away. This is what friends do, isn’t it? That’s what I said to Marley. Friends talk, they share, they accept each other. If anyone can accept me, it’s Neon.

  “I’m sorry,” she sighs.

  “Sorry for what?” I ask.

  “I’m sorry that that happened to you,” she explains. “That sounds like some traumatizing bullshit.”

  “Yeah,” I breathe. I squint at Neon through the smoke curling out of her mouth. She doesn’t have the sad, pitying eyes that people who say they’re sorry to me usually do. I’m not making her sympathize with me, she’s just … doing it. I didn’t know that was possible and I’m filled with a sense of warmth I’ve never experienced before.

  “But, I mean,” I continue, feeling brave, “I didn’t mean to traumatize her. I just, I wanted to be close to her, to touch her—”

  “I meant traumatizing for you, dumbass.” She snorts.

  “What?”

  “I mean, yeah, what happened to her was super shitty, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t suck for you too. Kissing someone for the first time and having them cry over you is kinda messed up. Like, I know that a lot of people have crappy first kisses but … Christ,” she finishes, taking another drag of her cigarette.

  “Oh,” I say dumbly. “I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

  “Really?”

  “Well, yeah,” I answer. “It was my fault—I’m the one who made her kiss me—”

  “But you didn’t mean to.”

  “Well, no, but you literally just gave me shit for using my ability on you without meaning to,” I point out, my voice developing an edge.

  “Yeah, that’s because we’re both adults and you should know better,” she says, like it’s as easy as that. “You were a kid. I’m sure your power did a lot of things back then that you regret. So did mine. It doesn’t mean we’re bad.”

  “So what, once you turn eighteen you have to take responsibility for everything you do?” I ask.

  “Kinda.” She shrugs. “It’s not a cut-and-dried thing, I guess. Kids mess up, of course, and there are certain things you can’t ever take back”—I think of my dad stepping off the roof, my parents getting into their car and driving away without looking back—“but for the smaller stuff, that’s how you learn. And I still mess up all the time, but it’s not like I’m fifteen and barely in control anymore. At a certain point, you just have to own up to what you can do and figure out how you’re going to use it. No one else can figure that out for you.”

  “I didn’t ask for this,” I snap. “And I can’t just … turn it off.”

  “I know that,” she says calmly, sitting up and crossing her legs in the space between us so she can face me head-on. “But that doesn’t mean it gets to control you. That doesn’t mean it’s a catchall for treating people badly.”

  “Do I treat people badly?” I ask quietly after a moment, terrified of the answer.

  “I don’t know, Damien,” she says, and the name sends a chill up my spine that isn’t the thrill of excitement. “Do you feel like you do?”

  The warm feeling of a few moments ago has turned toxic and roiling as I think about the people I’ve tricked, stolen from, accidentally hurt. I think about Them.

  “My parents left,” I say, breaking the heavy silence and surprising myself.

  “Did they find out about you?” Neon asks, her voice a smooth balm, free of judgment or probing curiosity. Is that what Neon means about control? Not only controlling your ability but controlling every single part of you and how you interact with people? Controlling your voice, your manner, the things you say? Neon is always in control in a way I wouldn’t even know how to begin to get to.

  “Sort of,” I say, voice quiet and breaking. I want to stop speaking, want to get up and go to bed, but there’s a power greater than even the one I assert over people driving me. All these years of being alone, of keeping everything tightly held to my chest, and now it’s desperate to come pouring out on my terms, not because someone has peered into my past.

  Neon takes another drag, exhaling smoke into the space between us, clouding my face from hers for a moment. I take the few seconds of cover to speak again.

  “I think they knew,” I continue softly. “I lived with them, you know? Every moment of me discovering what I could do, having it run wild without me … they were there for all of it. I couldn’t stop it. I couldn’t stop my dad from stepping off the roof to hand me back my Frisbee, I couldn’t stop my mom from making me cake for dinner every single night for a week. I couldn’t stop them from leaving.”

  Neon just sits there, listening. I can tell she wants to ask questions—wants to respond with a witty remark or a creative swear—but she stays silent.

  “I wanted them to leave me alone,” I whisper. “I was mad about something … I don’t even remember what. Honestly, it could have been about Anna Slauson.” I laugh softly for a moment at the thought. Was I really crying over a botched kiss? It all seems so unbelievably long ago, the cornfields of Nebraska and the dusty house like someone else’s memory.

  “Anyway,” I say, “whatever it was, I was upset. And my parents were trying to comfort me, and for once, I just wanted to be left alone. So I told them to leave. And they did.”

  “Fuck,” Neon whispers.

  “They got into their car and they drove away and they never came back,” I say.

  I can tell Neon is about to jump into whatever reaction she’s been having, but before she can, something leaps unbidden from my throat.

  “They could have,” I whisper, eyes prickling. “They could have come back. My ability wears off. It couldn’t make someone stay away—I have to be near a person for it to work. But they didn’t come back. My want for them to leave wore off and they stayed away. They chose to stay gone.”

  “Fuck,” she says again, even quieter than before.

  “I haven’t seen them since,” I finish, though I’m sure that much is obvious.

  We sit in silence for a few moments and I start to retreat inside myself again, worrying that I shared too much, wondering if I can get Neon to forget. I can do that from time to time—can make people forget they met me or talked to me—but it always comes from a place of survival. Making the hotel clerk forget I ever stayed, the grocer forget that I come in every day and never pay. If I’m being honest with myself, I don’t think it would work on Neon in this moment. I finally told someone the full truth of my existence—my sad little orphan Annie past—and they haven’t run away. As much as my stomach is roiling in fear, there’s also a lightness in my chest, a sense of deep relief. I don’t want Neon to forget. I just want her to help me.

  “Dude, you need to go to therapy,” Neon says finally, exhaling a large plume of smoke.

  “Therapy won’t bring my parents back,” I snap, thinking of Dr. Crane, of Francine, of destroying chances at vulnerability in even the safest of environments. If your parents don’t love you, if a therapist gives up on you and walks away, what hope is there?

  “Is that what you really want?” she asks.

  “I don’t know,” I say again quietly, the irony of it all hitting home. The boy whose wants infect everyone else can’t even articulate what he wants, even though it’s as simple as wanting to be wrapped up in someone’s arms. To feel loved. To fe
el safe, for just one goddamned second.

  Suddenly I feel a hand on my arm and cigarette smoke curls up my nose.

  “What are you doing?” I ask, looking at Neon’s face, now just a few inches from mine. She’s shifted closer to me on the couch, her knees touching my leg, her warm hand traveling up my forearm and gripping my bicep. Her eyes are big and so close that I can see the smudged blue eyeliner curling at the ends of her lids.

  She doesn’t answer me, just leans to the side to smash her cigarette—only half smoked—into the ashtray on the coffee table. When she leans back in, she’s impossibly closer to me and I can smell the smoke on her breath, mixed with the sweet scent of a perfume I recognize as Indah’s. My head is swarming with confused emotions—I shouldn’t be this close to Neon, not when she smells like Indah, but her hand is so warm on my arm and I just want to matter to someone for once.

  “Neon…,” I breathe, uncertain what I’m going to say, and the next thing I know, she’s leaning in, closer, closer, and her lips are pressed to mine.

  For a second I think she’s shocking me. I immediately tense, waiting for the pain that follows the brief moment of pleasure when the electricity hits, but it never comes. Instead, there’s simply a sweet buzzing on my lips, a surge of tingling through my body as she presses harder into me.

  I think about pushing her away, demanding to know what exactly she’s thinking, following the script that Indah laid out for me when I surprised her with a kiss, but then Neon moves her lips, bringing her other hand to my shoulder, surrounding me, and I’m convinced I’m going to black out. But she’s still not using her ability on me. The electricity I’m feeling isn’t supernatural, isn’t painful. It’s like nothing I’ve ever felt, like warmth and starlight, and I think about leaping into the sky to bring her the moon.

  I kiss Neon back.

  * * *

  The stars above me are bright and shining. I’ve snuck out of the house again. My dad says I’m not allowed to go into the fields at night until I’m at least in double digits, but I’m braver than he thinks I am. I know there’s nothing out here that can hurt me. I’m surrounded by tall corn stalks all around me, protected and safe in their shadows, and nothing in the entire world can hurt me.

  * * *

  “What are you doing?”

  I feel the sentence on my lips before the words make their way to my ears. All my senses have been dulled, my mind in a trance, focused entirely on Neon’s mouth on mine, her arms around me, the way my hands feel on her waist. But her voice starts to bring me back to my body and I feel her hands digging sharply into my shoulders, and then a surge of electricity that pushes me away from her, setting my hair on end.

  We flop back on opposite ends of the couch, both gasping for breath.

  “Robert, what the—” she pants. “What the hell.”

  “I—” I start, discombobulated, my head still somewhere high in the clouds, my lips still tingling, my shoulders buzzing with her shock. “What do you mean what the hell? You kissed me.”

  “Yeah, well, did you want me to?” she snaps, her eyes staring a hole through me, a freezing black worse than the coldest lake.

  My stomach drops.

  “No, I—” I stutter, “I—I just wanted to—to—”

  “Oh my god.” She swings her feet to the floor, standing up and moving away from the couch. “Look, I get that you—that you have a little thing for me—”

  “I don’t have a thing for you,” I scoff, standing up to follow her.

  “Then how do you explain this?” she shouts, sweeping her arms wide.

  “You kissed me!” I repeat, jabbing a finger at her. “You shocked me earlier, I don’t have any control over you—”

  “Are you absolutely sure, Damien?” she asks, bringing her voice down and narrowing her eyes at me. She crosses her arms and I see a little spark fly off, prompting me to take a step back.

  “I…”

  I’m not sure. I’m not sure at all. Yes, she shocked me, stopped me from influencing her too much, but it was a little spark, a brief jolt. Was it enough to keep my ability suppressed this whole time?

  “You promised us that you wouldn’t use your ability on us,” she spits.

  “No I didn’t. When did I promise that?”

  “It’s what we do, Damien. We only use our abilities when we have to and we don’t ever use them on each other without explicit permission.”

  “Bullshit,” I snap. “You’ve used your ability on me plenty of times. You used it on Blaze when he first got here—”

  “Yeah, to save him from himself!” she shouts, and I’m relieved that we’re alone in the apartment. Suddenly I think of Indah, think of how I might smell like her perfume now too, and that makes me feel just as cold as the look on Neon’s face. What if Indah finds out? What if Neon finds out I tried to kiss Indah all those months ago? What if Marley looks into my past and sees the whole ugly truth about how I don’t know anything about connecting to people and they all just give up trying with me for good?

  “Damien, are you listening to me?”

  Neon’s razor tone snaps me back.

  “I don’t get what you’re so mad about, Neon,” I groan, trying to sound casual. “It was one kiss.”

  “Yeah, to start! But I don’t trust you, Robert,” she says, her voice low and cutting into me like a knife. “I don’t trust that you wouldn’t take it further if I wasn’t here to shock you.”

  If I thought my stomach couldn’t drop further, I was wrong. The slice of Neon’s words hit an artery and I want her to stop, want her to wrap me in her arms again and tell me she loves me, despite what I am. But it doesn’t matter what I want. The most recent shock is still running through my body, putting Neon and me on an even playing field, at least for now. And I know myself and I know Neon—all things being equal, her will is much stronger than mine and she’ll shock me again if she has to. That in and of itself is a kind of relief, but I’m hurt that she assumes she’d have to. So I fight. I fight dirty.

  “What, you think I want you that badly?” I scoff. “You’re not as amazing and magnetic as you think you are, Neon.”

  “Oh, bullshit,” she cries again. “I see the way you look at me—I always have—but I thought you understood. We’re friends. Hell, I just spent twenty minutes crying to you about how much I love Indah—”

  “Yeah, and how you don’t want to fully commit to her—”

  “Because I’m scared!” she shouts. “That wasn’t an open invitation!”

  “What do you want me to do? Say I’m sorry? Then fine: I’m sorry.”

  “That’s not—” She grinds her teeth, pacing in frustration. “I can’t tell you what to do. An apology means nothing if you don’t actually believe what you’re saying.”

  “Well sorry,” I singsong sarcastically. “I guess nothing I do is good enough for you—”

  “God, Damien,” Neon exclaims, “you shouldn’t need someone to teach you how to respect other people. You’re an adult.”

  “Barely!” I shout back, teeth clenching. “I’m nineteen, give me a break!”

  “Haven’t you been listening?” she shouts. “You’re old enough to take responsibility for your own actions. When I was nineteen, I was fighting to survive—trying to figure out how to live with this ability that was constantly trying to tear me apart—”

  “And you think I’m any different?” I snap, hurt. “I’m fighting, just like you—”

  “No, you’re not!” she laughs, eyes to the heavens. “You couldn’t possibly understand what it’s like to really claw your way through existence. You’re a white man in America who has the literal power of persuasion! You’ve always gotten everything you ever wanted. Your ability has made things easy for you, not made it impossible for you to carve out your place in the world.”

  She finally stops pacing, the air pushed out of her as she finishes, huffing and puffing and staring daggers at me.

  “Is that really what you think?” I ask softl
y, wondering how we got to this place. “After everything I just told you—everything about my parents, about what my life has been like … you think just because the world falls at my feet now without me asking, I should be … what, grateful?”

  She shrugs and flips a stray loc over her shoulder with her hand—a gesture that is so familiar to me that it stops me in my tracks for a moment. I know Neon. Like, know her know her. Over the past eight months she’s become closer to me than anyone ever has. I know her expressions, her habits, her pet peeves. I thought, like she said, that I understood her. I thought she understood me.

  “I thought you understood me,” I say aloud, echoing her, my voice more fragile than I want it to be. “That’s why…”

  I stop myself, but Neon grabs on to the unfinished sentence.

  “Why what?” she insists.

  “I just wanted it to mean something. For once.” I look down at my feet, too terrified to look at Neon in the eyes. “It seems to mean so much to other people and I—I just want to matter. I thought you understood me. I thought it would matter.”

  “I don’t know that anyone’s ever understood you, Robert,” she says, and something inside of me breaks. “How could they? With you always wanting to keep everyone and everything at arm’s length…”

  “What if I wanted you to understand,” I say quietly, looking up at her, the hope caught in my throat. “If I wanted you to understand, then you would, right?”

  “You tell me,” she says, cocking her head like she’s looking at me for the first time. “Is that really how it works? You need to actually want it, right? Like you said.”

  I nod, scared of where she’s going with this.

  “So … do you really want people to understand you?” she asks, her face crumpling in sympathy. “Or is it just that you want people to see you how you see you?”

  “What’s the difference?”

  That makes her pause and straighten her head, her expression slackening, her posture collapsing. It’s like the wind has been let out of her sails and when she speaks, it’s as if I’m talking to a completely different person than the Neon who was yelling at me a few minutes ago.