A Neon Darkness

by Lauren Shippen

  “What did you do,” he whispers.

  “I…” I swallow around the lump in my throat, my eyes darting from petrified face to petrified face. I’m exhausted, in shock, the tethers connecting me to my friends gossamer and breakable.

  “Blaze,” I say to Marley, changing focus, “put him in the Plymouth.”

  Marley complies; whether it’s because his arms are getting tired or he’s listening to me or I’m influencing him is unclear, but I don’t think it matters. He lays Blaze in the backseat so gently, like a father putting his child to sleep.

  Marley’s spine straightens, his shoulders as tense as two slabs of marble, and he turns to me in one smooth motion on his heel, expressionless as he peers down at me. Suddenly I can picture him in the army very easily.

  “We need to get rid of the body,” he says, and Neon dry-heaves.

  “What…” Sweat breaks out on my brow. “No, we have to go. We have to get out of here—”

  I want nothing more than to leave, for all of us to pile into the Plymouth and drive off and never look back. But that desire doesn’t seem to be compelling anyone—the three of them stay still, looking at me expectantly, like maybe they need to get rid of my body too.

  “He’s evidence,” Marley explains. “This isn’t some back highway—it’s the PCH. Someone will find him and then, eventually, find us.”

  I walk over to the edge of the bluff, the adrenaline and heat starting to drain from my body, and look out over the edge. Cold wind rushes up from below, hitting my face as I stare into the freezing black of the Pacific, what feels like worlds away from the neon darkness of Los Angeles.

  “Can’t we just, I don’t know, throw his body in the ocean?” I say, the surreality of the words keeping me in a state of disbelief.

  “Not without a boat,” Marley says practically, like he’s talking about the best way to clean the loft after a night of drinking. “We wouldn’t be able to get him far enough out. He’d just end up washing back up to shore.”

  “Okay.” I swallow, my throat increasingly dry. “So we find a boat—”

  “And how are we supposed to do that?” he snaps, glaring at me.

  “I don’t know, Marley, but we can’t just bury him on the side of the road—”

  “There’s a spot I know, up in the canyon.”

  The two of us turn to Indah, her quiet voice steadier than I would have expected, steadier than all of us. Her arms are around Neon now—who is curled tightly into her, like she’s trying to melt into Indah and disappear—but her face is angled up to stare daggers at me.

  “What do you mean, ‘there’s a spot’?” I whisper.

  “I do actually have a life outside of you, Robert,” she snaps. “Or, I used to. I like to go hiking.”

  Marley nods sharply, like he’s been given his orders, and moves toward Isaiah’s body, whacking my shoulder as he walks past me.

  “C’mon,” he grumbles, and I follow him automatically, only realizing seconds later that he means for me to help him pick up the body and put it in my trunk.

  The next half hour moves in a strange, gruesome haze. Marley picks up Isaiah from underneath his arms, silently telling me to grab the feet with a jerk of his head, and I’m shocked by how heavy the body is. I’ve never dealt with a dead body before. Based on the way that Marley and Indah are looking at me, I’m not sure they’d believe me if I told them that.

  As we shuffle the body over to the Plymouth, I have an absurd and inappropriate thought: How did they move my body from the floor to the couch when Neon shocked me unconscious in the loft? Am I really that much lighter than Isaiah? He’s tall and older, yeah, but thin as a rail. If the dead weight of my chunky body is anything like his—

  The next thing I know, I’m sitting in the passenger seat of my own car, feeling like there should be blood on my hands and not just the smell of burnt leather from Isaiah’s shoes. Indah is in the driver’s seat next to me, driving iron jawed through the darkness, her eyes unblinking as they track the winding road in front of her. I turn around to look in the backseat, where Blaze still lies unconscious, now with Neon spooning him, holding on to him like he’s a security blanket.

  “Where’s Marley?” I croak, my voice feeling like sandpaper. Did I yell more than I thought? Was I screaming at one point?

  “On Neon’s bike,” Indah says.

  “Oh.”

  I didn’t know Marley knew how to drive a motorcycle.

  Seconds—or maybe hours—later, Indah pulls the Plymouth to a slow and steady stop. We sit in the silent car for a moment, the claustrophobia of the space both crushing and comforting. If we get out of the car, we’re going to have to get the body out too, and then perform the ghoulish task of burying it, and as much as I want to stay in the cocoon of the car, I find myself opening up the car door and leaning out of it to throw up.

  “Finally, he reacts,” Neon croaks, deadpan, when I’m done. I pull myself back into the car and look into the backseat to see her sitting upright, Blaze’s head in her lap. “Wasn’t sure if you realized that you just murdered someone,” she sneers.

  Instead of responding, I kick the door open fully and launch myself out of it, my feet landing on the ground just as the rumble of Neon’s motorcycle greets me. Marley isn’t wearing a helmet—Neon’s was probably too small for him—so his pale, bony face makes him look like Ghost Rider. All he needs is the leather jacket, not just the thin Alkaline Trio T-shirt hanging off his broad shoulders.

  “Give me a hand?” he pants, walking toward the trunk of the car. The gulp my throat performs is audible in the quiet clearing we’ve found ourselves in.

  Indah must have off-roaded it a bit, because we seem to be miles from any kind of civilization. We’re in the woods; the rustling of trees and occasional scurry of what I hope are small, harmless woodland creatures are the only noises that surround us. The sky seems brighter here somehow, the light of the stars not being sucked into the endless deep black of the ocean.

  The creak of the trunk brings me back to the task at hand and we proceed to slog through the grimmest two hours of my life. And large portions of my life have been very grim. By the time Isaiah is in the ground—accomplished solely through a crowbar that happened to be in the trunk and our collective hands—I’m covered in dirt, sediment pushed so far under my fingernails I fear they’ll never be clean.

  “All right,” Indah wheezes, pushing herself to her feet. “That’s done. We don’t ever speak of this, ever again, not even to Blaze.”

  “Fine by me,” I breathe. As grotesque as this outing has been, we’re bonded now. We have a secret that we all share. “It stays between us,” I continue. “Just between those we trust.”

  “No.”

  We all turn to look at Neon, who is shaking her head.

  “Neon, we can’t tell Blaze, he’s better off not knowing—”

  “You,” she spits, rounding on me, “are not someone we trust.”

  “What—”

  “You’re a virus.” She stalks slowly toward me, blue electricity starting to play around her fingertips, making us all flinch. “You infected all of us, made us do things we never would have, and we just went along with it. We had no choice.”

  “You locked me out, remember?”

  “After you’d been holding us hostage—”

  “Do you all still live at the loft?” I ask, receiving no response, just furtive glances between the three of them. “Yeah, that’s what I thought.”

  “You just made me murder someone, Damien,” Neon shouts. “You can’t brush this off—”

  “You have full control of your ability, remember?” I snap back. “That’s what you told me. If you didn’t want to kill him, you wouldn’t have.”

  “Come on, you’re not that willfully naïve,” she sobs. “You took my ability, my hands, and you made them do the worst thing imaginable. How could you do that? How could you want something so horrible?”

  She’s fully crying now, face crumpled, tear
s rolling down her cheeks in great quantity. I’ve never seen her like this. Strong, confident, take-no-prisoners Neon, completely broken. The kind of power she’s been holding over me—the power that can’t be manufactured, can’t be gained through my ability, the power that hypnotized me, seduced me, made me jealous and enticed in equal measure—has snapped with this one act. A small part of me feels hope—hope that maybe now we can truly connect. She doesn’t have to hide behind her tough exterior anymore, and I don’t have to hide behind indifference. But the bigger piece of me sees the hate in her eyes—sees the tears streaming down her face, sees all her raw vulnerability—and gets the sinking feeling that I’ve been right all along. Letting people in is a mistake. Show someone your soft underbelly and they’re going to stab you in it.

  In the end, the Unusuals are just like everyone else: weak. Too weak to stand up to me, too weak to stop me.

  “You were supposed to stop me,” I snarl, and all three of them are looking at me like I’m the weak, pathetic thing. “You’re the only one who ever has. I can’t stop myself from using people but you could have.”

  “How am I supposed to stop you from that when I’m one of the people you’re using?” she half laughs, half cries. “My god, Damien, it’s not my job to make you a person. The only person who can do that is you and you just—you refuse to.”

  “It’s hard—”

  “Tough shit,” she snaps. “Life is hard. Get over it. I just killed a man, against my will, and I still helped bury the body. I’m still here. And I swear on the grave I’m standing on that if you ever come near me again, I’ll kill you too.”

  She whips around so fast that her hair slaps me in the chest and I get a brief whiff of Indah’s perfume, making my heart ache. I know she means it. This is what she meant about things you can never take back.

  Without a word, Neon climbs onto her bike, violently kicks back the kickstand, and takes off into the night. Marley and Indah’s eyes trail after her but they don’t make any move to follow. Am I keeping them here? Please say that it still works. I’m so tired, nearly dead on my feet, but I need them to stay with me.

  Just as I think it, Marley starts to walk toward me, the disgust still plastered across his face.

  “Don’t go getting any ideas,” he says, and I don’t have time to think about what he means before I see him pulling his arm back, crowbar in hand, and then speeding toward me.

  I start to cry out in protest but then the crowbar comes down on my head and everything goes black.

  EPILOGUE

  THE WATER

  So this is the Pacific Ocean.

  Morning is dawning behind me, beautiful and warm, completely at odds with the way I feel. I look out over the stretch of water, just endless blue, as endless and empty as the roads I drove to get here, and I think that most things people call extraordinary are really just too big to comprehend. Why do people like that? I want to understand, want to be able to fit everything in my head; why would I think an infinite body of water is extraordinary?

  It was a long walk to get here. I woke up a few feet from Isaiah’s grave, the Plymouth gone, my head bleeding. With no idea where to go next, no idea what to do next, I just started walking. I followed the slope of the mountain down until I hit sand, and now, here I am.

  The sun is already too warm for my liking, but it’s at least drying my clothes. Diving directly into the water was another unwise choice in an evening of unwise choices—I don’t really know how to swim and it was, to say the least, fucking freezing, bringing up too many dark memories that choked me as much as the cold did—but at least it got most of the dirt off and cleared my head.

  I killed someone. Sort of. That thought has been running through my head over and over and over and I’m starting to come to terms with it. Sort of. I don’t regret Isaiah’s being dead and buried in the woods—he was dangerous, a sick predator of Unusuals, and it was either him or us.

  An easy choice.

  I do regret the role Neon played in it. The role she says I made her play. I wonder if she’ll always feel that way. If maybe someday she’ll realize that she probably wanted to kill him as much as I did. I’m not solely responsible. I can’t be. Because if I am—if I actually took ownership over the things I’ve done—I’m not sure I could live with the person I am. But I have to live with him. So it has to be everybody else’s fault.

  Over the crash of the waves, I hear a soft crunching as someone approaches me across the sand. I look over cautiously, not wanting to seem suspicious, and am surprised by the person who stops at my side.

  “What the hell are you doing here, Marley?”

  “I wanted to return your car,” he says, dropping the keys into my lap before settling down in the sand next to me, placing his shoes at his side.

  “Why?” I ask, confused. “How? I didn’t compel—”

  “No, you didn’t,” he confirms. “It seemed like the right thing to do. Besides, I don’t want to be caught with what I’m assuming is a stolen car.”

  “You have a stolen car already,” I point out. I never told Marley exactly where I got his car, but he also never asked, so I feel like that’s on him.

  “Fair enough.”

  “How’d you find me?” I ask, too afraid to ask anything else.

  “Well, this is the third beach I’ve tried. But I figured…” He sighs. “I figured you’d want to see the ocean. After all this time.”

  I don’t say anything in response, too annoyed that Marley knows me, that I was ever vulnerable with him, so we sit there, not talking, the push and pull of the waves a soothing rhythm that breaks any tension between us.

  “Aren’t you afraid I’m gonna hurt you?” I ask quietly after a few minutes.

  “Not so much.”

  “Why? Because you can just punch my lights out?”

  “That,” he says, grimacing, “but also, I’ve seen your past, remember? I know how much regret you have about what you made your father do.”

  “Oh, so you can read minds now too?” I say, ignoring the stinging at the fact that he knows about my dad.

  “Regret can be a really tangible thing,” he says solemnly. “I know that you’re not going to hurt me. I don’t think you want to. You don’t get any joy out of it.”

  “Of course I don’t,” I grumble.

  “But you do get joy out of controlling people,” he says. “Don’t you?”

  “No,” I reply automatically.

  “Liar,” he says, but there’s little heat to it. “I saw the look on your face tonight. The perverse pleasure you got out of having Neon in the palm of your hand—”

  He stops abruptly and I feel that tether pull taut. I don’t want to fully control him, want to give that rope some slack, but I can’t take more verbal abuse right now.

  “I don’t know what to do,” I mumble, pushing my feet farther into the sand.

  I can feel Marley breathe deep next to me, but he doesn’t say anything. I want him to speak, want him to comfort me, tell me everything is going to be okay.

  “She’ll forgive you eventually, I think,” he says, and there’s a rush of satisfaction through me at his words. “We all will.”

  “How could you?” I ask, needing more.

  “It’s what we do. We’re family. We forgive each other.”

  Family. That’s what we are. We’re family.

  But something in the way Marley says it sounds hollow. Even if they did forgive me, is this how I want it? Does it count if the family I have is coerced into being there? Does it count as abandonment if the family I had was coerced into leaving? Does it matter who forgives me as long as I’m forgiven?

  “Are you just saying that because I want you to?” I ask, uncertain if I actually want the truth.

  “Yes,” he says, and I can feel the thread between us snap.

  I swallow around the lump in my throat, doing everything I can to hold in the tears I can feel gathering at the corners of my eyes. I just nod, making a sound of agreement,
too scared to actually open my mouth in case nothing but a sob comes out.

  “There are limits,” he says harshly. “Everyone has to have their limits.”

  “What are yours?” I choke out, afraid of the answer, but the burning need to hear the truth is driving everything.

  “I don’t know,” he says, and once again I’m amazed at how often “I don’t know” is the truthful answer from people. I thought growing up meant figuring it out. I thought it meant never having to admit that you don’t know something. I thought it meant that that wouldn’t even apply. But, as far as I can tell, no one knows much of anything about being a person, no matter their age. I take cold comfort in the fact that I’m not the only one who has to playact at being a person sometimes.

  “What about you?” Marley asks.

  I roll my eyes. I can feel several other threads between us, but they don’t seem to be doing anything. Marley is deflecting again, somehow overriding my ability.

  “Why do you always do that?” I ask.

  “Do what?”

  “Turn the question back on me.”

  “Oh.” He pauses and looks out over the ocean. “That.”

  “Yeah, ‘that,’” I echo. “It doesn’t actually distract my ability from getting more information, you know that, right? Or, at least, it won’t for long.”

  “Yeah, of course,” he says, turning his face back to me. “Is that what you think I was doing?”

  His brow is furrowed and I feel like I missed a step.

  “Aren’t you? You feel the need to tell me things about yourself but you’re aware that it’s just my power doing that to you, so you try to fight against it by making it about me.” His brow furrows impossibly more. “Isn’t that what you’re doing?”

  “No, Rob,” he says, sounding surprised. “That’s something you’re doing.”

  “What?”

  “When I ask about you,” he says, “it’s because you want me to.”

  His eyes have widened now, like he’s pleading with me to understand. Like he’s explaining to a child that their dog died.

  “Not that I wouldn’t ask,” he rushes to explain. “I would, I totally would, but … you always beat me to it. I thought you knew that.”