by Amy Reed
I look up at the TV and there’s a close-up of Caleb Sloat, his dirty-blond hair in his eyes just like Billy’s, the same jaw, the same thin face, the same sad blue eyes staring right at me.
“Hey,” I say, walking away from the bar and settling into a booth for privacy. Only Old Pete is within earshot, but he doesn’t have much to say about anything.
Billy doesn’t speak for a while. I just sit there with the phone to my ear, listening to his silence. Is this what I’m supposed to do? Or am I supposed to start asking questions? Am I supposed to wait for him to speak? How the hell do people talk on the phone? Where do people learn these things?
I hear Billy take a deep breath. I swear I can feel his warm exhale on my cheek and smell something meaty and slightly sour on his breath. Gravy? I must be hallucinating. After all these years hanging out in a bar, some of the alcohol must have seeped in through my skin and caused permanent brain damage.
“He made really good mac and cheese,” Billy finally says. “I think he put, like, a whole stick of butter in it.”
“Yeah?”
“We’d draw and paint together for hours sometimes. He was a great artist. He’d draw all these weird magical creatures he invented himself.”
“That’s cool.”
“He was a hide-and-seek master. I could never find him.”
“Oh.” Oh? Is that the best I can do?
“My house is perfect for hide-and-seek. Because of all the stuff, you know? It makes good hiding places.”
“Uh-huh.” I keep saying these useless non-things. I’m failing at this conversation. I should just hang up now and put us both out of our misery.
“Do you know there’s a bedroom upstairs that’s full of nothing but blankets and pillows? Whenever there’s a sale on bed stuff at Thrift Town, Grandma always buys it all and makes me put it in that room. She’s been doing it for years, even before Caleb left. That was always his favorite place to hide. He’d, like, burrow into a spot and I’d find him and we’d just hide out in there together talking about stuff. And he’d tell me all these weird made-up stories about all the creatures he drew. And we’d just float in this soft place together.”
I imagine a little-boy version of Billy alongside an older, scowling, heroin-addict Billy look-alike, floating in a cloud. Safe. Impenetrable.
“He sounds like he was a really good uncle,” I say, and I feel something thick in my throat.
“He was. For a while. Then he wasn’t anymore.”
Then silence again. I don’t trust myself to say anything. I’m not helping Billy. I’m not making him feel better or fixing anything. I don’t know how to do this. I’m not being a good friend.
“I’m really scared,” Billy whispers.
“Okay.”
“I really miss him.”
“I know.”
“He was an asshole sometimes, but I think he was the only person who ever loved me.” Billy’s voice breaks, and then he starts sobbing. I can feel the percussion of his breath in my ear, the great intakes before the exhalations, like he’s inhaling parts of me, borrowing them for the seconds the breath is held inside, and then he exhales and gives them back again. I am okay with this. I can sit here and be inhaled, with the protection of the phone between us. I can be sturdy while he needs these parts of me. I am no less solid for being needed. For now, anyway. He is a few miles away, in a different town. He cannot take too much of me from there.
When his breaths calm and become little more than whispers, I finally speak. “I’m so sorry, Billy,” and I’m pretty sure that’s the nicest thing that’s ever come out of my mouth, and that makes me a new weird kind of scared, like all this softness is making me a target.
I see something move in the shadows. I feel like I’m being watched.
He sniffles. “For someone who’s never had any friends, you’re pretty good at it.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Thanks for listening.”
Is that all he wanted? For me to listen?
“Lydia?” he says.
“Yeah?”
“You’re my best friend.”
“Okay,” I say, and immediately regret it. Am I supposed to say “you too”? Or “me too”? I don’t know if I’m ready to say either of those things. I barely know him. What if the only reason we’re friends is because no one else wants to be friends with us?
“I’m gonna go to bed now,” he says.
“Okay,” I say, and I feel the air sucked out of my chest. Maybe I don’t want him to go to bed. Maybe I wish he were right here, sitting across from me in the booth, so I could tell him about how jumpy I’ve been feeling. About my dream. About my mom.
“See you tomorrow,” he says.
“Okay,” I say again.
I put my phone down on the slimy wood table. I hear Old Pete clear his mucusy throat in the booth behind me. “Time to wake up,” he grumbles.
I feel a thin tear stream down my cheek and settle into the side of my mouth. A brief burst of anger rips through me as I taste the salt, and I don’t know if I’m angry at Billy, or my mom, or myself, or the tear. Or everything.
BILLY
THERE’S NOTHING LIKE A GOOD night’s sleep to remember what your priorities are.
I woke up this morning determined to stay positive. I learned from one of my favorite therapy talk shows that just forcing yourself to smile can actually trick your brain into thinking it’s happy. So even though thoughts of Caleb keep flashing into my mind, even though I can’t find any clothes in my dresser that aren’t slightly damp, even though I woke up with seven spider bites in a straight line on my stomach, and even though the hole in the wall next to my bed got bigger overnight and I can hear mysterious things scurrying around in there and the lights in the bathroom started blinking on and off while I was brushing my teeth like in a horror movie, I’m smiling so hard my cheeks hurt as I recite today’s gratitude list in my head:
A roof over my head (though it’s got some holes and leaks and probably bats living in it and is connected to a house that is starting to act like it wants to kill me).
Food to eat (though it has little nutritional value and is probably giving me diabetes).
Living by the sea (though I don’t know how to swim and the water is too cold anyway and it usually smells weird and the beach is often covered by all the fish and seals and whales that keep dying in the ocean).
Family?
A best friend!
I don’t even have to force my smile for the last one.
I keep smiling all the way to school, despite the possum that lunges at my ankles as I walk out the front door, despite the rain, despite my crappy raincoat that’s not even waterproof, despite the hole in my shoe that cardboard and duct tape couldn’t fix, despite the fact that I’m too late for free breakfast and I have to wait until lunch to eat. I keep smiling even though everyone stares and laughs at me all day, even though Graylon Jennings trips me in the hall, even though people keep singing Rainy Day Knife Fight songs in my face, but with the lyrics changed:
Fishing in the mud
Look at all my blood
Don’t clean me up
I’m all done dying
If I act like nothing is wrong, then nothing is wrong. I manifest my own reality. I am made out of love and light.
It could be so much worse.
I smile when I sit across from Lydia at lunch. “Hello!” I say. “How are you today?”
“How are you?” Lydia says, with a confused look on her face. She doesn’t get it. She has not discovered the power of positive thinking.
“I’m great!” I say, biting into my corn dog.
“How are you great?” Lydia says.
“Aren’t these corn dogs delicious?” I say. “I saw a really cool moth on my way to school today.”
“You saw a moth?”
“It was really cool.”
“Moths are not cool.”
“Sure they are.”
“What is wrong wi
th you?”
“That’s the thing,” I say, taking another bite of my corn dog. “Nothing’s wrong. It’s all a matter of perspective. I have to let go of Caleb, you know? Because I’m powerless over what happens to him. And his path is his own. I can’t walk his path for him. What happens to him doesn’t really affect me all that much, if you think about it.”
“You sound like you’re in a cult,” Lydia says. “You can’t just decide to not have feelings.”
“Sure I can.” I smile even bigger. I just need to keep smiling. I just need to Fake It Till I Make It.
Lydia sighs. “Between you and my dad, I think I got stuck with the two most infuriatingly positive people in all of Fog Harbor.”
“You must be lucky,” I say, squirting a packet of mustard on my corn dog. “I saw a show once about this girl who lived entirely on mustard and Diet Coke.”
“How’d that work out for her?”
“She died.” I smile and take another bite.
LYDIA
IT’S BEEN A FEW DAYS since Billy’s uncle went missing, and he’s still got that goofy smile plastered on his face like nothing’s wrong. “Sorry I’m late,” he says, walking toward my locker. “I had to go the long way to avoid Mrs. Ambrose because she keeps trying to tell me about college scholarships.”
“How dare she.”
I’ve been wondering lately if I should tell Billy about my dancing. It’s feeling stranger and stranger to keep it a secret, especially since Billy tells me literally everything that goes through his head.
“Want to come over?” Billy says.
“Yeah, why not.” I close my locker with a slam.
“Did you hear Channel Five said someone reported seeing my uncle in Mongolia?” Something in his face gets droopy, like maybe he’s actually having a feeling besides his forced perkiness.
“I thought it was Italy,” I say.
“No, that was on Wednesday.”
He looks sad for approximately three seconds before he smiles again. Am I supposed to say something? Would a friend try to get him to talk about it, even though he said he doesn’t want to be sad? What’s more important—letting someone do things their own way, or trying to make them tell the truth?
“Where’s your skateboard?” Billy says.
“I don’t want to talk about it.” I don’t want to tell him about how I accidentally broke it in half when I tried to do a rail slide yesterday. Everyone knows you can’t do tricks on longboards.
The brand-new FOG HARBOR LUMBERJACKS sign in front of the school has been spray-painted over with UNICORNS KILL DRAGONS! which is actually not how the story goes at all; the dragons were the ones terrorizing the unicorns for most of the series. We don’t have much use for a mascot anyway, since pretty much all the sports teams have been canceled because Rome and Carthage students refuse to be teammates.
As we walk away from school, Graylon or Grayson or Braydon says, “Heard from your uncle lately, Billy Goat? By the time they find whatever ditch he died in, he’s gonna be pretty ripe.”
“God, that whole family’s crazy,” Kayla or Kaitlyn or Katelyn cackles through her chewing gum. “Just a bunch of white trash junkies.”
Like either of them can talk.
“Do you want to see my attic?” Billy says when we get to his house. It’s only a ten-minute walk from school. His house is a ten-minute walk from everything in Rome.
“Sure,” I say. His house seems even more broken than the last time I was here, like it’s been beating itself up.
Before we go up to the attic, Billy shows me his room on the second floor. “It’s not much,” he says as we stand in the doorway. That’s an understatement. There’s almost nothing in it. A mattress on the floor with an unzipped sleeping bag as a blanket, a crooked lamp, an old dresser and bedside table, and a big hole in the wall. No decorations or anything personal. It’s like the room of someone who thought they wouldn’t be staying.
“How long has this been your room?” I ask.
“Ever since Caleb left, so, like, ten years.”
I think about my own room, how I’ve spent literally my entire life decorating it. The walls are completely covered with a collage of posters and art I’ve found for cheap and pictures I’ve cut out of magazines. I’ve kept almost every stuffed animal I’ve ever owned. I have a whole table dedicated to random crap I’ve found on the ground.
I feel a mix of sad and angry that this is Billy’s room. He deserves more. He at least deserves some goddamned pictures on the wall.
“Show me the attic,” I say.
“Okay,” Billy says.
We climb a narrow set of stairs hidden behind a door I didn’t even notice. The air seems to change as we go up, become lighter somehow, and everything doesn’t seem so broken.
“It’s like a different house up here,” I say when we reach the attic. There is exactly zero stuff in it. It is empty and clean.
“I can’t even remember the last time I came up here,” Billy says, looking around like it’s as new to him as it is to me. “I forgot it existed.” He walks slowly around the open space, all exposed rafters and brown wood, with ceilings that meet the floor in sharp corners all around. “Doesn’t it feel a lot more stable up here than it does in the rest of the house?” He kicks a column that connects the floor to the ceiling. “It’s totally dry, even with all the holes in the roof. It’s like the leaks just skipped this floor or something. I don’t even see any spiderwebs or mouse poop. Isn’t that weird?”
“Yeah,” I say. I’m looking out the one small window at the view of the clear-cut hills in the distance.
He joins me by the window. We’re on our knees, side by side. We can see all the way to the hills in the east and the ocean to the west, where the fog is rolling in. I’m used to fog, but it’s usually something I wake up to in the morning, already there. Or it filters in so softly and gradually in the evening that no one really notices. But somehow, watching from up here, it feels different. More intense or something. More on purpose.
“It seems thicker than usual, doesn’t it?” Billy says.
“Yeah,” I say. “That’s not normal fog.” It’s like the fog in Book Two of Unicorns vs. Dragons, when the war’s about to start.
I’ve never watched it from the outside, never seen the edges, never seen where the sky stops and the fog starts. I’ve only ever been in it.
“Is it just me,” Billy says, “or do things seem weird around here lately?”
“Things have always been weird around here.”
“But they’re getting weirder.”
I think about the shapes I’ve been seeing in the corner of my eye, the strange movements in the shadows. But if I say it out loud, will that make it more real? Is it worth the can of worms it’ll open?
“Yeah,” I finally say. “Things are getting weirder.”
“The fog is coming in really fast,” Billy says.
“Yeah,” I say again.
“It’s almost here.”
Five. Four. Three. Two. One. And now we’re gone. Now there is nothing but white.
I feel strange, like the ground has dropped away, like we are suddenly suspended, no longer attached to the rest of the house, to Rome, to Fog Harbor, to even the earth for that matter. It’s just me and Billy in the attic like a ship, adrift in this sea of white, with no map, no compass, and no way to steer.
I wonder if Billy notices that I’m trembling. I’m used to having so much control over my body. I’ve been training it for years. I know every muscle and tendon and bone. But right now it’s like something inside me has taken over, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.
I remember studying the nervous system in biology freshman year, how there’s this phenomenon in prey animals where after they escape a predator, they’ll shake uncontrollably to get rid of their adrenaline, to flush out the trauma of their fear. Maybe this is like that. Maybe this fog is more than weather.
The corners are full of shadows. There is something movi
ng. Something human-shaped. The thing that’s been following me. I can almost see it.
“I have to go,” I say. Can he hear the fear in my voice?
“Not yet,” Billy says. What is that look on his face? Is he scared too?
“I have to go,” I say again, standing up too fast. I feel light-headed. When was the last time I ate?
I open the attic door and hurry down the rickety, steep staircase to the second floor, all the while hearing wood creak and crack beneath me.
As I reach the first floor, the front door swings open, revealing a large, panting woman carrying several plastic Thrift Town bags. She drops them in the entryway and wipes her wet forehead with the back of her hand.
“Grandma!” Billy shouts. “This is my friend, Lydia.”
Billy’s grandma narrows her eyes. “So she is real.”
“Of course she’s real,” says Billy.
“I thought you made her up.”
I look at Billy, at the temporary hurt on his face before he makes the choice to smile again.
“I have to go,” I say. “I’m sorry.”
I need to run. I need to get away. It’s not safe here.
Billy’s grandma is still between me and the exit, and she doesn’t appear to be moving anytime soon. I say, “Excuse me,” and I squeeze by without looking her in the eye, open the door, and take the biggest breath possible as soon as my face hits the cool air outside, but then I immediately start gagging. It smells all wrong. It smells like death and decay and bad things coming.
“What a rude girl,” I hear Billy’s grandma say as the door closes behind me, then “Billy, what’s for dinner?” and my heart cracks imagining Billy standing there with that woman, in that house, without me. I will call him later. I will.
The world outside has been transformed. Visibility is only a couple feet, and beyond that, a thick wall of white. Streetlights glow like fuzzy, floating orbs. A car drives by, and the red taillights create a smoky trail through the fog, as if the water particles have caught the light and are holding on to it on purpose. I can hear the world, but I can’t quite see it.
Something darts in front of me, something large and fast and silver. I hear what sounds like hooves on pavement.