by Amy Reed
Or I could flip that to something positive: I’m not materialistic. That’s a good quality for a person to have.
For some reason, the usual comfort of watching TV suddenly doesn’t seem so appealing. I want to go somewhere that’s dry and quiet and empty, where even if Grandma comes home and starts screaming at the top of her lungs I won’t be able to hear her. So I grab the sleeping bag off my bed, throw it over my shoulders like a cape, and climb the rickety steps to the attic so I can stare out the window and watch the fog until I fall asleep.
When I open the door to the attic, the first thing I notice is a wet trail from the door to the deep black shadows under the eaves, even though I didn’t notice any trail coming up the stairs. Fear freezes my body before my brain has a chance to make any kind of intelligent decision. And that’s where I am—frozen in place, head empty, blanket over my shoulders—when a hunched figure emerges out of the shadows, swathed in rags, greasy blond hair covering his eyes, a mirror image of myself.
“Dude, you smell like fucking dish soap,” says my uncle Caleb’s voice.
LYDIA
LAST NIGHT I DREAMED I was nine years old, just before Mom left. I’m at dance class, in my little pink tights and leotard and skirt, the nicest clothes I’ve ever owned. Mom put my hair in a bun, taught me about the secret world of hairnets and bobby pins.
Dance was the only thing I did that my mother ever showed interest in. She’d drive me to class and put her phone away and actually watch the whole thing. I would look back at her often, in the mirror, hoping she wouldn’t notice me gauging the softness of her face—her frown wasn’t so frowny, her eyes weren’t so empty, and that meant I was doing a good job.
In the dream, nine-year-old Lydia is dancing, and I can see her little body, but somehow I know it’s the older now-me inside it, because her face is too serious, her muscles are too tense, her point is way more arched than her foot should allow, her leaps way higher than humanly possible, her pirouettes faster. But she doesn’t look like some prodigy, she’s not beautiful—it’s grotesque. I’m inside her like some kind of torture device, tearing her apart. And the whole time her body is doing these impossible things, her head’s whipping around, looking for Mom, and I think I’m going to break her, I’m going to break her neck, I’m too much, I’m always too much, but Mom’s nowhere, even though we can feel her eyes, the little girl and me, Mom’s watching us from somewhere, in the wall maybe, the ceiling, behind the mirror.
The mirror. We walk toward the mirror. We’re still in character, still ballerinas. We’re always performing. It’s always a show.
We watch our faces get larger, mine and little Lydia’s, in split screen, then superimposed, then combined in some weird layering effect, but our eyes are the same, almond-shaped mirrors reflecting the mirrored wall, creating a feedback loop, turning our image infinite, and the mirror turns to liquid, and we pass through, and there is nothing on the other side. Just white. Just emptiness. There is no ground, no up and no down, no one but the girl and me, suspended in space, unable to move.
When I opened my dresser drawer this morning, the framed photo of my mom that usually hangs on the living room wall was sitting on top of my T-shirts. Have I started sleepwalking and moving things around while I’m unconscious? Sleep-redecorating?
I am looking in the bathroom mirror now, in the apartment behind Larry’s bar where I’ve lived my whole life. Mom hated living here. When she was in a particularly bad mood, she called it a dungeon. And Larry was her captor, as if his love was a curse. Just like in Unicorns vs. Dragons, when the dragon king kept the unicorn princess locked up in his tower, and the wind would carry the sound of her cry all the way to the ocean.
There is nothing magic about this mirror. It’s just me looking back at myself with a gash on my cheek and my tornado hair. The mirror is solid and cheap and scratched. It hasn’t been washed in a long time. Flecks of toothpaste and floss projectiles dot the surface like dirty constellations.
Even after shampooing three times and using a whole bottle of conditioner to get the tangles out, my hair is still a rat’s nest. It will never be clean again. The forest won.
So I raise a pair of scissors and start cutting.
BILLY
ON THE WAY TO SCHOOL this morning, I saw about a hundred cats sitting on top of someone’s roof. A couple blocks later, three deer were walking down the middle of the street like it was no big deal while a whole line of backed-up cars honked at them. Lydia wasn’t at breakfast so she missed the impromptu prayer circle about how the tornado was a sign from God that the rapture is coming and only the righteous will ascend to Heaven in the coming apocalypse and the rest of us will be burned to a crisp in hell. She would have loved that.
A whole trailer park in Carthage was demolished, which Carthageans are saying is proof that the tornado pit belongs to them, and Romans are saying is proof that God hates Carthageans, because apparently even weather takes sides in the Carthage versus Rome feud. I know the tornado was a big deal and all, but even though it almost killed Lydia and me in the forest, I’ve totally moved on because now I have way bigger news hiding in my attic.
Technically, Uncle Caleb specifically said to “not tell a living soul” that he’s hiding in the attic, but the way I see it, Caleb doesn’t know Lydia or understand the depth of my trust for her, so when he made that pronouncement he didn’t have the full information, so Lydia doesn’t really apply to his “not tell a living soul” rule, because he didn’t even know her soul existed. He was talking about everyone else’s souls, not Lydia’s.
By the time lunch comes, I can barely breathe, I’m so excited. There’s also the fact that I didn’t sleep last night, which may have something to do with how weird I feel.
“Lydia!” I shout as soon as I see her, and she jumps and almost drops her lunch tray, and I’m about to start telling her everything, but I get distracted by the fact that she doesn’t have any hair.
“You don’t have any hair,” I say.
“That’s not entirely true,” she says. “I have some hair. It’s a pixie cut. You like?”
I can’t decide. She doesn’t look like Lydia.
“What are you all jazzed up about?” she says. “You look like you’re going to fly away.”
I lean into her and she recoils. “What the fuck, Billy? Are you trying to kiss me?”
“Get a room, freaks!” someone passing by shouts. Someone else makes vomiting noises.
“I was just trying to tell you a secret!” I cry. This isn’t going well so far.
I follow Lydia to our table in the middle that no one sits at because it’s in the no-man’s-land between the Carthage and Rome sides of the lunchroom.
“So tell me,” she says, sitting down.
I lean in.
“Watch it,” she says.
“Can you hear me?” I whisper.
“Yes,” Lydia whispers back sarcastically.
I wait a few seconds for ultimate effect.
“Come on!” she says, throwing a tater tot at my forehead.
“CalebSloatishidinginmyattic” comes tumbling out of my mouth too fast. It is not the delivery I was hoping for.
Lydia doesn’t say anything. She tilts her head to the side, kind of like a bird.
She doesn’t say anything. And she still doesn’t say anything. I’m starting to feel dizzy from not breathing.
“Say something!” I finally blurt out.
“I don’t know what to say,” Lydia says very softly and slowly, which is the opposite of how she usually talks, which proves definitively that this is a Really Big Deal.
I tell her everything I know, which isn’t much. Caleb didn’t exactly want to chat. I had all sorts of questions, but every time I started asking one, Caleb told me to “shut the fuck up” and go get him some food and dry clothes. So basically what happened was Caleb just ordered me around for about twenty minutes as I went up and down the stairs getting him stuff. I start telling Lydia all the things I had
to go up and down the stairs to get—blankets, frozen pizza, Pop-Tarts, water bottle, bucket, toilet paper—and finally she cuts me off and says, “I don’t get it. How did no one see him the last two weeks? How did he even get there?”
“I asked him the same exact question,” I say. “I said, ‘How’d you get here without anyone seeing you?’ and he said, ‘I can’t tell you,’ and I said, ‘Why not?’ and he said, ‘You’d never believe me,’ and I said, ‘I’m pretty gullible,’ and he said, ‘Drop it,’ and I said, ‘Did it have anything to do with the tornado?’ but then he just told me to shut the fuck up again and go get him another pillow.”
“Billy Goat,” Lydia says with a grin, “this is a damn good secret.”
The compliment gives me sparkles in my chest. I lean in closer, and Lydia actually leans in too this time. “There’s more,” I say.
“What?” she says.
“He gave me his bank card and told me his code. He told me to get a bunch of cash out and buy him a computer.”
“Won’t the police be able to trace the card or something?”
“That’s exactly what I asked him! He said not to worry because it’s a secret bank account that’s not under his real name, because his old drug dealer also sold fake IDs and dead people’s social security cards. Isn’t that great?”
Lydia arches her eyebrow and I realize that sounded really bad.
“Are you going to do it?” she says.
“I need your help.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know how to buy a computer.”
“You just go to BigMart and buy one.”
“Will they sell it to me? Won’t they be suspicious I have so much money?”
“Dude, they just want to sell computers. They don’t give a crap where the money comes from.”
“Lydia,” I say, “I just really want you to come with me. I need your help. I don’t have anyone else.”
Lydia’s face does something weird.
“You get to meet my uncle,” I say.
“I have to admit, I’m curious,” she says.
“Curiosity is the root of all innovation!” I shout, because I’m so excited.
“That’s on a sign in our chemistry class,” Lydia says.
“I’ve always liked that sign.”
“Curiosity also killed the cat,” she says, and I shudder.
LYDIA
“DUDE, WHY ARE YOU SWEATING?” I ask billy. He would make a terrible criminal.
We’re in BigMart looking at computers. Neither of us knows anything about computers. Billy doesn’t even have one at his house, and Larry’s laptop is, like, twenty years old and so slow that I hardly ever bother using it.
“It’s scary having this much money in my pocket,” Billy says. “It’s like everyone knows and they’re all looking at me.”
“They’re looking at you because you look like a tweaker. Just breathe or something.”
I’m acting calm because Billy’s not. One of us has to be the calm one, and Billy’s made it pretty clear he’s the drama queen in this relationship. But the truth is, I don’t really feel calm at all. I keep thinking about my recent dreams, and my mom, and the tornado, and all the weird stuff that happened in the forest, and the photo that showed up in my T-shirt drawer, and the creepy figure I keep seeing but not quite seeing, and how one of the most famous people in the world suddenly appeared in Billy’s attic out of nowhere, and now we’re buying him a computer, and if you actually stop and put everything together and start thinking about how absurd it all is, it could really make a person freak out, and I’m not in the mood to do that right now.
“He said he wanted one that was good for watching videos,” Billy says, poking at some buttons randomly.
If you start thinking about stuff and how it all might be connected, then you start thinking about things like fate and destiny and the bigger picture and what’s the meaning of all this and what’s your part in it and where do people go when they die, and none of these are things I ever intend to think about.
“I need to sit down,” I say, and I plop down on a chair in front of a tester computer.
I haven’t been dancing enough lately. I’ve been hanging out too much with Billy. That’s the problem. Dancing is always the best way to keep me from thinking.
“He said if he’s going to be up there awhile, he needs something to do,” Billy says.
“How long is he planning to stay up there?” I say.
“He didn’t exactly let me ask questions,” Billy says. “I told him we don’t have Internet but he said it’s easy to hack into a neighbor’s Wi-Fi.”
“Your uncle’s a hacker?”
“I don’t know. He’s supposed to be a genius or something. Everyone knows that.”
“Lot of good it did him,” I say. “Being smart is just asking for trouble.” Where did that come from? Now I’m starting to sound like my mother. She was always so good at seeing the worst in things.
“I think we need help,” Billy says.
“That’s the understatement of the year.” I feel like my skin’s going to snap off. I’m wound so tight, I’m going to explode. “We need to get out of here,” I say.
“Should we ask this guy?”
“Hey,” I say to the clerk who has passed us about a million times and never asked if we need anything. “Which one of these computers is good for streaming videos?”
“Uh, all of them?” Nobody who works here knows anything about anything. They just wander around like blind zombies while hordes of teenagers shoplift right in front of them.
“Just point at one,” I say. “We have six hundred dollars.”
He points at one that’s five hundred forty-nine dollars.
“Okay. We’ll take it,” I say.
“I’m just warning you,” Billy says as we climb the steep stairs to the attic, “he’s kind of cranky.”
Billy opens the door and says hi, but Caleb doesn’t even look in our direction. He’s sitting by the window in a broken-looking lawn chair, wearing Billy’s dorky clothes. A dull puddle of cold gray light makes a circle on the floor in front of him, but only his ratty-socked foot is illuminated; the rest of him is hidden in the shadows. Torn potato chip bags and candy wrappers litter the floor around him, and the faint smell of pee is coming from somewhere.
I am not impressed. He looks like someone who should be sleeping on a bench at the bus station, not like one of the most famous people in the world.
Finally Caleb turns from the window and sees us. “Dude, what the fuck!” he shouts, and he throws the moldy paperback that was sitting in his lap at Billy’s head, and Billy ducks just in time for it to hit the wall behind us.
“Don’t freak out!” Billy says.
“Is this part of the fucking tour now?” says Caleb. “I bet you told Ma, too. Is she on her way here with the news crew? Is she going to charge fucking admission?”
“Don’t be mad—”
“You’re just as bad as her,” Caleb says. “You’re as bad as all of them. I thought I could trust you. I can’t fucking trust anyone. You’re all a bunch of fucking liars.”
“Is he crying?” I say.
“I’m not fucking crying, you fucking bitch!” and Caleb tries to throw a candy bar wrapper, but it just gets stuck in the air and we all pause for a moment to watch it float down to the floor. For a second, I forget to be angry.
But as soon as the wrapper lands, I say, “What did you call me?” and stomp over to where Caleb’s sitting. He smells like B.O. and garbage.
“Lydia, stop,” Billy says weakly, but I don’t think he means it. I think he likes watching me get mad at people. I think he likes hearing me say all the things he never can.
“I’m not doing any favors for some washed-up junkie in an attic calling me a bitch,” I say.
“What’d you call me?” Caleb says.
“Please stop,” Billy says, a little stronger.
“Why’d you bring me up here?” I say.
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br /> “Yeah, why’d you bring her up here?” Caleb says.
“I need her help,” Billy says.
“You need me to help you do what?” I say.
“Help me help him.”
“Yeah?” I say. “And who’s going to help me?”
“Me?”
“You’re going to help me help you help him?”
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Caleb says.
I’ve known Caleb Sloat for two minutes, and already I hate him. It’d be one thing if I loved his music, if I thought he was some artistic genius who could get away with being eccentric and not caring how he treats people, but he’s just an asshole and a mediocre guitar player who got famous for feeling sorry for himself and sold out as soon as he got the opportunity.
I stay as far away from Caleb as I can while Billy helps him unpack the BigMart bag, and then we basically just sit around watching him set up the computer. I can’t believe I wasted a day off work for this. I could be making money or at home dancing right now.
“Jackpot,” Caleb says. “Some dumb-ass neighbor’s Wi-Fi password is ‘password.’ People in this town are such fucking idiots.”
I look at Billy, but he’s just staring at his uncle like he’s some kind of god. Whatever this is that’s happening, I am certain it’s not going to be good for Billy.
“You need to get me some different clothes,” Caleb says. “I feel like a retard.”
“Don’t say retard!” I say. What the hell is wrong with people?
“Was I talking to you? Billy, you need to get me some weed.”
“Didn’t you just go to rehab?” I say.
“Let me tell you something about rehab,” Caleb says. He’s the kind of guy who’s used to people listening to him. I hate people like that. “After detox, rehab is pretty much just expensive summer camp for adults.”