The Boy and Girl Who Broke the World

by Amy Reed

  The temperature suddenly drops. In just seconds, clouds come out of nowhere and cover up the moon, and then snow starts falling, big, thick flakes of it, and the whole world turns silent and slow-motion and white, and it feels like we are the only people in it. Half of me knows this is some weird shit, but the other half isn’t surprised at all.

  “Me too,” I say softly.

  I just want a family.

  And then it’s like the rest of the world gets sucked away. I can’t see Billy, can’t hear the river. I’m alone, totally alone. It’s just me and the fire and the ache inside me. I’m gripping the arms of my chair because it’s the only thing that is solid. I can no longer feel my feet on the ground. Everything is twisting in the shadows. The fire is throwing itself around. It’s like the tornado again, except everything’s hot and dry. I’m in an oven. I’m being burned alive.

  I’ve been drugged. That’s it. One of those old bastards at the bar put something in my soda. That’s the only explanation for the way the fire is dancing. It’s the only explanation for the fire burning a hole in my chest.

  Why is it windy all of a sudden?

  Where is Billy?

  Why am I crying?

  Why is it black? Suddenly and completely black. The fire and wind and heat, gone. Billy and the bar and my apartment, the forest and the river, gone. Like I blinked and everything got sucked away, and now I’m stuck in an empty vacuum, a nowhere place. It’s just me and the fire.

  But there’s someone else. I can see a little now, just enough to make out the outlines of another figure, like someone turned up a dimmer switch on a light somewhere, except it’s impossible to tell where the light’s coming from. It’s almost like the figure is making the light itself, like some kind of phosphorescence, like one of those creepy deep-sea creatures who make blinking lights to attract their prey.

  But the figure is not a predator. Somehow I know this. I know it is the thing that’s been following me, hiding under my bed, darting into shadows, just out of reach. It is small, a child. It is sitting alone, surrounded by black. My heart rips open in my chest. The pain cannot be contained. The figure looks up. She. I can tell it is a girl. The girl looks at me, into the mirrors of my eyes. She is made of shadows. I cannot see her face, but I know exactly who she is.

  I open my mouth, but I cannot speak. My throat is full of dust.

  Somehow I know it is not my own heart aching, not my grown heart, strong from years of training. It is a smaller heart, a little girl’s heart, taking residence in my chest—a stowaway, an exile, squeezed tight with longing.

  Relax, I say without words.

  But she can’t. The girl can’t. How can she relax when she has so much to do? How can she relax when she knows there is no one who will help her?

  I see a scene like a movie with the sound turned off, a motherless girl with long black hair who can’t stop crying. An empty space, no one to hear her. The girl’s mouth opens and her eyes squeeze tight. She screams into nothingness. There is no echo, no walls, nothing to reflect her. No one to listen. She learns she does not exist. So the girl stops crying.

  As she fades away, I hear a whisper. I know it is the little girl speaking, but it is in my own voice: I am so tired.

  Tired of what? I ask her. But she is gone.

  I touch my wet face. The wind has stopped. Everything is cold and quiet.

  The fire comes back into focus. I feel pressure on my shoulder. Someone is squeezing me, shaking me.

  “What happened?” I hear Billy cry, but his voice sounds far away. Everything is buzzing, like I’m waking up from fainting. “Did you have a seizure? Did you cross into the spirit world?”

  “Jesus Christ, Billy,” I say. His face slowly comes into focus. I remember where I am. I look around for the girl, but the only things I see are trees dusted with snow, and Billy’s face, full of fear, and his eyes, full of flames.

  “It looks like we’re on a different planet,” I say. Everything is white. I blink my eyes and stand up, a little wobbly.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine.” But I think I may be lying.

  “You were, like, possessed for a minute. I kept saying your name, but you didn’t respond. You were just staring at the fire and crying and—”

  “I’m fine, okay?”

  But I’m shivering and lost and I feel like something inside me broke open.

  Then I look at Billy, and the love and concern on his face feels like a punch in my stomach, but it’s a warm punch that almost feels good, and a weird sound comes out of my throat, a combination of choking and crying, and I want to hug him so bad but I don’t know how.

  And then the cold of the night slices through me, and something becomes clear: I trust him. He is the first person in my life I have ever really trusted. And there are no rules for this, no script, no blueprint for what we are. We are making this up as we go along. But one thing I do know is that keeping a secret from him feels like lying.

  I am tired of living in the shadows. I want him to see me.

  “Billy, I want to show you something,” I say. For once, he does not ask any questions. I start walking, and he follows.

  I lead him to the back door of the building, though the dark narrow hallway lined with boxes and crates, and into my apartment behind the bar. It’s nothing fancy and way smaller than Billy’s house, but at least we can see the floor and there aren’t bags of stuff piled all over the place, and everything isn’t the color of dust. It strikes me now how, even though it’s kind of weird to live behind a bar, there’s something almost cheerful about how everything is brightly colored, how Mom actually made an effort to put art on the walls, but also something sad in how Larry has never bothered redecorating in the eight years since she’s been gone, like this place is still some kind of shrine to her.

  My eyes focus on the family photo hanging on the wall, the one we took at the Seattle zoo when I was seven. We look so happy, but it’s a lie. And there’s the photo of Mom I put back in place after I found it in the medicine cabinet this morning. She stares at me with her dark eyes, an empty smile painted on her face, full of mysteries I will never have the chance to solve. She took that chance away from me. She was buried with all her secrets.

  I feel a twinge of something I can’t name, which quickly turns into something I can: I hate her. I hate what she stole from me. I hate what she’s done to us.

  I meet Billy’s eyes for a second, and his love helps dissolve the hate just enough for me to keep going. I turn around, walk the few steps it takes to get to the other side of the kitchen, and open the door to my studio.

  BILLY

  WE ENTER A SPACE THAT used to be a two-car garage, but the garage doors have been boarded up. The floor is covered by a puzzle of particleboard and duct tape, and a long wooden bar runs along one side of the room. One of the walls is covered with old thrift store mirrors, cracked and mismatched, catching the light of the single dull light bulb hanging in the middle of the ceiling. It’s like somebody took a picture of a dance studio, crumpled it up, stepped on it a few times and dragged it through the mud, then flattened it out again.

  Lydia looks tenser than I’ve ever seen her, standing in the middle of the floor, looking at her feet.

  “What is this place?” I say.

  “I’m a dancer,” she says. “This is where I dance. I don’t tell people. I’ve never told anyone.”

  “You made this all yourself?”

  She nods. “It’s kind of a work in progress.” She pauses and looks up. “Dude, I feel naked.”

  “You’re completely covered with clothes. I can’t see anything.” That makes her smile a little.

  “So I dance,” she says, shifting on her feet. “It’s a thing I do.”

  “Do you take lessons?”

  “I used to. When I was a kid. Before my mom died. But I’ve mostly taught myself since then.”

  “Wow.”

  “You want to hear a secret?”

  “Yes,�
� I say, sitting in the one rickety chair in the corner and trying to stay calm. There’s nothing I want more in this moment than to hear a secret from Lydia.

  “I have this sort of dream about getting on that reality show Show Me Your Moves.”

  “I love that show!” I say. “But Grandma never wants to watch it with me because she says it makes her feel fat.”

  “Most of the people who get in the top twenty have been hard-core training since they were, like, three and can do flips and all kinds of acrobatic shit. But the show always leaves a couple spots for break-dancers and random self-taught people because viewers love the underdog stories, right? I mean, look at how your uncle got so famous. And I thought maybe I could do that, you know? And if I get that far, even if I get kicked off early, those people always get offers from top dance schools for full scholarships. It’s like free publicity for the schools. And then I could get some real training finally. And then, I don’t know, maybe travel the world as a professional dancer.”

  In our long two months of friendship, I am pretty sure that’s the most Lydia’s ever told me about what lives inside her head without any sarcasm to mask it. I think it’s also the longest she’s ever talked at one time, because witty comebacks are usually pretty short, and this is the furthest thing from a witty comeback she’s ever said to me.

  “I think that’s an awesome dream,” I say, and as the words come out of my mouth, I realize I don’t have anything close to a dream. I have all kinds of weird fantasies, but nothing actually based in reality. Nothing I’ve been working for. Nothing I care about so much I’d build a whole room for it.

  “Show me,” I say.

  “Show you what? This is it. This is my pathetic Frankenstein dance studio.”

  “No, show me your moves!” Lydia doesn’t laugh. “You know? Like the show?” Still nothing. “Show Me Your Moves?”

  “I don’t dance for people,” she says. I can tell she’s trying to not look at herself in the mirrors, but she’s also trying to not look at me, so there aren’t a lot of places for her eyes to go.

  “You were just talking about dancing in front of millions of people on TV and around the world,” I say. “You need to at least dance in front of one person.”

  “You’re harder.”

  “Dancing for one of me is harder than dancing for a million strangers?”

  “Yeah,” she says, like it should be obvious. “A lot harder.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “I showed you my uncle in the attic.”

  “I never asked you to do that.”

  “What are you so scared of?”

  Finally, she looks at me. “Are you calling me chicken?”

  Bingo.

  “Yes,” I say. “I am calling you chicken. You act so tough, but really you’re terrified of letting anyone see the real you.”

  “I am going to break your TV so you can’t watch any more goddamned therapy talk shows.”

  We stare each other down for a long time.

  “I’m not leaving until you dance for me,” I say. I’m a total wimp about almost everything, but for some reason I can do this.

  We stare each other down some more.

  “Fine!” Lydia finally says, pulling off her coat. She throws her hoodie at me. And her shoes. And socks. She starts pulling off her jeans.

  “Oh, hey,” I say, and I can feel my face getting red.

  “Calm down, you prude,” she says. “I have leggings underneath.” She throws her jeans at me too.

  “Okay, I’m ready,” she says. She’s barefoot in the middle of the room, in leggings and a T-shirt. “I’m not warmed up, so don’t expect me to do anything crazy.” I try to imagine her in some kind of sequined tutu with her face all made up, but I can’t. Maybe she’s not that kind of dancer.

  “See that CD player next to you?” she says. “Find the CD on the floor called Satie and play track number three.”

  “Ooh, a CD player,” I say. “How retro.”

  “Shut up.”

  I follow her directions and the music starts—sparse piano that sounds like rain and fog and loneliness, like the classical, even-more-depressed version of Rainy Day Knife Fight. With the first note, Lydia is transformed. Suddenly, she’s neither the cynical girl with a snappy retort for everything, nor the lost girl I caught a glimpse of by the fire, but someone fluid and graceful and not fighting anything. And even though she’s moving all over the place, it’s like deep down, some part of her is really still, and that still place travels with her wherever she goes, as she lifts her arms and points her feet, as she closes her eyes and arches her back and spins and leaps across the floor, and for some reason I think of a blue heron, how they’re always so still and dignified and focused, so long and beautiful and always alone, and how I always feel a weird combination of lucky and sad when I see one.

  Lydia stretches and slinks across the room, like someone waking up who’s not quite sure she wants to wake up. She starts close to the ground but gradually gets taller, longer, until she’s whirling around the room. She’s a slow-motion tornado. She’s performing some kind of spell, a conjuring. I feel my insides swirl. She leaps and I half expect her to never land.

  The song is short, probably only around three minutes. But I don’t think I could have handled anything longer. I feel like the air’s been knocked out of me. I don’t know anything about dance, but I am one hundred percent sure Lydia is brilliant.

  “Billy, why are you crying?” she says, sweaty and a little out of breath. “Was I that bad?”

  I can’t speak. All I can do is shake my head.

  I know exactly what I’m going to spend my new money on.

  LYDIA

  I’VE BEEN TRYING TO FORGET what happened two nights ago. But every time I close my eyes I see the fire, and every time I open them I see the little girl. She’s not hiding anymore, not sneaking behind me and rushing out of sight when I try to get a look. She sat beside me on the bus to school this morning, for Pete’s sake.

  But she doesn’t speak. She doesn’t make any noise at all. All she does is kind of hang around, appearing randomly throughout the day and disappearing just as randomly. She’s like the world’s most boring ghost. Now that I can see her clearly, I’m not really scared of her anymore. What I am is pissed. I don’t have time for this shit. I don’t want some little kid following me around. I yell at her when no one’s looking. I tell her to leave. But she just ignores me, and that just makes me madder.

  Fog Harbor has always been weird, but the weirdness has started speeding up since the tornado. Flocks of Canada geese are flying north instead of south. A bald eagle snatched up some lady’s Chihuahua yesterday in the BigMart parking lot, and then she found the dog’s collar hanging on her mailbox when she got home, like the eagle knew where she lived.

  There’s some new app that’s got everyone walking around school with their faces glued to their phones because they score points based on how long they let their retinas get scanned. People are running into walls and knocking over trash cans and yelling at each other for talking or doing anything else people do in real life that might distract them from staring at their phones. Who knows what kind of brain-scrambling powers those fancy phones have, or what kind of subliminal messaging might be happening? If I were so inclined, I might say this is the beginning of the zombie hordes and the end of civilization. But that sounds a little too much like one of Larry’s conspiracy theories.

  The lunchroom is eerily quiet. Billy and I are the only ones actually talking to each other, plus the handful of doomsday-prepper kids in the corner who have been grumbling in hushed tones and comparing their rations with extra vigor ever since the tornado. Even the other poor kids without fancy phones aren’t talking, as if their silence is some kind of sad, secondhand participation in the richer kids’ absurd game. The quiet is oddly freeing, like we’re on a vacation from the usual nonsense.

  But I’m having a hard time lo
oking Billy in the eyes since I danced for him. I showed him too much and now I want to take it back. I want my secret back. This is probably something close to how people feel after they sleep with someone and regret it. Embarrassed. Exposed. Like some kind of vulnerability hangover. He kept bringing it up all day yesterday, kept telling me how great I am and begging me to dance for him again, and it made my skin crawl. I think I hurt his feelings a little when I told him to leave me alone, but he bounced back. He always bounces back.

  Billy’s been excited about something all day, but he won’t tell me what. “I can’t talk in here,” he whispers. “It’s too quiet.” His black eye is starting to fade to a yellowish brown, and now the skin just looks kind of dirty.

  “Dude, nobody’s listening to us. They’re too busy getting brainwashed.” One of the prepper kids nods at me like we’re in this together. I have to admit, it feels a little comforting. They’re not bad people to have on your side in an emergency.

  “A kid in my Blog Studies class got so mad when he had to put his phone away that he started punching Mr. Belding in the nose and had to get taken away in handcuffs,” Billy says.

  “That’s what you were so excited to tell me?”

  “This other kid was talking about how he went hunting with his dad over the weekend and saw an albino stag as big as an elephant with a weird antler, like, one long antler, and don’t you think that kind of sounds like a uni—”

  “Don’t say it!” I reach my hand out to cover Billy’s mouth, but a little too forcefully, so it ends up more like a slap.

  “Ouch!” Billy says, rubbing his chin.

  “Sorry,” I say.

  “I can’t stand this anymore,” Billy says. “I have to tell you.” He leans in. “Are you ready?”

  “Sure.” Sometimes he is so melodramatic.

  “Okay, so I was reading the Fog Harbor News.”

  “That thing still exists?”

  “Mostly it’s just advertisements and classifieds. Stop asking questions!”