by Beth Bloom
Unfortunately, my chance for romance had cut off somewhere between five and five fifteen this morning. This wasn’t even a business trip. This was like a shakedown-Libby-or-bust kind of thing. Blah-blah or die trying.
We were only a few exits from Aunt Lynn’s when I roused myself, stretching my sore neck. I tried to remind myself why we were here.
“You know, Libby wasn’t exactly easy to talk to even when she was normal,” I said, searching under the car seat for my shoes.
“Don’t worry.”
“Well I’m, like, only completely worried.”
“You said she was okay.”
“I said ‘sort of okay.’” That was still being generous. “What are you going to ask her?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“What if she won’t talk to us? Or what if she sees you and has some insane post-torture flashback and starts screaming or crying or something?”
“Why would I mean anything to her? She’s barely met me.”
“Oh, you know you all look alike.”
“That’s prejudiced. That’s like pulse profiling.” He raised his eyebrows.
“And that’s, like, a Whit joke.”
I noticed James grip the steering wheel tighter, but he said nothing.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
In some ways James was still a typical teenage dude. I sighed. “What, James?”
“Nothing.” But he didn’t mean nothing. “You and Whit really messed things up.”
“But we were successful,” I said. It seemed like an important detail to stress.
And finally we were there: the semicircle dirt driveway, the softly lit adobe house, the wide front porch with the potted cacti and wind chimes and bench-seat swing. The lonely dark desert, littered with crooked, creepy Joshua trees.
We got out and headed toward the front door.
Then James said, “What do you consider successful?”
I swallowed hard. Point taken. I’ll let you know the answer to that one once I’ve reunited with my possibly comatose, most likely deranged, ex-best friend.
I hadn’t called in advance—which I only thought of after we’d knocked on the door—but for some reason Aunt Lynn didn’t seem remotely surprised to see us. She just bustled us in, offered us herbal tea, pomegranate seeds, edamame, hot wash towels. While we hovered in the living room she casually related the story of calling Stella, telling her sister that Libby had just come out for an impromptu desert relaxation retreat to help sprout alfalfa, make candles, and plant succulents. Then a gust of wind rattled the wind chimes, reminding me of why we were here: to scavenge the clangy, chimey recesses of Libby’s mind.
“Is Libby awake?” I asked. It was only ten thirty p.m., but who knew?
“She is; she’s reading out back. She’ll be so happy you’re here.” Lynn didn’t beam the same radiant light anymore. There was a slight sadness in her that I’d put there by dropping Libby in her lap. “You can go through the side gate next to the house.”
We nodded, and she patted my hand and left to tend to the teapot, feed the cat.
Outside everything was quiet except for a faint breeze. There were a thousand stars. We walked around on a pebble pathway that led through a gate into the back. The sound of our feet on the gravel was too intense, too suspenseful. I tried to walk lighter, but James urged me forward.
Past the house was a small open cabana area with some tables and chairs under a trellis-style roof. Seated in one of the chairs, facing away into the desert, was the silhouette of a figure shaped like Libby, long and lean. As we got closer I squinted my eyes to see in the direction she was staring. There was nothing out there. Sand. Shrubs. Joshua trees.
When we were by Libby’s table standing next to her, James gestured for me to speak, but I didn’t have anything to say. How could I expect her to remember me when remembering her was this hard?
“Libs, hi,” I said, sitting in the chair next to her.
She was Libby and she wasn’t. Her face looked severe, starved, like she hadn’t eaten in a month. And the skin around her eyes was faded and gray, colorless. Someone who didn’t know her that well might’ve thought she just looked tired. But that wasn’t it. Libby looked tired after our five-day camping trip in the eighth grade. She looked tired in the morning after every really great party, after cramming for exams, after that week we thought we had mono but it was just food poisoning from some nasty sushi. This was something more, worse, different. I didn’t know what this was.
She was barefoot, in a pair of Lynn’s jeans that were dated and too baggy, wearing an oversize tie-dyed T-shirt, and in her right hand she loosely held a book—Stranger in a Strange Land, obviously Lynn’s, Libby hated sci-fi—the pages turning in the wind. She didn’t break her gaze into the black, silent distance.
“Hey, it’s Quinn,” I said. “I came to visit.” I touched her shoulder.
“Oh.” Her voice was an alien thing.
“How are you?”
Then for the first time she looked me in the eyes. Hers were glassy, fogged over. She gripped the hand I’d put on her shoulder and held it in her lap. She rubbed along the inside of my wrist. “Why did you come?” she said.
“I wanted to see you. See how you were doing.”
She stroked my skin. My veins? I felt James move in closer toward us. “That’s cool of you,” she said slowly.
I needed to make this moment saner. I needed to get to my point and get my hand back and get the hell out of here. “Libby, I need to ask about some stuff, but I don’t want to upset you.”
She didn’t react. Then James sat down in the chair next to me, and Libby’s eyes locked on him, her nails digging into my hand. “Who’s that?”
I wrenched my hand free and rubbed at where she’d scraped the skin.
“You remember James,” I said.
James stiffened. “Hello,” he said. No handshake.
“No,” Libby said, eyes still locked on James. “Who are you?”
“He’s Naomi’s brother,” I said. “Remember Naomi Sheets? From school?”
“Hello,” he said again.
“Hi.” Finally she looked back to me. “Ask about what stuff?” she said, without any expression.
“Listen—,” I started.
But James interrupted, “We need to ask about Stiles. He wants to kill us. Do you know why?”
Her eyes scanned every inch of James, searching for something. Then she said, “I think so. It’s because I’m here.”
James nodded.
“It’s not that big a deal, though,” she said, looking back to the desert. “He’s not like that. He’s just…possessive.”
My mouth fell open. Like in a cartoon. “Possessive? That’s a joke.”
But she wasn’t joking. Her face was cold and dazed, an empty skull with two hazy eyeballs looking out of it. “He’s just really into me.”
I felt that getting-up-too-fast feeling, blood rushing in the wrong direction, then spiraling away in a whirlpool. I was lost: Libby never knew Stiles wasn’t human. Even though he bit her. Even though he sucked her blood. She must’ve thought he was just kinky or weird or a little too intense. I could’ve felt relieved that Libby was so oblivious, since that made James’s secret safer, but I didn’t. I felt sucker punched. If anything, the idea made me lonelier. Libby and I couldn’t share our shared fate. We weren’t both in love with forever twentysomethings. In her mind she was just in love with an average post-high-school, food-eating, James-Spader-looking jerk. I was flipping out.
I turned to James, hyperventilating. Libby couldn’t help us with anything if she didn’t understand anything.
“Okay, so maybe he won’t kill us,” James said, going along with Libby’s cluelessness. “But he wants to hurt us. He’s angry. We need to avoid him.”
Libby nodded vacantly.
“Where does he usually hang out?”
“I don’t know. He leaves after I’m already asleep.”
/>
“Doesn’t he go out to eat?” James asked.
“I don’t think so.” She hesitated, her eyes drifting. “But he drinks a lot. There’s nothing ever in the fridge but bottles of wine.”
James said, “Thanks, Libby.”
“That’s it?” I whispered.
He shushed me.
She said, “Okay,” and let her eyelids slide closed. She sat frozen in the dark.
“We’re gonna go now,” James said, standing up.
“We’re leaving?” I said.
He nodded. “Bye, Libby.”
She opened her eyes and looked at us. She beckoned with her hand to come nearer.
I didn’t want to, but we both stepped closer.
“Don’t hurt Stiles,” she said. She was dead serious; becoming dead to me. “I love him.”
I couldn’t deal. I snapped. I put my hand on her cheek and shoved her face away, hard. She barely blinked. I turned and stormed back toward the side gate.
All of this, this whole visit, the hand-holding and the looking-in-the-eyes, it all meant nothing. Less even than the last time I’d been here. We’d known each other since forever, but it meant nothing now. It was as empty as the desert. I heard James call my name, but I shut it out like everything else.
I pushed open the gate and got into the car and slammed the door. No one was getting a good-bye. Tears wanted to come, but I didn’t listen to what tears wanted anymore.
James scrambled out from the backyard and walked fast to the car and got into the driver’s side. “Why’d you do that?”
“Who cares?”
“She has no idea.”
“I don’t care.” I turned away from him, because he was part of this and I wanted no part of any of this.
“That’s not true.”
“Drive.”
“Okay.” But he sat still, waiting, the keys dangling from the ignition.
“Just drive, James.”
Finally he turned on the car and pulled out of the driveway. Minutes later we were getting on the highway, leaving it all behind.
“You should know,” he said suddenly. “If it’s just a little bit at a time, it isn’t that painful. The feeling can be pretty…subtle.”
I didn’t want to hear it.
“They sometimes don’t even realize what’s happening. They’re too in the moment.”
I remembered my fantasies of James’s bite, the way my imaginary body melted into his bloody kiss. Libby had actually felt that. She’d felt it and she liked it. But she didn’t even know the kiss wasn’t a kiss, that Stiles was drinking her, taking her life.
I shook my head. “Whatever, that isn’t even Libby.”
“Of course it isn’t.”
“Doesn’t matter now, though.”
He rubbed my shoulder. “It still matters.”
But I didn’t know if it did.
“She’s becoming one.”
He said, “She was,” and looked right at me.
So Libby was something in between.
We rode for a while without talking. The radio was on low. There were other voices. Outside it was a black blur.
I tried to picture the future: senior year, rushing home every day right at dusk, avoiding the big game, homecoming, tech rehearsals for the fall musical, anything that met at night, avoiding Naomi, Morgan, my parents. And in this vision of daytime yearbook staffs and study groups, Libby was just a mysterious dropout, another high school casualty to gossip about.
I glared at James. “So what now?”
He looked at me, saw the pain on my face, but didn’t answer.
“Why did we even come here?”
“I know what we’re going to do,” he said.
“What?”
“We’re going to poison them.”
What? “How?”
“Before I got sick from that girl’s blood, I didn’t know anything like that could happen. I’d never been wrecked like that. But that was just accidental, some pills, drugs or something.”
“Okay.”
“So we could fill Stiles’s bottles with something way harsher. Something chemical, completely toxic.”
“Do you mean, like, laundry detergent or paint thinner?” What were we supposed to look for, warning stickers with a skull and crossbones? I didn’t know where to get poison.
“Maybe. I’m not sure.”
I wasn’t too numb to feel his hand squeezing mine.
“It might work.”
I nodded.
“Remember how bad I was?”
I nodded more.
“That was just traces. This could be brutal.”
“But if it doesn’t kill them, will they at least be screwed up enough for us to finish them off?” I couldn’t believe I lived a life where I could seriously say sentences like this. It was Valley girl/scary movie/action flick stuff.
“They’ll definitely be screwed up.”
“So…this is going to work?”
“Yeah, I think so.” He paused, thinking. “Totally.”
I looked outside, at the Inland Empire racing by, at my city sleeping, lonely truckers headed nowhere. I looked back at James. It felt like he was all I had left, and I tried not to think he might leave again.
“I believe you.”
“Then come closer.”
I leaned closer.
He kissed me on the lips.
“Can I come home with you?” I asked.
He said, “Whit and Naomi are there.” But it wasn’t a no.
“So?”
He paused then said, “So. Come home with me.”
I could’ve cried. And this time I’d let the tears have their way.
17.
KITTEN
Back before I had someone to wake up next to, I used to daydream about waking up next to someone. Now that the fantasy was finally possible for me, it was impossible with James.
You can’t share a magic morning moment in a pitch-black closet. Can’t do anything really but inch your body like a worm down in the direction of the exit. Because lingering in there doesn’t mean gazing into your sleeping lover’s face, watching his chest rise and fall, tracing the contours of whatever with the tips of your fingers. It only means staring into so much darkness your eyes start to cross.
Lying there like a blind person, I tried to imagine James next to me, looking beautiful, tender, dreaming of our future together. But the longer I imagined it, the lonelier and lamer everything got. When our future seemed as black and bleak as the stupid closet, I peaced out of that hotbox.
And into another hotbox. James’s room was stuffy, dusty, and dim. I stumbled across the carpet and stepped outside the door. The day—what day was it anyway? Monday?—felt especially sweltering, a numb blanket of light, the sky bleached white with smog. The air buzzed with the distant drone of a thousand air conditioners blasting at full power. Out of it, I wandered down the stairs to the garden, where everything was either limp and browning or dry and dying. Charlotte Sheets’s basil plants in particular were scorched, the color of mud, the smell of a plate of pasta sitting way too long under the heat lamps at Olive Garden. I tore off a leaf from a honeysuckle bush, and it disintegrated against my fingers. I stared at the ashy bits, letting them blow away into the warm wind, and thought, This could be Stiles. Then, James.
“So now you’re torturing our plants?” Whit asked, walking toward me in only a pair of plaid boxers, his hand over his forehead to shield his eyes from the sun.
“Whatever, already dead, see?” I picked a dead leaf up off the ground and crumpled it into dust.
“Yeah, I see.” His voice was sarcastic but tired. “But isn’t it dead enough without your help?”
I didn’t answer, just picked dead leaf fragments off my hands.
“What are you even doing here?”
“I slept over.”
“I mean in the garden.”
“Just looking at the plants.”
“They were a lot more to look at when th
ey were alive.”
“Whit,” I said. It was too hot for this.
“‘Whit,’ what?” He said it like a challenge. “Nice outfit too, by the way.”
I glanced down: I had on only a T-shirt and underwear, and my feet were dirty from walking in the garden. Whit still shielded his eyes from the sun, unamused. He didn’t shield his eyes from my naked legs, but it didn’t matter. His face already looked different. Like he’d convinced himself not to forgive what I’d done. Like he’d convinced himself to move on. I pulled the T-shirt down as low as it’d go.
“You should go home. He won’t be up for hours. And Naomi gets back from the stables at three. Probably shouldn’t be sunbathing in your panties then.” He turned to leave.
I rushed out, “Hey, what are you doing?”
He paused, looked confused.
“I mean, like…today.”
He stared at my face for a few seconds, squinting in the harsh light. The sun was bleaching us out, erasing us. Whit was disappearing—and not just to his room.
“I’m hanging out,” he said. “Alone.”
“Why are you so mad at me?”
“Don’t ask questions you know the answers to,” he said sharply. “It makes you sound stupid.” Then he turned around again, held up three fingers to remind me of Naomi’s return time, and went inside.
I was alone with all the dead stuff again. I wandered through the garden, feeling sweat on my face but not caring. There was another bed of herbs behind the honeysuckle I hadn’t seen, so I plopped down next to them and stuck my hands in the dirt, stretching my fingers into the warm, dry texture.
A couple of feet away toward the house I noticed a half-rusted tin watering can lying on its side. I reached over and grabbed it. There was still a decent puddle of old water left in it, so I found the only plant with some green leaves left—some mint or cilantro or something—and gently poured the contents of the can down over it like a hot, short rain. It still looked pretty dead. Too little too late.