Except Marley.
We made her the very symbol of the place she tried to escape. In all the years she’d been on my shoulders, in my mind, my heart, in everything I ever did or said, she never once told me she wanted to leave the world altogether.
Why? I kept asking, over and over.
She wouldn’t answer. My imagination had always lifted me up, and now it dropped me down lower than I’d ever been. If given enough time, I might’ve let my questions cocoon me until I hatched into a person who knew the answers. Marley couldn’t hide from me forever. I’d made myself her home.
She had to come back home.
Aidy, however, would not allow me to disappear into my own confusion. Though she left me, in a fit of tears no less, she did not abandon me. She sent Ruby in her place, and soon Ruby was beside me on the ground. She grabbed my hand and squeezed.
“What do we need to do now?” she asked. My Ruby, always ready, the girl who could pick up a movie halfway and stick with it through the credits.
“Understand,” I told her.
“Hmm.” She looked at me and then the sky, trying to see what it was that I saw.
“Aidy thinks Marley knew the gun was loaded.”
“How could Aidy know that? She wasn’t there,” Ruby said, running a hand along the side of my face to wipe off my tears.
“I know.” I leaned my head onto her shoulder.
She reached into the pocket of her jeans and pulled out her letter, her eyes searching for mine in the dark like fingers hoping to link into a promise. “You know what? I know it says eyes on your own paper, but what the hell, Marley’s dead and we’re all screwed because of it.” She turned on her phone’s flashlight. We sat up and huddled close, letting the light show us her letter.
RUBY MARQUEZ
Welcome to the Adventure. Eyes on your own paper, please.
When was the last time you thought of that day you and Ollie were sucking on the Gatorade bottles and you did it for too long? You had that red mustache on your upper lip that turned into a bruise. It didn’t fade for a week and a half.
The whole time it was there, you’d catch sight of yourself in a mirror or something and you’d laugh. If that were me, I swear I would have had to move to a different country. Or buy that concealer that’s made to cover up tattoos. I love that you didn’t seem to care. I’m sorry that mean kid at the park made fun of you for it.
Really proves that our Cadence is not the same Cadence everyone else has, I guess. It’s so weird to think that. All of these other people our age, one or two streets over, getting a whole different life. That could’ve been any of us. We could be strangers. Or enemies. All because we lived in a different house. Or a different body. This place feels like it’s ours, but it belongs to a lot of other people too. And they don’t treat it the same way we do.
I like to believe we’d all find our way to each other no matter what. Don’t you think? Promise me that’s true. That we’ll all stay together. People trust you like they trust therapists. If you were the type to gossip, I’d never write this stuff down. Of course, if you were the talking type, you wouldn’t know what you know in the first place. What a weird catch. You have to stay bottled up to keep the trust. But I need you to use that trust to make sure we don’t lose each other. We can’t lose each other.
Anyway, know that I love you.
You are a part of me forever.
Love always,
Marley
July 11
Five Years Prior
“Can you believe my mom didn’t want to feed everyone?” Marley said as she rummaged through her kitchen cabinets in pursuit of something breakfast-like for the three of us. “That’s so rude.”
“There are a lot of us. My parents always get mad about it too,” I told her.
“That’s the thing. All of our families do it. It’s only fair. And it was our turn.” She found a box of strawberry Pop-Tarts hidden behind bags of rice in her pantry closet. “Aha! I knew my dad had these in here.” She tossed a packet to Nick and me.
Nick had been quieter than usual, ever since the day before. He and I had stuffed ourselves inside the Campbells’ towel closet during a game of hide-and-seek. To fit, he’d scooted his back against the wall. I came in face-first, my back to the door. Our heads were ducked low to keep from hitting the shelf above us, and we ended up cheek to cheek. He barely breathed. I tried to laugh, but I couldn’t.
It wasn’t funny.
“Here,” Nick said, pointing the opened Pop-Tart pouch toward me. He wrapped the foil back to better show the contents. “Pick which one looks better.”
“They look the same.”
“I want you to have the one you like more,” he said.
“What if you hate the other one?”
“Didn’t you just say they’re the same?”
“Yeah, but what if you can taste the fact that I didn’t choose that one?”
He smiled. His grin was toothier than he wanted it to be. He fought it often, covering his mouth with his hand or turning his cheek. But not then. He shone his joy on me like a blazing star breaking through pitch-black infinity. “Hurry up and pick. I want to know what your hate tastes like.”
It sounded inappropriate somehow, even though he’d meant it innocently, and there was no double meaning our eleven-year-old minds could scrounge up. Still, the both of us broke our gaze to look at anything but each other. I reached my hand into the Pop-Tart pouch and pulled out the first one my fingers found. Nick took the other.
After his first bite, Marley wrapped her braid around her pinkie. “Go on, Nicky. Tell us what Ollie’s hate tastes like. Is it…” She paused to raise her eyebrows. “Sweet?” Only Marley could make an awkward situation unbearable and enjoyable all at once.
Nick didn’t give an answer.
Marley sauntered out of the kitchen with a laugh, leaving us to chew our Pop-Tarts in silence. I finished my half. Nick finished his. He used his hands to dust up the crumbs we’d shed, then crumpled up the pouch and threw it away.
“I still liked it,” he told me when he came back to his seat.
It took me a full thirty-six ticks of the birdhouse clock to decide what I thought that meant. What Ruby told me about feelings became more than an idea. They didn’t lasso my throat, though. Instead, my heart outgrew my chest, but it couldn’t break through, so it pounded against my rib cage, furious and unruly, demanding some kind of action I was nowhere near ready to take.
“Quick,” he said. “Be a chair!”
We played this game every so often. Usually when we didn’t know what else to do. I stepped down from my actual chair and then bent at my knees and hips, extending my arms forward to be a human chair. After a few seconds, I came back with, “Quick! Be a lamp!”
Nick stepped away from his seat and stood stock straight with his arms pinned to his sides. “Quick! Be a paper towel!” he told me.
The goal was always to start easy and keep going until the objects got more and more obscure. He’d taken a major leap between lamp and paper towel, but I gave it my best effort. There wasn’t really a way to lose, anyway. I lay down on the kitchen floor face-first, spreading myself out as much as possible.
“I see it, I see it,” he assured.
“Quick! Be a pen cap!” I called out.
Marley returned, right as Nick began folding himself in half, his fingers reaching for his toes. “You guys are so weird,” she said. She’d taken down her braid and put on her bikini, cherry red like her nails. Fire against her icy skin. “Go get dressed. We’ve got stuff to do.”
I stood. Dusted off the Pop-Tart crumbs on my chest.
“I can’t believe you were face-first on this gross floor,” Marley said as Nick and I headed toward her bedroom.
“She doesn’t know what it takes to be a paper towel,” Nick whispered, saving me from
all-consuming embarrassment.
All of the Albany kids left spare swimsuits in a drawer in Marley’s room. She was the only one of us with a pool. It made sense to keep some stuff at her house. But when I pulled open the drawer, I cursed myself for my tie-dyed peace-sign tankini, sun faded and baggy from overuse. Where was my cherry-red two-piece with a padded top and drawstring bottom?
Only in my mind.
Nick took out his board shorts. “Today’s gonna be good,” he said as he left to change in the bathroom.
I undressed in front of Marley’s mirror, slipping into my old suit. Maybe it didn’t fit. Maybe it was old. But it was mine. I could make it wonderful.
No. Today’s going to be amazing, I thought to myself, a ghost of a smile traced onto my puckered lips.
I loved getting into trouble with Marley and Nick.
9
I stared at Ruby’s paper like the words were going to rearrange into something easier to decipher. “Mine’s pretty strange,” she said. “I never knew she thought like that. I can’t think of a time she was ever embarrassed. The Marley I remember was like—”
“Unstoppable.”
“Yeah.” Ruby examined her paper. “You know what else is weird? She says I’m in on everyone’s business. I mean, I am good at keeping secrets, but I don’t know that many. I know things like Aidy and Harrison lost their virginity to each other on the pool table in your attic.”
“I told you that.”
“That’s what I mean.”
“I think she’s trying to say she knows you’ll listen.”
“That’s my clue, then, isn’t it?”
“I’d say so.”
Ruby smiled to herself. “Her clues never made a lot of sense. She plucked this stuff straight from her head like we were all wired into her brain. No wonder we never finished a single Adventure.” She wrapped her arms around her knees. “Remember the year that everyone got mailed a different pair of something? I got a pepper shaker from the Campbells’ table. Did I ever tell you that? When I figured out which one of our houses it came from, I stole their salt shaker and brought the pair to Marley. She was like, Okay? So what? and didn’t tell me anything else. I’m pretty sure she counted it as me giving up.”
I hadn’t heard the story before. Not even Ruby shared her memories of Marley with me anymore.
I got mailed a sock that year, and I spent most of the following days sneaking into my friends’ bedrooms to rummage through their underwear drawers. I never found the matching one, but folded into a rolled pair of Bigs’s socks, I discovered a picture of some boy from the sleepaway camp he and Teeny went to at the start of every summer. There was a heart drawn around the boy’s face. A photo of Teeny with her arm around that same boy was prominently framed in Teeny’s room. She talked about him (and to him) almost every day after she got back, until the school year came, and their long-distance camp romance had to go where all summertime activities went: into hibernation. Bigs never said a word about him. When the next year’s sleepaway camp came around, neither did Teeny.
Ruby read her letter one more time, then folded it up and tucked it into the pocket of her ripped jeans.
“Aidy thinks because there are letters, it means Marley planned to die.” I tried my hardest to make each syllable sound ridiculous and implausible, but my throat was too dry. I sounded naive. Sputtering, I fought to find the courage to explain what Marley had told me about the Adventure having a different purpose.
“Purpose? She used that word?” Ruby asked.
“Yeah. But when she said it, I took it as meaning she’d have a different goal or something. I can’t really explain right now.” I paused. “I see how that sort of proves Aidy’s point. But it’s not possible.” Another wave of upset began to wash over me. Tears rolled down my cheeks as my breath came out in hiccups.
Ruby found herself stopped up. “Olivia, the message on the wall in the sewer. You didn’t love me like I asked of you. Still I love you back.”
I fixated on the dark outline of raised land to my right, imagining the sky as the ground and the ground as the sky. I wanted the world to flip me over and empty out my hurt like loose change falling from pockets. In trying to form a response to Ruby, I couldn’t inhale without choking. No single thought of mine made sense.
“Aidy might be right,” Ruby said. She pulled me in close. “Hey. Listen.” She whispered our oldest, most private saying: “No stops.”
There used to be days we Albany kids did things boys versus girls. Who knows why. Everyone hated it. The older girls complained Ruby and I messed things up because we were too little and didn’t understand how to work hard. The older boys were mad they had two fewer bodies on their team. One day, moments before beginning a relay race down Albany, as Marley and Aidy and Teeny yelled at us to pull our weight, I suggested that Ruby and I have our own team instead. The older girls agreed with such little hesitation that Marley got a crick in her neck from nodding so aggressively.
“No stops,” I said to Ruby as she crouched low. She would have to run the relay twice to keep things fair.
“No stops,” she repeated back. A razor’s edge of determination glinted in her eyes, ready to slice everyone’s expectations.
What I said, I meant literally. If we were going to beat everyone else, she could not stop for anything. After we won, it became more. Our secret code for staying in the race in whatever way applied. Keep running. Even when everything hurts. You’ll find a finish line. It may not be the one you set out for, but wherever you end up, it’s still ahead of where you were.
“Aidy told me about Camp Califree. Don’t worry. We’ve got time,” Ruby assured, wrapping her arm around me. She could feel me pulling away, so she switched focus. “It was nice, wasn’t it? Everyone on the bikes again, riding down Albany.”
Suddenly I was furious with myself for being so relaxed. Maybe Marley stopped showing up because I bored her, taking too long to get everything together. Maybe I’d gotten the Adventure so far off track already that I’d lost her, just like the rest of them. I searched the desert for some piece of her to assure me.
I found nothing.
“We have to keep going,” I said to Ruby. I had to make everything right. If Marley wanted to die, I needed to know for sure. If she didn’t, I needed to show everyone what she meant by the Adventure having a different purpose. And I had to do it all before Camp Califree.
“Would I ever do anything less?” Ruby dipped her head. “Would I? We’re gonna finish this one. We’ve got that whole box of stuff to look over. And I want to get back to the tunnel during the day. If there’s more for you to find, you’re gonna find it. If I’m the one who’s supposed to know secrets, then I’m gonna know them.” In her lowest, steadiest voice, she asked, “What do you say?”
I didn’t answer.
“Olivia Stanton, what do you say?”
“No stops.”
“What was that?”
“No stops.”
She stood tall and cupped her hand behind her ear. “I can’t hear you!”
“NO STOPS!”
“There she is. Now let’s get out of here. We’re nearly past”—she put on her spookiest voice—“the Point of No Return.”
That was true. And Ruby pointing it out meant Marley wasn’t as far away from me as she felt.
We started walking toward Albany Lane.
“Did Aidy tell you we’re grounded?” I said after a while.
“When I tried texting you, and you didn’t respond, that wasn’t really anything new. But when you didn’t answer my calls, I figured something was up. Is that why Aidy had to call me from your house phone?” Ruby asked, but I didn’t have to answer. She already knew. She laughed so hard, it startled me. I couldn’t help but laugh with her. She found her next question—“Are you supposed to be home right now?”—so hilarious she had to hunch over and c
lutch her ribs. “Sometimes I can’t believe how much I love you,” she said.
“I can’t believe it either,” I said back.
July 11
Five Years Prior
“You guys, come here!” Marley yelled.
Nick and I ended our game of Marco Polo without question. We jumped over the pool’s edge and raced each other to the towels draped over the railing on the other side. It took me five easy strides to beat him.
“Good job,” he said when he reached me. His eyes fell to his feet. At first I thought he was embarrassed, but it was far from the first time he’d lost a race to me. We’d been outside for a few hours and color had already bloomed on his cheeks and his shoulders.
Suddenly, my cheeks warmed too. “Thanks,” I said back. I usually preferred to air-dry, but I snapped up a towel, wrapping it around my newfound self-consciousness.
The back screen door squeaked as it slid open. Too excited to bother washing them, our unrinsed feet tracked grass through the hallway and into the master bedroom, where Marley stood on the bed, hiding something with her right hand and holding a strange object in her left.
“I hit the jackpot,” she said.
I pretended to marvel at whatever she held in her left hand. It looked a little like a miniature rocket. “Everyone else will wish they came to swim with us,” I told her, hoping I sounded confident enough to disguise my cluelessness.
Marley turned the rocket on, which prompted Nick to shove my shoulder. As soon as I shoved back, the only response I could muster, Marley tossed the rocket onto a nightstand.
“Come on, Ollie. It’s a vibrator!” she scolded.
I didn’t know what that meant, not exactly, but I laughed like I did. “So cool,” I said.
“Please, it’s not even the best part,” Marley scoffed. She held her free hand up in the air. “Nicky, look.”
My spit turned thick as peanut butter. “I’m going back to the pool,” I said as I swallowed back. I hated when she treated me like Little Ollie.
When the Light Went Out Page 8