When the Light Went Out

by Bridget Morrissey

  “No,” I said, making hard eye contact, daring him to notice the bruises I’d concealed.

  “I hope to God that’s true. You two have your mother convinced you’re actually playing by the rules this time. I’m going to take her out to a nice dinner, and you’re going to take that time to do whatever it takes to make her keep believing that. And then you’re going to tell me exactly what went on today and why there’s a bag of bloody clothes out back.” We didn’t have a chance to speak before he added, “You both know exactly what will happen if you don’t.”

  For me, it was Camp Califree. A longer stay there, or an earlier departure date.

  For Aidy, whatever it was made her say “We understand” in a low, solemn voice.

  “I’m sure you do,” Dad agreed. “Please remember I love you.” He left Aidy and me in the kitchen, the two of us conflicted by the ebb and flow we faced in our every shared breath.

  “What do they have on you?” I asked when our parents drove off for their dinner.

  “I don’t want to talk about it.” Aidy headed over to the house phone. She picked it up and started dialing, leaving me no choice but to go full drama, grabbing the receiver and slamming it back down. “I got caught plagiarizing,” she said, bored with the staginess of our exchange. Before I could even form the necessary shocked response or ask the obvious questions, she kept going. “That’s the short version. It was actually Harrison who was caught, but he was the one writing papers for me.”

  I couldn’t hold back my shock.

  “I was going to flunk out if he didn’t help me,” she continued. “He, like the unbearably perfect boyfriend he is, couldn’t let me learn from my own mistakes. I don’t know how you don’t know about it. The dean launched an investigation into Harrison and me.” She seethed with contempt. “You know what the real problem is? It’s not that I don’t love him anymore. It’s that I love him too much. There’s never any room to breathe between us.” She waved the topic off, batting her tears away like an unwanted fly. “I got expelled. Harrison was suspended for two quarters. Would’ve been expulsion too, but the dean showed some last-minute mercy when we went in and explained everything. Doesn’t matter, though. Harrison probably can’t go back. His mom can’t afford it without his scholarships. And if I don’t keep it together with Mom and Dad, I can’t leave here either. I’ll be another forever Cadence kid, married to my childhood sweetheart, living in the shithole haunted house next door, my admission letter some buried treasure my kids will find in the attic and toss aside while looking for something more interesting.” She answered my rigid body language by saying, “So yeah, only you should go to camp. You’re the only one of us with problems.” She picked the phone up to dial. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

  Normal Ollie would’ve kept prodding anyway, but the regret kept flooding in, reaching higher and higher. The only fight inside me was for survival.

  “Hey,” Aidy said into the house phone’s receiver. “You guys can head over now. Our parents just left. When they’re done with dinner, Olivia and I will have to go back to our house until they go to bed, but I think the earlier we start this, the better.” She sounded clinical: a doctor giving her prescription. “Great. See you then.” She hung up the phone and looked at me. “You’re ready, right? I’m assuming, by all the…” She waved fingers at my face like I’d worked some wizardry on myself.

  All there was to do was brace myself for what was to come. Hope—oh, pathetic hope—that whatever I was made of was strong enough to withstand it all. Every time I made a plan, I got thrown another wrench.

  “Mm-hmm,” I said. I retrieved the bag I packed earlier in the day.

  Aidy turned on the TV. I hit a few more light switches. We did this so when we needed to rush back to our house, it looked lived in, in the recklessly negligent teenage way.

  We left. We’d never used the Marley way to go anywhere but Marley’s. The effort that went into the later parts of the path were what made it worthwhile. Aidy and I tried to remain dignified as we dusted ourselves clean, but bitterness punctuated our movements. There was no sense of accomplishment in crawling like dogs into our neighboring yard.

  Aidy opened the haunted house’s back door. The vacant building was aggressive in its many disappointments. It still hadn’t become what it was meant to be: spooky and old, in muted grays, a chandelier swaying without any wind. If the walls whispered anything, it was, This is what you’ll become, as they hacked a throaty laugh at me. Nothing but a rotting husk.

  “Follow me,” Aidy said. She led me past the kitchen and to the same stairs Marley once bounded up without fear. We inched up instead, soft darkness seeming to promise the aging architecture would fail us. In an upstairs room, Aidy had set up the party. She’d tacked a blackout curtain over the window, with streamers draped atop. String lights traipsed across the sheets she’d pinned from wall to wall. “The outlets were working,” she told me in response to my gawking.

  It looked exactly like my vision. My Marley had made it happen.

  I could keep going.

  Under the tent, my old sleeping bag waited for me, covered in rainbow tie-dye and reeking of attic mold. Earlier in the day, Aidy had carried over quite a few things from our attic, including an old coffee table and various drinks from our parents’ long-forgotten liquor cabinet. Liquids I never imagined anyone, especially not myself, would ever drink. They were household artifacts. Aidy displayed them alongside a stack of white paper cups she’d found in the depths of our kitchen cabinets. “Harrison’s bringing mixers,” she told me, tracing the path of my eyes. “I thought the streamers looked best there. And the string lights look kind of like a sky.”

  “It’s perfect,” I said.

  “And the flashlights? Any idea what I should do with them?” she asked, her brow furrowing.

  “We’ll know soon enough,” I assured her.

  We both perked at the sound of a downstairs creak. “Hello,” Harrison called out. “You guys here yet?”

  “Upstairs,” Aidy told him. He came up with a bag of snacks and drinks in one hand, his sleeping bag in the other. “Put the food over there.” Aidy pointed to the closet door she’d opened to turn into another little display area.

  “Why are we in this room?” Harrison asked.

  “Farthest room from my house,” Aidy said. “The house where my parents are. You know, those people who grounded me.”

  His lips pressed into a flat line, eager to avoid trouble. He peeked under the tent to look around, making such a point of avoiding me that I had to say, “Hi, Harrison,” to appease him.

  “Oh, hey,” he said back, like he’d just noticed I was there. “Do you have my letter?”

  “It’s at my house.”

  “I’d like to get it soon.”

  “Of course.”

  I hadn’t brought it with me. I’d collected three letters, including my own, and I’d left them all at home. They were complicating the Adventure. We didn’t need them for the sleepover.

  Bigs and Teeny arrived next. I couldn’t recall the last time it had been only the five of us somewhere. The room was alive with that unfamiliarity, giving the walls more to say. Does this combination of people work? Can you even remember?

  When Ruby came, the six of us configured our sleeping bags into a pattern that made sense. Room was left for Nick’s to go beside mine, which caught in my throat like a sweater on a hook. As we waited for him, we stayed tucked away under the bedsheet tent. I felt at once very small and very important, my favorite feeling in the world. I was with my secret society, reconvening in a secret hideout, for a secret party.

  Secrets, secrets, secrets.

  Teeny poked at the flashlights piled up in the middle of our formation. “If we’re supposed to be telling ghost stories with those, I’m gone. It’s already bad enough being in this house.” She pulled her knees up to her ches
t. I couldn’t decide if the Marley magic was growing, or if Teeny never once doubted the house was haunted. “If you wake up and I’m not here, don’t leave thinking I went home. Walk this house up and down and make sure I haven’t been dragged into the attic by some demon.”

  “Stop it! Now you’re scaring me,” Bigs said.

  Everyone let out disjointed, apprehensive laughs, baited with anticipation. We were so close to what was going to happen. It was almost touchable.

  Harrison stole away to make drinks for everyone. He brought them in one by one, each a different combination of liquids. “This is my specialty,” he told us as he did it. “Call me Mr. Mixologist.”

  Aidy scoffed. “Yes, everyone please call him that. It’s such a great gift he has. Let’s make sure to celebrate his knowledge of mixed drinks as often as we can.”

  Teeny busted into a full throttle laugh. “You are catty.” Harrison brought in her drink. “It is good, though,” she told Bigs in whispered confidence, even though we all could hear.

  Mine was the last drink Harrison made. As I pondered it, he told me, “Hey, I know what I know,” and shrugged the same shrug I loved to shrug. The dismissive, know-it-all shrug.

  We sipped away at the drinks in hand, skirting around telling stories of past memories. That kind of talk would surely be the catalyst, and everyone knew it.

  A loud creak silenced us. Nick had arrived. He did not say hello downstairs or call out to ask where we were. He was all shuffles and swooshes, doors opening and closing. In our rational minds we knew it was him, but we sat stock-still with pursed lips, because that was what we kids of Albany did: created moments where there were none. Made the average into the entertaining.

  How could they not see?

  Eventually, Nick opened the door to our party room, and the rest of us dropped our charade. Nick crawled in without comment, making his way to the open space beside me. As he unfolded his old sleeping bag, black-and-blue stripes, the smell of soap and must and tree bark wafted over to my swollen nose. Once settled, Nick’s bag overlapped with mine just enough for him to pretend to adjust it. Really, he gave my fingers a quick squeeze: a continuation of our earlier conversation. I’m still here. Are you?

  I squeezed back. Oh, the thrill of our touch, in front of the others, but without them knowing. My drowning heart gasped. Wading through my regret was getting harder to do. Everything brewing inside of me was desperate to come out, if only to make room for the hugeness of the feeling between Nick and me.

  “So, we’re all here,” Aidy said once Nick stopped fixing his sleeping bag. Her words had sharp edges, ready to cut details into what the night might become.

  If I knew my sister, it wasn’t an image that matched with mine.

  If I knew myself, I could beat her.

  Teeny gasped. “You’re about to announce this is a séance.”

  Aidy replied bluntly, “It is not a séance.”

  Teeny reached across Ruby to grab my hand and hold it to her chest. “Feel my heart. It’s pounding,” she said to me. It was so flattering, I almost burst right then and there.

  She knew I would care. She was starting to understand.

  “I’d protect you,” I told her as her heart beat into my palm. I’d always wanted her to toss me even the smallest of olive branches, so I could prove how that branch would root inside me and grow into an undying tree.

  “Oh, because you know how to communicate with ghosts now?” Aidy probed.

  “I do not do ghosts,” Teeny snapped, breaking our connection. I pulled my hand back and shoved it under my sleeping bag, trying to stop the world around me from shrinking again. I was okay.

  It was all okay.

  “You’re spending the night in the haunted house,” Harrison taunted.

  “If you think this story doesn’t end with you being the first person here the demon kills, you haven’t watched enough horror movies,” Teeny taunted back.

  “Why me?”

  “Because your girlfriend hates you, and instead of dealing with it, you’re acting like Mr. Mixologist, whoever the hell that is, and people are leaving you behind in tunnels and stuff. It’s just, it’s obvious, is all.” To Bigs, she whispered, “And because I won’t be a part of any situation where the well-meaning black people die first. I’ll kill the demon with my bare hands before that happens.”

  Bigs laughed at her.

  “What?” she asked. “You know I will.”

  Harrison folded his arms. “Who decided that was the person I was?”

  “You did,” Aidy said, holding his ego like a toy she might toss.

  “Okay, I didn’t say now was the time we deal with it,” Teeny warned. No one wanted to pick at the scab covering Harrison and Aidy. “I guess I have to say this. I’ve been trying not to, but obviously the rest of you don’t see it yet. This night is about ghosts.”

  The room went stiller than still. It was as if stillness itself tipped over and spilled out until it was dry, leaving us in suspended animation.

  “Exactly,” Teeny said in answer to the quiet. “You all know I’m right. We’re here for a ghost, and I’m going to be the one to announce it, because then I can take the power out of what scares me. I’m about to leave for college, and I want to get out of this place for good. I’m not carrying her ghost around. Listen to what she told me.” She removed her letter from the purse beside her sleeping bag. “You listen and try to tell me I’m wrong.”

  TENIYAH CAMPBELL

  Welcome to the Adventure. Eyes on your own paper, please.

  What do you think about when you’re in dance class? All that time in front of a mirror, studying every inch of your body. Does it make you stop thinking of yourself as a person? You’re a billion pieces, building and unbuilding, stacking and unstacking, hinging and unhinging, squeezing, pushing, pulling, leaning, standing, falling, all to create something bigger than you. I know when I watch you that you’re more than a person. But do you? Is that what you think? It’s got to be more than eight counts and technical corrections in your head. There’s seriously no way you can do the things you do thinking like that. Or believing you’re just a person. I’ve gotta think that you see yourself as so many things, like you’re the sun and then the sky and then a ball and then fire and then a bird and then a tree, all in one step.

  What happens to that when you’re not dancing? Where does your sun and sky and ball and fire and all of it go? I feel like I see it in you, even when you’re walking down the street. You’re not just a body. That’s only the most obvious part of you. How boring. We all have one of those. It’s what’s inside. Even if the body is gone, the rest of you would have to stay. It’s so much bigger. I don’t know how else to put it. It’s the you when you aren’t in the room. It leaves a beautiful mark over every place you’ve ever been. Maybe that’s what you’re thinking about. Maybe you’re asking yourself Is this the way people will remember me? When they hear this song, will I be woven into every beat?

  Sometimes when you dance, I swear you’re actually fixing the sun and the sky and all the things that seem broken when people think they’ve been left behind. It makes me believe that we’re always together, even when we’re apart. We’re all inside of each other, sometimes sneaking out in ways they can’t be easily qualified. I am in your steps. You are in mine.

  I really like believing that.

  I wish I knew why I do the things I do. I wish I had a purpose for my body like you have a purpose for yours. I wish for so much. Like more words to say better things than this. More ways to tell you how important you are. How you stay with me, wherever I go.

  Can you make it so I stay with you too?

  Love always,

  Marley

  July 11

  Five Years Prior

  Squad cars, fire trucks, and ambulances arrived all at once. Fear gnawed at my stomach. Would I be in trouble?
Was it my fault? What would they do to me? To Marley? I closed myself inside the shed as Nick had, letting the near total darkness devour me whole. Heavy air panted down my neck. Time became taffy, lapping and twisting over itself, stretching out in new ways, never once breaking.

  The world outside whispered more questions into my ear.

  “How did this happen?” and “She’s just a kid,” and “You know whose daughter that is, right?” and “She’s fifteen,” and “Fifteen? Christ,” and “Where is Officer Bricket?” and “Why’d he have to take leave this week?” and “Did she do this to herself?” and “Has he been told?” and “Wife troubles, I think,” and “No signs of life,” and “It was with his gun,” and “It makes me sick to my stomach,” and “No adults around,” and “They’re all just kids.”

  A small sliver of light shone on my dirty toes. The concrete was cold. So cold. A perfect pillow for my heavy head.

  “What are they saying?” and “Can we believe them?” and “Who left the scene?” and “A vibrator?” and “Just a kid,” and “Blood everywhere,” and “Vomit in the pool,” and “For Chrissake, someone starting calling their parents,” and “Put out an APB for Nick Cline,” and “Now they’re saying another kid left,” and “What’s your sister’s name?”

  Someone needed to rescue Aidy from questions for which she had no answers. That someone should’ve been Nick, but he was gone, so once again, that someone had to be me.

  The floor was so cool. My head hurt so much. From my mouth escaped sounds that were meant to be words. The blackness of the shed swallowed their meaning, and they came out as mumbles. Now the dark was Marley’s too. She’d taken everything.

  The shed’s temperamental left door fell open without complaint. Aidy carved her silhouette into the blinding light. “I found her,” she said. Before anyone else could reach me, she scooped me up and pulled me into her lap.

  “Olivia, listen,” she whispered into my ear, calm as the sky before a storm. “I need you to be okay.”