When the Light Went Out

by Bridget Morrissey

  All my life, Aidy had done things like give me the best seat on our couch without argument. Let me go swim at Marley’s instead of dragging me home with her like she should. She didn’t wield the power older sisters were supposed to have over tagalong siblings. I saw then it was because she feared me. She thought I was too young. Too emotional. Too irrational.

  She should’ve known me better than the rest, and she didn’t. She thought the same things about me that everyone else did.

  And she thought I killed her best friend, Marley.

  Marley.

  What would Marley Bricket do if she were me? The answer came as quick as the asking, because Marley herself was there with me in that shed. She wasn’t an apparition. Marley would never be so boring. She was the primary colors. She was every loud noise. She was stars in the sky and the wind in the trees. She was the encouraging voice behind every apprehensive lie. Marley Bricket was who she’d always been, and we were going to cover her in a sheet and cart her off to the morgue. Bury her body in the ground and mourn her there. Forget her everywhere else.

  Not me.

  I could carry her.

  I knew I could. Our friends always underestimated me, and there I was, the one who’d be doing all the work. The one who’d make sure Marley didn’t get left behind.

  So what would Marley do if she were me? She would pretend. And she would be so good at it that no one questioned her.

  For Aidy, I put on my biggest voice and, for the first time in an infinite number of times I would utter this phrase in different iterations and not really mean it, I said, “I am okay.” As soon as the words fell from my lips, I draped Marley around myself like fur, a coat I planned to wear for the rest of my life. She was mine.

  The old Ollie was gone.

  Aidy had to help me stand. I wasn’t yet used to all the extra weight.

  Uniformed bodies swarmed nearby, looking at me and then each other, using meaningful glances to decide who should ask me questions. A female officer nominated herself by pushing out of the chaos.

  She greeted me with a smile made of cardboard. I looked around to see if anyone else was as offended by how fraudulent her expression was. All I saw were more flimsy smiles. Tongues pressing behind exposed teeth, biting back shock and fear, trying to trick the little girl in front of them into believing everything was okay. The lies lit up like tumors on a scan. Everything that was once dark to me was now bright, overexposed by a laser-focused beam.

  “Are you hurt?” the officer asked.

  A funny question. My outsides were fine. My insides were not, but not the insides that could be fixed. The insides of my insides, where all these new changes were ripping me up to build a stronger, better body. One that could carry dead girls and harbor secrets and keep the world bright and happy, all at the same time.

  “I’m okay,” I said again.

  She looked at the blood on my tankini. “Let’s have a medic check you out, just in case.”

  As a man examined me, the woman urged me to tell her everything. It amazed me that she didn’t think I could tell she was not prepared for the death of a fellow officer’s daughter. Anyone could see the little eyebrows of sweat under her chest and the hives forming above the collar of her uniform.

  “Nick and I were swimming,” I said. “Marley yelled for us. We came inside, and she had her dad’s gun. She found it somewhere. She gave it to Nick. She said it wasn’t loaded, but I guess it was. She asked him to pull the trigger. He did. I ran to get help. I don’t know where Nick went.”

  “That’s it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where did you go after you got help?”

  “Into the shed.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Are those your footprints?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did you get sick in the pool?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Eleven.”

  “All right. Why don’t you and your sister have a seat over there while we finish making sure you’re okay. We’ll bring you some water and some towels. Take some time to calm down, and try to remember everything you can about what happened.”

  I knew everything, of course. Every detail. I could have drawn a flip book, showing how the bullet flew, millimeter by millimeter, toward the golden pillow, entering the fibers, then Marley’s body, pushing her back and in, turning off the light in her eyes forever.

  But I’d never share all of that.

  I would never share my Marley with anyone again.

  15

  When Teeny finished reading the last sentence of her letter, we tensed into an elevator silence—a group of people in an enclosed space, afraid to catch the potential conversations polluting the air. Unfortunately, no doors were going to burst open and free us of the unspoken obligation we’d all been avoiding.

  There would have to be someone brave enough to speak.

  It was going to be me.

  It was always me.

  Sentences curdled at the back of my throat, ready to spill. “Marley,” I whispered.

  Teeny jerked her head to see if the girl of the hour had manifested in the spot where my dizzy gaze rested. She hadn’t. She wouldn’t. But every sentence I spoke would have to start with her name, because everything that had happened in the past three days started with her name.

  Everything in the past five years started with her name.

  “Told me to do the Adventure,” I finished.

  I was greeted with “What?” and “What?” and “What do you mean?” and “Hold on,” and “Ollie?” and “What?” again.

  I measured the quiet into spoonfuls, swallowed them back, let them digest, and said again, “Marley told me to do the Adventure.”

  Part Three

  Unbelievable Realities

  16

  A small part of me wished to step away from myself for the rest of the night. Decide that I didn’t owe anyone the rest of my truth. People got away with shutting down like that all the time.

  But the great thing about the drink Harrison gave me was how it made my body slowly soften. Every few breaths, tension dripped off me, loosening years of knots I’d wound around myself to keep from giving away too much.

  The others—eyes glued on me, waiting for my explanation—had not yet loosened. “Olivia, I’m not joking around; you need to explain yourself right this very second,” and, “You can’t just sit there,” and, “So now she’s some kind of statue. If this is some fake demon thing,” and, “It’s all right,” and a squeeze of my hand.

  Nick’s palm nestled into mine.

  Aidy and Harrison had hurt each other by linking up in every choice, good or bad, and saying through words or touch or actions, I’m here. We face this together. I knew this, but I wanted to take Nick with me. To keep holding his hand as the room filled up with the rest of what I would soon release. I wanted to ride the wave of it out onto Albany and away from our town. I’d warned myself not to pull him too close, but everything else I prepared got warped, so how was I to really know I shouldn’t if I didn’t at least try? My warnings never took proper account of my feelings.

  Oh, feelings.

  I squeezed back. Twice for get out of here.

  Nick reacted in an instant. “Let me talk to her outside,” he told the room. We stood together, pillars crashing into the cotton sky of bedsheets, dragging along the top until we broke free.

  “Hold on.” Aidy grabbed my other hand.

  “I’ll be back,” I said to her.

  Nick and I crept down the rickety stairs. The back of his hairline looked like a tiny tornado. The caramel brown swooped down and kissed his bare neck, a collision of chaos and calm. Nick’s free hand patted the little swirl, warm from the pressure of my stare.

 
; He pushed open the back door, and we stepped down into the yard. It was built from all the other fences connecting. We walked to the corner where Miss Sherry’s chain-links met the strong metal stakes of someone else’s backyard. I linked my fingers through the chain holes. Nick held a stake. We burrowed until our corners also connected, my shoulder and side pressed into his.

  “Ollie,” he said before anything else could be said, but that’s not what he meant.

  “Nick,” I said right back. Our names were proclamations of something more.

  “What’s happening?” he asked, about me. And us. And Marley.

  Me and us and Marley.

  I said his name again, because I was still performing. I’d become the type to keep going long after the curtain came down. But the whole paper cup of mystery drink swishing around in me put a brand-new spin on my role. Even the order of my reveals was off, because I told him, “I did this,” which under normal circumstances would’ve been the last thing I got direct about. “The stuff in her room. The letters.”

  “Olivia,” he said back. First time he’d ever used my full name. He even said it with a wispy touch, making it sound like a promise and a regret. “That’s why I don’t have a letter,” he realized. “I wasn’t supposed to be a part of this. Was I?”

  Yes. He was good.

  But this was where it got complicated.

  It was so complicated.

  The impossibility of Nick’s presence throughout all of this had no place in my logical mind, so I went to the place inside me where everything was whispered admissions and stolen touches. That place, full of changing landscapes and countless unbelievable realities, had always been the very heartbeat of who Nick and I were to each other.

  “How is it that you see the things I see?” I asked him.

  “Because it’s real. And we’re the only ones who know to look.”

  More words bubbled up. “But I can’t tell what’s real anymore.” My eyes filled so fast, it seemed absurd, because tears weren’t anywhere the moment before, and they were suddenly everywhere.

  Nick looked at me. In his eyes, I saw my face filled with hope and terror and regret and mischief and sorrow and loss, so much loss, and still it was hard to recognize myself. Maybe because of the swollen nose and hidden bruises. Maybe because of the unfiltered honesty. My face hadn’t worn it in years.

  “I know what you mean,” Nick said. He held me to him. His heart beat into my ear, steady and certain. I tried to set my breath to it. Eight beats to inhale. Eight beats to exhale.

  “This was never supposed to be about her wanting to die,” I told him. “It was about us. The Albany kids.” Nick’s white shirt was damp from my tears and discolored from my foundation. I tried to rub it away.

  He ran his hand over the top of my hair. “You see her more than I do,” he said.

  “I told you before. I carry her everywhere.”

  He took the life out of her. He saw it disperse into everything around us. But he hadn’t realized how much of it went into me.

  And I hadn’t realized how much went into him.

  I’d been trying to rework the Adventure into something simpler. That night, looking at Nick, melting from alcohol, imagining eyes from upstairs moving rooms to peer down on us—I accepted another version of reality. The Adventure really did have a different purpose, like she’d said it would.

  It was about a Marley I’d never met.

  Because somebody somewhere decided that every five years, tragedies must be made extra important again. And without consulting me, Marley Bricket decided her tragedy would be reimagined entirely.

  With so much to do, it was hard to choose what was next, especially since Nick Cline stood in front of me with a gaze that could break locks and shatter windows. I told him what I thought he couldn’t know. And he was still there.

  “I didn’t even mean to be at the memorial,” he said. “Every year, I wake up with the sound of the gun in my ears.” He broke his endless stare to look at me, giving a you know with a raise of his eyebrows. “When it happens, it’s like I’m wearing headphones with the volume turned all the way up. There’s nothing else to hear. And then the sound becomes the feeling, and it’s like I’m falling over, like I did when it fired, even though I’m only lying in my bed. That’s when I get up and start moving.”

  In all my playbacks of the day she died, the moment belonged to Marley. As soon as the trigger was pulled, I saw no one other than her. I didn’t even know Nick had fallen over.

  Each word he spoke became a line drawn between stars, completing a constellation I hadn’t noticed before.

  “I walk for hours,” he continued. “I go until my entire body can’t feel anything anymore. I practically fall asleep standing up, that’s how tired I try to make myself. This year was different, though. She started showing up in all those ways I told you, but there was more to it. I don’t know. The morning of the eleventh came, and the gun fired in my mind like it always does. When I opened my eyes, I felt as if she were behind me somehow, sitting me up. Pushing me out the door. As soon I started my walk, it felt like she was everywhere, and I couldn’t catch her. I always avoid City Hall, because I know no one wants to see me at the memorial, but I was so caught up in trying to find her again that I ended up right in front of the building.”

  A soft breeze blew his hair across his forehead. I pushed it back into place for him.

  “And there you were, getting out of the car,” he said. He clutched a handful that wanted to fly away again. “So then I was walking in, and in my head I was asking myself, What are you doing? But I couldn’t stop, because I knew you would never think I was making this up.”

  When Marley died, our lives to that point got put on permanent pause. It was up to Nick and me to figure out a new way to animate. We were not lucky to just be kids. We were cursed with big imaginations and open hearts. We felt everything. And then we felt nothing.

  But even nothing was something.

  “I realized it wasn’t her I’d been looking for,” Nick continued. “It was you.”

  Heat rushed up to my cheeks. I had to look away. I still couldn’t handle it.

  “I get what you mean about the room with no exit,” he said. “You and me, we’re stuck inside July 11 forever. But I really do have to believe there’s a way for us to get out. And I think we’re finding it.”

  “You don’t understand,” I started. “There might not be any real answers to find, because I did all of this. Mr. Bricket didn’t think it was weird when we were in his house because I’m always in his house. I’ve been going to his house, to her room, for years. I wrote the letters. I hid the journal and the map. I put things all over Cadence. I was even the one who put the lock on her nightstand, but I didn’t have the key with me when we went there that night.”

  He raised his eyebrows.

  “You and me, we feel her in everything we do, right?” I asked. “I felt like the Marley I carried with me wanted me to put this together. She’d told me on the day she died that the Adventure was going to have a different purpose that summer. And after five years, I felt like I knew what it was. I’d spent so much time watching our friends forget her. I mean, think about the day she died. We were all split up. She knew that would keep happening, and she wanted to create a way for us to stay together. That was all the Adventure had ever been in the first place. I don’t think she’d realized until things started to fall apart. She was going to make it official, and she never got the chance. So I did it for her.”

  Nick soaked in my every word, nodding along.

  “It wasn’t supposed to start the night of the memorial,” I continued. “I wasn’t really ready. That’s why it’s all such a mess. I hadn’t finished planning. But you showed up. And then everyone else saw this so much differently than I did. It was never supposed to be about her wanting to die,” I repeated. “But that might
be what it is. All the stuff I used came from real things she had. Like that map. Even the letters were all taken straight from things she wrote about us in her journal. And rereading some of it has made me see what Aidy sees, and I hate that I did this at all. I ruined her.”

  So much poured out of me that I was dizzy. The ground was the sky was the ground was Nick, standing in the tar that once filled me whole. A little under half-empty and incapable of deciding if it was good or bad, I took to blaming myself anyway. “It’s turning me back into Little Ollie,” I said. “I don’t want to be her. I’ve spent every day of the last five years making sure I’d never be anything like her again. I thought I’d changed into something new. But the past is catching up to me.”

  “Olivia,” Nick said, careful to use this name, passing it out as another anchor for me to grab. “There’s no version of you I don’t want to know.”

  He wanted this to mean everything to me, but he forgot the five years he didn’t know me. The me before him was pasted together from all the mistakes I made in the time between, and the haphazard glue job was falling apart. The skin I’d shed when he showed up was the only layer of protection I had.

  “Here’s what I know,” he said. “You’re the person I always want to talk to. Whenever anything happens, I’m always wishing I could tell you. I can’t count how many times I’ve wanted to walk over to your house and start a conversation. I used to imagine myself doing it. I’d talk to the you in my mind until I fell asleep. It was never enough. But I was too scared to do anything else. Then you were right in front of me at the memorial, and I started walking over to you. I was trying to psyche myself up by imagining a million greetings. Literally trying to imagine the moment into existence. I couldn’t do it. I got too scared of all that would go wrong. I was gonna walk by you and hold on to the split second of time we shared. I figured it would have to be enough. I didn’t deserve anything more. Then you said hi to me.”