When the Light Went Out

by Bridget Morrissey

He wanted me to really hear this part, so he moved his hands down to my forearms, hoping the different touch further pulled me out. Or in. Wherever it was I was, he wanted me to be saved from it.

  “You’ve always been the brave one, Olivia. You were the one who said we shouldn’t play with the gun in the first place. You were the one who went and got help. At the memorial, you gave me that single word. Hi. You didn’t owe me that and you gave it anyway. There’s nothing you can do now that’ll erase that. I will make the choice to stand beside you, over and over, for as long as you let me.”

  When he let himself, there was a way Nick Cline smiled at casual acquaintances. He did it like they were family. He smiled at family like they were the world. That night, he smiled at me like the world wasn’t big enough.

  All I could do was say his name.

  Why was it that my sister thought I shouldn’t have him around?

  Yes, this was the Nick that left me. This was the Nick that pointed a gun at Marley and fired. I knew these things. I lived them.

  I also knew forgiveness. And I knew change. He had hurt me. I had hurt him. We were hurt. We were fractures and splinters and gaps of time so long they rotted and replanted, over and over. And still, I hoped we had a chance. Hope worked like that. If it was odds I needed to beat, then I would beat them, betting my hope against the house, always.

  He kissed me. “You can tell them what you told me,” he said. “And everything you haven’t. No matter what they say, I’ll still be here. You and I can figure out the rest on our own, if we have to. Or we can have five other people along for the ride. It doesn’t matter. This has always been about you and me and Marley, and it always will be.”

  17

  The haunted house grabbed on to us as we reentered. Each croak up the stairs became another story piece, wrought with suspense. We’d given the lonely space secrets to whisper and regrets to yawn out.

  We’d given it an afterlife.

  The tent had been taken down in our absence. Its colorful sheets sat crumpled in a sad pile in the corner. Our sleeping bags were whirlpools of fabric strewn across the floor. Our stars hung on by a single tack, the string of bulbs forming a triangle in the center of the room. Even though the atmosphere was deconstructed, drink cups had been refilled. Bodies swayed—in anticipation, frustration, fear, general disorientation—not at all synced to the music softly playing from someone’s phone, but swaying nonetheless. Against all odds, it was a party indeed.

  “Finally,” Teeny said when I walked in. “Always disappearing when we need you most.”

  It should’ve hurt me, but I warmed instead. Teeny needed me. Not only that, but she needed me most. “I’m sorry,” I said. And then, “No.” I wanted to do my proper part for once, not just stamp my signature on the dotted line. Swimming against the current of myself, I searched for a how. How to be brave when I wanted to fall. How to get up again.

  Before I could, Aidy stepped up to me. “Ollie, Ollie, Ollie,” she said, using the rule of threes to its maximum effect, “Don’t bother. I went ahead and explained to everyone exactly what you did. They were pretty mad at first, but I said, What do you expect from Ollie anyway? And they were all like, Oh. Yeah.” She pushed me, ever gently, like a tease. “Every knockoff has a tell. Something that makes it a little less valuable than the original.” She hurried off to the corner and rummaged through her bag. “Did you already take it? Oh no, never mind, here it is.” She pulled out her Marley letter. “I’ve read this over and over. Probably a thousand times. At first because I was like, whoa, more of Marley. Then because I was confused. Why would she have written us letters? Then, because I was scared. Had she wanted to die? And then, because I knew. She hadn’t done this. You had.”

  Her index finger traced lines into the paper until she reached the part she wanted. “‘Everyone respects you, and you keep it all to yourself, piecing it out into tiny servings. You don’t want to give too much for fear of the pushback. But Aidy, you should try. Be the one to throw us a party. Do it somewhere cool and different. Get scandalous! Make it a sleepover! Bring some of that ancient liquor from your house. No one’s touched it in years. I guarantee your parents won’t notice. Think of how much we steal from our houses, and we’ve never once been caught. I want you to sub in for me. Feel what it’s like to hold the strings. I’ll give you the other stuff you need to do it. I promise, it’s not that much. All you really need to do is rearrange the furniture. Parties are just smoke and mirrors. That’s all life is, I think.’”

  The entire room was listening, far past the point of pretending to talk to one another.

  “You get the point,” Aidy said. She crumpled the letter into a ball and shoved it into her pocket, smart enough to know that in spite of it all, I’d still try to steal it. “Can you spot it?”

  Again, I said nothing.

  “I’ve read it enough that it’s more than one thing now. The whole thing is so you, it’s actually incredible no one else noticed, but there’s one thing in particular. Do you know what it is?” Her words struck brass-knuckle blows. “Nick? How about you, since you and my sister are so in tune again? Do you know her well enough to know when she’s pretending?”

  What he knew was that no words could fix what had broken inside Aidy. It was Nick I was so afraid to hurt, and he turned out to be the only one who could stand what I’d done.

  Aidy laughed at his silence and turned back to me. “I should be honest. Not that it matters. It’s clearly not something you value.” She swished around her cup. It was still the first drink Harrison gave her. And it was full. She was not drunk, I realized. She wasn’t even buzzed.

  She was angry.

  “When I was in your room the other day, I saw a receipt on top of one of the piles on your floor. The product names were abbreviated, so I didn’t really know what everything stood for,” she said. “I didn’t think anything of it until I opened up that box. Suddenly I knew what everything stood for. And here we are.” Her face kept shutting down then surging back to life, a trick candle that kept on well past the point of being any fun.

  Nick squeezed my hand three times, a new code I didn’t know, but understood all the same. Me and us and Marley.

  “Oh great, another thing I didn’t miss, the little telepathy twins over here, not talking out loud because they’re having a great little chat in their secret little world,” Aidy said. Each time, the word little hit the hardest, like a cymbal clash. She meant Nick and me, but laughed when she realized there were actual twins in the room. “Sorry, Campbells. I’m sure you two are having some great conversation, but these two”—she glared at us—“have always been up to no good. Since I’m a nice sister, Olivia, I let you think it was all Thing Two’s fault over here. But it’s the both of you, always insisting on being so damn different every single second. A tree was never just a tree with you guys. It was a magical fortress. And yeah, that was cute for a while, but you two never stopped trying to make things more than what they are.” She narrowed her eyes. “You made this into an adventure, as if that’s what we all need to heal. Finally, the closure I’ve always wanted! I get to wonder if my best friend was so lost in her own life that she made you two shoot her point-blank in her parents’ bedroom!”

  The Olivia of days, even hours before, would’ve been able to stop Aidy. Maybe with the perfect rebuttal or a well-timed redirection. But I didn’t have her. I couldn’t fight anymore.

  “I should’ve been there,” Aidy whispered. “I knew better than to take my eyes off you for a single second. But I let you convince me, like I always did.” She took her first sip of her spilling drink, then spit it back into the cup, glaring at Harrison. “Everyone knows what you were doing that day, but do you have any idea what we were doing? The real reason we didn’t stay?”

  This broke the spell she’d cast over the room. Bigs and Teeny and Harrison all advanced on her, backing Nick and I into the corner closest to
the closet. Ruby hung back, instead crawling onto the windowsill to sit on the blackout curtains, her arms wrapped around her knees.

  “It’s kind of perfect, actually. It’s like you knew without having a single clue. We were writing a letter.”

  “Aidy,” Teeny warned.

  “We were never going to talk about this again,” Harrison added, so aware that he was saying the wrong thing but so incapable of stopping himself. He grabbed at his throat as if battling against the words.

  “And has it helped?” she asked him. “Every time you drink, you start slurring about it. Not in obvious ways, but I’m pretty sure all you’d need to do was blink, and I’d know what it is you’re thinking, because I’m thinking it too.” Aidy laughed like she’d finally gotten to the punchline of a joke years in the making. “We were kicking Marley out of the group. Calling her superficial and self-centered and clearly too good for the Albany kids. You’ll be happy to know that your little Ruby wanted no part of it. She’d come with us that day to put up a fight over it. No one listened to her, so she closed herself up in your room to pout.”

  Ruby tucked her head into the space between her knees.

  She’d never told me.

  Aidy sneered. “If you’re wondering why every one of us got our asses on our bikes and pedaled for our lives over to Cadence Park on the night of the memorial, now you know. No one cares about what you’ve done. Honestly. What they care about is whether any of it is true. If there really is anything left to hold on to. Some sort of forgiveness Marley can give us, even though she never even knew we did anything wrong.”

  Aidy’s anger crashed into me with the volatility of a hurricane wave. For years I’d used Marley as my shield, pinging back everything I didn’t want to touch me. But she couldn’t protect me from what she never knew herself, and I was too weak on my own. The Marley I carried struggled to hang on to my fragile frame. She wrapped around my throat, pressing into my trachea. The room shrank, everyone becoming miniature while I remained life-size.

  No one could see that I was suffocating. They were too small. Too far away. I had no way to breathe them back to their regular size.

  Soon enough, the entire room went black.

  18

  “She’s been asleep since you left! What was I supposed to do?”

  “Wake her up!”

  “I tried! You know how she gets sometimes.”

  “So, she was sleeping and you couldn’t do what I asked all by yourself?”

  “I forgot.”

  “You forgot?”

  “She fell asleep so fast I thought maybe she was sick.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you, Dad. It’s the truth.”

  “You really don’t seem to care about what’s going to happen to you.”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Are you sure? Because I can’t think of a single thing I’ve asked you to do this summer that you’ve actually done, and I can think of quite a few things I’ve asked you not to do that you’ve had no trouble accomplishing.”

  I started to shift around, figuring this was as good a time as any to announce I was awake, but in her continued whisper-fight tone, Aidy said, “Dad, I’ve been trying to look out for her this entire summer,” and I turned myself toward our couch’s pillow cushions, burying my head in the crease between two, trying to keep my breath as steady as it was in sleep. “That’s pretty much a full-time job. She’s—she’s acting like she did the first—” Her volume dropped so low my dad couldn’t even hear the rest of her sentence.

  “What?” he said, matching her urgency.

  Murmur, murmur, murmur.

  The kitchen had never seemed farther away. I must’ve slept for at least an hour. Probably more. My parents were already back from dinner. My last dose of ibuprofen had worn off. The pain in my nose radiated out from the center of my face and into my cheeks and eyes. And the mystery drink from Harrison. Oh, the mystery drink. It felt like I’d never be right again.

  Aidy was too quiet, as if she knew my ears were trained on the conversation.

  My dad, unaware or unconcerned, remained loud enough for me to understand. “Earliest we can get her there is the end of the week. We can’t afford to take off any workdays. Your mom and I gave up all our PTO when we came down to your school. And this camp’s not cheap. We’re not made of money, you know.”

  My parents had left me home alone for a week toward the end of May. Told me they’d decided to visit my great-aunt, who’d been sick with cancer for years. It only furthered my headache to realize how oblivious I’d been. They’d left me an expanse of unsupervised free time, perfect for organizing the Adventure. It did not occur to me then that they never once said exactly why they were visiting her, or what they were planning on doing there for a whole week, or upon their return, how it had gone.

  “We’re gonna tell your mom we have a feeling,” Dad said. “Not that anything more has happened since the memorial.”

  How the alliances had once more shifted. Aidy and my dad were now on a team that didn’t even involve my mom. I comforted myself by appreciating my own loyalty. People could accuse me of a lot of things, but being a traitor was not on that list.

  “Mom’s already up in bed,” Dad said. “Bring the clothes to that dumpster on Arbor. If there’s stuff in Olivia’s room that you need to get rid of, maybe now’s a good time for that too.”

  Aidy’s volume returned to normal. “Okay,” she said confidently, always appreciating a clear task.

  “Is there anything else I need to know?”

  “No,” she said with equal confidence.

  The floorboards creaked. He must’ve moved to hug her. Their conversation was lost in the closeness. The squeaks moved closer, until my dad’s breath hung over me, full as a rain cloud. “Good night, Ollie girl,” he said. “You’ll be okay.”

  The people in my life decided for me I was okay. And I decided right back I was whatever I wanted to be, at least on the inside. But time made the inside sneak outside, until every part of me became Marley’s death, and no one, not even me, wanted to admit it out loud.

  Dad went off to his room. Once his door closed, my eyes opened. Aidy stood nearby, as if she knew it would happen that way. “As always, your timing is perfect.” She pulled me up from the couch to look me over. “You seem to be okay,” she said (of course), and started walking to the back door, expecting me to follow.

  The pain and the liquor made for a perfect storm of disorientation. Aidy took the bag from the shrubs by our garage. I did my best to keep pace. We walked along the side of our house and out onto Albany Lane. We made it all the way to the intersection of Albany and Arbor, past the haunted house and Marley’s, before Aidy spoke. “What part of this is the act?” she asked me as we turned.

  She didn’t want me to answer.

  It was another seventeen steps before she spoke again. “Because I believe you when you tell me you’re okay, and I believe everyone else when they tell me you’re not.” The garbage bag thumped against her legs as she walked, catching between her thighs and tripping her up. She tossed it over her shoulder instead. Thirteen steps more. “You collapsed,” she said. “It was so scary. Then you stood and announced to everyone that you were gonna take a ‘little nap.’ Not even Nick could convince you to stay or drink some water. Or do anything to actually help you. You were all, I’m fine, I’m fine, and the part I don’t understand is that you actually looked like you were. You were smiling, Olivia. I couldn’t even follow you right away because we all had to help Teeny, who was about three seconds away from passing out too. That’s where I’m like, ugh, you wanted her to think there was a demon, because that’s the kind of person you are. Always looking for the best story. Trying to stop me from going in on you. But then I think about all that’s happened.” She hesitated. “I don’t know.”


  We made it to the end of the block, to the very dumpster eleven-year-old Nick hid behind after he left me in the Brickets’ shed. Aidy tossed our dirty clothes inside it. The lid closed with a pronounced thump, punctuating Aidy’s sharp turn. “I get home, and you’re already asleep on the couch. I shook you over and over, whispering your name, then screaming it. You wouldn’t wake up. I don’t get it. And I don’t know what to do anymore.” Tears welled in her eyes as she looked on expectantly, knowing full well this was the moment I had to come clean.

  Explaining my Marley to her could not go like it had with Nick. Aidy worked in literals. Marley transcended them. Still I tried unraveling it as best I could, hoping she’d know these truths were more truthful than other things I’d advertised as truths before.

  She leaned herself against the dumpster to listen.

  “Olivia,” she said through heaves, barely letting me get more than a few sentences out. “It doesn’t help you to see her in everything. Because you know what you’re not seeing at all?” Tension traveled up from the base of her and out through her mouth. “She was mean! Marley Bricket was mean, and unfair, and liked to pick on you because you were the youngest and you thought you were somebody special. She ripped you apart every chance she got, and I let her, because I looked up to her too. But now, if I could go back, I’d shut her down every time, because she died and you rewrote history to make her into someone worthy of the power we gave her.”

  The moon was majestic, a large glowing semisphere of yellowish gray. It illuminated the fresh gloss on Aidy’s cheeks.

  “You’re the one who’s rewritten who she was to us!” I screamed. “You made her into someone who could disappear, and we’d all get to keep living our lives as if she was never there in the first place!” This was the last of my murk inside me. The stuff at the very bottom, grimy and toxic. “I left Cadence and went to the camp. Put in the work at therapy. All of it. For you!” I slumped down beside her, leaning against the dumpster to catch my breath. “You told me I had to be okay. So I was.” Long, solitary seconds turned into drawn-out minutes. I fawned over the smudge covering the pallor on my knees, rubbing back and forth with excessive attention to detail, hoping for something to strike us both: inspiration, courage. Anything at all.