“She never says it,” Bigs whispered. He wouldn’t say the word. No one could. Her eyes that day, so full of mischief, sparkling with countless plans yet to be carried out. Those eyes told me her own death was never one of her plans. But her words seemed to scream it. Which one was right?
“I can’t accept it unless she says it somewhere,” Bigs said, much louder.
“But Biggy, she was so lost,” Teeny countered, tucking her arm under her brother’s and leaning against their titanium connection. Tears fell out from beneath her fanned lashes, so long they grazed her cheekbone when she closed her eyes.
“Are you sure this is everything?” Aidy asked Harrison.
“We can definitely go back to check all the places,” he said. “I mean, I found something in every spot. So unless there’s more than one thing hidden in each place, this is everything.”
Aidy tapped my shoulder. “What about in your room, Olivia? Is there more I didn’t find?”
“I don’t think so.”
“What do you mean you don’t think so?”
“Exactly that.”
“Did you write this journal for her?”
“No.”
“But you wrote our letters?” Aidy asked.
“I typed them.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I do. But I’ve said all there is to say.” I was being frustrating. But it was the truth, in all its imperfect glory.
“When you’re stuck in a room with no exit…” Nick started.
Harrison did a three-sixty. “What do you mean? The door’s right there.”
Aidy, Nick, and I exchanged knowing glances, a substitute for the smiles we would’ve shared if the mood was lighter. I always knew we’d be forever stuck in the room of Marley’s death, but it was a surprise to find new ways of surviving it, like the three of us landing on the same side of something. The moment flickered by, folding back into the shadows as quickly as it came.
There was so much to see, even in places I’d searched through for years and years.
Marley’s journal gave us no out. No matter how much he wanted to, Nick could not break down a wall with the weight of the words she wrote.
Marley had left it up to us to decide. Did she know the gun was loaded? Why wouldn’t she tell us she was hurting? Why would she ruin Nick’s life by asking him to do what she couldn’t? They were ugly thoughts. The ugliest of Marleys lived inside them. They were the reason the room had no exit. Uncertainty was a trap we could not work around.
I neared a full panic, clutching my knees tight, trying to find my breath before I lost it again. If I wanted to know everything, I had to deal with what it took.
Ruby placed her hand on my knee. “I have an idea,” she said, redirecting my focus. “If this is all we have, and it’s not enough to know for sure, we have to make our own kind of peace with it.” She gently shook the journal out of my balled fists. “I could look at all of this for hours and come up with a million points for either column, but in these past few days alone, I’ve barely eaten. I haven’t slept. I’m so sick over this every second I’m awake.” She started neatening the pile of hidden objects. “We should hold our own memorial.”
Ruby streamlined the thoughts clanging into me. Cadence did not know how to remember our Marley, because Cadence didn’t know our Marley. Cadence’s Marley was yet another of her infinite iterations, and we’d been memorializing that version for five years. She was dead and gone. Buried under our constant attention to her foam-board stare.
Ruby started fitting all the hidden objects into the wooden box. Aidy took a permanent marker and wrote MARLEY. on the top. A period for a girl who did not deal in sort-ofs or maybes, yet left her whole life as a question mark for us to forever ponder.
Our whole group traveled down the center of Albany Lane. The sky had fallen into a deep slumber, so dark the streetlights could only touch the edges of each intersection, waiting for us like mile markers.
I took a spot next to Ruby at the back of our V. I didn’t need to be up front anymore. It made no difference. We’d all get there, whether or not I was the one to lead us. Instead, I snapshotted each person, determined to preserve the memory of the night.
Because there would be no next time. I felt it like I felt Marley. Impossible to explain, but real all the same. If there was an acceptable way to move that was slower than walking, like getting on my stomach and slithering toward Cadence Park, I would’ve done it, if only to hold on longer.
Teeny wore jean shorts and a navy-blue crop top that sat right above her navel, showing a hint of the tattoo that traced her ribs—her brother’s time of birth. Her braids were so long they almost covered the ink. She stretched her fingers out like the air was water to wade in, and she was testing the temperature.
The night was hers.
Bigs, in a maroon shirt and black mesh shorts, looked across the street to his twin as she did this, her motions a language he spoke fluently. He joined her in touching the night by looking up to the stars.
The night was his.
Harrison had on his old tennis team shirt. It said SHIN on the back, with MVP written below. He walked a few paces behind Aidy, following her as he always had. And maybe always would.
It seemed then that they were each other’s compasses, sometimes flitting too quickly between directions, but ultimately headed the same way. It was yet another Marley who had wedged between them, desperate to be acknowledged, the two of them not letting it happen, afraid of what it meant. I could see her there, sideways like Harrison and Aidy were connected rocks she’d hammered into, and she’d gotten stuck in the middle, so immobile she could do nothing but wait for them to notice. If they would let her pass all the way through, the jagged line she’d cut into each of them would sit flush, leaving only a hairline fracture in place of what was once a gaping hole. Then Aidy wouldn’t have to lead with anger all the time. She could heal.
Harrison sped up to reach for Aidy’s hand. She grabbed on, lifting their tightly balled palms to her mouth for a gentle kiss, creating a little more space for their Marley to one day sneak out.
Harrison smiled the widest smile I’d ever seen, his teeth glowing against the dark.
The night was his.
Aidy walked proudly at the tip of the V, wearing a striped bow-neck shirt and her favorite high-waisted black shorts. Her hair was pulled into a neat ponytail that was high enough to create a waving waterfall down the sides of her head. With her unlinked hand, she held the box of Marley like she sometimes held me, willing it to be okay.
The night was hers.
Ruby leaned into my side, her hand in mine like always, ready to go wherever I needed her. Even in the dark, her wine-tipped hair was distinct against her warm skin and painted lips. A long, black tank swished against her leggings. Her eyes were all around us, taking in every moment as I tried to, another memento we both wished to keep. She picked up a rock instead, twirling it between her fingers. It was an item to tuck away in our box of trinkets, looking mundane but so full of significance, something physical to remember the untouchable. She pressed it to her chest.
The night was hers.
And on the other side of the street, diagonal from Ruby and me, filling in the Nick-shaped space that had shadowed my life for five whole years, walked the impossible boy himself, towering over his old outline. He twisted time in his white tee and jeans, changed and unchanging, his cheeks as bashful but his eyes no longer cheerful; instead, weary and cautious and still somehow hopeful, the curse of the life of people such as us. He looked over his shoulder, passing me a glance that burst into flames.
The night was his.
Then there was me, of course, little Olivia Stanton in Marley’s sky-blue denim romper, a cardigan tied around my waist. Dirty tennis shoes on my feet. Always dressed for possibility. Maybe I’d need to run. Maybe it would be cold.
Maybe I’d need to look nice. Maybe Everything was Something.
The night was mine.
Once we passed the first intersection, we entered the block that belonged to Ruby and the Campbells. Ruby stopped inside her house to grab something, slinking in and out without turning on a single light, no comment toward what she’d taken, only that it was necessary.
“Anything else?” Aidy asked when Ruby came back, the first words spoken aloud since we’d left.
“Shovels,” Bigs said. When we got to his house, he opened the garage and grabbed two. He held one in each hand, waiting to hear what else we needed.
There were many things we each wanted, but we had all we needed. We continued along Albany, trudging up the steep incline, a leg-scorching task that always signified the last hurdle before relief.
A warm glow from the streetlamps surrounded the swing sets and wood chips of Cadence Park. Pushing on, our pace accelerated, somewhere between walking and jogging. Every few steps became a long sliding skip, each person ready to reach this sacred space of ours. The hot breath of night blew on our backs, egging us on, conspiring with us. Our V turned single file as Aidy led us through the playground and down into the bowl. We coiled around until we formed a circle in the center of the dry grass.
“We made it,” Aidy said, a bit breathless. No car had seen us walking. No cell phone had rung to tell one of us to go home. We were intact.
“Let’s dig the hole,” Bigs said, already breaking ground in the bone-dry soil. The tip of his shovel dug down and flipped back up, more force than he anticipated, creating a firework of grass and dirt, sparks landing on Teeny.
“Xander!” she yelled. She picked up a handful of loosened soil and threw it back at him.
“Sorry, T,” he said. He didn’t even brush her revenge dirt off his shirt. He kept digging, much more carefully.
Harrison picked up the other shovel and joined him. “How deep are we going?”
“Not very,” Bigs told him.
It still took longer than expected to carve out a satisfactory shape. As the rest of us waited for Bigs and Harrison to finish, we huddled together. The closeness was a hug, so tight my busted nose could smell perfumes and body sweat and a trace of all the drinks Harrison had made. Nothing hurt much then, not my head or my nose or my heart.
Bigs and Harrison set down their shovels to wipe their foreheads at the exact same time, which gave me the bizarre thought that maybe twins were twins with everyone, just by nature. As if they couldn’t help but link right up to someone else’s movements because they were so in tune with what it was to share space with someone.
Maybe everyone was a twin, in some way. I leaned closer to Teeny to test it out, just enough for the pressure of my shoulder to seem accidental. She matched me right away, the two of us conjoined at nearly identical heights. Maybe it meant nothing, but even nothing was something, and I liked the idea of her and me as twins of some sort. Twins of circumstance, forever connected.
Aidy opened her purse and took out the flashlights. She passed them out to us, ignoring questions about their purpose. Once we each had one, she sat down a way back from the discarded dirt. “Ruby, do you know how you want to start this?”
“I do.”
We unpacked ourselves to let Ruby through, then coiled back around into our circle, sitting legs crossed with our hands in our laps. Aidy turned on her flashlight and pointed it toward the discarded dirt. We copied. All our beams looked like rays, the hole in the ground our sun.
Ruby stayed standing. The wooden box was beneath her feet. She considered it, then picked it up to hold, her fingers tracing Marley’s name. “When she left us, we were supposed to forever ask, How did this happen?” she said; a question I’d repeated more times than I could count. “How did she get her hands on such an ugly thing? How did she not know it was loaded? Who turned off the safety? Why would she play with it? We had to think in consequence and in regret, but we didn’t think of any answers. Looking at her life before that moment was a no-no. But you guys, we’ve always been the kids who dug around where we shouldn’t. And not one of us touched it after she died.” She stopped moving her fingers. “Except for Olivia.”
It was like all the lights in the ground turned to face me. I shifted to find a position that would make me more comfortable, not that such a thing existed. Ruby had created a moment designed for squirming.
“Asking questions without looking for answers is an easy way to live. I know I liked it. I bet all of you did too. Olivia did the heavy lifting for us. She was keeping tabs on everything so the rest of us didn’t have to: speaking at the memorials, helping the committee set up scholarships. Younger than all of us and doing all the work. For five years, I watched her. I could see how it wore her down, but for some reason, I didn’t think I should help. It felt like an invasion of privacy or something. This was her thing now. Best to stay out of her way.”
The lights brightened.
“Why did I think that was what I was supposed to do? Why was I doing what I thought I was supposed to, anyway? When have we ever done that? We ignored Olivia. Let people who didn’t know her try to help her. When we were younger, we treated figuring things out like it was our job. It should have been us that did this with her.”
Now everyone had to share in the squirm of the exposure.
“The reality is, the answers don’t make sense. Yeah, there’s some evidence that suggests Marley might have made Nick… take her life. It’s way more likely it was a terrible accident that can’t be erased, no matter what we do, or say, or create to try. There is no easy out. Why did we try to make one? Why did we automatically think the easy way was the best way? Are you noticing how many more questions we’ve created because we ignored the first ones?”
She held the box closer to her. “I look at this, and I can imagine Marley climbing up a tree behind City Hall and tucking the map into some little nook no one would ever think to see. I don’t care what Olivia did. I know in my heart that this all came from Marley. We all do. That’s why we’re here, regardless of whatever other reasons you all made up to explain to yourself why we’re all basically adults and we’re at the playground with flashlights and a box of pretend. We’re here because we love Marley, and we love Olivia, and we know the two are not that different.”
The grass under me bristled. I tugged at it, holding a handful, rubbing the dirt into my palms.
Ruby knelt. “Marley, the girl I loved so desperately. My first crush. My worst crush.” She laughed. “My biggest enemy and my favorite friend. A villain and a hero. All of the things any girl could ever want to be. Smart and tough and proud, staying friends with us younger Albany kids because she liked us better than the people in high school. She loved us, and we loved her, as imperfect as she was. But we missed how much she needed our help. We were too busy looking at other things to see it. The thing is, we all see Olivia. I know we do. I watched everyone’s faces when she came up with that broken nose. I felt the room sink away when she fainted.”
I closed my eyes.
There was an activity we did a lot at Camp Califree. In front of a small group, two people would stand and get a suggestion from the group leader. Something random, like hat. From there, they had to make up a scene using the suggestion. The only rule was that they had to agree with everything the other person did and said. The small idea was to help us see it’s okay to fail, and to trust the other people in our lives. The big idea was to help learn how to navigate conversations that might turn toward whatever sent us to Camp Califree in the first place. To help free us of the fear of talking about it. Or talking at all.
From the periphery of myself, I could see how it was helpful. I’d already faced constant scenarios where I had to talk about what happened to Marley. I didn’t just talk, I relived, climbing right back inside that hot July afternoon, the metallic smell of her fresh blood curdling up under my nostrils as I did
. I was constantly swept away by the rushing tide that was the loss of her.
The activity reaffirmed that I didn’t have to make it so hard on myself. Life was a performance. Like Marley had always taught me. As long as I could read what the other person wanted, I truly had the power, even if I was going along with their idea. I learned to write myself the best role that way. To swiftly pivot and swirl and turn and climb until I hovered above the reality of my life, crafting myself into someone everyone liked better.
What I never took into account was how my kind of story ended. Living so high above everyone else meant I either floated away or they climbed up to meet me in the clouds. And there they were, a ladder leaning right onto the teetering edge I’d constructed above them, extending their arms, ready to help me back down. I could not catch my tears. The dirt in my hands started turning to mud.
“Marley’s mom and dad needed to be better people, and they weren’t,” Ruby continued. “Let that be a lesson to us. We can be better. We should think of her every time we hop a fence instead of opening the gate. Or peek under the bed at a new friend’s house to see what interesting things we might find. That’s what we owe her. So, we’re going to get up here and cry our eyes out. Tell the stories we thought we forgot. Put this box in the ground not to bury it, but to keep it as a secret monument. This is who we were. We owned this place. The kids of Albany Lane.” Ruby placed the wooden box into the hole. “Let’s make it so that we never again have to ask ourselves, How did this happen?”
It wasn’t exactly as I imagined, but the night was becoming everything I wanted. It took my best friend to make it happen. Even though I’d tried to hide, she saw me anyway.
When the Light Went Out Page 20