Translucent

by Dan Rix

  Maybe that was why I kept slipping up around him.

  Part of me wanted him to know.

  But I couldn’t let him know. I couldn’t tell anyone. Ever. No one could know. I had never been more aware of that than right now, locked in this room with him. I set the frames back on the desk and tucked my hair behind my ear, taking shallow breaths.

  Here it comes . . .

  “Who killed my sister?” he said.

  “No one killed her,” I said, my voice dry and raspy.

  “Look at you, you’re a nervous wreck. I don’t know whether to feel sorry for you or pissed off.”

  “Don’t feel sorry for me,” I said.

  He crossed his arms and nailed me with a probing glare. “I got all night. So do you. We can do this the easy way, or we can do this the hard way. Either way, you’re going to tell me what you know.”

  “I don’t know anything,” I said, my voice rising.

  “You’re not acting like someone who doesn’t know anything.”

  I lowered my eyes, straining to draw in air.

  “You going to puke again?”

  “Shut up.”

  “What do you know?”

  I said nothing.

  “Leona . . . Leona . . . oh, Leona—”

  I shot him a glare.

  “What’s your deal? You freak out every time I show up. You freak out every time I mention my sister.” He leaned forward, eyes menacing. “Why do you freak out?”

  Suddenly, I had an idea.

  Something Megan had said . . . looking up a hot senior isn’t weird, Leona

  I looked Emory straight in the eye. “Because I’m in love with you.”

  “Bullshit,” he said, calling my bluff.

  “Yeah, my friend pointed you out on the first day of school, and I’ve had a huge crush on you ever since. You looked at me, and I got so nervous I threw up. I do that sometimes.”

  His eyes narrowed a little. “Double bullshit.”

  “You don’t believe me? Ask my friend Megan.” Knowing her, that would be her default story, anyway.

  Emory shook his head and muttered, “Hard way it is.” Then he stepped closer, invading my personal space.

  Instinctively, I stepped backward, knocking another frame off the desk. “What are you doing?”

  “You want to play games?” He backed me into the wall, eyes menacing. “Let’s play games.” He cupped his hand behind my neck and kissed me roughly on the mouth.

  Huh? Caught off guard, I twisted my face away from him and shoved him away hard, more stunned than anything. “What are you doing?”

  “You’re a liar,” he spat.

  He’d just called my bluff.

  I fumbled around for an explanation. “I . . . I wasn’t ready.”

  He glared at me. “What the hell was that? That wasn’t a kiss. That was bullshit . . . just like every goddamn thing out of your mouth, Leona. Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.” He whipped to the side and delivered a violent kick to the desk, which wobbled violently and dumped the frames back to the floor. His shoe dented the wood. “That wasn’t a fucking kiss.”

  I had to do something.

  “No, this is a kiss.” I grabbed his letterman jacket and yanked him in to kiss him for real this time. Even though my entire body protested, I made him believe it, until he pushed me away and slumped against the wall.

  “You have no idea what it’s like,” he moaned through gritted teeth. “No idea . . . hoping every day, hoping maybe, just maybe, she’s still alive out there. Wandering around, lost. That’s the worst part . . . that tiny little bit of hope. It’s like a piece of glass right there—” he pointed to his heart. “A little piece of glass stuck right there.” His eyes teared up, and he wiped his face with his hands. “I was supposed to protect her, my baby sister . . .” He pounded the wall and sobbed into his elbow. “I was supposed to protect her!”

  I couldn’t speak, couldn’t breathe.

  His words closed around me like a noose.

  He looked up, eyes red. “Can you tell me anything?”

  Feeling like my throat had sealed shut, I nodded.

  He needed to know.

  In order to move on, he needed to know.

  So I told him.

  “Your sister Ashley is dead. I saw her die.”

  Later that night I shivered on the edge of my mattress, suffering wave after wave of icy dread as I stared down into the open contact case.

  I saw her die.

  Those words would come back to haunt me.

  Emory hadn’t asked me any other questions at the party. He’d merely nodded with a vacant look in his eyes as if he sensed my sincerity . . . and sensed that I couldn’t tell him more than that.

  Maybe just knowing was enough. Maybe he would leave it alone now, leave me alone. Maybe he would be able to have closure now, and I would be able to heal. Maybe it would be enough.

  It wouldn’t be enough.

  I rocked forward and backward, chewing the skin off my lip as a little voice tormented me.

  Why’d you tell him, Leona?

  You already got away with it. Why’d you tell him?

  I shut my eyes, trying to squeeze it all out. They were only lulled right back open, my gaze drawn right back to the bottom of the contact lens case.

  You kissed him.

  Why’d you kiss him, Leona?

  Can you imagine if he knew . . . ?

  That he kissed his sister’s killer?

  Can you imagine, Leona?

  “Shut up, shut up,” I breathed through my fists, trying desperately to warm my chilled fingers. I had left the party and hiked down Mission Ridge Road to catch a bus home, and it had been oddly cold for a September night. I hadn’t bothering to tell Megan I’d left.

  She would be furious.

  Technically, I hadn’t told Emory anything he hadn’t already suspected. I’d just confirmed that Ashley was dead . . . because that was the right thing to do. I hadn’t admitted guilt.

  He can see right through you.

  He knows.

  A quiet shuffle sounded out in the hall, yanking my gaze off the contact case. My pulse rose in tempo. I listened.

  Nothing.

  My door hung open an inch. Through the gap, just blackness.

  My parents still weren’t home.

  “Who’s there?” I called.

  No answer, no other sounds. Just my own thudding heart. I leaned over and hastily screwed on the lid of the contact lens case, in case someone accidentally kicked it over—

  My bedroom door creaked.

  I tensed and glanced up. The door inched open, creaking on its hinges until it came to rest a foot open, wobbling a little. The light from my bedroom spilled through the gap into the dark hallway, gleaming off the old pictures of family lining the walls.

  “Who’s . . . who’s there?” I stammered. “Mom? . . . Dad?”

  I would have heard their car.

  I rose and tiptoed to the doorway, paused for a nerve-wracking second, and lunged out.

  No one.

  Then what opened the door? It couldn’t have been a draft, all the windows were shut. A smell wafted through the air. Recently disturbed dust, a hint of ash—

  Warm air blew against my fingertips, and my hand recoiled.

  Petrified, I gaped into the blackness at my feet. Slowly, my eyes adjusted. On the wall, a rectangular shape came into view.

  I recognized it.

  A vent.

  I breathed out a sigh of relief.

  The furnace had just come on, blowing air through the house. That was what had swung the door in. Probably the first time the heat had come on in months, hence the smell o
f singed dust. Summer was almost over—it was mid-September—and the night did have a particular bite to it.

  I retreated into my bedroom, pulling the door shut behind me, grateful for the warm air swirling through the house.

  Chapter 9

  “Megan, would you kindly explain what this is doing next to your bed?” My voice had an accusing tone as I pushed aside the miniature globe on her nightstand, revealing a wrinkled newspaper article cut from the Santa Barbara News Press. The title had caught my eye.

  Sleepwalking Teen Vanishes into Thin Air

  I scanned the article, feeling faintly nauseous. About fifteen-year-old Ashley Lacroix, her increasingly frequent episodes of sleepwalking, and how on the morning of July first, her family had found her bed empty, covers thrown aside.

  She was never seen again.

  “Why is this here?” I asked again.

  Megan ignored me, doodling in the corner of her math book.

  “Megan . . .”

  “What?” she snapped, looking up.

  I held up the article. “We talked about this.”

  “Yeah, so what?”

  “Why do you have this? Were you her friend? Was she in one of your classes? Did you know her? When the cops come and ask why this is sitting on your desk, what are you going to tell them?”

  She glared at me.

  “You need to get rid of it.” My patience was wearing thin. “We talked about this. No articles, no mementos, no journaling about it, no looking for details on the internet . . . because that’s what guilty people do.”

  “It’s still a weird story.”

  “Not to other people, Megan. Other people don’t cut out articles like this, only criminals do. They become obsessed, and that’s how they give themselves away. It’s psychology.”

  “Kind of like how you’re obsessed with Emory?” she said.

  “That’s not the same,” I said hotly, feeling heat rush to my cheeks.

  “You’re blushing.”

  I bit off my next words. “Just get rid of it, okay?”

  “Okay,” she sighed, crumpling it into a ball and tossing it into the trash. This probably wasn’t the first time she’d thrown it away. The cutout already had signs of being crumpled. As soon as I was gone, the urge would come over her, and she would rescue the article from the trash, flatten it, and put it by her bed again.

  To remind her of what we’d done.

  Then she would get paranoid and throw it away. Then right before her mom came to empty the trash, she would fetch it again, not wanting to lose it.

  I knew the cycle, but said nothing.

  She was right. I was blaming her for my own slipup, taking my frustrations out on her. I was the one who had screwed up. Soon Emory Lacroix would come asking for more information, and now that he knew what I knew, he would never give up.

  Our homework lay before us, all blank. Megan and I had the same AP Calculus class, and this week we had a huge problem set. I’d gotten halfway through reading the first problem and given up.

  We were both going to fail every class this semester. That was obvious. I hardly cared.

  “I looked up his dad again,” Megan said quietly.

  My skin bristled. “What part of They can track our browser history don’t you understand?”

  “Just thought you’d want to know I looked him up again.”

  “Mr. Lacoix?”

  “Doctor Lacroix. He has a PhD.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because I found something weird,” she said. “But you don’t care at all, so fine. I won’t tell you.”

  “Good,” I said. “I don’t want to hear it.”

  “Good, because I don’t want to tell you.”

  “You just said that.”

  “Why are we still talking about this?”

  “Because you’re a butthead.” On my graph paper, I focused hard on outlining the individual letters of my name, brows tugged together in concentration. The silence wore on.

  I found something weird.

  It nagged at my brain.

  Finally I could bear it no longer and exhaled loudly. “Fine. What did you find, Megan?”

  “Oh, you do care?”

  “Don’t be patronizing.”

  With a smug smile, she woke up her laptop and navigated to an open tab. “So I looked up that defense contractor he works for—Rincon Systems, or whatever. Guess who they’re under contract with?”

  “Who?” I said.

  “The Defense Department.”

  “No duh,” I said. “That’s the definition of a defense contractor.”

  “Okay, shut up. But guess what branch?”

  “No idea.”

  “AFSPC,” she said, turning to me with a twinkle in her eye. “Air Force Space Command.”

  I stared at her. “Wait . . . Major Connor?”

  “Yeah, Vandenberg Air Force Base . . . the Space and Missile Systems Center in Los Angeles . . . it was their helicopters that landed at the crater, it was their hazmat team, they were the ones that decontaminated our rooms. And Dr. Lacroix’s company was just awarded a four-year contract with them.”

  “That’s just a coincidence, right?” I said. “Defense contracting is a big sector in Santa Barbara, so that’s not weird, right?”

  “You mean, that we killed his daughter and crossed paths with his funding agency? It’s a little weird.”

  “Huh,” I said, staring at the squiggles on my graph paper. Thinking about it, that seemed like either an impossible coincidence or a very minor one not even worth taking note of. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out which.

  “But as weird as that is, it’s not as weird as this,” said Megan.

  I looked up. “There’s more?”

  “Mmm-hmm,” she said. “His company just put out this huge document, over two-thousand pages long. Apparently, it was part of the bid that earned them the contract. The primary author is John Lacroix.”

  “Emory’s dad?”

  “Right. Check out the title.” She tilted the screen so I could see better.

  I leaned in and read, and a chill went down my spine.

  Defending Earth in the Worst-Case Scenario: Efficacy of Modern Weaponry against an Extra-Terrestrial Threat

  Before I could react, Megan’s phone buzzed. A text message.

  She stared at her phone. “Uh, Leona . . .”

  “What? What is it?”

  “It’s Sarah . . . the grad student. Look—” She held the phone out to me so I could read the text.

  Get over here now. You guys need to see this.

  “I tried everything,” the grad student shouted over her shoulder, leading us at a near sprint through a maze of dark linoleum hallways toward the physics lab in Broida Hall after she’d unlocked the doors for us. “And I mean everything. Visible light didn’t work, so I tried infrared, ultraviolet, microwaves, X-rays, gamma rays. Nothing showed up. I even bombarded it with Alpha particles, heavier stuff too. Gold nuclei. Whatever I could get my hands on, but it all goes right through like it’s not even there. It bothered the heck out of me.”

  As we ran, an excited adrenaline buzzed under my skin.

  We were onto something here. A major discovery.

  Dark matter.

  “Then I started losing my slides,” said Sarah. “They were turning invisible on me. Once the stuff gets on a surface, it wants to spread out and cover the whole thing. I’ve seen that behavior in superfluids before. Helium, for example. You get it cold enough, and it exhibits zero viscosity and starts doing all sorts of strange shit. It’ll climb right out of its container if you let it. Basically, I think we’re looking at a room temperature superfluid.”

 
“A superfluid?” I said dumbly.

  “Oh, and just a heads up, the stuff grows in the presence of human tissue.”

  Megan and I exchanged a nervous glance.

  “The invisibility has to be an optical effect resulting from the superfluid state itself,” she continued. “I figured it was bending light around the object, and since light would obviously take longer to go around an object than straight through it, I knew there had to be a way to measure it, so I did a little experiment. That’s when it started getting weird.”

  “What do you mean? What happened?” I said.

  “You’ll see.”

  Triggered by motion sensors, fluorescent tubes flickered on behind us, too slow to keep up. It was nearing midnight. At last, we burst into the brightly lit lab, where a half dozen empty Starbucks cups littered the floor under Sarah’s computer chair.

  “There . . . that’s the apparatus.” She pointed at the two-by-four, easily ten feet long, that hung off both sides of her desk, before she stooped to catch her breath and brushed behind her ears the frizzy red flyaways that had come undone from her bun.

  Fixed to the two-by four were a series of half-silvered mirrors at different angles, a red laser pointer, and a lens that magnified the beam of the laser into a dull red blob on a projection screen.

  “That,” she said, grinning, “is how we see it.”

  “How does it work?” Megan asked, as we cautiously approached the apparatus.

  Sarah took a deep breath. “You guys know how light is a wave, right?”

  “It’s a wave and a particle.” I said with a superior tone. I’d taken physics my freshman year to fulfill the requirement.

  “It’s not a particle,” said Sarah. “It’s just a wave. Okay, so you know how light interferes with itself?”

  “Whoa, slow down,” said Megan.

  “Think of two beams of light as two squiggly lines,” said Sarah. “If they line up, so the peaks line up with the peaks and the troughs line up with the troughs, the beams add together and they’re brighter, right? But imagine if they don’t quite line up, and the peaks of one end up in the troughs of the other, and vice versa. The beams are going to cancel. They interfere.”