by Dan Rix
“We can use it to read the journal. It was your idea, remember?”
“Oh come on, it’s never going to pick that up,” said Megan. “Paper’s already paper-thin to begin with. It doesn’t even have a thickness. It has zero thickness. It’s one atom thick.”
“No, it’s not,” I said.
“It’s not going to work, Leona.”
“I bet it will,” I said boastfully. “Come on, let’s try it.”
So we rummaged around for the invisible journal, shut the blinds and turned off the lights, and gathered around the apparatus. I opened the journal and began flipping through invisible pages, but hesitated, realizing the flaw in my plan. “We’re going to have to go letter by letter . . . this is going to take hours.”
“How about the last thing she wrote?” Megan suggested. “The last thing before she killed herself? That’s where the crazy’s going to be.”
“Brilliant.” Now how to find the last page she’d written on . . .
I picked a page at random and rubbed it between my fingers, closing my eyes to focus. The surface felt bumpy and pock-marked.
Writing.
My pulse accelerated. I flipped another twenty pages or so and gently trailed my fingertips down the sheet. Again, bumpy.
So I flipped another twenty, and this time, the paper felt smooth and unblemished. A blank page.
I flipped back ten pages, concentration tight in my eyebrows. Bumpy.
Forward five. Smooth.
Back two. Smooth.
Back another two. A rutted texture mottled the top half of the page, but then the pad of my finger slid onto smooth ground. My eyes flew open. She’d written on the top half, but not the bottom.
This was the last page she’d written on.
My index finger slid horizontally, like I was reading braille out of thin air. At last, I honed in on the very last letter.
“Got it,” I said, bending the journal back so just that page hung down. I dipped it into the laser beam.
On the wall, the square edge of the paper swam through the red light, seeding tiny ripples. I moved it down until my index finger blocked the beam, then removed my finger.
A haze of red pulsated on the wall, random interference, but no letters.
“Move it around a bit,” said Megan.
I made tiny circles with the paper.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” she said. “It’s huge . . .”
“What? Where?” I said.
“Keep moving it—there! I think I see a P, but it’s reversed.”
And then I saw it too. A jagged shape floating in the smudge, barely visible—about a hundred times bigger than I’d expected. Only by moving it around did my eyes even register the pattern. Looping out of view was a monstrous letter P.
Megan grabbed a loose receipt and a pencil. “First letter . . . P . . . keep going.”
Thumbs sweaty on the page, I continued to slide it through the beam, making a circular motion. Huge letters flicked across the wall, tiny pieces at a time.
“That’s an I, and an H, and . . . an S?” Letter by letter, Megan copied it down, then stared at what she’d written. “Piss?”
“What?” I said, and the projected image jerked wildly. “No, no, no, keep going.” I resumed sliding the journal through the beam, trying not to shake so much. My hands were beginning to cramp up.
“A . . . G . . . N . . . T,” Megan muttered. “Wait, back up. That’s an I.” Her pencil eraser tore the receipt. “Okay, keep going.”
Sweat beaded on my forehead, and a gnawing ache spread through my stiffening knuckles. I needed to shake them out, but then we’d lose our place.
“D . . . L . . . I . . . U, maybe, then . . . uh . . .” she screwed up her eyes, “the number eight? Dude, hold still.”
“I’m trying,” I said, my fingers twitching badly. I needed a break.
“Okay . . . E . . . R . . . Y . . . um, then . . . E . . . H . . . T . . .”
“Screw this.” I collapsed against her bed, exhausted, and leaned Sarah’s journal back against the nightstand. “What do we have so far?”
Megan sounded out what she’d written. “Piss ah nidliub ery eht. Is that a different language?”
“We scanned it backward,” I said. “Reverse the letters.”
“Oh. Duh.” She stared at the receipt another moment. “They’re building a ship.”
“What?”
“That’s what it says . . . they’re building a ship.”
“Did you hear that?” Megan whispered, fumbling with the remote to pause the movie.
“Hear what?” I sat up in my sleeping bag and scanned her dark bedroom, lit in spooky shades of blue from the television. I was spending the night at her house again, since it was Friday. For the time being, we’d given up on translating Sarah’s journal . . . and figuring out what she’d meant about building a ship.
“I thought I heard footsteps,” said Megan.
“In here?” The thought gave me a jolt of fear.
“I’m not sure.” Her voice quavered. “Maybe it was nothing.”
Maybe it was Salamander the snake.
My gaze slid to the door, open eight inches. The dark hallway outside. “Megan, did you leave the door open?”
“Uh . . . I can’t remember.”
I shimmied out of my sleeping bag and pushed it shut. “Let’s keep doors shut, okay?”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t like waking up in the middle of the night and seeing creepy dark hallways outside of doors, okay? I always think there’s going to be a figure standing out there.”
“Yeah, that is fucking creepy.”
I crawled back into my sleeping bag, hyperalert now. The sudden movements circulated air around the bedroom, and I caught a smell. Like the forest. My nostrils flared.
Tentatively, Megan started the movie again.
But I was too on edge to pay attention now. Every sound made me tense up—the crinkle of Megan’s sleeping bag, a vibration in the floor underneath me, a dripping faucet somewhere else in the house.
And the slow, drawn-out creak of the floorboards next to my head.
I sat upright in a whirl of polyester. “Megan, stop it . . . stop it!”
Her eyes widened. “What?”
“Stop the movie!”
She obeyed. Silence.
I sat there, breathing, listening. “I think . . . I think there’s something else in here.”
Silently, she rose and flipped on the lights. Our eyes darted around the bedroom. We were alone. Nothing stirred.
“Hear anything?” I asked.
She shook her head.
A nervous lump rose in my throat, which I swallowed back down. I knew what I had to do.
I circled the room and reached my arms into empty air, probing all the hiding places—the corners, the closet, under the bed, the gap between her desk and her dresser—all the while bracing myself in case I touched something.
Something invisible.
Megan watched me, wide-eyed.
I combed my fingers across her bed, over her pillow, moving toward the nightstand—
The nightstand jiggled, and a tube of chapstick rolled onto the floor.
But I hadn’t touched it.
My gaze snapped to Megan’s, equally terrified.
She mouthed, “What do we do?”
“I don’t know,” I mouthed back. A weapon. We needed a weapon, a knife, the kitchen—
A force slammed my chest and pitched me onto the bed, knocked the wind out of me. The floorboard squeaked suddenly, violently, and a series of depressions squished into our sleeping bags in a beeline toward Megan.
She cowered to the side.
&nb
sp; The door banged open next to her and footsteps stomped up the hall, shaking the entire house. A few long seconds later, the front door opened and slammed.
Then silence.
I gasped for breath.
Megan was the first one to say it, her voice trembling. “There was someone invisible in my room. There was just someone invisible in my room.”
Chapter 16
I didn’t sleep well that night.
Huddled on my side, I stared into the dark crevice beneath Megan’s bed, my body rigid and wide awake, every muscle taut and quivering. I listened for footsteps, or the sound of someone breathing, or a creak in the hallway. Megan wheezed fitfully next to me. We had locked all the doors and checked all the windows, but that didn’t help.
Someone else knew about dark matter.
About invisibility.
The house felt unsafe, unclean. Sullied. Someone had been in this room. I breathed out slowly, silently, but a shudder caught me off guard. My polyester sleeping bag rustled, shooting me with needles of adrenaline.
Just me. It’s just me.
I’d never realized until now how many sounds there were at night. Little clicks and hums and creaks. Every noise could be an intruder, a peeping Tom, a murderer. How could I ever feel safe again?
Someone had invaded our home, our sacred space. They had violated our privacy.
Like I had done countless times to Emory.
Without warning, my heart was slamming at the thought of him, my breath coming in gasps, as if catching up for all that time I’d suppressed it while watching him in his bedroom. I couldn’t keep doing that to him.
Not after seeing what it was like to be on the receiving end.
Plus I didn’t need to watch him anymore.
I had seen enough of his pain to know I had to tell him, had to spill my guts, had to get it off my chest. I couldn’t hold it in any longer.
In the past week, telling him had transformed from a fantasy into an urgent need. It was the only way to cool the burning fever in my heart, even though the thought made my insides do corkscrews. I was so sick of this dance. First the haunting paranoia that they would find out my secret, then the reckless impulse to just spit it out, and then the sudden choking panic that made me swallow it back down. This torture had gone on long enough.
Tomorrow.
Just do it tomorrow.
Just get it over with, get it off my chest. Tell him. A brief episode of physical agony, and then it would be over. Go straight to his house first thing in the morning and confess everything.
There, I’d just made the decision.
I swallowed hard and turned over, regretting it already.
“Something’s missing,” Megan announced in the morning, standing in the center of her bedroom with her hands on her hips.
“Huh? What?” I’d just finished stuffing my sleeping bag, now so nervous I was shaking. Last night, while falling asleep, I’d decided to confess to Emory. What was I thinking? In the light of day, the act took on terrifying significance.
“I don’t know,” said Megan. “I just feel like something’s missing.”
I looked up. “You think he stole something?”
“Why else would he be in here? He didn’t assault us.”
“Speak for yourself,” I said, rubbing my bruised rib cage where an invisible palm had shoved me hard.
“I think he took something,” said Megan. “I can feel it. Yep.” She moved to her dresser and rummaged through her jewelry, then moved to the drawers.
“If he took something, we would have seen it float out of the room in his hand.”
“Unless he stuck it up his butt.”
I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, I’m sure that’s what he did, Megan.” I finished stuffing the sleeping bag and yanked the cord tight, and another nervous shudder passed through me. Oh God.
I had committed to doing it today.
As soon as I packed up.
Was I insane?
“He could have wrapped something in dark matter while we were watching the movie.” She finished searching the bottom drawer of her dresser and straightened up, peering toward the laptop on her desk. “He could have made something invisible.”
“Wait . . . how do we know it’s a he?”
“Because people who break into your house in the middle of the night are criminals, and criminals are automatically a he.”
“Yeah . . .” I swallowed my rising nausea and went back to packing, gathering my clothes and toothbrush and stuffing everything in my backpack. I couldn’t stay here any longer or else I probably would throw up. I couldn’t back down now. I’d made up my mind.
I was going to tell Emory everything.
“You’re leaving?” said Megan, a hint of fear in her voice.
“I, uh . . . I have something I need to do today.”
“Help me look first.”
“Look for what?” I was too preoccupied to follow the conversation.
She stared at me like I was an idiot. “What the invisible guy stole from my room. Help me look!”
“If he stole it, Megan, then we’re not going to find it.”
“We’ll narrow our search. Here—” she rushed across the room, “he was over by the nightstand. He knocked off a tube of chapstick, right?”
I humored her, and my voice sounded like it was a million miles away. “Is there anything valuable on your nightstand?”
“My phone’s still there . . . hmm . . . what else was on it?”
Suddenly, my eyes widened. “Megan!”
“What?” she said, startled.
“The journal . . . Sarah’s journal.”
“What about it?”
I dropped to all fours and felt frantically around the legs of the bedside table, where I’d leaned it yesterday. My hands passed through empty air. Just empty air. My gaze flicked to hers. “It’s gone.”
So someone else knew about dark matter, and they had snuck into Megan’s house to steal a journal in which a dead grad student had written something about them building a ship.
Who was them?
Whatever this was, whatever was going on here, I didn’t give a shit about it. Soon I would be in jail where I belonged. The dark matter had found me because I had sinned. I realized that now. It had found me because guilt was eating me alive, and it had shown me the way out.
I didn’t care about anything else.
Today I would confess.
My bike lay on its side behind me, wheels spinning lazily.
I wasn’t invisible.
But right now, standing in front of Emory Lacroix’s house in broad daylight with the midmorning sun scorching my T-shirt and jeans, I felt more naked than ever.
I knew what I had to do.
Tell him I was the one responsible. Me. No one else. Leave Megan out. It had been me behind the wheel, me who suggested we hide the body, me who picked the place. The guilty one was me. I had let Megan carry my guilt because I was too weak to carry it myself.
There was nothing more cowardly. Nothing.
Taking fast, deep breaths, I hyperventilated my way to Emory’s door. At some point, my stomach had been replaced with a writhing nest of garden snakes, each one trying to slither up my throat. Through sheer will I suppressed my gag reflex, all the while trying desperately to knead the heat back into my icy fingertips. Electricity crackled in my nerves.
I reached the porch, feeling like my legs were noodles.
My finger reached forward on its own, as if someone else controlled it. Under my clammy skin, the doorbell felt hot.
Ding-dong.
The sound sent my heart reeling into a sickening somersault, and my body broke into shivers.
I couldn’t do this.
I couldn’t be here.
Oh God, what was I thinking?
Footsteps shuffled inside the house, and a woman answered the door—Ashley’s mother. Too soon. Way too soon. I froze, wasn’t ready, couldn’t meet her eyes, and fidgeted on the doormat as I mumbled something incoherent about Emory.
He alone must hear my confession.
“Come on in,” she said, and yelled up the stairs. “Emory!”
Her voice made me flinch. I took an impossibly heavy step into the foyer, wheezing a little.
“Can I get you something to drink?” said his mom.
“No thanks,” I croaked
Something hot and wet touched my hand, and I yanked it back. The Golden Retriever was licking my fingers, tail wagging. I patted his head, wishing my life could be as simple as his.
“Leona Hewitt,” drawled Emory’s voice from the bottom of the stairs, yanking my gaze to him. “What a pleasant surprise.”
His voice lacked conviction.
“I’ll leave you two,” said his mom, shuffling into the other room.
I wanted to shout, Don’t leave! When she left, I would be alone with him. And then there would be nothing standing between me and confessing. I shuffled my feet.
He wore jeans and the same letterman jacket I’d seen him wearing at Andrew’s party, hands shoved in his pockets.
I tried not to think of him naked, and thought of him naked.
Instant heat rushed to my face. “You play sports?” I blurted out to cover, nodding to his jacket.
He leaned against the wall, assessing me. “Did. Football.”
I raised an eyebrow.
“Not this season.”
“Oh,” I said, nodding. “Now you smoke cigarettes.”
“You smoke pot.”
“I used to,” I said defensively. “Not anymore.”
“And I didn’t used to smoke cigarettes. In the end, it’s all even.” He continued to stare at me, making me want to shrink.
“How’d you know I used to smoke?” I said.
“That’s what people say.”