by Barry Lyga
“I hear you,” Dean said, his tone rising. “But don’t you think you’re blowing this out of proportion a little bit?”
Marcus found himself licking his lips again, stalling as he gathered his calm. He did not, in fact, think he was blowing this out of proportion. Not a little bit. Not a lot. Not at all. The ease with which Jay had produced and wielded that knife concerned him. A split-second decision and Dean’s suggestion to hit the high beams had been the difference between a crazy night and a night in jail for Jay and probably the rest of them. Marcus and Antoine, certainly. Just being crime-adjacent would be enough for the cops in Canterstown to slap handcuffs on two Black teens. Never mind that those same cops had no doubt cheered on Black Lightning during the county-wides in the spring; at the end of the day, if he wasn’t entertaining, he was dangerous.
“What do you think is gonna happen, if they find out we’ve been breaking in with him? You think you’re gonna get good recommendation letters for college?”
“Plus, we’ve all been slacking off because Jay was going to fix our grades,” Brian added. “And now it’s too late to catch up. You want to be applying to college with lousy grades and a B&E on your record?”
“We need to make sure he keeps his mouth shut,” Marcus said.
Dean pursed his lips. “That sounds like a threat, man. Come on. It’s Jay. What do you want to do, go after him with this and make him promise to behave?”
This was a hunting knife that Dean plucked from the gun rack mounted over his bed.
“No one’s saying hold a knife to his throat,” Marcus said, then startled at his own words because now he had uttered those words.
“Reason with him,” Brian suggested. “And if that doesn’t work, we find a way to intimidate him.”
Dean clucked his tongue as he flipped the knife around and around in his hands. “Jay’s never been intimidated in his life.”
Brian finally came away from the door and stood next to Marcus, putting a hand on his shoulder in solidarity. “He’s never had his best friends gang up on him before, man. Come on!”
“What does Antoine think?” Dean asked suddenly.
The question snuck up on Marcus like the hands coming out of the mirror at the end of Phantasm. Because the question’s innocuousness tilted out of balance with its core truth: He had no idea what Antoine thought on this issue.
Once upon a time, there would have been no stumble, no hesitation. He and Antoine agreed on most things, on the things that mattered, at least. And more recently, had he not sensed Antoine’s position, he would have sussed it out or just asked.
But he hadn’t spoken to Antoine about Jay because he hadn’t spoken to Antoine much at all. Other than Pass the salt at the dinner table or Did you steal my practice shoes?, they’d hardly exchanged words since the argument in the locker room.
And what really gnawed at Marcus’s sense of self and balance right now wasn’t that he didn’t know Antoine’s mind on the issue of Jay, nor even that he hadn’t asked.
It was that it hadn’t even occurred to him to consider what Antoine thought until Dean—Dean!—posed the question.
“Antoine’s not sitting in front of you,” Marcus snapped, more harshly than deserved.
“What do you want to do about it?” Dean asked. “You know Jay—if we tell him to take a chill pill, he’ll do something crazier than usual, just to make a point.”
The beanbag beneath him tilted and made a shushing sound as Marcus leaned back. “I don’t know. I guess we just wanted to know what was in your head.”
“And whose side you’re on,” Brian supplied. “Because right now, there aren’t any sides, but who knows?”
Dean shrugged. “I don’t know yet. But I’ll think about it.”
Marcus figured that was probably the best he could hope for.
THE PRESENT: LIAM
He picked up El outside her house. Grimacing, her lips set in a firm line, she didn’t so much as peck him on the cheek.
“Let’s go,” she said.
He didn’t ask where; he could tell she had no idea. Away was the only answer.
So he drove in silence. What must it be like, he wondered, to think your father could be a murderer? The evidence was thin but incontrovertible. It had always been likely that Antoine was somehow involved—his running away to Mexico seemed too convenient to be mere coincidence. But it had been an accepted piece of town lore, of family history, for more than three decades. A strong wall, built over time, reinforced with grief and certainty. It would take a hell of a sledgehammer to knock it down.
A sledgehammer made of DNA and handwriting analysis.
“I’m really sorry,” he said.
Speechless and staring out her window, she sought him over the center console, settling a hand on his thigh. Instant electricity, instant shame. He drove with his left hand, his right resting atop her hand. The sky clotted with clouds, blocking out the moon and the stars. Purple-and-gray shadows saturated the buildings.
With no conscious thought, he guided them to the Wantzler factory. A single smokestack coughed black smoke against the charcoal-scudded sky.
“He’ll be working tonight,” she mumbled.
“Oh. Sorry.” He put the car in gear and started to back out.
“No, it’s okay. Just go around to the other side.”
He steered them to the west-facing side of the building, a smallish parking lot bordered by three dumpsters. Liam killed the engine, and they sat listening to the car’s engine ticking down to cool.
After a while, she spoke. “Back when they were kids, the night shift was as busy as the day shift. So he says. This parking lot was full, twenty-four seven.”
“Things change.”
“What replaces it, though?” she asked. She turned partway in her seat, her back to the door now, so that she could face him. “They keep laying people off. Cutting hours. Things change, sure, but when do they change for the better?”
He didn’t know. He told her so.
“Do you think Kim was right?” she asked. “All our dreams, up in smoke?”
He put a hand on her closer knee. “I don’t know. I don’t want to think about it. We’re supposed to have everything in front of us, you know? And I thought we did. Do. Did. Whatever. I mean, Jorja’s gonna write and Marse is gonna run for office and you’re gonna… be brilliant.” He smiled at her. “I hear that pays hella good.”
She shook her head. “But what if we’re just hoping and dreaming? We think we’re special, but what if we’re just big fish in a small pond, and the big pond doesn’t care about us?”
With a sigh, he leaned back, his hand still warm on her knee. A lifetime, it seemed, of wanting to touch her, and here he was, doing it so casually already, as though their flesh naturally sought each other’s out. Living one dream, contemplating the death of others.
“I can’t speak for any of us,” he said at last, “but you’ll make it, El. You’ll get out of this town and make something of yourself.”
“How do you know that?” Her voice, smaller than he’d ever heard it before. Needy in a way he’d heretofore thought impossible.
“Because it’s you,” he told her.
Grunting, she adjusted her position, twisting and contorting until her knees tucked under and she could lean into him, kissing him softly and sweetly on the lips. He closed his eyes and did not move. Passive, he lost himself in her lips, his head awhirl.
She broke contact, rocking back on her heels. He gazed at her.
They said nothing. They watched each other, seeing each other as though for the first time, despite their lifelong friendship. She was so. Goddamn. Beautiful. So beautiful and so perfect that it hurt. If he’d seen her on the street, he would have noticed her, maybe indulged in a momentary fantasy, but he was lucky. He was the luckiest man alive because he’d known her before. Before the beauty. Before growing up. He’d known her with Ben 10 Band-Aids on her knees from recess scrapes. He’d known her with rainbow bows in
her hair, with glittery fairy T-shirts, with Smurfs pajamas on PJ Day in school. He’d known her as the first kid in class to raise a hand during lessons on multiplication, the girl who danced—so badly!—to Beyoncé for the second-grade talent show. Who had brought in a microscope for show-and-tell and had students line up to see what lived on the ends of your hair.
He knew her from parties and dances, lunchroom sandwich swaps, and the regrettable blackface Barbie incident in third grade. Movie nights with friends, joint stag appearances at middle school dances. Before she was a woman, she was a friend, and he’d loved her then, too.
“Do you think we should have sex?” she said abruptly.
Fortunately for Liam, clueless comedy stepped into the breach.
“I don’t think the back seat is big enough, but I’m up for it if you are.”
Finally, finally, she cracked a grin, nudging his thigh with her toe. “Dumbass. I mean, do you think we’re ready? And don’t say I’m always ready.”
“It’s like you can read my mind.” Truthfully, in that instant he was ready. Physically, at least. His entire body ached with need, one part in particular.
“I want you pretty badly,” she admitted. “That’s no secret, right?”
Forcibly and forcefully, he rejected a smart-ass comment. “The feeling’s mutual. But I don’t think we’re ready. Not yet.” He paused. “Was this a test?”
She laughed. “Sure, let’s call it that. I think…”
Her phone bleated. Not a text or a notification—this was her actual ringtone.
“Has to be my parents,” she said, struggling to turn in the seat, reaching for her pocket. “They’re the only ones who—”
“Or Jorja,” he reminded her. Jorja had an annoying tendency to use the phone for its original purpose.
She wrestled her phone from her pocket. It was, in fact, Jorja.
“You’re on speaker,” she told her.
Jorja didn’t even ask who else was listening, nose-diving straight into a monologue. “I’ve been thinking about alternate theories of the crime. That’s what they’re called—a different way events could have happened that still fits the same facts.
“Remember Rumson, the pizza guy?” she went on, not waiting for affirmation or denial. “What if he’s the one? What if your dad is still Marcus and Rumson had a fight with Antoine? I know you’re thinking why? Well, we know someone was following Rumson around in the weeks before the burial and the disappearance. We also know that we can’t find Rumson. I think Rumson was actually the victim.”
Even Liam could see the holes in this theory.
“Why?” El asked. “And how did the knife get into the time capsule, then? And what about the handwriting on the note? And what about the cassette?”
Jorja did not so much as clear her throat to stall for time; she’d thought it all through: “Antoine wrote the note to apologize. Someone was following the pizza guy—what if it was Antoine? They met in secret. A fight broke out. Rumson was killed. Maybe with the knife, maybe not. Either way, Antoine is cut, too. Bleeds on the knife. Antoine, fearing reprisals, flees to Mexico. A Black man killing a white man in this town, especially back then? He knew he’d never get a fair hearing. No one would listen to him. So he ran.”
Silence welled up and filled the car. Jorja stopped, as Jorja always did, without pronouncement or summary.
Liam had much to say, but this was El’s family and her burden. He waited, watching her as she mulled it over.
“I don’t know,” she said after a few moments of cogitation. “How did they even know each other? Why would they fight?”
“Maybe Rumson was a dealer. Possibly steroids for track. Maybe Antoine was using.” Jorja sounded both injured and exasperated. “Who knows? We don’t need to know. All that matters is: Does this theory fit the facts as we know them? Yes.”
“We’re not in court.” Liam couldn’t stop himself from jumping in. “Beyond a reasonable doubt is nice, but it doesn’t prove anything.”
“I’m trying to give El a different perspective, okay?” Jorja snapped, and Liam immediately felt like an asshat. El was crushed at the idea that her father had killed her uncle and taken his place—Jorja was laying down a nice, fresh path for her to walk, one that avoided the bear trap of twin fratricide. And Liam was kicking dirt all over it.
“I appreciate it, Jorja,” El said. Her voice was cheerier than her expression. “Thanks. That’s a lot to think about.”
After she’d signed off, though, she crossed her arms over her chest and scrunched up into the corner made by her seat and the door, staring out at the factory.
“What are you thinking?” he asked after he figured she’d had enough time to come up with an answer.
“I don’t know if Jorja’s right or not,” she said slowly. “Probably not. But she’s right about one thing: There’s more than one possibility here. If we could just get Antoine’s DNA. Something we know is his, that couldn’t possibly be my dad’s. We could compare it to the sample from Dad Indira has already, and we’d know once and for all if my dad is Marcus or Antoine.”
“He’s been gone for thirty-something years,” Liam said as gently as he knew how. “Anything he touched or left DNA on would be hopelessly contaminated. So what else can we do? Is there another way to—”
“The stamps,” Elayah said, sitting upright. “The stamps.”
“What?”
She waved Liam quiet. “Uncle Antoine sent postcards from Mexico. He had to put a stamp on them.”
“So?”
“So… back in the eighties, you couldn’t just stick a stamp on something. You had to lick it.”
“Can they even get DNA from that?” Liam asked.
He meant it as a rhetorical question, no doubt certain that there was no answer, but El charged on, already excitedly typing on her phone: “I don’t see why not. The stamp has been stuck to the postcard all this time. So the DNA couldn’t get out and no contaminants could get in. I’m asking Indira.”
They waited as a gray bubble popped up on El’s screen, throbbing with an ellipsis.
“Come on.…” El muttered.
Then she held out the phone to him.
Indira: Lab says they can try. Get me a postcard.
Sucking in a breath, she nodded with more confidence and élan than she truly felt. They held each other’s gaze.
“What are you gonna do?” he asked.
She said nothing, but her fingers flew over the glass.
I’ll get it to you.
Liam had never seen one of the fabled Antoine postcards before. El sat on her bed, shuffling them. Mexican vistas flipped into sight and out of sight. “Which one should I give them?” she asked without looking up.
“Does it matter?” he asked.
“Probably not.”
“Then just pick one.”
“I can’t.” She kept shuffling through them, a blackjack dealer with ADHD. “You choose.”
“Me?” She offered the stack of cards to him, and he recoiled, yanking his hands back toward his body as though a copperhead had hissed its warning.
“Yeah, you. Like you said: Just pick one.” Her hand did not waver as she held out the postcards. “Please? For me?”
Well, hell. That wasn’t fair.
Reluctantly, he accepted the cards. “I want it on the record that I’m only doing this because my love for you makes me incredibly weak-willed and you unfairly used your feminine wiles to manipulate me into doing your bidding, which is super unfeminist of you.”
El grinned broadly. “So noted.”
He spent a moment riffling through the postcards before settling on one that was blank white on the side that should have been a picture. It seemed to him that it made sense to keep the ones with pictures. At least they gave a sense of place, a way to situate Antoine in the imagination, even as it was impossible to locate him in the real world.
Turning it over, he read the handwritten note:
Mom, Pops, Marcus—
I’m sorry, but I can’t explain this right now. Maybe later. I’ll try. I’ve gone away. I have to do this. Please don’t try to find me. I love you all, but I can’t be home right now.
Love, Antoine
“I think this one,” he told El.
She nodded. Together, they laid it out on the desk with good lighting and took pictures, just in case something happened to it. And then El tilted her face toward him and brushed her lips against his in the sweetest, truest kiss he ever had or ever would taste.
ELAYAH
Days passed. She heard nothing from Indira. She was still avoiding her father, a chore made somewhat easier by his night-shift duties. He usually woke up around the time she got home from school, so she’d taken to arranging a series of study dates right after school ended. Anything not to go home until he’d left for work.
Today, she was at Liam’s and neither of his dads were home. The house echoed with possibility and the soft murmurs in Elayah’s throat as she and Liam kissed on the living room sofa. He traced a hot, wet line from her lips to her ear along her jawline, then dipped lower. She flinched as he tickled the line of her stitches—now dissolved, but still tender.
“Sorry,” he mumbled.
“’S’okay,” she told him with what little breath still lived in her. He’d sucked all the oxygen from her lungs, from the room, the house, the world. She lived anaerobically now, sustained by his propinquity, his heat, his touch.
“So, uh, how do your dads feel about…” She pointed from him to her and back again.
Liam’s eyes widened in something like panic. “I haven’t actually said anything yet. Is that okay?”
She laughed. “Are you asking me for permission to not do something?”
“I don’t know.”
“I haven’t told my parents, either. It just…”
“Doesn’t seem like the time,” he finished for her.
“Yeah.”
A silent wave rolled between them, and then Liam said, “Told them about Jorja and Marse, though. Holy crap, you’d think I told them someone cured cancer! They were super psyched.”