by Meg Elison
“Okay, whatever, Andy.” I jog a little and catch up to Kristi.
“So, what are you doing tonight?” She’s doing that thing where she’s listening to me talk but staring at her phone. I never know if she’s hearing me or not.
“I don’t know. My stepdad is gonna be home, so I’ll probably hide out in my room. Since I don’t have anywhere else to go.” She looks away from her phone just enough to show me her face arranged along beautifully sad lines, tragic like an Insta model who’s lost her sponsorship. Then she goes back to it, her face blank.
I don’t say anything. My solid strategy.
“What are you gonna do?”
“Homework,” I lie. All my homework is done, and she’s gone.
Andy catches up, and we go through the iron gate to our apartment complex. Once upon a time we shared a key to get in, but the lock broke more than a year ago. The hinges screech and the springs slam the gate shut behind us. We walk around the stucco corner, trotting a little faster with home coming into view. Andy goes up the stairs first, as always. We’ve figured out how to do this fast and never be seen. He gets to the top and looks around while I come up behind. The coast is clear.
He climbs on the black banister and leans out over the gap between the stairs and the building. It’s about a foot wide, and the drop is two stories. I don’t think either of us can slip through, but the fear is real every time. Andy tugs at the window and it slides over, knocking the blinds around. He shoves his backpack through, and we hear it hit the floor. Then he lifts one knee up onto the air conditioner just below the window. I boost him up the last foot and a half, and he goes through the blinds into the dark.
I toss my backpack in after him and look over my shoulder again. Still clear. I push up on the banister and lay my belly across the AC unit. I pull with both hands to slide over the windowsill, which hurts from the band of my training bra down to my knees, and slip headfirst to the floor. I stand up, blinking until my eyes adjust, and close the window. I wait until the blinds stop swinging and then go to find the hurricane lantern. It’s a tall glass old-school lamp that works through the surface tension of its fuel and the capillary action of its wick. It’s kind of cool, but I wish I didn’t need it.
It doesn’t slosh when I shake it. Out of lamp oil.
I feel around to find the candle I left in the kitchen. I turn on the stove to light it, but nothing happens.
Sighing, I make my way carefully to the couch. Somewhere at the edge of the dining room my foot slides into something mushy and slimy, like a banana a few days past ripe. I ignore it. I push my hands deep into the couch cushions and reject stale crackers and empty cigarette packs until I find what I was looking for.
One plastic BIC lighter. I push down the little button with my thumb, and it’s the kind that flares straight up like a jet engine. I take it to the candle and light it, light all the ones I can find. I light the lamp after all, figuring that the wick is soaked enough to burn for at least a little while. I’m right.
Andy has a Fruit Roll-Up crammed in his teeth. I wonder what else is in the kitchen. “I want to watch TV.”
“Yeah, well. Good luck with that.”
He sulks, kicking something unseen. “Wanted to sing the pineapple song.”
I wait until he’s distracted and quiet enough to tiptoe away.
I go to our bedroom, headed straight for my secret hideout. A milk crate beneath the window, the glass covered with foil. The window open just enough. Hours of quiet on the other side. If he’s bored enough, he’ll find me. He might come looking for me any minute. I’m running out of time already. I need him distracted, and without the TV he won’t be.
Screw it.
I turn my back on my spot and find him trying to pull a couple of tightly joined Legos apart. That might have kept him busy awhile, but the light is fading. Once he can’t see, it’s all over. Can’t do anything then but go to bed, and he’s not tired. I’m not tired. Well, not sleepy. We’ve got to do something else.
“Come on, Andy. Let’s just go to the pool.”
He jumps to get his trunks. I undress and pull on my blue thrift-store bathing suit, still wet from yesterday and cold enough to make me break out in gooseflesh all over.
We walk to the apartment-complex pool and get dinner from the vending machine there. We count our change and pick one short can of Pringles and one big bag of Twizzlers. We swim for hours, the pool water warm and cloudy, with pennies and secret surprise broken glass at the bottom. There’s a little bit of Wi-Fi signal at the pool, so I tweet that I’m going night swimming. That sounds like something a normal kid would do, right? I leave my phone on a chair and swim with Andy, keeping him away from the deep end. We talk about how cool it is now that the gate that’s supposed to keep the pool safe is broken and we can just step on the bottom rung to open it. We argue over who can hold their breath the longest and how fun it is to float on our backs. Nobody else is in the pool tonight, so it’s just us. Still, we’re careful.
We don’t talk about our dark house where the lights don’t work and the gas is definitely off again. We don’t talk about how long it’s been since the front door stopped opening, or how scared we are of the window climb every day. He doesn’t ask me when Mom will be home, which is great because I have no idea.
9:45 p.m.
It isn’t as much of a fight to get him out this time. I climb up the pool ladder and hug myself in the cold and tell him it’s time. He comes up after a minute or two, hugging himself the same way. We can’t see our breath, but our fingers are prunes, and his hair hangs pointy in his face like icicles. We don’t have towels. We walk home like penguins, arms and legs tight together and straight, our backs to the wind.
I boost him through the window and then come up slowly, extra careful because I’m soaking wet and I have imagined myself falling like a thousand times. I don’t fall, but the corner of the AC unit leaves a long, angry scratch down my bare thigh. I look at the beads of blood welling up, wondering if the chlorine on my skin is enough to disinfect. Blood, bacteria, uncertainty. That’s life.
I only light one candle this time. We drop our wet suits on the floor and scavenge something to sleep in. I come up with a big shirt covered in soda logos; he finds a pair of underwear or shorts. It’s impossible to tell which and hard to care.
We slowly climb up the ladder to my loft bed, each of us using one hand. I have the candle, he has a book. He reads aloud to me like we do every night, and I trace the pattern of spaceships on the mattress, thinking about adventures somewhere else. We each huddle under our own blanket, and he laughs at the funny parts of his book. He still doesn’t ask when she’ll be home.
I guess he doesn’t care anymore, either.
Tuesday 2:56 a.m.
I think that was her. I hold my breath for a minute. The candle’s out, and Andy didn’t wake up. I hear the snick of the lighter, smell the smoke a minute later.
Mom’s home.
Tuesday 11:36 a.m.
Everybody’s phone is better than mine.
On my right, the new iPhone. Tall, skinny, stylish. Just like the guy who holds it. He’s scrolling through girls’ profiles. I recognize some of them.
On my left, a new Android. Shiny and bright, and the girl holding it doesn’t even bother to try to hide it. Phones out all over the room. No one cares.
In the front of the room, Mr. Raleigh. He’s lecturing on monocots or eudicots or dicots right now. Pictures of leaves on the big screen. I haven’t been keeping up, but I know when he’s checking the cracked screen of his old iPhone, because he looks down at his lap behind his desk and frowns or smiles.
In my pocket, a no-name knockoff phone that hasn’t had minutes on it since summer vacation. It only works when I have Wi-Fi, and I guess the school knows we’d never quit texting or watching YouTube if they offered it. I still plug it in at night so that I can take pictures with the squinty little camera and keep time. I take it out and pretend to text on it when I need a minute to myself. I hav
e a set of funny and mean things to say when people ask for my number. It never rings.
Pistil, stamen, sepal. I open my gallery and scroll through the pictures I took last week. Kristi and me eating french fries at the Jack in the Box by the high school. She passes for a high-school girl, and even though I’m a year older than she is, I don’t. That’s life.
A blurry close-up of a honeysuckle, another of a rose. The flowers remind me to look up occasionally and check in with Mr. Raleigh. This time it’s a good thing, because he’s staring at me.
“Layla?”
Not a chance that I’ll guess correctly.
“I’m sorry, what was the question?” I close my phone with one hand and move it slowly toward my pocket.
Raleigh sighs. “What is the circled structure on the slide called?”
I looked up for a second. The little green cup under a flower. I look back at him.
“Calyx.”
“Yes. Thank you. Try to stay with us.”
My face burns. On my right, the iPhone disappears. On my left, the Android doesn’t even waver.
I stay after class. Raleigh is a nice guy and I feel bad.
“I’m sorry I’ve been so out of it, Mr. Raleigh. I’m doing the reading and the homework. I’m just daydreamy in class.”
He’s smiling at his lap.
“Okay, I’ll see you later,” I tell him, already sliding toward the door.
As I turn to leave, he clues in. “Hey, Layla. Come on back. Sorry, I just had to check something. So, what’s up with you? Why were you absent two days last week? Are you okay?”
He’s got that look of polite concern. I’d know it anywhere; it means a grown-up is worried but can’t actually do anything to help.
“Yeah, I’m fine. I was just sick last week. I aced the Friday test anyway, so it doesn’t really matter.”
“No, I guess it doesn’t. Still, you don’t seem . . .”
Oh god please stop looking at me. Please don’t notice that I’ve taped my shoes together or that my jeans haven’t been washed in a month. Please tell me this flannel makes me look grunge on purpose rather than gross on accident. Please just don’t even look at my hair.
I stare at the floor.
“Is everything okay?” His voice is too kind, too soft.
This response is ready, has always been ready without question or any time to think.
“Yeah, everything’s fine.”
He’s trying to catch my eye, but I can’t look.
“You know, I’ve never even met your mother,” Raleigh says. “She’s never come to a parent-teacher conference. She signed the paperwork to get you into the honors program, but other than that, I’ve never even gotten an email.”
She signed that paperwork the same way she’s signed everything for Andy and me since she registered him for kindergarten: in my handwriting. Am I supposed to be emailing my teachers as her? Do the other parents do that? What do they ask?
“She just works all the time, Mr. Raleigh. She’s not into all this.”
He tilts his head to the side, at an angle that makes his huge nose look even bigger. Black eyes on mine, and that look of concern is back, but pity is creeping in. If I could shoot ink out of my butt and swim away like a squid, I would.
“Okay. Just let me know if there’s anything I can—” There’s a faraway buzzing sound, and he’s frowning at his crotch again.
“Anything you say, Mr. Raleigh.” And I can finally escape.
Lunch
Kristi’s lunch kills me. It kills me every day, so I’ve died hungry at least a thousand times.
Her mom packs it for her, and it looks like something out of a magazine ad, like no real food ever looks. Today it’s a bento with brown rice and a line of shrimp, all pink and perfect. Seaweed salad in one of the small compartments and orange slices in the other. She also has a pack of kale chips, but they don’t fit in the box.
Kristi will eat one, maybe two bites of her shrimp and rice before turning the box upside down over a trash can. She’ll ignore the seaweed salad because it gets caught in her braces, and into the garbage it will go. She’ll eat all the kale chips right now, saying that they’re the only thing she likes.
“These chips are the only thing that bitch packs me that I even like.” Crunch crunch crunch.
School lunch today is spaghetti with the cheese on top that looks like dandruff. Canned peaches on the side and a carton of milk. Every day, I try to figure out how to eat it slowly while looking disinterested. Watching Kristi whack her lunch box against the side of the garbage can to throw away her pretty food, I know that today I will fail.
“Do you think Emerson likes me?” She’s looking across the room at Emerson Berkeley, the semigoth hotness in our class. He’s reading, as usual.
“Maybe. That one time in geometry, he thought your cartoon was really funny.” I eat more spaghetti, thinking of her seaweed salad. The dressing on it is black and full of sesame seeds. I bet it’s good.
Kristi makes a face. “That was like a year ago. I don’t even draw cartoons anymore.”
“Yeah, but you should.” I’m staring at Emerson now, his black leather and black skin and black hair and black eyeliner. He looks like a rock star who adopts three-legged dogs.
“What?”
My eyes snap back to Kristi and I can see she’s pissed at me. No idea why.
“Your cartoons. You should go back to them. They were really good, remember how Emerson said—”
She’s red in the face, blood-pink under her red-orange hair. Oh god, here it comes.
“You know that I stopped drawing my comics when my dad moved out! I told you I’d never draw again after Sean moved in! Those comics were about my family and now my family is gone!” Tears come up in her red-rimmed green eyes but don’t spill.
Kristi’s temper is like a lion (Panthera leo leo, king of the loud but lazy). It needs to roar a lot and get noticed, but it’s not really gonna do anything. It’ll wait for someone else to do the work.
“I’m sorry, Kris. I didn’t mean to . . . I was just thinking of proof that Emerson likes you. That’s all. And I’m sure he does.”
Now she has to choose. Be the lioness and change the subject to boys that like her (her favorite subject) or keep throwing her endless fit about her parents’ divorce. I watch her while she tries to decide.
Her little pink compact mirror comes out, and she blots under her eyes. “I think he does like me. I think you’re right. Even if you had to say it in such an insensitive way.” She runs a brown pencil under her eyes again, fixing herself up and going back to staring at the daydream-dressed-like-a-nightmare boy. Emerson gets up to leave, and she’s bored again.
My lunch tray is empty. I resist the desire to run a finger through the biggest rectangle, to pick up the last whisper of red sauce and lick it.
“I guess you wouldn’t know what it’s like,” she says in a whiny little voice.
“What?” I look at the empty spot where Emerson used to be. If she thinks I don’t know what it’s like to have a crush on the boy everyone has a crush on, she’s a crappy best friend.
“My life. You don’t know what it’s like to go through a divorce. How it wrecks your life. What it’s like to only see your dad on the weekends, and live with some asshole your mom married. You don’t get how hard it is, that’s why you don’t care about my feelings.”
“I said I was sorry,” I tell her, trying to sound sympathetic.
She’s looking in the mirror again. “Nobody understands. Not even my best friend.”
She’s right. I don’t.
5:40 p.m.
Sometimes I think Kristi invites me over just so that she can have an audience for her suffering.
She plugs her phone into her speakers, puts on some emo band, and tells me to sit down on her bed. Her bed is all pale pink. It has a canopy above it with tiny glow-in-the-dark stars her mom put in it, so that when we lie on our backs in the dark it’s like we’re in a safe, enc
losed universe of soft pink skies.
The whole house smells like cinnamon pancakes.
Kristi changes into a long black skirt and a black leather jacket that looks way too big for her.
“Okay, listen to this:
Son of no sun
beach in the rain
you’re an enigma
with an old poet’s name.”
She switches back from her poetry voice into her normal voice. “Get it? Because his name is Emerson, like that one guy?”
“Yeah, I get it. That’s clever.”
“Thanks!” She smiles wide, but then gets her serious pout back on. She lifts her black leather arms and sways just a little.
“Wild dark angel
with raven’s wings
you shine like a dark star
among the dull things.”
“You use the word dark twice.”
She frowns and looks back at the piece of paper on her pale-pink desk.
Kristi’s mom, Bette, knocks at the door. She talks to us without opening it.
“Hey, sweetie, will you two be ready for dinner in about thirty minutes?”
“Yeah, Mom.” Kristi’s getting out another sheet of her pretty paper.
“Okay, see you downstairs, then.”
While Kristi’s back is turned to me, I look around her room. Her shoe collection is mixed up all over the bottom of her closet, but her clothes are hung straight. It looks like she has about forty pairs of jeans. She tapes posters up all over the walls with that special blue tape that won’t mess up the pale-pink paint. I try to imagine what this room would look like if it was mine. What if Bette was my mom and the room was pale green and that was my MacBook just casually lying on the floor?
No, I’d never leave it on the floor. Not if I had my own pale-green desk.
“Hey, Kristi?”
She doesn’t look back at me. “What?”
“Hey, is it cool if I do it now? Your mom said we have like half an hour, and you’re pretty involved in your poem. So, cool?”
“Yeah, sure. My stuff is in the bottom drawer, help yourself.” She’s distracted.
I’m out the door as she asks, “What’s another word for dark?”