This Little Light

by Lori Lansens

  “Now you’re getting it, Fee.”

  “I know people lie, Rory. I’m not stupid.”

  “They’ve already accused us of doing the most heinous shit imaginable, so what’s in your purse that could make us look any worse?”

  “Nothing. It’s just—my purse. You know.”

  What is it about that purse? I’m remembering last night in the bathroom with Fee. Before the bomb. I’d gotten my period, which I only realized when I sat down to pee. Fee was still in the stall feeling the first effects of what I’m pretty sure were poisoned chocolates. I left the stall and was so pissed to find the pad dispenser empty, as usual, so I asked Fee if she had a tampon because we cycle together and she’s usually prepared. Her Gucci clutch was on the counter and I go, “Fee, you got a plug in your purse?”

  And she’s like, “NO!”

  “Okay.”

  “Do not go in my purse, Ror!”

  “Why can’t I go in your purse? I always go in your purse.”

  Then Fee said she was out of toilet paper and asked me to find her some, so I got distracted. But now I’m thinking—what is in her purse that I wasn’t supposed to see?

  Warm blood trickles down my arse and into my sopping gown as I sit here on the shed floor beside Fee. “What’s happening, Fee? What was in your purse? Are you doing Addies again? I mean, don’t, because I’d kill for your curves, and Adderall makes you bitchy.”

  “It’s not Addies.”

  “What then? Talk to me?” I’m worried. Fee’s no stranger to pills. She’s used Addies, and had an unhealthy reliance on Tylenol 3s for a while there too, and told me her cousin Dante gave her Zan when she was in Cerritos.

  “Nothing.”

  “Something.”

  “I just…There’s a pic of my cousin Dante in my wallet.”

  “So?”

  “Ror, he’s illegal.”

  “Okay, but, I mean, they already raided your abuela’s procit community and he wasn’t there, so…”

  “I just don’t wanna get him in trouble.”

  “Sure that’s all?” I obviously don’t think that’s all.

  “Ror…please just…”

  I toggled back to InfoNow, but the Feds haven’t made the announcement yet. I guess I’ll find out what the fuck is in my best friend’s purse when the rest of the world does.

  Fee goes, “What about that little girl, though? Where do you think she came from? How did she know we were here?”

  “Dunno.”

  “Think she’ll come back?”

  “She must live in one of the trailers on the other side of that bunch of oaks.”

  “Maybe she’ll bring more food. I can’t stop thinking about Fatburger. And all the other stuff I didn’t eat when it was in front of my face…all that stuff I hurled on purpose.”

  Remember that overloaded buffet table at Leons’ Labor Day barbecue? Waste. Such an abstract concept to us. Waste was wasted on us. Abundance we understood.

  Then Fee said, “I wonder if Miles is, like…I hope Miles doesn’t believe we did this.”

  Brooky’s brother? “Who gives a shit about Miles?” I get the feeling she’s trying to distract me again.

  * * *

  —

  Still nothing about Fee’s purse, but guess whose face popped up on my screen on cable news? Chase Mason. That bald anchor from CNN just did an interview with him on the steps of the Calabasas Library, where this big crowd of people has gathered to chant for our capture.

  When I saw him, I wanted to weep with relief, because, like, my crush is gonna have my back, and say something like, “I believe Rory Miller is innocent.” Right? But I’m watching his beautiful face—those big brown eyes—and I’m hearing these words coming out of his mouth, and I really do cry, but not from relief.

  The reporter asks him, “Can you give us some insight, Mr. Mason? Who is Rory Miller?”

  Chase looks straight into the camera, like he’s looking straight at me. “Well, I guess she’s not who she said she was. I guess she was kinda in disguise.”

  He used my own words—my flirty words—against me.

  The reporter prods some more. “Was anything suspicious about her behavior while she was volunteering here? Did you have reason to be suspicious?”

  “Do you mean did she meet people here at the library?” Chase says. “Did a lot of people come to see her here? Yes. A lot. She used to take girls into the media room. Not sure what they did in there.”

  What the fuck? My hive came to visit me at the library a few times. No one else. Literally no one else. My four friends. And Jinny, a few times this fall. And never once did I take anyone into the media room! That was him!

  “The girls who came to see Rory Miller? Were any of them visibly pregnant?”

  “I couldn’t tell. I couldn’t say.”

  “Would you say it’s possible that she used the library as a base for her Red Market activities?”

  “I don’t know about all that. I just know she said she was looking for trouble.”

  You. Fucker. Throwing me under the bus. Undercover Crusader? Chase is the one in disguise.

  The news showed footage of the inside of the library. Empty. It is usually empty. Hardly anyone uses the local library except a few fogies from the nearby retirement village. Then the reporter starts talking about how this quiet, empty building would make the perfect, unassuming place to meet teen girls seeking illegal abortions and Red Market payouts for the sale of fetal tissue, or girls looking for ways to sell their unwanted babies for cash.

  They cut back to Chase and the crowd outside on the steps, and he’s saying, “Rory Miller’s smart. I wouldn’t put anything past her.”

  “You believe that a couple of teen girls are going to outwit the Feds and all the Crusaders and bounty hunters and everyone else out there looking for them?”

  And Chase says, “Actually? Yeah.”

  Et tu, Chase Mason?

  As I’m watching this vid of Chase’s interview, in the crowd behind him I spot a green Roots ball cap hiding a mop of curly, dark hair, and under the cap is this heart-faced woman in too-big sunglasses, and then I’m like, Holy shit. That’s Aunt Lill. My Aunt Lilly is standing behind Chase Mason on the steps of the Calabasas Library, looking like she’s in some kind of disguise.

  Aunt Lilly would never wear a ball cap because hat-hair, and plus, she’s wearing a pink T-shirt, well, actually a V-shirt, like the Crusaders wear, with Bible verse numbers—Corinthians 14:34. She hates pink—like, it’s a thing. She’ll wear the pink ribbons in support of breast cancer research, and maybe, like, a pink button or whatever when she marches for women’s rights. But what’s with the pink Bible verse shirt? Trying to blend in? I’m looking at her in her pink V-shirt and I can’t help but go—those numbers? Do they mean something? Is it a telephone number? Is the other half of it on her back? Turn around! Aunt Lilly? Help?

  The reporter asks Chase if he has any final words or thoughts. Well, doesn’t Mr. Lead Singer just whip out his old-school card with his band name and website info and hold it up to the camera and go, “If you’re looking for a band for your next event, check us out.” Fuck. So that’s his gig? He wants publicity for his stupid fucking crap-ass band. Crushed by my crush.

  I told Fee Aunt Lilly was here, but she doesn’t seem excited, because Lilly can’t save us. And when I tell Fee about Chase Mason’s betrayal, she is not mad for me. She is not sympathetic or bestie-ish in any way. Fee is not acting like Fee.

  “Who cares, Ror? It’s not like he’s your boyfriend. And Lark’s Head sucks anyway.”

  “Too true.”

  It just hit me that something was wrong with the business card Chase Mason held up to the camera.

  I just went back online and I’m like—right—the card says Larkspur, not Lark’s Head. They changed the shitty name to an even shittier name. Okay. Whatever.

  Will the betrayals never end? I will never forget what Chase Mason did.

  Makes me think of Mo
ntreal. My parents dragged me along to a weekend conference there when I was in seventh. We got stuck in a traffic jam on the way to our hotel and I noticed the license plates on the cars said Je me souviens. Shelley told me it means “I remember.” Like “Lest we forget” in America. She said it was a call to keep in mind all the terrible things that have happened in history or else we’re doomed to repeat them. Maybe because of the Jewish thing, or the human thing, I don’t know, but it stuck with me.

  Je me souviens, Chase Mason.

  * * *

  —

  More noises outside. Can’t see anyone or anything, but I’m really scared about that old man coming over here to get his stray tarp.

  According to the news, the air surveillance and bounty hunters are concentrating their efforts on a homeless encampment near Griffith Park now, where hundreds of tipsters say we’re hiding. They’ve shown pics of all these ATF guys—because we’re packing, don’t you know—and ICE guys, of course, hassling the homeless. I’m sorry to all of the humans who are enduring this bullshit because of us.

  The little bald girl’s nowhere in sight. I hope she doesn’t come back, because what if she leads the hunters to us? What if someone in a copter wonders what a little shaved-head girl is doing playing around a random shed in the hills? Wish I could thank her, though. Well, I can. Here. Now. Thank you, little bald angel in the Patriot Girls dress.

  Just occurred to me that little girl might have cancer or something. So skinny. Damn.

  Also in the news just now—the Kardashians. Mama Kris has posted a pic of her and her five daughters, and all the granddaughters, in long white wedding-style gowns. So Vogue cover, but whatever. “Innocent until proven guilty”: that was the caption. Choked me up. Seriously. Thank you. From the bottom of my shattered heart. I will KUWTK until I die. Fee too. That must have been hard for those girls, because they are God people. Like, that shout-out means everything. It gives us hope.

  And hope is hard to hold on to right now. Especially since I also just read that they’re going to be moving my mother to another facility because the crowds where she’s currently being held are clogging up the roads and making it hard for emergency vehicles to get to a fast-moving brush fire that broke out near Bel Air this morning.

  They showed the crowd gathered outside the courthouse, and I’ll be fucked if it isn’t Chase Mason again. Front and center of the crowd, wearing a red Larkspur T-shirt. Must have taken a copter to get there so fast.

  He wasn’t waving an American flag around, chanting, “Burn Shelley, burn,” like some of the protesters, but he was standing with them. And Aunt Lill is there on the courthouse steps too. She’s still wearing her Roots ball cap and she’s still got on that gross pink T-shirt. Those numbers: 14:34. I googled the Corinthians verse—something about “women should be silent in the churches.” I’m so bad at riddles. The fuck, Aunt Lill? I know she’s trying to send me a message. Just? What? Go to a church and be quiet? Doubt that. Those numbers mean nothing to me. I’ve been adding the numbers up and moving them around. Nada.

  Aunt Lilly knows about my crush on Chase Mason. Maybe she went to the library to see if he had any ideas about where we might be? Or did she think we might be hiding there? In the courthouse crowd, I saw her moving closer to Chase. Why? Is she gonna kick him in the balls for all the crap he said about me to the media?

  After Chase’s interview, I watched a panel discussion on CNN—one of those split-screen jobbies with multiple guests. Jagger Jonze was streaming live from the foyer of Hutsalls’ mansion, the crystal chandelier a halo of light over his head, along with three other female guests. One is this well-known feminist who was there to discuss abortion laws, and steered the conversation away from the AVB incident, which she claimed was a publicity stunt orchestrated by the alt-right. She said Fee and I, two little Christian virgins, were prolly in on the whole thing. Another guest was the evangelical adviser to the president, who made a fierce plea to the bounty hunters not to kill us. The blue-eyed former pageant queen didn’t say not to kill us because killing two innocent girls would be wrong, or don’t kill us because mercy. She said, “Don’t kill them because they’ll become martyrs.” Ugh.

  The other guest was a well-known child psychologist, who last night tweeted out “Another Case of Gucciosis?”—a term she just coined, which is now the title of her new book. She claims the label-whorishness of my generation, our worship of celebrity culture and the steady bombardment of images of designer goods causes a constant craving that turns into addiction, and that, like any addict, we’ll do inconceivable shit for our shit.

  Jonze is nodding his head over the shame of it all, tugging at his designer T-shirt in the light of the hundred-thousand-dollar chandelier. Then he tells the world they should pray for us. He says my involvement in the ball was obviously just a way to mask the truth about who I am and what I do. He even floated the idea that I brainwashed Fee! Godless people, he said, have no moral compass. If people have no God, and no book of rules and guidelines to follow, they can’t be good. So they must be evil.

  That is just so impressively stupid. If you don’t believe in God, you have no ethics? What about remote tribes—like that one they just discovered in the Amazon when they “accidentally” clear-cut one of the last protected areas of the rain forest? Those people lived peaceably, though they had no word for God, and no word for war, and no word for hate. When the American anthropologists figured out their language, and asked them about survival, the people said, basically, “All men are my brothers. All women my sisters. All children are my children. We care for each other in the way we want to be cared for.”

  Reverend Jonze says the Christian God is the one true God. Dude, it’s like the guys from the tribe say—the do-unto-others thing is just common sense. It doesn’t need to be based on theology. Like, treat people the way you want to be treated and the world works, and we survive as a species. So fucking simple. The Golden Rule is on our hard drives as human beings! Religion is the virus that corrupts.

  Oh fuck. Fee just got up to look outside. She says the little kid in the Patriot Girls dress is back.

  “Where is she?”

  “Over by the trailer? Are you typing what I’m saying right now? Please don’t.”

  I can’t help myself. I can’t stop my fingers. “Yes, Fee. I told you, I’m writing it all down. Someone has to document this shit.”

  “Okay. Well, blog this—the kid is dancing in the gravel driveway. Dancing and singing.”

  “Got it.”

  “Maybe she’s whack.”

  “Maybe.”

  “There’s sky traffic.”

  “I know.”

  “A MiniCop coming up over the cliffs from the beach. He can see her.”

  “No one will mistake her for one of us.”

  “True. She’s tiny.”

  “Think she’s sick?”

  “She’s bald. And skinny. She has some big bruises on her legs, but she’s a kid, so, I don’t know.”

  “What’s she doing now?”

  “She’s still dancing…Oh my God, Rory, she’s doing the moves from the intro to the kids’ show! She’s doing the choreography. Remember how we used to do the choreography for Dancing Dina? Remember how we all practiced the dance and performed it for the parents in the Leons’ backyard? That makes me wanna cry.”

  “Why isn’t that dog barking or whatever with the kid kicking gravel around in his driveway?”

  “Maybe he’s, like, hiding somewhere, licking his wounds. Or maybe that drunk guy killed him last night.”

  “Does she have another plastic bag?”

  “Not that I can see.”

  “And no one’s watching her from the trailer window?”

  “No.”

  “Is the TV still on in the trailer?”

  “Ror? Ror? RORY!”

  “Shh.”

  “Stop typing.”

  “I can’t.” I really can’t. I actually can’t lift my hands off the laptop. How’s
that for addiction?

  “Rory? Seriously, stop typing right the fuck now and listen to me.”

  I’m listening, but my fingers keep pressing keys.

  “There are three dudes with rifles coming through the brush.”

  I take a minute to repeat to myself what Fee just said. There are three dudes with rifles coming through the brush. “Tracker dogs?”

  “Don’t see any dogs.”

  “Heading this way?”

  “Yes. Huge guys, with long rifles, dressed in camo like they’re out to shoot deer.”

  “Maybe they’ve come to help us?”

  “With rifles?”

  “Maybe Javier sent them?”

  “I don’t think so.” She turned away from the window and crouched down beside me “Is this it? Oh God, Ror. I think this is the end.”

  “Should I press Post?”

  She’s crying. “Yes.”

  “But what if they don’t find us? What if they don’t look in here?”

  “What if they do, though? Ror, stop typing!”

  I can’t. “If they don’t find us right now, and I press Post, the whole world will know where we are.”

  “Press it, Ror.”

  “But what if they’re here to save us?”

  Fee raised herself back up to peek out the window. “They’re carrying an American flag.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Oh my God, Ror. The little girl. She’s running over to them.”

  “Oh no. Oh no. Oh no.”

  “We’re gonna die.”

  “No. Shh. We’re not gonna die.”

  “She’s talking to them. They’re looking around. They’re looking at the shed.” Fee backed away from the window again. “I peed,” she whispered.

  “It’s okay.”

  “Oh my God, did you just write that down?”

  “It’s all right.”

  Fee peeked out again.

  “Are they coming?”

  “They’re still talking to the kid.”

  “What’s she doing?”

  “Nodding. She just keeps nodding.”