Chapter 2: More Than You Bargained For

Eliana found the clique where she always did after school, leaning against Hannah's car in the student lot. Vivian was already filming.

"Candle check," Vivian said, panning her phone across a row of tea lights lined up on the hood. "Wow, the lighting is going crazy right now."

Emily came jogging across the lot with a cardboard box in both arms. She had spent the whole day on the vigil, and her eyes were red from crying over someone she had never met. She handed Eliana a candle with both hands, like it was something fragile.

"I'm so glad you're coming," Emily said. "I know today's a lot, with your uncle and everything. If you need to leave early, nobody's gonna say anything."

It was kind, and she meant it. Eliana took the candle and felt, for a second, like she might be sick.

"Melanie said everyone's free to hang at hers Saturday," Hannah said. She was leaning against the driver's door with her sunglasses pushed up. "Her parents keep the pool heater on all year, so bring a swimsuit. There's pizza, and Melanie says there’ll be drinks too."

"The three of us are riding together," Tessa said. "Obviously."

"I can't," Eliana said, easily. "I’m gonna go to the dentist at four-thirty. I'll try to catch you guys after."

Hannah looked at her a second too long, then pulled her sunglasses back down. Eliana felt her stomach drop, but still kept smiling.

"The dentist," Hannah said. "Okay. Go."

"On the day of the vigil?" Tessa said.

"She's allowed to have a dentist, Tess."

Vivian lowered her phone. "The group pic's gonna look so weird without you."

"I'll be in the next one," Eliana said.

Eliana wondered whether Hannah knew, and decided not to ask.

By the time she reached the bus stop, her phone was buzzing in her bag. She checked it once.

She put the phone on silent and did not answer. In three years of being Hannah's friend, she had never once left a group chat unread. She stood there a moment and let it sit.

The bus came. Behind the house key was a small brass one she had forgotten about until last week, when she found it at the bottom of a drawer and clipped it on without really deciding to. Tommy had given it to her when she was twelve, and nobody had ever asked for it back, the way nobody had ever asked about much of anything that had to do with him.

Lexie didn't go to the vigil either. She went home, which put her in the opposite direction from everyone else on the street, and let herself into an empty house.

Her mom worked until six. The kitchen still smelled like this morning's toast. Lexie dropped her bag on a chair, and the flyer she'd torn down fell out of her hoodie pocket and onto the floor, still creased where she'd smoothed it. She stepped over it. Then she went back, picked it up, and put it on the counter, because leaving it on the floor felt worse.

The envelope was still there.

It had been propped against the toaster for six days. It was cream-colored and heavy, with a law firm's name printed in the corner in small, expensive letters, and it was addressed to her mom. Her mom had moved it twice to wipe the counter, and both times she'd put it back in exactly the same spot, squared to the edge, without looking at it. That was how things worked in this house. If nobody opened it, nobody had to decide anything.

Lexie picked it up. It was heavier than paper had any right to be. Something shifted at the bottom with a small, light clink.

Her phone buzzed on the counter.

Lexie turned the phone face down.

Lexie held it for a while. She knew it was addressed to her mom, but got a butter knife out of the drawer and opened it anyway.

Inside were two things: a letter on the firm's letterhead, and a smaller padded envelope, taped shut.

The letter was short. It said the enclosed item was a personal bequest to Alexandra, that it was not part of the estate, and that Celeste had asked for it to be delivered to her directly. It said to contact the office with any questions. It didn't say what the item was. Nobody called her Alexandra except lawyers and substitute teachers.

On the front of the padded envelope, in blue ink, was one word: Lex.

The handwriting was fast and slanted, and the L looped back on itself. Nobody has called her Lex in ages, because there was only ever one person who did.

Lexie sat down at the kitchen table, put the envelope in front of her, and didn't open it yet.

Tommy's building was a brick walk-up over a laundromat, and the key stuck.

Eliana stood at the third-floor door and jiggled it for almost a minute, sure she had the wrong key, or that the locks had been changed. Then it turned, and the door almost fell open to the smell of dust, old coffee, and warm laundry coming up through the floor.

The apartment had one room and a kitchen. A blanket was thrown over the couch. A mattress sat on the floor in the corner. There were dishes in the sink, takeout containers on the windowsill, and two guitars leaning against the wall, one with a missing string. Her parents had been right about the mess. They just hadn't mentioned the records.

They were everywhere. Crates lined the walls, stacked two high, with handwritten dividers sticking up between them. The records were in better shape than anything else he owned. A few shelves had gaps in them where her parents had already taken some for the DONATE box.

Eliana put her bag on the couch, and a puff of dust came up from the cushion. She sat down anyway.

When she was nine, at somebody's graduation party, he had found her alone on the back steps. He borrowed a guitar from a cousin and taught her three chords while the adults were inside pretending he wasn't there. She still remembered the G, because it hurt. From there she could play some easy songs, enough to say that she played guitar, just not well.

Someone knocked on the open door.

"You the niece?" A man in a work shirt stood in the hallway holding a ring of keys. He looked like he'd been fixing sinks since before she was born. "Your folks said the cleaners are coming Saturday."

“I’m just getting a few things,” Eliana said.

"Take what you want. They'll toss the rest." He looked around the room, then back at her, and she braced for a comment about Tommy. "He paid late, but he paid. Played that thing at all hours and nobody ever complained, one hell of a guitarist I’ll tell you that much."

"Thanks," Eliana said, polite as ever.

He nodded and left. His footsteps went down the stairs, and then the building was quiet again, with only the dryer humming under the floor.

Lexie peeled the tape off the padded envelope slowly, in case it mattered. Inside was a small, fat notebook, the kind that fits in a back pocket, swollen with pages that had been taped and glued in over the years and held shut with a rubber band. There was also an index card, and something wrapped in a paper napkin. She unwrapped the napkin first.

It was a charm bracelet. The chain was tarnished and the clasp was held together with a twist of wire. There were about a dozen charms on it, none of them matching: a tiny brass key, a flat silver star, a chipped enamel heart, a little airplane. When she lifted it, it made a soft, uneven clinking sound.

Lexie knew that sound. It was every car ride she had ever taken with Cece, with the bracelet shifting on the wheel and the radio turned up too loud.

One of the charms was a small flat disc, rubbed smooth at the edges. It was stamped with three rings, one inside the other, and a lightning bolt cutting through behind them. She stared at it for a long time before the memory came up on its own.

She was seven, in the car on the morning of a spelling bee, crying. Cece had pulled over, taken a marker out of her purse, and drawn that exact shape on the inside of Lexie's wrist: the bolt first, then three quick rings over it, like a target. "Don't wash it off until it's over," she'd said. Her mom had scrubbed it off with a washcloth that night, and she hadn't said anything about it. Lexie hadn't thought about it in years.

She picked up the index card. It was in the same fast, slanted handwriting as the envelope.

Lexie read it twice, looking for the part that explained anything. There wasn't one. It didn't say why, or what any of this was, or sorry. She hadn't realized she was hoping for a goodbye until she saw it wasn't there.

It was signed with a single letter. Every screen in the country was saying Celeste, and this was the only thing anywhere that sounded like Cece.

She turned the card over. The back was blank.

She put her hand flat on the cover of the notebook and left it there. It could be anything. It could be a recipe collection, or a list of phone numbers, or a pile of lyrics Cece had never finished. The card hadn't explained anything, and Lexie had been waiting for somebody to. If the notebook didn't either, she didn't know what she would do with that.

Eliana stayed on the couch for a few minutes after the super left, listening to the dryer. Then she got up and went through the kitchen because she didn't know what else to do.

Her parents had gotten there before her. The cabinets were half empty, and a stack of flattened boxes was leaning against the fridge. The only thing left on the table was a large coffee tin, the red kind, with the lid taped shut. On the lid, in black marker, was a single word: BIRDIE

Nobody had called her that in years. Tommy had started when she was five and hummed along to every record he played, and he had never once stopped.

The tin was sitting on top of a thick composition notebook with a cracked cover, held together by a rubber band and about forty loose pages that were stuffed inside. Nobody would have looked at it twice. It looked like trash.

She peeled the tape off the tin first. Inside was one guitar pick, dark red and worn thin at the tip. She turned it over. On the back, scratched into the plastic with something sharp, were three rings, one inside the other, and a lightning bolt cutting through behind them.

She knew that symbol. Tommy wore it on his jacket and on his guitar, she never thought twice about it.

She opened the notebook, and that symbol was everywhere. One page was nothing but the symbol, row after row of it. The first ones were bad, with lopsided rings and thin wobbly bolts. They got steadily better down the page until the bottom rows looked almost printed.

Everything else was a mess: lone letters, arrows, lyrics crossed out and written again, chord diagrams, phone numbers without labels. She read a line at random. It said DON’T PLAY THE BRIDGE IN TUNE, with two underlines. She read another, it was a setlist for a show with no venue and no date.

It read like a man arguing with himself. She couldn’t tell if this meant anything, or if this was just what Tommy’s head had always looked like on the inside.

It felt like stealing. The super said she could take what she wanted, and the cleaners were coming on Saturday to toss everything anyways, but it still felt wrong. She stood there with the pick in her palm anyway, until her hand started to feel warm from holding it.

Then she put the lid back on the tin, shoved the notebook and the tin into her bag, and left before she could change her mind.

The clasp was held shut with a twist of wire, and it took her three tries to get it around her wrist. The chain was heavier than it looked. She turned her arm over once to check, and the charms slid down against her hand with that uneven clink.

She told herself that she’d take it off in a minute. Nobody was home. It didn’t count if nobody saw.

She left it on.

At six, keys hit the dish by the front door. Lexie had put the notebook in her bag and the card in her pocket, but she hadn't thought to hide the rest. Her mom came into the kitchen with her work bag still on her shoulder and stopped. She looked at the envelope on the counter first, slit open down the top, with the letter beside it. She looked at it for a long time. Then she looked at Lexie.

Lexie's hand was on the table. The bracelet was on her wrist, in plain sight, and she didn't move it.

The charms clinked once as her wrist shifted. Her mom’s eyes went to the sound.

Her face went completely still, like somebody had hit pause. It lasted maybe two seconds. Lexie had seen her mom tired, and angry, and politely furious, but she had never seen this.

Then her mom put her bag down, picked up the envelope and the letter, and slid them into the drawer by the stove, squared to the edge, exactly the way she'd have put them back unopened.

“Did you eat?” She asked.

“Yeah.”

“Okay…”

She turned on the stove. The pan started to hiss, and Lexie pushed her chair back quietly and went upstairs. Her mom didn't turn around.

Eliana got home at ten to seven and found dinner already on the table. Her parents had started without her. The DONATE box was still sitting in the hallway, taped shut now, the record sleeve was pushed back down inside. Her bag felt heavier than it should have, so she set it by the stairs where nobody would look.

"There she is," her father said, putting his tablet down. "How was school, did you have fun?"

“It was fine, Mr. Anderson gave us an essay.”

“On what?”

"Whether you can be responsible for what the people before you did."

"Huh." He looked genuinely pleased. "That's a good one. You could write about Grandpa's company, the whole-”

"Can we not turn dinner into a seminar," her mother said.

She said it to her plate. Eliana had spent sixteen years learning to read her mother from the way she held a fork, and tonight it was the grip of someone who was already angry and hadn't picked the target yet.

"Vivian's mom posted pictures from the vigil," her mother said. She turned her phone around. Emily was holding a candle with both hands, and Hannah was beside her, and there was a gap on the left where Eliana would have been standing. "Everyone was there."

"I was at the library."

"On the one day."

"Mom-"

"Do you have any idea how that looks? I have spent three weeks being gracious about all of this, about him, and you can't show up to one thing for one hour." Her mother's voice had gone thin and fast. "I'm not getting phone calls from other mothers about my own daughter."

"Honey," her father said.

"Don't." Her mother pushed her chair back and left the table. The bedroom door closed. It wasn't a slam, which was worse.

Her father waited a moment. "She's had a day," he said, and gave Eliana a small, tired smile. "The essay sounds interesting, though. I'd like to read it when you're done."

"Sure," Eliana said.

Under the table, her phone had been buzzing against her knee since she sat down. She checked it between bites.

She typed with her thumb, below the edge of the table.

She sighed into her own breath, and looked back at her phone

It was only one word, but somehow it felt fitting.

Afterward, while her father ran the dishwasher, she stopped in the hallway. The box was only taped across the middle. She slid two fingers under the flap and eased out the record that had been sticking up that morning. The sleeve was soft at the edges, the cover a blurry photo of four men in a parking lot, nobody she knew. She tucked it under her sweater and went upstairs, taking the steps slowly so they wouldn't creak.

Eliana locked her bedroom door, which she never did, and spread everything out on the bed: the notebook, the tin, the record. She put the record on top. It didn't seem right to leave it at the bottom.

She took the pick out and held it under the lamp. The symbol had been scratched in deep, like somebody had gone over it more than once. She found a pen and tried it on the back of her essay prompt. Three rings, then the bolt across them. The rings came out lopsided, and the bolt sat on top of them like a crack in a windshield. She tried again. It still looked wrong, and she couldn't say why.

She went back to the page of practice rows in the notebook and counted. Forty-one. Her own three attempts looked like the first row. She put the pick on the nightstand where she could see it and turned off the lamp.

Lexie was lying on her bed in the dark with the bracelet still on. She had meant to take it off before her shower and hadn't. Every time she moved her wrist, the charms ticked against each other.

The notebook was on the nightstand where she'd put it. She didn't touch it. Instead she dug the marker out of her bag, the one she used for band flyers, and drew on the inside of her wrist without really deciding to: the bolt first, then three quick rings over it, the way Cece had. She turned on her phone flashlight to look. It wasn't perfect, but it was close, and it looked like the charm.

She left it on. She switched the light off, the charms ticked once more, and then the room was quiet.