Chapter 9: Can We Forget About the Things I Said When…

Saturday morning, the kitchen smelled like coffee and nothing else. Nobody had made breakfast.

Eliana came down in her swimsuit under a sweatshirt, with her bag over her shoulder, and stopped in the doorway. Her father was at the table with his tablet propped against the fruit bowl, the way it was every morning. Her mother wasn’t there. From the living room came her voice on the phone, bright and a little too loud, laughing at something Melanie’s mom had said.

“Coffee’s ready,” her father said.

She poured it and added the cream in one slow pour. Her fingertips stung against the mug. She held it by the handle instead.

Her father didn’t look up from the tablet for a while. Then he set it face down on the table, which he never did.

“You want to tell me what last night was?”

Eliana looked at her coffee.

“You don’t talk to your mother like that,” he said. He didn’t raise his voice. He never had to. “You know that. Tell me what happened.”

She thought about the bus shelter, and the plexiglass, and her own voice coming back at her off the walls. She thought about trying to explain any of it at this table.

“Nothing happened,” she said.

He waited. She didn’t say anything else.

After a while, he nodded, slowly, like she had answered a different question than the one he’d asked. He picked the tablet back up.

“I’m going over to Tommy’s at ten,” he said. “To let the cleaners in.”

She had forgotten it was today.

“Is there anything you want from there?” He was looking at the tablet again, but his thumb wasn’t moving. “Before it all goes.”

The dishes in the sink. The mattress on the floor. The two guitars leaning against the wall under the window, one of them missing a string.

“The guitars,” she said.

Her father looked up like a deer in the headlights.

“Both of them,” she said. “Please.”

He looked at her for a long moment, and something in his face she couldn’t name came and went. Then he nodded. “I’ll put them in your room.”

Outside, a car horn went off twice. Hannah.

“Go,” her father said. “Be back by six.”

Eliana put her mug in the sink and went. In the living room her mother was still on the phone, and she didn’t look over as Eliana passed, and Eliana didn’t stop.

Melanie’s backyard looked like a commercial for being sixteen.

The pool was lit from underneath even in the daytime, a bright, unreal blue, and steam came off it in the cold air because Melanie’s parents kept the heater running all year. There was a stack of pizza boxes on the patio table, and a cooler full of sparkling water that Melanie had promised was only sparkling water, despite the words HARD SELTZER written on each bottle, and a speaker playing something Vivian had picked. Eliana knew every song on it.

She put the bag of sour candies on the table, the ones Melanie liked.

“Oh my god, you remembered,” Melanie said, and hugged her with one arm, still holding a slice of pizza in the other.

“I said I would.”

“Everyone always says they will. You’re the only one who actually does!”

It was a small thing. Eliana held onto it anyway.

Hannah was already in the water. She was sprawled on the inflatable unicorn float in the middle of the pool, the way she was every time they came here, with her sunglasses on and one hand trailing in the water. Everyone knew the unicorn was Hannah’s. Melanie had bought it for her as a joke two summers ago, and the joke had stuck.

“Get in!” Tessa called from the shallow end. “The three of us need a picture!”

“My hands are messed up,” Eliana said. She held them up. The fingertips were still red, and the grooves had gone dark overnight. “Guitar thing. The chlorine’ll kill me.”

“Since when do you play guitar?”

“Since always. Badly.”

“Oh, right. Wonderwall.” Tessa lost interest and dove under.

Eliana sat on the edge of the pool, still in her sweatshirt, and put her feet in.

The water was warm. It was nothing like the school pool, which had been freezing. That was the first thing she told herself. This pool was warm, and it was bright, and it was full of people she knew, and Vivian was filming Emily trying to do a handstand in the shallow end and failing, and everyone was laughing.

Eliana laughed too. For a minute it was easy. For a minute she was just here, with her feet in Melanie’s pool, the way she had been a hundred Saturdays before, and nothing had ever been on fire.

Then the jets kicked on.

A line of bubbles came up along the wall right beside her ankles, white and fast, and the surface broke open into seams. She jerked her feet out of the water before she knew she was going to.

Nobody saw. Emily was still upside down in the shallow end. Vivian was still filming her. Tessa was still under.

Eliana put her feet back in, slowly, a few inches further from the jets. Her heart was going hard. She looked at the water until it was just water again.

Out in the middle of the pool, the unicorn float turned in a slow circle. Hannah had pushed her sunglasses up into her hair.

She wasn’t watching Emily. She was watching Eliana’s feet, and then the jets, and then Eliana.

Hannah slid off the unicorn and swam over to the edge. She hauled herself up beside Eliana, dripping, and sat with her shoulder almost touching Eliana’s, her feet in the water next to Eliana’s feet. The speaker was loud. Over in the shallow end, Tessa was trying to talk everyone into playing Marco Polo.

For a while Hannah didn’t say anything. She just kicked her feet slowly, making small waves that washed over Eliana’s ankles.

“So,” she said finally. Not loud. Just for the two of them. “What’s going on with you and Lexie Calloway?”

Eliana watched the water. “Nothing.”

“You got off a bus with her.”

“We had a civics thing.”

“You were crying in my car.”

Eliana didn’t answer that one. She hadn’t known Hannah had seen. She had thought she’d kept her eyes on the dashboard the whole way.

“I was tired,” she said. “It was a long day.”

Hannah looked at her for a long moment. Eliana kept her eyes on the water and tried to work out what Hannah was thinking, the way she always tried, and couldn’t. Hannah’s face was just Hannah’s face.

“Let me see your hands,” Hannah said.

Eliana hesitated. Then she held them out.

Hannah took the left one, turned it over, and looked at the dark grooves across the fingertips. She didn’t press on them. She just looked.

“You’ve never played long enough to get these,” she said. “You get bored after the first chorus of Wonderwall.”

“I played longer this time.”

“Yeah.” Hannah let go. “I can tell.”

She didn’t ask anything else. She leaned back on her hands and looked up at the sky, and after a minute she reached over to the edge of the patio, where the bag of sour candies had ended up, and picked one out and held it out to Eliana without looking at her.

“Have some marshmallows,” she said.

Eliana took it. Her throat had gone tight, the way it had on the front steps on Monday, and she swallowed until it went away.

Hannah slid back into the water and swam out to the unicorn, and climbed on, and pulled her sunglasses back down.

Eliana looked at the candy in her palm. It was one of the sour ones, green, coated in sugar that stuck to her fingers.

She put it in her mouth. It was so sour it made her eyes water, and she let them, because she finally had an excuse.

Hannah had turned her hand over the same way Lexie had, palm up, looking at the same marks. Lexie had pressed on them. That’s gonna callus, she’d said, like it was a good thing.

I’ll pay you back. Eliana had said it twice. Lexie had counted her crumpled bills under the streetlight, enough for two, barely, and paid anyway.

Eliana reached behind her for her bag, found her wallet, and counted what was inside under the edge of a towel. Enough for two fares, and a little more. She folded the bills in half and tucked them into the front pocket by themselves, where she’d see them every time she opened it.

She didn’t know what she was going to say to her. But she had brought the sour candies to Melanie’s every single time since freshman year, because she’d said she would once. On Monday, she would bring this.

Rodney’s basement smelled like laundry and old carpet, and the walls were lined with egg cartons that Rodney’s dad had glued up in eighth grade and refused to take down. Somebody had added a Christmas light strand along the ceiling. It was October. Nobody was going to take that down either.

Meghan had the setlist taped to the top of her amp. She went over it with one finger like she was reading a contract.

“Six songs,” she said. “We open with ‘Static Saint,’ we close with ‘Dead Mall.’ We run the whole thing twice today, and if anybody rushes the bridge on ‘Dead Mall,’ I swear to god.”

“That was one time,” Rodney said.

“It was every time.”

On the old plaid couch against the far wall, Narnia was curled up with a coffee in both hands, watching like it was a matinee. Mika was beside them with the camera bag open on her knees, changing a lens.

“Clubs spread is due Friday,” she told the room cheerfully. “So everybody look alive. Or at least look like a band.”

Lexie stood at the mic stand with her hood down for once. Her throat felt like she had swallowed sand, and then gravel, and then a little more sand. She hadn’t said more than ten words all morning.

“You good?” Ryan asked, tuning.

“I’m good.”

It came out as a scrape. Ryan looked at her for a second, then went back to his bass.

Rodney counted them in.

The first verse was fine, sort of. Her voice cracked on two of the lines, and she pushed through it. By the chorus it wasn’t singing anymore. She was screaming, louder than the song needed, louder than she had any reason to. Every line came out of her like she was throwing something at a wall.

She was thinking about the bus shelter. She was thinking about how she was just being nice, and the laugh that came right after it, the right amount, at the right time.

Her voice broke completely on the bridge. It just stopped, halfway through a word, and what came out after that was barely air.

She kept going anyway.

“Stop,” Meghan said. Then louder, over the guitar. “Stop, stop, stop.”

Rodney let the cymbal ring out. Ryan’s bass faded.

Lexie coughed, bent over, and coughed again. It hurt all the way down.

“You’re done,” Meghan said.

“I’m fine.”

“You sound like a garbage disposal. You’re done.” Meghan pointed at the amp in the corner with the neck of her guitar. “Sit.”

“The show’s in a week.”

“Yeah, and if you blow your voice out today, it’s in a week with no singer. Sit down.”

Lexie sat down on the amp. She pulled her knees up and put her hood back up.

Nobody said anything. The Christmas lights buzzed.

Then Ryan cleared his throat, stepped up to the mic, and, without changing his expression at all, sang the opening line of “Static Saint” in a high, warbling falsetto, a full octave above where it was written.

Rodney fell off of his stool.

“No,” Meghan said. “Absolutely not.”

“I think I’ve found my calling,” Ryan said, in the same voice.

“Do the bridge,” Rodney wheezed from the floor. “Do the bridge, do the bridge.”

Ryan did the bridge. It was somehow even worse.

Narnia had to put their coffee down. Even Meghan’s mouth twitched, and she turned around so nobody would see it.

Lexie didn’t laugh, but she didn’t leave either. She sat on the amp with her hood up and watched her idiots, and after a minute Mika got up off the couch and came over and sat down on the floor beside her.

Mika didn’t say anything at first. She just sat on the carpet with her back against the amp, the camera in her lap, and watched Ryan slaughter the bridge a second time.

Narnia got up off the couch and wandered over with their coffee. They stopped in front of Lexie and looked down at her hand, the one resting on her knee. The gauze had come loose at one corner.

“Oh, that’s new,” Narnia said. “What did you do?”

“Pulled it. Swimming.”

“You pulled it.” Narnia looked at the gauze. “And then you bandaged it. The pull.”

“And scraped it,” Lexie said. “On the ladder.”

“Swimming. In October. With a ladder.” Narnia took a sip of coffee. “Very athletic of you.”

They wandered back to the couch.

Mika was still sitting there. Her eyes went to Lexie’s wrist, where the bracelet had slid down out of her sleeve, the brass key and the little airplane and the flat disc with the rings on it. She looked at it the way she had in the hallway that week, a second longer than anybody else would have. Then she looked at Lexie’s face.

“You look like you didn’t sleep,” she said quietly.

“I slept.”

“Your eyes are all… what’s the word… puffy. Like a sponge.”

Lexie pulled her hood down further.

Mika didn’t push. She dug into the camera bag, came out with a handful of honey sticks, the little plastic straws from the coffee place by school, and dropped three of them into Lexie’s lap.

“For your voice,” she said. “They work. I’m not kidding. I did the whole spring musical on these.”

Lexie looked at the honey sticks. She picked one up and turned it over.

“Also,” Mika said, brighter, “I’m in the yearbook room all week finishing clubs. It’s super boring in there. Like, nobody ever comes in. If you ever need somewhere to be boring.”

“I’m fine.”

“Okay,” Mika said. “I know.”

She lifted the camera and pointed it at Lexie on the amp, hood up, the Christmas lights behind her and her knees pulled in. It would have been a good picture. Lexie could tell from Mika’s face.

Mika lowered it without taking it.

“I’ll get you on Friday,” she said, and turned the lens toward Rodney, who was still lying on the floor.

On Monday morning the steps were already full when Eliana got there. Hannah had the third one. Tessa was a step below with her phone out, and Vivian was showing Emily something from Saturday, a video of Emily falling out of a handstand, on a loop.

Eliana took her usual place, one step below and to the left. Hannah’s hand came back without her looking and passed down a paper cup.

“Have some marshmallows.”

“Thanks.”

She had a new phone in her pocket. Her dad had brought it home on Sunday night without a word, still in the box. Everything had transferred from the cloud: her photos, the group chat, two hundred and eleven unread messages she’d already marked as read. She had scrolled through her contacts twice before school, as if Lexie’s name might be in there somewhere. It wasn’t. They had never traded numbers. There had never been a reason to.

The folded bills were in the front pocket of her bag. She could feel them there, even though she knew that wasn’t possible.

She watched the front doors. Then the side path from the bus loop. Then the doors again.

“Okay, who are you looking for?”

Tessa had turned all the way around on her step. She said it at the volume she said everything, and three people on the steps above them looked down.

“Nobody.”

“You’ve looked at that door like eleven times.” Tessa held up her phone, as if she’d been keeping count on it. “You’ve been weird since the fire. Like, weirder than normal.”

“Thanks, Tess.”

“I’m just saying! I notice things. Somebody has to.” Tessa looked around the group for backup. “Right? She’s been weird.”

“She’s been fine,” Hannah said, without looking up from her phone.

“She skipped the pool.”

“She sat at the pool. With her hands. Drop it.”

Tessa dropped it. She turned back around, but she glanced over her shoulder once more before the bell, like she wanted Eliana to know she was still keeping track.

Eliana drank her latte and didn’t look at the doors again. She didn’t have to. She knew which way the buses came in.

The hallway outside the civics room was packed, the way it was every morning. Eliana saw Lexie before Lexie saw her.

She was at her locker with her hood up, digging for something on the top shelf. Alone. Nobody from the band was around.

Eliana unzipped the front pocket of her bag and took out the folded bills. They were warm from being near her all morning. She held them in her fist and started walking.

She made it halfway. She could have said it in four words. Here. For the bus. She had practiced it on the steps, in her head, between sips of latte.

Then she saw Tessa at the water fountain down the hall, not drinking, just looking.

Eliana stopped walking.

Lexie shut her locker. She turned, and for a second she looked straight down the hall in Eliana’s direction, and Eliana didn’t know if Lexie had seen her or seen past her. Then Lexie put her head down and went into the civics room.

Eliana stood there with the money in her fist until someone bumped her shoulder going by. Then she put the bills back in the front pocket of her bag, zipped it shut, and followed Lexie in.

Mr. Anderson was at the door of the civics room.

“Eliana, good to see you.”

He’d said Lexie’s name the same way a minute before, warmly, with no extra weight. Eliana went to her seat, third row on the left, and didn’t look right. She heard Lexie’s chair scrape on the other side of the room and didn’t look then either.

Mr. Anderson had barely closed the door when Leonard’s hand went up.

“Can we talk about the fire?”

“We can talk about anything,” Mr. Anderson said, and sat on the edge of his desk. “Go.”

“The sprinklers didn’t go off,” Leonard said. “Everybody knows that. My cousin’s on the fire department, and he says they’d been shut off since the renovation and nobody turned them back on. So who’s responsible for that?”

“The contractor,” someone said from the back.

“The principal,” said someone else.

“Just playing devil’s advocate here,” Leonard said, turning in his seat. “The principal didn’t do the renovation. She inherited it. The guy who shut them off is long gone. So is it on her?”

Thea didn’t look up from her notes. “It’s on the district. They pay their facilities people less than a shift manager at a drive-through, give each of them more buildings than they can walk through in a month, and never check whether the work got done. Of course somebody forgot the sprinklers. Pay people enough to care, put their name on the sign-off, and audit it. Then you’d actually know whose fault it was.”

“Respectfully,” Sean said, and his chair started tipping back, “pay is a symptom. The disease is the public-sector incentive structure. It’s literally called civil servitude. The etymology is right there. Remove skin in the game and you get moral hazard, and moral hazard creates a praxeological vacuum where sprinklers go to die. Privatize it. All of it. A firm with fiduciary exposure to combustion would never forget the sprinklers.”

“Again, playing devil’s advocate here,” Leonard said, turning on him. “A company would just charge extra for the same poorly made, poorly installed sprinklers.”

“Then the free market decides what sprinklers are worth.”

“Imagine, hypothetically,” Sean went on, “a fire department sponsored by an energy drink. Every truck fully branded. Response times have never been better.”

“That’s not hypothetical,” Leonard said. “Crassus did it in ancient Rome. Private fire brigade. He’d show up to your burning house and offer to buy it off you for almost nothing. If you said no, his guys stood there and watched it burn.”

“And Rome,” Sean said, without missing a beat, “had the most dynamic real estate market in the ancient world.”

Thea put her pen down. “Sean, the contractor who did the renovation was private.”

Sean paused.

“That’s who forgot the sprinklers,” she said pleasantly. “A private company. On a public contract. Nobody checked their work, because the district couldn’t afford to send anyone.”

“Which proves my point,” Sean said. “It was contaminated by the public contract.”

“So a private company,” Thea said, “was ruined by touching the government.”

“Like a frog,” Sean said. “You touch a frog with human hands, the oils get in, and the frog dies. The district is the hands.”

Thea looked at him for a long moment.

“I think about you sometimes,” she said. “Not in a nice way. I just lie awake at night wondering how you happen.”

“Through rigorous first principles.”

Mr. Anderson hadn’t moved from the edge of his desk. He looked like a man watching his favorite show.

“Let’s go back to Leonard’s question,” he said. “Somebody before her made a decision. She didn’t make it. But she’s in charge now. Is she responsible?”

“Only if she knew,” Thea said.

“And if she didn’t?”

“Then she should have,” Leonard said, and then, immediately, “I mean, devil’s advocate.”

“There were two kids still in the building,” somebody said. “I heard they were trapped. They almost died.”

The room got quieter. A few people looked around.

Eliana felt it before she decided to do anything about it. Her eyes went across the aisle on their own.

Lexie was already looking at her.

It lasted maybe a second. Lexie’s face was pale, and her hood was down, and she looked like she hadn’t slept again. Then they both looked away at exactly the same time, Eliana to her notes and Lexie to the window.

“Rumor,” Mr. Anderson said lightly, “is a very poor historical source.” He stood up and uncapped a marker. “But it’s a good place to start an argument. Leonard, I want a paragraph by Wednesday. Pick a side.”

“Which side?”

“Either one, Leonard.”

Eliana wrote the date at the top of her page. Her pen cap was in her other hand, and she was flicking it, and she couldn’t make herself stop.

Lexie made it ten steps out of civics before Sean fell into step beside her.

“Lexie. Wait up.”

She didn’t slow down. He matched her pace anyway, his blazer flapping over his hoodie.

“I want to say that I noticed,” he said. “In there.”

Lexie’s stomach dropped. “Noticed what.”

“The Barker girl looked at you, and you refused to engage.” He nodded, deeply, like he was paying her a compliment. “That’s discipline. Most people in this building would kill for one glance from that pastel hegemony. You looked out the window. You declined the transaction.”

Lexie kept walking.

“And I respect it,” Sean went on. “Because I know what it is to be surrounded by people who want you to perform belonging. Like Plato said, sort of. The cave. Except the cave is a group chat.”

“Sean.”

“Which brings me to the show.” He pulled a folded square of paper out of his blazer pocket. It was one of her flyers, the ones she’d made in marker and photocopied at the library, with the date at the bottom. Someone had pulled it off the stairwell wall. “Saturday. I’m coming. In solidarity.”

Lexie stopped walking.

He looked thrilled that she had stopped. “I’ll stand in the back. I won’t mosh. I don’t believe in moshing, it’s collectivist. But I’ll be there. You won’t be alone in this.”

You won’t be alone in this. Out of everyone in the building, the one person who had noticed, and looked at her, and decided to show up on Saturday, was Sean.

“Don’t,” she rasped.

“Too late. I’ve already cleared my schedule.”

She walked away. Behind her, Sean tucked the flyer back into his blazer, looked around the hallway like he had just won something, and headed off in the other direction, very pleased with himself.

The last bell had rung, and the hall outside the civics room was emptying out. Eliana was almost past the door when Mr. Anderson said her name.

“Eliana. Do you have a second?”

She stopped. He was at his desk with a stack of essays in front of him, squared off at the corners, and he had his reading glasses pushed up on his head.

“I don’t have yours,” he said. Not like an accusation. Like he was telling her the weather.

“I know. I’m sorry. I meant to…”

“Next Friday,” he said. “Take the week.”

She had prepared a story. It had a dentist in it again, and it was a good one, and she didn’t get to use it.

“That’s it?” she said.

“That’s it.” He smiled. “It’s been a strange couple of weeks. Fires have a way of eating homework.”

“Thank you.”

“I told Ms. Calloway the same thing at lunch,” he said, and picked up his pen. “Same deadline. It seemed fair.”

Eliana didn’t know what her face did. She hoped it was nothing.

Mr. Anderson was already reading the essay on top of the pile, his pen moving down the margin.

“And Eliana,” he said, without looking up. “The prompt. Whether you’re responsible for what the people before you did.” He turned a page. “I suspect you have more to say about it now than you did last week.”

She stood in the doorway for a second longer than she needed to.

“Yeah,” she said. “Maybe.”

“Good,” he said. “Bring me something true.”

Eliana had left the guitars leaning against the wall by her closet since Saturday, side by side, the one with five strings and the one with six. Her father hadn’t said anything about them since.

She sat on the floor between them with Tommy’s notebook open in her lap.

She hadn’t meant to read it tonight. She had meant to start the essay. But the essay was due Friday now, and the notebook was right there, and she kept thinking about the studio, the lights crawling out of the amp and the outlets like they lived in the walls.

She found them about two thirds of the way through.

It was a run of pages she had flipped past before, because they looked like nothing. Arrows. Little circles with lines coming off them, like suns drawn by a kid. An outlet, sketched badly, with three of the circles coming out of it. And between two of the arrows, a few lines in Tommy’s cramped hand:

pretty little lightscrawling through the wiredon’t you follow where they godon’t you sing them any higher

Beside it he’d written feedback = door and old wire = hallway, and underlined both.

Eliana read it twice. Then she turned the page, and the next one was different.

It was numbers. Columns of them, with Hz written after some, crossed out and written again. A wavy line drawn across the page, up and down and up, and an arrow pointing to it from a single word: us. Under that, a drawing of a wine glass with little lines coming off the rim.

She knew that one. Everybody had seen the video. Somebody sings the right note at a wine glass, and the glass starts to hum, and if they hold it long enough, it shatters. Mr. Bayer had shown it once, in a unit on sound, before they got to redox. It was called resonance. Every object had a frequency it liked, and if you hit that frequency, it answered.

Tommy had written louder = further next to the glass. And under that, smaller, pressed so hard the pen had nearly gone through the paper:

Eliana sat very still.

She thought about the school, and the fire coming down the hall toward her and Lexie and nobody else. She thought about the bike racks, and how she had told Lexie not the band basement, because whatever this was had found them in a school full of people.

She had been right. She hadn’t known why. It wasn’t the music. It was them. Something in them hummed, the way the glass hummed, and things on the other side could hear it.

And on Saturday, Lexie was going to stand in a basement full of old wiring and amps turned all the way up, and sing.

Don’t you sing them any higher.

She turned the page, looking for what to do about it. There was more. There was a lot more, and none of it made sense. Half-words, circled numbers, a diagram that might have been a speaker or might have been an eye. At the bottom of the page, in the margin, he had written:

Eliana closed her eyes.

Their number. The one note the glass was waiting for. Cece had the number. And Cece’s notebook was in the back pocket of a girl Eliana had screamed at in a bus shelter, a girl whose number wasn’t in her phone, who was playing a show on Saturday in some guy’s basement that Eliana didn’t know the address of.

She opened her bag, took the folded bills out of the front pocket, and laid them flat across the page.

Then she closed the notebook on them, so she wouldn’t lose her place.