Chapter 10: All Apologies

Eliana was done waiting. It had been days of not looking across the civics room, and the folded bills were still pressed between the pages of Tommy’s notebook.

The strip of asphalt behind the gym was where the dumpsters lived. She had walked past the end of it a hundred times on the way to the parking lot and never once turned down it. Today she did. She checked over her shoulder first, and hated that she did.

The band was where everyone knew they would be, on four milk crates in a rough square. Rodney was drumming on his knees with two pencils. Ryan had his phone out. Meghan had her guitar case flat across her lap like a desk, and she was writing something on the setlist taped to the lid.

There were four crates. One was empty.

Rodney saw her first. His pencils stopped.

“Uh,” he said. “Are we being recorded? Where’s Vivian hiding?”

“No.” Eliana stopped a few feet from the crates. She had planned this part. She had planned to be pleasant. “Hi. Sorry. Is Lexie around?”

Meghan didn’t look up from the setlist. “No.”

“Do you know where she is?”

“Nope.”

“It’s kind of important.”

“Then text her.”

“I don’t have her number.”

Meghan finally looked up. She took her time doing it. “Huh,” she said. “Weird. Me neither.”

Rodney made a small noise like he was trying not to laugh, and Meghan didn’t even glance at him.

“Look, she’s been a zombie since your little pool adventure,” Meghan said. “She doesn’t sing, she doesn’t eat, she doesn’t sit with us. So whatever you want with her, I really don’t think she needs more of it.”

Eliana opened her mouth. The pleasant voice was right there, ready to go, and she could tell it would make this worse.

“I just need to talk to her,” she said instead. “That’s all.”

Meghan looked at her a moment longer. Then she went back to the setlist.

“We’ll tell her you stopped by.”

Eliana stood there for another second. Nobody said anything else. She turned around and walked back up the strip of asphalt, past the dumpsters, with her face very carefully nothing.

She was almost at the corner of the gym when she heard footsteps behind her.

It was Ryan. He had his phone in his pocket and his hands in his hoodie, and he didn’t look like he was in a hurry.

“Yearbook room,” he said. “She’s been eating lunch in there all week.”

Eliana stared at him. “Why are you telling me?”

Ryan shrugged.

“Because she’s been moping like somebody dumped her,” he said, and made a kissing noise. “It’s gross. Go fix it.”

The yearbook room was at the end of the second-floor hallway, past the art rooms, and it smelled like printer toner and old pizza. Proof sheets were taped to every wall. Two ancient computers hummed on a long table under the window, and one of them had the clubs spread open on the screen, with a big empty rectangle labeled BAND?? in the corner.

Mika was at that computer. Lexie was in the far corner, sitting on a rolling chair with her boots up on a box of old yearbooks, a honey stick in her mouth and a small notebook open on her knee.

She closed the notebook when the door opened.

Mika looked at Eliana. Then at Lexie. Then back at Eliana, and something in her face changed, like she was doing math.

“Oh!” Mika said brightly, and stood up so fast her chair rolled into the wall. “I just remembered. I have to go check on… the toner. In the library. It’s an emergency.”

“The toner,” Lexie said.

“It’s very low. I can feel it.” Mika grabbed her camera bag. On her way past Eliana in the doorway, she stopped for half a second, close enough that only Eliana could hear.

“Be nice,” she said quietly. Then, louder and brighter: “Okay! Bye!”

The door clicked shut behind her.

Eliana didn’t sit down. She walked over to the long table, took Tommy’s notebook out of her bag, and slid the folded bills out from between its pages. She put them down on the table between the two computers, flat, and pushed them a few inches toward Lexie.

Lexie looked at the money for a long time.

“What’s that,” she said finally. Her voice was better than it had been on Saturday, but not by much.

“Bus fare. For both of us. And a little extra.”

“I told you it was chill.”

“I told you I’d pay you back.”

Lexie took the honey stick out of her mouth and looked at it, like it might have an opinion.

“You walked all the way up here,” she said, “to give me eight dollars.”

“Nine.”

Lexie was ready to scowl. Something else got there first, and she stopped it, but not before it showed.

Eliana saw it and didn’t say anything. She set Tommy’s notebook down on the table next to the money instead.

“And I need to show you something,” she said.

Eliana opened Tommy’s notebook to the page with the wine glass and turned it around so Lexie could see.

Lexie didn’t move at first. Then she took her boots off the box, rolled her chair over to the table, and leaned in.

Eliana walked her through it the way she’d worked it out herself on Monday night, one page at a time. The lights and the outlets. Feedback = door. old wire = hallway. The wavy line with the arrow from us. The wine glass, and what resonance meant, and louder = further.

Then she put her finger under the line pressed so hard into the page it had nearly torn.

Lexie read it. Something went across her face and was gone again. She didn’t say anything.

Eliana turned to the next page and pointed at the margin.

“So I’m asking,” Eliana said.

Lexie looked at that line for a long time. Then she opened Cece’s notebook in her lap and started turning pages, fast, past the salamander and past things Eliana didn’t get a good look at. Her thumb stopped near the back, on a page that was almost empty.

She turned it around and set it on the table.

In Cece’s small, neat handwriting, in the middle of the page with nothing above it and nothing below it, was a single line:

That was all. No explanation. No song. Just the number, underlined once, with the symbol drawn small in the corner the way it was on every page.

“I didn’t know what it meant,” Lexie said. “I thought it was a radio station.”

Eliana got out her phone and typed it in. The results came up, and she read the first few, and the hair on her arms stood up the way it had in the studio.

“It’s too low to hear,” she said. “It’s called infrasound. You don’t hear it, you feel it.” She scrolled. “There was this engineer whose lab was supposed to be haunted. People felt like they were being watched. They saw gray shapes out of the corners of their eyes. It turned out a fan in the wall was making nineteen hertz.” She looked up. “People call it the ghost frequency.”

Lexie stared at her. “And that’s us.”

Eliana looked back at Tommy’s page. The wavy line. The arrow from us.

“I thought it was the singing,” she said slowly. “Don’t you sing them any higher. I thought he meant your songs.” She shook her head. “It’s not the song. Everybody plays music. Cars, parties, the gym, at pep rallies. Nothing comes for them. It comes for us. The music just makes us louder.”

Louder = further.

“The basement,” Eliana said. “Is it old?”

“It’s some guy’s parents’ house. The outlets spark if you plug in the fog machine.”

“And you’ll be on a mic. Through speakers.”

“Through Rodney’s cousin’s PA,” Lexie said. “It has a subwoofer. It shakes the ceiling.” She sat back. “Great. Awesome.”

“You have to cancel.”

“And tell them what? That I’m haunted?” Lexie shook her head. “It’s our first real show. Rodney’s been telling everyone he’s ever met. Meghan made the setlist three weeks ago. I’m not pulling the plug on them three days out for a reason I can’t even say out loud.”

“Then don’t sing.”

“Then there’s no show,” Lexie said. “Same thing.”

Eliana looked at the page with the number on it, and then at Tommy’s page with the wine glass, and then back.

“Then we figure out how to stop it,” she said. “Before Saturday.”

Lexie reached over, picked up the folded bills, and put them in her pocket without looking at them.

The door opened before either of them could stand up. Mika came in backwards, carrying a single ream of printer paper like it was evidence.

“They were out of toner,” she announced. “Tragically. I got paper.”

She looked at the table. The money was gone. The two notebooks were sitting side by side, and both girls were still in the room, and nobody was crying.

Mika’s face did something very small and very pleased, and then she went back to the clubs spread like none of it had happened.

Lexie stood up and shoved Cece’s notebook into her hoodie. “After school,” she said. “Here?”

Eliana looked at Mika.

“Oh, I’m always here,” Mika said, typing. “I don’t hear anything. I’m wallpaper.”

“After school,” Eliana said. “Here.”

The bell rang for fifth period. Lexie went left, toward the library. Eliana went right, toward the science wing, with three more classes between her and the last bell, and a list in her head of exactly who to ask.

Eliana had science last period on Wednesdays. She packed her bag slowly when it let out. Lisa packed hers slower. By the time the room had emptied, they were wiping down the same bench, the way they always did.

“You look tired,” Lisa said, without looking up.

“So do you.”

“I always look tired. I was up till three doing stoichiometry for fun.” Lisa wiped the same spot twice. “What’s your excuse?”

Eliana didn’t have one ready. She had been thinking about how to ask this since lunch, and every version sounded strange.

“I heard Ajax in the library last week,” she said finally. “Something about lights. Behind the bleachers.”

Lisa stopped wiping.

“I was with him,” she said. “He told the whole library about it. Nobody believed him. Anthony logged it, and that was it.” She looked at Eliana sideways. “Why?”

“I just want to know what they looked like.”

Lisa was quiet for a second. She was deciding something. Then she put the rag down.

“Small,” she said. “Like marbles. Blueish white, kinda. There were maybe six of them, just floating at shoulder height, like they were waiting for something.” She held her hand out flat in the air to show where. “And the stadium lights were off, but the scoreboard was flickering. On and off, the whole time. Ajax said they were looking at us. I told him he was high.” She paused. “He was high. But they were looking at us.”

Eliana thought about the lights crawling out of Tommy’s amp, turning slowly in the dark like they were curious.

“Did they come closer?”

“A little. Then Ajax started walking toward them, and I grabbed his hood and made him leave.” Lisa picked the rag back up. “Why’d you ask anyways?”

“I saw something like that,” Eliana said. It was true, and it was all she could give.

Lisa looked at her for a long moment. Then her shoulders came down, just slightly, like something she’d been carrying around had finally been set on a table.

“Okay,” she said. “So I’m not crazy.”

“You’re not crazy.”

“I mean, I’m a little crazy.” Lisa wiped the bench one more time. “But not about that.”

“Do you have any idea what they are?” Eliana asked. “You’re like the smartest person I know.”

“Actually,” Lisa said, “I’ve read about it. There’s a thing called ball lightning.”

“Is that real?”

“Sort of. Nobody’s sure.” She leaned on the bench, and for the first time all conversation she looked awake. “People have been reporting it for centuries. Glowing balls, usually bigger than what we saw, floating around during thunderstorms. Some of them go through windows. Pilots have seen them inside planes. A few years ago some scientists in China were filming a storm and caught one by accident, and when they looked at the light, it had silicon and iron in it. Like it was made of vaporized dirt.”

“So that’s what it was.”

“That’s the thing.” Lisa frowned. “It needs a storm. And it wasn’t storming that night. It was totally clear.”

Eliana didn’t say anything.

“So it can’t have been ball lightning,” Lisa said. “Which means I don’t know what it was.” She started folding the rag, like she was almost done. “Next time I’m bringing a camera.”

“Don’t,” Eliana said, too fast.

Lisa looked up.

“I mean,” Eliana said, “maybe just don’t walk toward them.”

The robotics lab smelled like solder and burnt plastic. The whiteboard at the front said COMPETITION IN 25 DAYS now, with six other numbers crossed out above it. Emma was bent over Alfred Esquire the Third with the soldering iron and didn’t look up.

Dylan was at the back bench with a Monster in one hand and a multimeter in the other, poking at a circuit board like it owed him money.

“Hey,” Eliana said. “Can I ask you something about electricity?”

“You can ask,” Dylan said. “I’ve had two hours of sleep, so I don’t know if I can answer.”

“Two and a half,” said Emma, without looking up.

“Two.”

Eliana sat down on the stool across from him. “If something electrical got loose in a room, and you couldn’t just turn it off, how would you get rid of it?”

Dylan set the Monster down. “What do you mean, got loose?”

“Like…” She thought about how to put it. “Like if you cut the power, but it was still in the wires anyway.”

“Ground it.” He picked the Monster back up, like that settled it.

“What does that mean?”

Dylan stared at a spot just past her head for a long moment, like he was waiting for the words to load.

“Electricity wants down,” he said. “Into the ground. Always. It’s lazy. Takes whatever’s easiest.” He took a sip. “Relatable.”

“So how do you get rid of it?”

“Give it something easier.” He picked up a bit of copper wire from the bench and bent it into a hook without looking at it. “Lightning rod. Big metal stick. Lightning goes, oh, sick, and hits that instead of your house. You don’t fight it. You just…” He waved the wire vaguely. “Make it a better offer.”

“So you don’t stop it,” Eliana said. “You lead it somewhere.”

“Yeah. That.” He squinted at her. “Like the fuse thing. Fuse gives up. Ground just… takes it.”

He reached for the multimeter again. As Eliana leaned in to look at the board, the needle on the meter jumped, twitched hard to one side, and fell back.

Dylan frowned at it.

“Huh,” he said. “That’s weird.” He tapped the side of it. “This thing’s been glitchy all week.”

Eliana sat back on her stool, very slowly. The needle went still.

“Probably the battery,” Dylan said, and went back to the board.

Lexie found Anthony at the table by the library window, the one the librarian pretended she couldn’t see. He was at the far end with his laptop open and his headphones on, typing. Ajax was lying across two chairs with his eyes closed and a textbook open on his chest like a blanket.

She dropped her bag on the table hard enough that Anthony’s laptop bounced.

Then she pulled one side of his headphones off his ear.

“Don’t,” Anthony said.

“I need your spreadsheet.”

“No.”

“The weird stuff one. Narnia says you log everything.”

“Narnia talks too much.” He tugged the headphones back on.

Lexie sat down on the edge of the table, right next to his laptop, and stayed there. She didn’t say anything else. She just sat there and looked at him.

Anthony typed for about forty more seconds. Then he stopped.

“If I show you,” he said, “will you leave?”

“Immediately.”

He sighed through his nose and turned the laptop around.

It was a spreadsheet, the cleanest one Lexie had ever seen. Date, time, location, description, source. Every row was something small and wrong. A vending machine that ate forty dollars and then spat it all back out at once. The gym scoreboard flickering during an empty period. An alarm panel in the south hall that went off with nobody near it. Lights behind the bleachers, source: Ajax, reliability: low.

“They cluster,” Anthony said, in the voice of someone who had been waiting a long time for anyone to ask. “Look at the times. Assemblies. The drill. Pep rally. Anything loud.”

Lexie looked at the times. Then she looked again.

It wasn’t just anything loud. The music wing came up over and over. Second period on Thursdays. Fourth period on Mondays.

Every time her band played.

Her stomach went cold. She left her face exactly where it was.

“Cool,” she said.

Anthony looked at her for the first time. “It is cool,” he said, with real feeling. “Statistics, the building blocks of human survival.” He scrolled down. “And this one doesn’t fit anything. I logged it on Saturday.”

He pointed.

Lexie stared at it.

“I wasn’t at school on Saturday,” she said.

From the two chairs, without opening his eyes, Ajax said, “You were. I saw you. You waved at me.” He let that sit. “Think about what a wave is. It’s a hand saying hello without a mouth. It’s the body admitting it’s happy to see someone. You have never once admitted that about me. So either you had a spiritual awakening on the bleachers, or I did.”

“I was in Rodney’s basement all day. With five people. Who can all tell you I didn’t wave at anybody.”

Ajax opened one eye.

“Huh,” he said. Then he closed it again, perfectly calm. “Doppelgänger.”

“What?”

“German. It means double-goer. A walking copy of you.” He folded his hands on top of the textbook. “Old superstition says if you ever see yours, it’s bad news. Like, death bad. Goethe supposedly saw his once, riding toward him down a road, wearing clothes he didn’t own yet.” He yawned. “But honestly, everybody’s got one somewhere. It’s statistics. There are only so many faces. Eventually the universe starts reusing them.”

Nobody said anything.

Anthony typed something new into the notes column. Lexie leaned over and read it.

“I’m leaving,” Lexie said, and she did, before either of them could see her hands.

Eliana got to the yearbook room first. Mika wasn’t there. A sticky note on the computer screen said, in bubbly purple marker:

There was a little cartoon of a lucky cat beside it, one paw raised.

Lexie came in two minutes later and shut the door behind her. She didn’t sit down.

“You first,” she said.

Eliana told her about Lisa’s lights behind the bleachers, and Dylan saying you couldn’t fight electricity, only give it somewhere better to go.

“Ground it,” Lexie said.

“Ground it.”

Then Lexie told her about the spreadsheet. She told it fast and flat, like she was reading off a list. The incidents clustered around loud things. Then she stopped.

“Around my band,” she said. “Every practice. It’s me.”

Eliana didn’t say anything for a second. “It’s us,” she said. “It found me at the school too.”

Lexie looked at her. Then she told her the rest, about Saturday at three-forty, and Ajax on the bleachers, and a version of her that smiled and waved.

“Doppelgänger,” Lexie said. “Ajax had a word for it. It’s German. It means a walking copy of you.”

Eliana went very still.

“Emily thanked me,” she said slowly. “On Friday. For talking to her by the fence during the drill. When she was crying.” She swallowed. “I was in the kitchen with you. And Hannah said she saw me on the lawn, waving. Dry. And Tessa said I was laughing with somebody by the flagpole.”

They looked at each other across the table.

“So there’s two of you,” Lexie said.

“And two of you.”

“Great.” Lexie pulled out the rolling chair and sat down hard. “Awesome.”

She opened Cece’s notebook and started turning pages, faster than she had at lunch. She stopped near the middle and turned it around.

Eliana thought about her own hand coming up in the studio, all on its own.

“That’s Lisa’s ball lightning,” she said. “It’s the same thing. She just has the science half.”

“And Cece has the freaky half.” Lexie shut the notebook. “Does yours say anything about the copies?”

Eliana opened Tommy’s notebook and went through it page by page. Nothing. Nothing. A setlist. A grocery list. A drawing of a dog. Then, near the back, a page with no arrows and no diagrams, only a few lines of lyrics, written slower than the rest, so the letters were almost neat.

it wears many facesand it’ll wear yours tooit sits at your tableand it smiles back at you

Under it, Tommy had written slow. never loud. And under that, circled twice: not one of the little ones.

Lexie read it over her shoulder. She didn’t say anything.

Then she opened Cece’s notebook again and turned to the very back, to a page Eliana had seen her skip over at lunch.

It was nearly empty. At the top, in Cece’s handwriting, was a single line:

And under it, smaller:

There was nothing else. No description, no drawing, no note in the margin. Eliana looked at the corner of the page out of habit.

The symbol was drawn small in the corner of every page in Cece’s notebook. It wasn’t on this one.

Neither of them said anything for a long time.

Outside the window, the buses were pulling out of the loop one by one. Saturday was three days away.

Eliana was the one who finally spoke. She’d had the words ready since Monday, in the right order, and when she opened her mouth none of them came out that way.

“About Friday,” she said.

Lexie didn’t look up from Cece’s notebook.

“The bus shelter. And before that.” Eliana pressed her thumb into the edge of the table. “I said you were just being nice. In front of them. Like it was a joke.”

Lexie turned a page she wasn’t reading.

“You were being nice,” Eliana said. “That’s the thing. You were. And I made it sound like…” She stopped. She tried again. “I tried to give you the money on Monday. In the hall. And I saw Tessa at the water fountain and I just. Didn’t.”

Lexie still didn’t say anything. She was going to make her do all of it, and Eliana understood that she deserved that.

“I don’t know how to be friends with somebody who isn’t,” she said, and then heard it, and her face went hot. “That came out wrong. I mean somebody they don’t already know. I’ve never done it. I don’t know how it works.” She looked at the table. “I’m sorry. I was a coward. That’s all I’ve got.”

The room was very quiet. Out in the hall, a janitor’s cart went by.

Lexie closed Cece’s notebook.

“Yeah,” she said. “You were.”

Eliana took it. It was fair.

“Okay,” Lexie said, after a second.

That was all. Eliana couldn’t tell what kind of okay it was. She decided, for once, not to try.

Lexie was turning the notebook over in her hands, her thumb on the worn edge of the cover. When she spoke again, she didn’t look at Eliana.

“I have to tell you something too,” she said. “It’s not about Friday.” She hesitated. “The night of the fire. I read the salamander page, the first one.” She opened the notebook again, to the very front, and turned it around. She put her finger under one line.

“I’ve known since Thursday,” Lexie said. “That it was coming for us. Not the school. Us. And on Friday at the bike racks you said you didn’t want it finding Rodney, and you didn’t even know why, and you were right. And I just let you be right without telling you.” She shut the notebook. “And then on Monday you had to find it out from your uncle, by yourself.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?”

Lexie was quiet for a while.

“Because if I said it out loud,” she said, “then it was real. Then it was something in me. In my family. Cece’s fault and your uncle’s fault and mine.” She shrugged one shoulder, badly. “I didn’t want it to be in me.”

Eliana thought about the wine glass, humming because somebody had found its note.

“It’s in both of us,” she said.

“Yeah,” Lexie said. “I noticed.”

Neither of them laughed, but it was close.

Eliana didn’t decide to do it. She was around the table before she knew she was moving, and then she had her arms around Lexie’s shoulders, awkwardly, half bent over the rolling chair, her chin knocking against the top of Lexie’s head.

Lexie went completely still.

Her hands came up off her knees and just stayed there in the air, like she wasn’t sure what they were for. The bracelet clinked once. Eliana could feel her breathing, short and surprised.

After a second, one of Lexie’s hands came down and patted Eliana’s arm. Twice. Stiffly, like she was testing whether it was hot.

Eliana let go and stepped back. Her face was burning.

“Sorry,” she said. “I don’t know why I did that.”

Lexie stared at her. Her ears had gone red.

“Give me your phone,” she said.

Eliana handed it over. Lexie typed for a second with her thumb, and handed it back, and stood up and shoved Cece’s notebook into her hoodie.

“Saturday,” Lexie said.

“Saturday.”

Lexie went out first. Eliana stayed a second longer, and looked down at the new contact on her screen.

Lexie had saved her number under STRICTLY BUSINESS.

Eliana looked at it for a long moment. She didn’t change it.

Then she put her phone away, found Mika’s key in the drawer, and locked up behind her.