Chapter 18: It’s What You Do to Me

By Tuesday, Eliana couldn’t remember what an ordinary week felt like.

The steps were full when she got there. Hannah had the third one. Vivian was showing Melanie something on her phone, and Emily was eating a granola bar in small bites, and it all looked exactly the way it had a week ago, which was the problem. Eliana didn’t trust things that looked exactly right anymore.

She 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, held by the rim, between two fingertips.

“Have some marshmallows.”

“Spiritually,” Eliana said.

Hannah smiled at that, but it was a small smile, and it went away fast.

Tessa was sitting a step below Hannah with her phone in her lap. She looked up when Eliana sat down, and lit up the way she did when she had something.

“Oh my god, Eliana. Thank you for yesterday.”

Eliana’s whole body went still.

“What about yesterday?”

“After school. By my locker.” Tessa put her hand on her chest. “When you said my Morticia was the best costume at the party. Which, like, I know. But it meant a lot, coming from you. You never say stuff like that.”

You never say stuff like that.

Eliana had gone straight home after school yesterday. She had slept for three hours in the middle of the afternoon, face down on her bed, and woken up with her arms still heavy.

“Of course,” she heard herself say. “It was really good.”

Tessa beamed and went back to her phone.

Eliana opened her notebook on her knees, to the back page, where nobody would look. She uncapped her pen and wrote, small and neat:

Mon after school. Tessa’s locker. Complimented costume.

Then she sat there with the pen in her hand and looked at everyone.

At Tessa, scrolling. At Vivian. At Emily, folding the granola bar wrapper into a tiny square. At Melanie. Every one of them looked exactly like herself, and that didn’t mean anything anymore. Any of them could be wearing a face.

She looked up at Hannah last.

Hannah was laughing at something Vivian had said. And while she laughed, without noticing, she wiped her palms down the front of her skirt. Both of them, front and back. Then again.

Eliana let out a breath.

It was Hannah. A copy wouldn’t know to do that. It wouldn’t know about the deep end, and the hands stuck flat, and the way she couldn’t stand to touch anything since.

Eliana looked down at her notebook. She hated that this was how she knew.

She clicked her pen cap on and off, twice, and wrote the time.

PE was third period, and the gym smelled like varnish and somebody’s spilled sports drink, the same as last week.

Ms. Johnson had them scrimmaging today, six on a side. Eliana ended up in the back row with Lisa beside her, which nobody had planned and nobody questioned anymore.

The first ball that came to Eliana, she watched sail past her shoulder like it was happening to somebody else.

“Barker!” Ms. Johnson called. “Eyes up!”

“Sorry.”

The second one she got her arms up for, too late, and it bounced off her wrist and into the bleachers. Somebody on the other side laughed. Eliana stood there with her arms still out in front of her, feeling the sting of it, a full second after it happened.

Lisa jogged back from retrieving the ball and stopped beside her.

“Okay,” Lisa said, low. “What’s going on with you?”

“I’m just tired.”

“You were tired yesterday. You fell asleep in Bayer’s class, basically. Today you look like you got hit by a truck and then the truck backed up.”

“I slept nineteen hours this weekend.”

“That’s not better, Eliana. That’s worse.” Lisa turned the ball over in her hands without serving it, the way she did when she was thinking. Then she said, more quietly, “Is it the thing?”

Eliana looked at her.

“The lights,” Lisa said. “Behind the bleachers. The ball lightning. Whatever you went down to that basement for.” She didn’t look away. “Is that why you look wrecked?”

Across the gym, Ms. Johnson blew the whistle for a rotation. Nobody moved fast.

Eliana thought about lying. It would have been easy. She had gotten very good at it.

“Kind of,” she said.

Lisa held her eyes for a long moment.

“Okay,” she said. That was all. She didn’t push. She just nodded, once, like she was filing it somewhere safe. Then she served, and for once it went over the net.

“Progress,” Eliana said.

Lisa didn’t laugh this time. She just bumped Eliana’s shoulder with hers on the way to the next rotation.

Between plays, while Ms. Johnson was yelling at the front row, Eliana slid her phone out of her waistband.

The answer came almost immediately.

She put the phone away before Ms. Johnson saw. On the far side of the gym, past the bleachers, the door to the back stairwell was shut, the way it had been last week.

She didn’t look at it this time. She looked at the clock instead, and did the math on how long it was until civics.

Food Studies was fourth period, and today it was soup.

The recipe card Mika had taped to the cabinet door said TOMATO BASIL, in the teacher’s handwriting, with a smiley face. Lexie looked at it for a long second.

Of course it was soup.

“I’m not touching anything,” Ajax announced, holding up both hands. “I’ve thought about it, and I think soup is just a salad that gave up. I don’t want to be part of that.”

“You touched the butter last week,” Mika said.

“The butter and I had an understanding.”

Lexie took the knife and started on the onion, left hand flat on the cutting board, bandage under the latex glove. It was clumsy, but she had done worse. She chopped fast and didn’t look up.

Narnia leaned against the counter beside her with a wooden spoon, which they were not using for anything.

“So,” Narnia said. “Soup.”

Lexie kept chopping.

“Fitting, I think,” Narnia went on, very pleasantly. “Since I hear you’re the soup girl now.”

The knife stopped.

“What?”

“Oh, it’s everywhere.” Narnia waved the spoon. “Lexie Calloway, notorious punk, brought Hannah soup on Sunday. Homemade, allegedly. Hannah told Melanie, who told Vivian, who told literally the entire internet. You’re basically a redemption arc.” They grinned. “I love that for you.”

Lexie looked down at the onion. “It wasn’t a big deal.”

“Mm.” Narnia tapped the spoon against the counter. “Also, Wolverine, you heal fast.”

“What?”

“Your hand.” Narnia nodded at the vending machines, out past the classroom door. “I saw you this morning by the machines, getting a soda. No bandage. Hand totally fine. You were even waving it around.” They raised their eyebrows. “I figured you finally took it off.”

Lexie didn’t say anything.

Her left hand was flat on the cutting board between them. Gauze, and the roll, and the glove over all of it. She hadn’t taken it off since Sunday morning in the bathroom.

Narnia looked at it. Then at her face. Then back at the hand.

For a second, nobody at the station said anything. Even Ajax.

Then Narnia smiled, slowly, the way they had at the basement show, a little sad and very calm.

“I’m not going to ask,” they said. “I’m just going to remember.”

They went back to not using the spoon.

Across the counter, Mika had stopped measuring the basil. She was looking at Lexie’s hand, too. She had the face. The deciding one. And this time, Lexie thought, she looked like she had decided something.

Lexie finished the onion. Her hands were steady. She was a little proud of that.

When the soup was simmering and the teacher had gone to yell at another station, she got her phone out under the counter.

The reply came a minute later.

Lexie looked at the gauze on her hand for a long time.

It doesn’t know about the burn.

That was something.

Eliana saw Emma on her way to civics, crouched by the outlet across from the trophy case, the same one as last week.

She had the multimeter in one hand and her notebook on her knee. Eliana kept her eyes ahead and her pace even.

The needle jumped as she passed.

Emma looked at it. Then she looked up at Eliana, and stood.

“Were you in the gym last night?” she said. “Around eleven.”

“No.”

“Someone who looks exactly like you was. I cut through on my way out of the lab.” Emma said it like she was reading a measurement. “Lights off. Dancing.”

“Dancing?”

“By yourself. In the dark.” Emma’s mouth went flat. “Weird. But not my business.”

She held up the multimeter, with the needle still twitching.

“This is my business. It does this every time you walk past. Four times now.” She tapped her notebook. “You asked about grounding before Alfred fried. You were here late, or someone who looks just like you was. And our competition is Sunday.”

Eliana stared at her. “You think I’m sabotaging you?”

“I think I have data,” Emma said. “And I think if anything happens to Alfred before Sunday, I’m going to know who to ask.”

She crouched back down by the outlet and went back to work.

Eliana walked to civics. Halfway there, she took out her own notebook, opened it to the back page, and added a line under the others.

Mon, 11 p.m. Gym, lights off. Dancing. Emma saw.

She looked at it.

Dancing. Alone in the dark, with nobody watching.

She couldn’t remember the last time she had done anything like that herself.

Lexie got to civics before Eliana did, which almost never happened, and spent the thirty seconds until Eliana walked in staring at the door.

When she came through it, Lexie looked at her hands first. Eliana had her pen out. Her thumb was already working the cap, on, off, on.

Lexie let out a breath and looked at the board.

Mr. Anderson had written one question on it.

WHO ARE YOU?

“Not philosophically,” he said, once the bell had rung. “Legally. Driver’s licenses, passports, birth certificates, signatures. The entire modern state runs on being able to prove you’re you. So. What actually does that?”

Sean’s chair was already going back. “Documentation. Obviously. Which is why the government wants a monopoly on it. Whoever controls the papers controls the person. Imagine, hypothetically, a man who prints his own passport…”

“That’s just forgery, Sean,” Thea said, without looking up.

“It’s sovereignty.”

“Devil’s advocate here,” Leonard said. “Papers can be faked. Faces can’t.”

Lexie’s pen stopped.

“Faces can absolutely be faked,” Thea said. “That’s what masks are for.”

“Eliana,” Mr. Anderson said. “What do you think?”

Lexie watched the back of Eliana’s head, three rows over. Eliana put her pen down on the desk before she answered, the way she always did.

“Something only you would know,” Eliana said. “Papers can be copied. Faces too, I guess. But if someone knows something nobody else could, something that only ever happened between you, then it’s really them.”

“A secret,” Mr. Anderson said.

“A password. Kind of.”

He smiled, the way he did when someone said something he liked. “And if somebody learns the secret?”

“Then you pick a new one,” Eliana said. “And don’t tell anyone.”

Mr. Anderson looked at her a second longer than usual. Then he moved on to Thea, who had a great deal to say about biometric data.

Lexie got her phone out under the desk.

The reply came fast. Eliana didn’t turn around.

There was a pause. The dots came and went twice.

Lexie read it.

Lexie stared at her phone.

Lexie stopped typing.

Thorne. Her mom’s name before she married. Cece’s name, the real one, under all the spotlights. The name nobody at this school knew she had, except one person.

A rose, and its thorns.

Lexie looked up. Across the room, Eliana still hadn’t turned around. But her shoulders were very straight, like she was waiting.

“Ms. Calloway. Ms. Barker.”

Lexie’s head came up. So did Eliana’s.

Mr. Anderson was standing at the front of the room with the marker in his hand. He didn’t look annoyed. He looked delighted.

“Phones,” he said. “Please.”

Lexie put hers away. Across the room, Eliana did too.

He turned back to the board and underlined the question, once, slowly.

“Hold on to whatever you two just came up with,” he said, to the whole class, like it was a joke. “Sounds like a good one.”

A couple of people laughed.

Lexie didn’t.

Eliana spent the hour before dinner at her desk with the guitars leaning against the wall beside her and two things open in front of her.

On the laptop was the essay. Thomas Barker, at the top of the page, and a page and a half underneath it, which was more than she had ever written about anything she cared about. It was due Friday. She hadn’t touched it since Sunday.

On the desk, beside the laptop, was the back page of her notebook.

It had started on the steps that morning as one line. Now it filled the whole page, in small, neat handwriting, with the date and the time and the place first, the way Anthony did it.

She had gone back through everything she could remember. Every time somebody had told her she was somewhere she hadn’t been. Every time Lexie had.

She read it from the top.

The first one stopped her.

The lawn. The day of the fire. She had come around the corner of the gym soaking wet and barefoot, and Hannah had said I swear I saw you across the field a few minutes ago. You waved. And Tessa had said she was laughing with somebody by the flagpole. And Mr. Bayer had checked her off.

She had thought it was a mix-up. She had made a joke about blondes.

It had been there since the beginning. Since the first time something magical happened.

She looked down the list again, slower this time, the way she would look at data for Mr. Bayer, trying to see the shape of it instead of the individual points.

It was always after school, or at night, or somewhere crowded. It had never been anywhere either of them actually was. It had never gotten caught.

And it had never hurt anybody.

She read it again to make sure. It comforted Emily. It complimented Tessa. It brought Hannah soup. It tried on wigs, and bought candy, and danced alone in the dark. Every single thing on the list was something somebody had enjoyed.

Eliana sat back in her chair.

She didn’t know what that meant. She didn’t like how it made her feel, either, which was something close to jealous.

She looked at the essay on the laptop, at Tommy’s name at the top of the page, and then back at the list.

Her phone was next to the notebook. She picked it up.

It took less than a minute.

Eliana almost smiled. She put the phone face down on the list, and went downstairs to dinner.

Lexie got home a little after six. Her dad was at the stove with a pot of something that smelled like garlic and tomatoes, and he looked up when the door opened and smiled at her in a way she didn’t understand.

“There she is,” he said. Softer than usual. “You okay?”

“Yeah. Why?”

He looked at her for a second, then shook his head, still smiling. “No reason. Dinner’s in twenty.”

Her mom was at the kitchen table.

She was wearing the gray hoodie again, the one that was too big for her, with the sleeves pushed up to her elbows. There was a mug of tea in front of her that she was actually drinking. Her eyes were red around the edges, but not the way they had been for weeks. She looked up when Lexie came in, and her whole face changed.

“Hi, honey,” her mom said.

Lexie stopped in the doorway.

Her mom never called her honey.

“Hi,” Lexie said.

Her mom wrapped both hands around the mug. “I just wanted to say thank you,” she said quietly, so it was only for Lexie. “For this afternoon.”

Lexie’s whole body went cold.

“For…”

“I came home early today,” her mom said. “I don’t know why. I just couldn’t be at work.” Her voice wobbled, just slightly, and steadied. “And then you came in, and sat with me, and asked about her. Nobody’s asked me about her. Everybody asks about Celeste, and nobody asks about her. You asked what she was like when we were little. And you just let me talk.”

Lexie didn’t move.

“I told you about the treehouse,” her mom said, and laughed, a small wet laugh. “The one she fell out of and broke her arm, and she made me swear not to tell Mom, and I didn’t for two whole years.” She shook her head. “I haven’t thought about that in so long. And you laughed at the end, just like she used to.”

Behind Lexie, her dad was stirring the pot. He didn’t turn around, but he had gone very quiet, the way you get quiet when you’re listening to something you don’t want to interrupt.

“It was nice,” her mom said. “It was really nice, Lex.”

Lex.

Lexie stood in the kitchen doorway.

She had stood right here a week ago with all the words lined up in her mouth, what did Cece used to say, what did she tell you, and she hadn’t been able to say a single one of them.

And this afternoon, something with her face had sat at this table, in her chair, and asked. And her mom had answered. And her mom had called her honey, and laughed, and was drinking her tea, and looked like a person again for the first time since the funeral.

Lexie couldn’t say it hadn’t been her.

She couldn’t take that away.

“Yeah,” she said. Her voice came out rough. “It was nice.”

Her mom smiled at her, really smiled, and went back to her tea.

Dinner was pasta. Her dad talked about a guy at work who had locked his keys in his car twice in one day. Her mom laughed at the right parts. Lexie ate, and didn’t taste any of it, and kept her bandaged hand in her lap.

Halfway through, she put her fork down.

“Mom,” she said.

Her mom looked up, warm and open, waiting.

The words were right there again. That wasn’t me. Something is wearing me. It sat in my chair and asked you about Cece, and I don’t know what it wants, and I don’t know what it heard. They were all lined up, in order.

Her mom was looking at her like she hadn’t looked at her in weeks.

“Can you pass the salt?” Lexie said.

Her mom passed it.

“Thanks.”

Lexie salted her pasta. It didn’t need it.