Chapter 21: My Mind Plays Tricks on Me

Eliana had her face ready by seven-thirty.

It took longer than it used to. For two weeks she had been doing it in the mirror the same way she had in September, chin level, mouth a little bored, nothing behind her eyes that anyone could use. It was harder now that there was more behind them.

The list of sightings in the back of her notebook was two pages long now.

The steps were cold enough now that everyone sat on their bags. Hannah had the third step and a scarf that went around her neck twice. Her hand came back with a paper cup without her looking, held by the rim.

“Have some marshmallows.”

“Spiritually,” Eliana said.

The cup was hot, and her fingertips didn’t feel it much anymore. The calluses had come in hard over the last two weeks, yellowish and smooth, on every finger of her left hand. Her mom had noticed at Thanksgiving and asked if she was doing something with her hands, and Eliana had simply said guitar.

“Okay, so Friday,” Hannah said to the group. “Mel’s again. Same movie, because we didn’t finish it last time.”

“Because somebody fell asleep,” Melanie said.

“Lexie fell asleep twenty minutes in,” Hannah told Eliana, like Eliana hadn’t been there. She looked delighted about it. “On my shoulder. With her boots on. Mel had to put a blanket on her.”

“She snores,” Vivian said.

“She does not snore.”

“She snores a little.”

“I already asked her,” Hannah said. “She said maybe, and from her that’s basically yes.”

Eliana smiled at that, and meant it, a little.

“You’re coming this time, right?” Vivian said, turning to her. “Since you skipped my birthday dinner.”

Eliana had forgotten the birthday dinner existed. Saturday. She had been at the studio until ten with Lexie, grounding wisps out of the outlets, three of them in one night.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “My mom dragged me to my aunt’s. Thanksgiving leftovers, round two.”

It came out easy. It always did.

“Wait.” Tessa turned around on her step. “Your mom was at the mall on Saturday. My mom ran into her by the Sephora.” She tilted her head. “She said you were sleeping over at Hannah’s.”

The step went quiet.

Hannah had been at Vivian’s dinner. Everybody on the steps knew it. Everybody had been there.

Eliana looked at Hannah, and waited. This was the part where Hannah said oh, she came over after, or Tess, drop it. Hannah always had something.

Hannah looked back at her. She didn’t say anything.

Then she looked down at her phone.

“Huh,” Tessa said, very pleasantly. “My bad.”

The bell rang. Eliana stood up with everyone else and went in with her face exactly where it should be, and she didn’t look back at the steps.

In chemistry, Mr. Bayer handed back Friday’s quiz face down, the way he always did. Eliana turned hers over under the bench.

It was a 64, in red, with a small note underneath in his messy handwriting.

This isn’t you. Come talk to me.

She folded it in half, then in half again, and put it at the bottom of her bag.

When the bell rang, she packed slowly. Lisa packed slower. They ended up wiping down the same bench.

Lisa didn’t say anything for a while. She was looking at Eliana’s notes, still open on the bench between them. Eliana followed her eyes.

The top of the page was hers, small and even. Halfway down, the letters started to lean. By the bottom they were loose and tilted and too big, crowding each other, like someone had been writing them in a hurry on a moving bus.

“That’s not your handwriting,” Lisa said.

“I was tired.”

“You’re always tired now.” Lisa wiped the same spot twice. “You fell asleep in here on Wednesday. Bayer let you. That’s how bad you look.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re not.” Lisa put the rag down. “Sleep. Like, actually sleep. More than four hours.” She heard herself and made a face. “Damn, I can’t believe I’m the one telling you this.”

Eliana almost laughed. She closed the notebook over the leaning letters instead.

“Okay,” she said.

Lisa looked at her for a long moment, the way she had in PE, like she was filing something somewhere safe.

“You’re still not going to tell me,” she said.

“Not yet.”

Lisa nodded once. Then she picked up her bag and left first, the way they always did.

Lexie had stopped keeping track of which lie went with which hand.

The left one was easy. It had been “pulled it swimming” since October, and nobody really asked about it anymore, even though there was gauze. The right one was newer, two knuckles taped over where they had split on the Doppelgänger’s steel face, and that one changed depending on who asked.

In Food Studies they were making bread dough, which meant a lot of kneading with the heel of her hand. Lexie did it anyway, gauze on the left, tape on the right, wincing every time she pushed.

Across the counter, Ajax had both hands in his bowl and was losing.

“It’s eating me,” he said. The dough had come up past his knuckles in long sticky strings, and every time he pulled one hand free, the other sank deeper. “This is how it starts. First it holds your hand. Then it holds everything.”

“Stop pulling,” Lexie said. She reached over, grabbed a fistful of flour from the bag, and threw it into his bowl. “Flour. It stops grabbing.”

Ajax worked his hands free, one at a time, staring at the dough with deep suspicion.

Narnia leaned on the counter beside her with a rolling pin they had no reason to be holding.

“How’s the hand?” Narnia said.

“Fine. I slipped on the ice by the bus stop.”

Narnia nodded slowly.

“Last week,” they said, “you told Mika you closed it in a car door.”

Lexie kept kneading.

Normally this was where Narnia said something light and wandered off. I’m not going to ask. I’m just going to remember. Lexie waited for it.

Narnia didn’t say it. They just stood there, with the rolling pin, watching her, and waited too.

Across the counter, Ajax was explaining to nobody that bread was the precipice of human agriculture. Mika was measuring water and not looking at either of them, very carefully.

“It was ice,” Lexie said.

“Okay,” Narnia said. They didn’t move.

The silence went on long enough that Lexie’s face got hot.

“It’s nothing,” she said. “I promise.”

Narnia looked at the tape on her knuckles for a while. Then they finally pushed off the counter.

“Fun thing, though,” they said, lighter, but not all the way. “I saw you at the Pit on Saturday.”

The Pit was a garage on the east side where bands played when nobody’s parents were home. Lexie had been at the studio on Saturday, until ten, holding the copper wire while Eliana grounded the third swarm of the night.

“What was I doing?”

“Dancing.” Narnia raised their eyebrows. “Front row. To a ska band. You knew all the words.” They paused. “You hate ska, Lexie.”

“I do hate ska.”

“That’s what I thought.” Narnia pointed the rolling pin at her bowl. “Yours is sticking too.”

Lexie got her phone out under the counter while the dough rose.

The reply came a minute later.

Lexie ate lunch in the yearbook room.

Mika was at the computer with the clubs spread open, chattering before the door had even closed.

“Okay, crisis,” she said. “The band page. I have forty-one photos from the basement show and in thirty-nine of them Rodney is mid-scream and in one of them Ryan has his eyes closed, which, honestly, might be the one.” She scrolled. “Come pick. You get final say. I’m generous like that.”

Lexie rolled her chair over.

Mika clicked through them fast. Rodney screaming. Meghan bent over her guitar. Rodney screaming again. Then one that was mostly dark, blurry, with a smear of blue-white light in the middle, and Lexie under it with her mouth open and her hand on the mic stand.

Mika didn’t click past that one. She left it up.

“Not this one,” she said, cheerful. “Obviously. Too artsy.” She tapped the screen right on the smear of light. “Is that the same thing that’s been happening to your hands?”

Lexie looked at her.

Mika smiled at her, all the way, the same way she smiled at everyone. But she wasn’t joking. Lexie could tell, the way she could tell when Meghan’s okay meant okay.

“And Hannah’s soup,” Mika said. “And Emma being nice for a whole day. And Narnia seeing you at a ska show.” She ticked them off on her fingers, light, like a grocery list. “I’m not asking what it is. I’m just asking if it’s all the same thing.”

Lexie didn’t answer.

Mika waited a second longer. Then she nodded, like that was an answer too, and clicked to the next photo. Ryan, eyes closed.

“That one,” Lexie said.

“Oh, good.” Mika beamed. “I was hoping you’d say that one.”

She dug in her camera bag and dropped two honey sticks on the desk without looking.

“For your voice. You sound like you’ve been yelling somewhere.” She was already dragging Ryan into the empty box on the spread. “Also, if I ever start walking toward a pretty light again,” she added, in exactly the same voice, “yank harder this time. My neck still hurts from the strap.”

Lexie got her essay back on Friday, five weeks after she’d turned it in.

Mr. Anderson handed them out himself, walking the rows, setting each one face down on the desk with a pleasant word for everybody. When he got to Eliana, three rows over, he left his hand on her paper a second longer than the others. Lexie saw her turn it over. There was an A at the top, and under it one word in his square handwriting. Eliana looked at it for a long time.

Then he put Lexie’s down in front of her.

It was a B. She’d expected worse. She hadn’t named her. She had written about an aunt who was famous, and how plenty of people had written her history from a stage and a screen, and how her own family had decided she was too busy to call. Two pages, and then she’d stopped, because she didn’t know how to write the rest without saying who.

At the bottom, in the same square handwriting:

Lexie read it twice. Then she folded it in half and shoved it in her bag, and didn’t look at the front of the room for the rest of the period.

After school they took the two buses out to the studio, the way they had every day that week.

Eliana had built the rig the next day, after three swarms in one night.

It wasn’t much. A clamp from the hardware store on Fifth, the cheap kind, screwed around the cold water pipe under the studio’s little sink in the back. A coil of copper wire run along the baseboard, stapled down every few feet, with the bare ends left hanging next to the two outlets the lights liked best. It was ugly. Lexie had said it looked like a science fair project about anxiety.

It worked, though. Twice that week a wisp had slid out of an outlet, touched the wire, and run down it like water down a drain, and the pipe under the sink had rung once and gone quiet.

Up on the shelf, the salamander didn’t like any of it. It had been pressed against the far side of its jar all afternoon, cracks glowing, watching the outlets.

Both notebooks were open on the floor between them. They had been open for an hour.

“Nothing,” Eliana said. She had read Tommy’s slow, almost neat page so many times she didn’t need to look at it anymore. it wears many faces. And under it, slow. never loud. “He doesn’t say how to stop it. He doesn’t even say what that means.”

“Cece doesn’t either.” Lexie had the pocket notebook open to the empty page. The Alpha, the Omega and the Unknown. No symbol in the corner. “She didn’t even know what it looked like.”

“And PUSH didn’t do anything to it.”

“It laughed.”

They sat there.

“Again,” Eliana said, and picked up the guitar.

They had been doing it all week, every day after school. Louder each time, longer each time, until Eliana’s calluses split and Lexie’s voice went to gravel. Eliana played. Lexie sang, and brought her wrist down on the edge of the workbench to keep the bracelet’s rhythm.

Her wrist was the left one. The burn. Her right hand was still taped. She hit the bench late on the second beat, then late again, and the rhythm went soft and dragging under Eliana’s downstrokes.

Eliana stopped playing.

“You’re behind.”

“I know.”

“You were behind yesterday too.”

“My hands are wrecked, Eliana.” Lexie held them up. Gauze, tape. “I can’t hit the bench any harder.”

“Then carry it with your voice.”

“I am carrying it with my voice. I’ve been screaming for a week.”

“Then scream on the beat.”

“Don’t tell me how to sing.” Lexie stood up. “You don’t even sing. You hit a guitar and smile at people.”

“I don’t smile anymore.”

“No, you just lie to them.” It came out of Lexie fast and hot. “Hannah texted me Monday, did you know that? Asking where you were Saturday. Because you told your mom you were at hers. Again. And I had to lie to her too.”

Eliana felt it come up in her chest, the same hot thing as the bus shelter, the same thing that had nowhere to go.

“What was I supposed to tell her? That I was here? Doing this?” Her voice was too loud. It rang off the brick. “You think I like it? You think I like lying to Hannah every single…”

She stopped.

Her face was wet. She hadn’t felt it start.

Lexie was standing by the workbench with her bandaged hands at her sides, and her face was wet too. She looked as surprised about it as Eliana felt.

Neither of them said anything for a while. Up on the shelf, the salamander shifted in its jar.

Eliana put the guitar down and sat on the arm of Tommy’s couch, because her legs wanted her to. After a second, Lexie came over and sat on the cushion beside it, and leaned her shoulder against Eliana’s knee.

“That wasn’t about the beat,” Lexie said, eventually.

“No.”

“I’m not mad about Hannah. I mean, I am. But.” Lexie wiped her face with the back of her taped hand. “I don’t know why I’m crying.”

“Me neither.” Eliana looked at her own fingers. They were shaking a little. Raw emotion, Cece had called it, somewhere in her neat columns. Big uses leave it closer to the surface. “It’s the magic. I think. We’ve been using it every day.”

“Great,” Lexie said. “Awesome. So we’re cursed and emotional.”

Eliana laughed, and it came out wet, and that felt just right.

Lexie picked up the pocket notebook off the floor again, mostly to have something to do with her hands. She flipped through it fast, back to front, looking for anything. Bridle lines. The wisp page. Columns and columns of Cece’s small neat writing.

Near the very back, there was a page in different handwriting. Fast and slanted, the L looping back on itself, the way it had on the index card.

Lexie turned past it so quickly the paper snapped.

Eliana, wiping her face with her sleeve, didn’t see.

They locked up a little after seven. Eliana hung the key back on its hook behind the sixth pipe, and they walked to the bus stop without saying much, the good kind of not saying much this time.

On the bus, Eliana fell asleep against the window before the rail yard was out of sight. Lexie didn’t. She sat with the pocket notebook in her hoodie, her hand flat over it, and thought about the crooked page at the back, and the way she had snapped past it like it might bite.

Eliana woke up at her stop, mumbled something that might have been bye, and got off.

At home, her dad had made soup. Her mom was at the table in the gray hoodie again, and she smiled when Lexie came in, a real one, the kind she’d been doing since the afternoon that Doppelgänger had sat in her chair and asked her mother about Cece.

Lexie sat down across from her and ate her soup.

She waited until the house was quiet before she opened the notebook again.

Her dad had gone to bed at ten. Her mom’s light was still on under the door down the hall, but it always was. Lexie sat on her bed with the desk lamp on instead of the ceiling light, the way she had the night of the fire, and turned to the back.

It was still there. A single page, taped in crooked, in the fast slanted handwriting that wasn’t Cece’s neat column writing. It was the other one. The index card one. The one that sounded like her.

She had read it in October, the first night, at one in the morning. She had turned the page so fast it tore at the corner, and she had not turned back to it since.

It wasn’t because it was sad. It wasn’t sad at all. It was just Cece, being bossy about cookies.

It was that nobody in her family went to see Grandma and Grandpa. Lexie couldn’t remember the last time. A birthday when she was nine, maybe, in a living room that smelled like radiator dust, with her mom sitting very straight on the edge of the couch the whole time. After that, Christmas cards. Her mom signed them for all three of them, and nobody ever said why that was enough now.

Lexie had never asked. Asking would have meant hearing whatever the answer was.

She looked at the page for a long time.

Two weeks of both notebooks open on the studio floor. Every page read until she knew them by heart. And nothing in either of them said how to stop the thing that had killed Cece. The only thing in this notebook she hadn’t done was this.

Who else remembers her? Worth asking.

She hated that it was a teacher who’d said it.

The charms on her bracelet ticked when she reached for her phone. It took her a while to type, with the tape on her knuckles.

The dots came up and went away twice.

Lexie looked at the page. I mean it this time.

She thought about it. She thought about the living room that smelled like radiator dust, and her mom on the edge of the couch, and whatever it was nobody said.

She put the phone down and turned off the lamp. She didn’t close the notebook. She left it open on the nightstand to the crooked page, so it would be the first thing she saw.