Chapter 25: Thanks for the Memories

Eliana’s arm stopped.

The pick was right there, over his face. She could see the cut on the side of her thumb, bleeding down onto it. And under it was Tommy, kneeling in the snow behind the studio, looking up at her the way he had when she was six and he crouched down so their faces were level.

“Birdie,” it said again, softer. “Hey. Hey, kiddo.”

Her hand started to shake.

Lexie came up beside her. She was breathing hard and holding her burned hand against her stomach. She looked down at Tommy, a man she had only ever seen in a photograph, and her face went hard.

“You killed them,” she said.

It flinched like she’d hit it.

“No.” Tommy’s voice cracked, and for a second it sounded like three people. “No, no, no. I didn’t kill anybody. I don’t do that. I watch. I told you, I just watch.”

“You were there,” Eliana said. Her voice didn’t sound like hers. “You knew him. You knew how he played.”

“Because I watched him! For years! That’s my job!” It held its cracked hands up in front of its face. Tommy’s hands, with the calluses on the fingertips. “I didn’t touch them. I wasn’t even there that night. That was him. You think he’d let me anywhere near them? He’d kill me!”

“Who?” Lexie said.

It went quiet.

Its eyes moved to the mouth of the alley, then up at the roofline, then at the dark windows across the street, like something might be looking down. When it spoke again, it was barely a whisper.

“Loki.”

Nobody said anything.

“Like…” Lexie said finally. “Like the Marvel guy?”

“Don’t.” It was shaking. Pieces of sand crust were falling off it into the snow. “Don’t laugh. Don’t you dare laugh. You don’t know what he is.”

“Then tell us,” Eliana said.

“I can’t.” Tommy’s face twisted, and for a second it lost hold of it. The features slid and blurred and tried to become something else, and couldn’t, and came back. “I’m a god of shapes. Do you understand what that means? I can be anything I’ve seen. Anything. And I can’t be him. I’ve tried. He never wore the same face twice. Not once, in all the times. I don’t know what he looks like.” It laughed, wet and awful. “I don’t know what he looks like.”

The pick hadn’t moved. Eliana’s arm was starting to burn from holding it up.

“He’s close,” it said. “That’s all I know. He’s always close.” It looked from Eliana to Lexie and back. “He sent me to give you a little push and see what you’d do. And now I’ve got nothing. He sent me to look, and I let you see me, and I lost.”

“So go tell him,” Lexie said.

“I can’t go back.” It said it so simply that Eliana believed it. “Not like this. Not with nothing. You don’t go back to him with nothing.”

It looked up at the pick. Then at Eliana. And it was Tommy again, completely, the way he looked in the photo, tired and a little embarrassed.

“So go ahead, Birdie,” it said. “If you’re going to.”

Eliana tried.

She told her arm to come down, and it didn’t. She looked at the chipped tooth and the stubble and the flannel and told herself it wasn’t him. She knew it wasn’t him. It didn’t matter. It was his face, and she had already watched them close the lid on it once.

Her arm came down by itself, slowly, until the pick was hanging at her side.

Beside her, Lexie let out a breath. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t reach for the pick, and she didn’t tell Eliana to do it. She just stood there.

It stared up at them like it was waiting for a trick.

Then it got smaller.

Tommy folded in on himself, down and down, into a heap of gray in the snow, and the heap was a cat. A thin gray cat, with black cracks running all through its fur like lines on a dropped plate. It stood up on three legs and held the fourth off the ground.

It looked at Eliana for a second with flat yellow eyes.

Then it limped off down the alley, past the dumpster and around the corner, leaving small, neat prints. Four toes and a pad.

The snow kept falling. The pressure was gone. There was only the hum of the streetlight at the end of the alley and her own breathing.

Eliana sat down in the snow with her back against the studio wall. She didn’t really decide to. Her legs just stopped.

After a while, Lexie sat down next to her. Their shoulders didn’t touch.

They sat there until Eliana couldn’t feel her feet. Then Lexie got up, went to the sixth pipe on the fence, and came back with the spare key.

Inside, it was dark and freezing. Lexie found the lamp. On the shelf over Tommy’s couch, the salamander was pressed against the glass of its jar, glowing a low, steady orange, watching them.

Hannah came by on Saturday morning, the first day of break.

Eliana heard the car before the doorbell. She knew the sound of it, the squeaky belt Hannah’s dad kept saying he’d fix. She was at the door before her mom could get out of the kitchen.

Hannah was on the step in her big white coat. She had Eliana’s backpack over one shoulder and a black canvas coat folded over her arm, with patches safety-pinned on the sleeves.

“You left these,” she said.

“Thanks.” Eliana took the backpack. Her phone was still in the front pocket. She could feel it through the fabric.

Hannah held out the other coat. “That one’s Lexie’s. It was under her seat. I don’t know where she lives.”

“I’ll give it to her.”

“I told your homeroom teacher you threw up,” Hannah said. “In case anybody called.”

“Oh.” Eliana held the two coats against her chest. “Okay. Thanks.”

From the kitchen, her mom called, “Is that Hannah? Hannah, honey, come in, it’s freezing!”

“I can’t, Mrs. Barker!” Hannah called back, bright, the voice she used for parents. “My mom’s waiting!”

Her mom was not waiting. The car in the driveway was empty.

Hannah stood on the step with her gloved hands in her coat pockets. She looked past Eliana, at the hallway, at nothing.

“Is it gone?” she said quietly.

“Yeah.”

“Is it coming back?”

Eliana thought about the cat limping around the corner on three legs.

“I don’t know.”

Hannah nodded slowly, because there was nothing she could say.

Eliana looked at her. At the pink in her cheeks from the cold and the gloves she still hadn’t taken off, and the way she was standing, a little sideways, ready to go. She said she was scared you were getting tired of her.

“Hannah.”

Hannah looked at her.

The words were right there. I know you were scared. I know you told it, and you thought it was me. I didn’t pick her over you. I never wanted you to find out like that. I didn’t want you to find out at all, because I didn’t want you anywhere near it. I’m sorry. Please don’t go. They were all lined up in her mouth, in order.

Hannah was waiting, with her gloves in her pockets.

“Thanks,” Eliana said. “For getting my stuff.”

Something in Hannah’s face closed, very gently, like a door being pulled to without a sound.

“No problem,” she said. “Merry Christmas, Eliana.”

She went down the steps and got into her car. She sat there a minute with her hands on the wheel. Then she backed out of the driveway, and the squeaky belt went all the way down the street until Eliana couldn’t hear it anymore.

The first text was Saturday night, from Eliana, after her parents had gone to bed.

The dots came up and went away. Came up again.

That was all, that night. Eliana fell asleep with the phone on her chest.

On Christmas morning, Lexie was sitting on the floor by the tree in the T-shirt she’d slept in when her phone went off twice.

A picture came through. Eliana in a red sweater with a giant knitted reindeer on the front, looking dead into the camera with no expression at all. The reindeer’s nose was a real pom-pom.

Her dad looked over from the couch and asked what was so funny. Lexie said nothing, and kept smiling at her phone anyway.

The last one was New Year’s Eve. Eliana was on the couch between her parents, watching the countdown on TV, when her phone buzzed.

On the screen, the crowd started counting down. Her dad reached over and shook her mom’s shoulder, gently, so she wouldn’t miss it.

At midnight, her phone buzzed again.

Lexie asked her mom on the second of January, at breakfast, before she could talk herself out of it.

Her dad had already left for work. Her mom was at the counter in the gray hoodie, the one that had been Cece’s, waiting for the toast.

“Mom.”

Her mom turned around.

The words were right there. They were always right there. This time Lexie didn’t wait to see if they’d go away.

“I went to see Grandma and Grandpa,” she said. “Before Christmas. Cece told me to.”

Her mom didn’t move. The toaster ticked behind her.

“They said to come back,” Lexie said. “They said bring your mother.”

The toast popped up. Neither of them looked at it.

“They said that?” her mom said finally. Her voice was very careful.

“Yeah.”

Her mom stood there a long time. Then she turned back around and buttered the toast, slowly, all the way to the edges.

“Get your shoes,” she said.

They stopped at the bakery by the train station on the way. Her mom picked the lemon cookies without Lexie saying anything, and held the box on her knees at every red light, the way Lexie had on the bus.

Margaret opened the door. She looked at Lexie, and then past her, at Lucia on the step with the box, and her hand went to the doorframe.

“Hi, Mom,” Lucia said.

Nobody said anything for a second. Then Alexander’s voice came from inside, gruff, asking who it was, and Margaret said, “Close the door, you’re letting the heat out,” to nobody in particular, and stepped back to let them in. Her eyes were wet. She didn’t mention it, so nobody else did.

Margaret said she didn’t want any cookies. Then she ate three. Lexie’s mom watched her do it and laughed, a real laugh, surprised out of her.

“You always do that,” she said.

“I do not,” said Margaret, and took a fourth.

After a while, Lexie went out to the back step, because the living room was too warm and too full. From out there she could hear them through the kitchen window. Her grandfather was telling the treehouse story again, the one where Cece broke her arm. Halfway through, her mom started laughing, and then the laugh went wrong in the middle, and then she was crying, and her grandmother was saying, “I know, I know, I know.”

Lexie sat on the cold step with her hands in her pockets and let them have it.

Then, because nobody could see her, she cried a little too.

On the drive home, her mom didn’t turn the radio on. They were almost to their street before she said anything.

“I thought they stopped calling,” she said.

“They thought you did.”

Her mom was quiet for a block.

“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah. I figured.”

She reached over at the next light and pushed Lexie’s hair out of her face. She hadn’t done that since Lexie was little.

“Thanks, Lex,” she said.

Lexie looked out the window so she wouldn’t have to say anything back.

Rodney’s basement still smelled like laundry and old carpet. Somebody had finally taken the Christmas lights down off the egg cartons and then put them right back up, because it looked weird without them.

It was the last Thursday of break. Lexie was sitting on the amp with her boots up on a milk crate, and the four of them had been playing the same song for an hour because Rodney kept speeding it up and then accusing everybody else of dragging.

“You’re rushing,” Meghan said, for the sixth time.

“I’m driving,” Rodney said.

“You’re driving into a wall.”

Ryan didn’t say anything. He just played the bass line at the right tempo, louder, until Rodney fell back into it.

They ran it again. Lexie sang it all the way through, and her voice did what she told it to for the first time in weeks. No rasp, no catch. When she hit the long note in the bridge, she held it longer than she needed to just because she could. Rodney whooped and hit the crash for no reason.

Somewhere in the middle of the second chorus, she noticed she was listening for something under the music. The pressure, or a hum. A light in the outlet.

There was nothing. Just the four of them, too loud, in a basement.

She let herself stop listening.

“Okay,” Meghan said when they finished, flexing her fingers. “That was actually good. Don’t tell him.”

“I heard that,” Rodney said.

“Pretend you didn’t!”

Meghan put her guitar on its stand and looked over at Lexie. She didn’t look like she was gearing up for a fight. She looked the way she used to, before the fall.

“Is your friend coming to the next one?” she said.

“Probably.”

“Tell her she can’t stand in front of my pedals again. She kept stepping on the cable.”

“She didn’t step on anything.”

“Her vibe was stepping on them,” Meghan said.

Rodney spun a drumstick, dropped it, and picked it up off the carpet. “We need a cover for the winter show,” he said. “Something people actually know. Crowd pleaser.” He pointed the stick at Lexie. “What about a Celeste song? Like, a punk version. People would lose it.”

Lexie went still on the amp.

Meghan made a face. Ryan looked at Lexie, and kept looking.

Lexie thought about the framed photo on the studio shelf. Cece in sunglasses, laughing. She thought about her mom in the car, saying thanks, Lex.

“Maybe,” she said.

Rodney stared at her. “Wait, really?”

“I said maybe.” She pulled her hood up. “Run it again. You’re still rushing.”

The first day back, Hannah got to the steps early.

She had two lattes. She hadn’t meant to buy two. She had ordered hers, and then she had heard herself ordering the other one, and the girl at the window had already started it, so she’d paid. Now they sat on the step next to her, steaming in the cold.

She held hers with both hands. All the way around the cup, her whole palms flat on the warm paper. She noticed she was doing it and didn’t stop.

The clique came up in twos and threes. Vivian, filming the frost on the railing. Melanie, complaining about her brother. Emily, who hugged everybody and said she’d missed them, and meant it.

Tessa came last and stood at the bottom of the steps for a second, looking at the spot. The second step from the top, on the left, next to Hannah.

“Is she coming?” Tessa said.

“I don’t know,” Hannah said.

Tessa waited a second longer, to be polite. Then she came up and sat down in the spot, smoothing her skirt under her like she’d always sat there.

Nobody said anything about it. Vivian showed everybody the frost video. Emily asked about Christmas. Melanie said her brother had gotten a drone and already flown it into the pool cover.

Hannah watched the bus loop.

The 7:40 pulled in and let out a stream of kids. She saw Eliana almost at once, it was hard not to notice someone you’ve known your whole life. Her good coat, her hair down, her bag over one shoulder. She was walking with her head down and her thumb going on something in her pocket.

She didn’t look at the steps. She went right past them, along the side of the building, to the side door by the library, and pulled it open, and went in.

Hannah realized she was half standing. She sat back down.

“Was that Eliana?” Emily said.

“I think she’s going to the library,” Hannah said.

“Since when does Eliana go to the library?”

Hannah didn’t know. She didn’t know a lot of things now.

She looked down at the second latte on the step next to her. Vanilla, extra hot, no foam. It had stopped steaming. She thought about texting. She thought about walking to the library and putting the cup down on the table in front of her and saying something. She couldn’t think what. Everything she came up with sounded like asking for something Eliana had already decided to give up.

The bell rang. Everybody got up.

Hannah picked up both cups. She drank hers. She carried the other one all the way to her locker and set it on the top shelf, and she didn’t throw it out until lunch.

At lunch, Eliana carried her tray into the library.

The table by the window was where it always was, the one the librarian pretended she couldn’t see. Lisa had a sandwich in one hand and a pencil in the other, with the fourth edition of Principles of Polymerization spread out in front of her. Ajax was lying across two chairs with his eyes closed and a granola bar on his chest. Anthony had his laptop open behind a wall of textbooks, typing.

Eliana stood there with the tray for a second.

Then she pulled out the chair across from Lisa and sat down.

Anthony stopped typing. He looked at her over the textbooks like she was a raccoon that had gotten in.

“No,” he said.

“I’m just eating.”

“This table is a closed system,” he said. “You’re increasing the entropy.”

Lisa snorted into her sandwich.

Eliana looked at Lisa, then at Anthony. She could tell from Lisa’s face that it was a joke, and that she was supposed to get it. She nodded like she did.

“Closed system,” Anthony said again, firmer.

Ajax opened one eye. He looked at Eliana, then at her tray, then at the ceiling, with the expression of someone about to say something he believed was very deep.

“Can a table really be closed?” he said. “Or is a table just an idea of where people sit, and we all agree to it? Like, is it even the same table if a new person sits at it? Theseus would say…”

“Theseus would say shut up,” Lisa said, without looking up.

She reached over, picked her backpack up off the chair next to Eliana, and put it on the floor. Then she turned her chem packet around and slid it across the table.

“Look at this graph,” she said, and tapped it. “Tell me this isn’t insane.”

Eliana looked. One line ran flat along the bottom of the page almost the whole way across, barely moving. Then, right at the very end, it shot straight up.

“The chains stay tiny the whole time,” Lisa said. “You have to get to like ninety-nine percent before anything gets long. Why?”

Eliana looked at the little diagram next to the graph, the beads with hooks on both ends. She popped her pen cap off, then on.

“Because they can all grab each other,” she said. “Any one of them can hook onto any other one. So at the start everybody just pairs up into little pieces. Twos and threes.” She traced the flat part of the line with her finger. “They only get long when the pieces start hooking onto other pieces. And that can’t really happen until almost all the single ones are used up.”

Lisa stared at her.

“Did you read this before?”

“I’ve never seen this book in my life.”

“That took me a week,” Lisa said. She pulled the book back and looked at the graph again like it had betrayed her. “I hate you. I love it here.”

Eliana picked up her fork.

Nobody asked her why she was there. Ajax closed his eye again. Lisa went back to her packet. After a minute, Anthony started typing again, a little louder than before.

Eliana ate her lunch. She didn’t look out the window toward the front steps. She looked at Lisa’s packet upside down, and found two more mistakes, and didn’t mention them yet.

When the bell rang, Anthony turned his laptop a few degrees so she could see the screen. He didn’t say anything. He just went back to packing his bag.

The newest row in the spreadsheet said:

Mika texted Lexie on Thursday, at the end of lunch.

Lexie was weird about it the whole way there. Eliana didn’t ask why, which was weirder.

The yearbook room was the same as the first time Eliana had been there. The long table buried in proofs, the dead plant on the windowsill, and the good computer in the corner with the big screen. Mika was at the computer with her knees pulled up in her chair, wearing a corduroy jacket three sizes too big. Narnia was lying on the table on top of the proofs, reading a script upside down.

“You guys have a club meeting?” Lexie said.

“No,” Narnia said, not looking up. “I just felt like being here.”

Mika spun her chair around. Her face did something careful, which Mika’s face almost never did.

“Okay, so,” she said. “Vivian sent over her chosen picks for the Halloween spread. Like, the clique account picks. And she wants this one as the full page.” She turned back around and clicked. “I didn’t want to just put it in without asking you first.”

The picture came up on the big screen.

It was from early in the night, before the unicorn. The pool lights were blue behind them, and the trees were full of string lights. Hannah was in white, with her halo a little crooked and her arm around Eliana’s neck, laughing at something off camera with her whole face. Eliana was in the red dress with Hannah’s horns on her head, and she was laughing too. Really laughing, with her eyes squeezed shut, leaning into Hannah like she didn’t even have to think about it.

Lexie had never seen her laugh like that.

Eliana stood in the middle of the room and looked at it.

“It’s a really good picture,” Mika said quietly. “That’s kind of the problem. If you don’t want it, I can tell Vivian the file got corrupted. It’s pretty easy to lie to her.”

Eliana didn’t say anything. She took a step closer to the screen. Her thumb found the pen cap in her pocket, and then it stopped.

Then her face crumpled.

It happened all at once, the way a kid’s does. She put both hands over her mouth, and it didn’t help, and she was crying, hard, in the middle of the yearbook room with her backpack still on.

Narnia sat up.

Mika was out of her chair before Lexie could move. She took Eliana by the elbows and steered her down onto the floor against the table, and sat down next to her, and pulled the huge corduroy jacket off and put it over Eliana’s shoulders without a word.

Narnia slid off the table on Eliana’s other side and pulled a pack of tissues out of their bag. “I keep these for theater,” they said. “Real tears or otherwise. You’re the first real ones this year.” They pressed the pack into Eliana’s hand.

Lexie stood there.

Then she sat down on the floor in front of Eliana, cross-legged, close enough that their knees touched, and didn’t say anything. That seemed like the right amount.

“I didn’t…” Eliana said. Her voice kept breaking in different places. “I never wanted to pick. Everybody thinks I left. I didn’t leave. I just couldn’t sit there.” She pressed a tissue against her eyes. “She’s been my best friend since we were five. I don’t want to give her up. I never wanted to.”

“So don’t,” Mika said gently.

Eliana shook her head. “She doesn’t want me anymore.”

Nobody said anything to that. Mika rubbed slow circles on her back through the jacket. Narnia handed her another tissue before she’d finished with the first. Lexie sat with her knee against Eliana’s and looked at the picture over her head, at Hannah’s arm around her neck, and thought about the gloves on the steering wheel, and the latte by the rim, and a girl holding on to a wrist with her whole bare hand.

She didn’t believe it. She didn’t know how to say that, so she didn’t.

After a long time, Eliana wiped her face with the heel of her hand and looked up at the screen.

“Use it,” she said. “The picture. Use it.”

Mika nodded and squeezed her shoulder. “Full page.”

The course selection forms were due Friday. On Wednesday, on the bus to the studio, Eliana had the catalog open across both their laps.

It was the same bus as always. The heater blew too hard, the seats were cracked, and the window by Lexie’s head was fogged at the bottom. Out past it, the stores slid by, then the overpass, and the rail yard fence.

“Okay,” Eliana said. She had a highlighter in one hand and her pen in the other, cap off. “We need at least one.”

“One what.”

“One class we definitely have together. Civics is over after this year.”

Lexie leaned over and looked at the page Eliana had open. Most of it was yellow already. Pre-calc. Physics. Honors Chem 11, with Mr. Bayer’s initials scrawled on the recommendation line and three stars next to it in Eliana’s pen.

“None of those,” Lexie said.

“I know none of those.” Eliana flipped back to the English section, ran her finger down it, and stopped. “Anderson is doing a literary analysis class next year. How about that?”

Lexie looked at her.

“Seriously? You wanna double up on English credits?” She sat back against the window. “Hey, you’re the one that cares about college, not me.”

“It counts as an elective.”

“It counts as reading.”

“You read.”

“I read things I want to read.”

The bus went over the bump by the overpass, and the catalog slid, and they both grabbed it at the same time.

Eliana held onto her side of it and looked at Lexie. She was smiling a little, the way she did now sometimes when she didn’t notice.

“Come on,” Eliana said. “We’ve been beside each other in the face of danger before. What’s one hard class?”

Lexie stared at her for a long second.

“That’s the corniest thing anybody has ever said to me.”

“But you’re going to do it.”

Lexie took the highlighter out of her hand, uncapped it with her teeth, and drew one long yellow line through Literary Analysis — Mr. Anderson. Then she handed it back.

“You’re doing my essays,” she said.

“I’m not.”

“You are, a little.”

At the next stop, a guy got on with his phone playing out loud, no headphones. It was Celeste. The chorus, the part everyone knew.

Eliana felt Lexie go still beside her.

The guy dropped into a seat near the front and kept it playing. Eliana didn’t say anything. She waited.

Then Lexie started singing along.

Not under her breath. Loud, the whole chorus, every word, in the voice she used for basements. The guy with the phone turned around and stared at her. An old lady across the aisle looked up from her crossword.

Eliana laughed so hard she dropped the highlighter. Then she came in on the second line, off-key and too high and not caring, and Lexie elbowed her for it and didn’t stop singing.

She didn’t have her face ready. She didn’t have one on at all. Her mouth was wide open and her eyes were wet from laughing, and there was nothing behind them that she needed to hide from anybody.

Lexie reached over and wiped the fog off the window with her sleeve, and sang the chorus out at the rail yard and the river and the whole gray town going by, as loud as she could.