Bombshell Page 11

  When it gets really hot, you can actually see the heat rising from the ground, and on a road long and uninterrupted enough, it turns into a mirage. When you’re driving, it looks like you’re going to go right into it, but you never do. The mirage stays the same distance away.

  I wondered what it would feel like to be inside a mirage.

  Like being in cool water. Like being strong glass.

  Dear James,

  Planning a meeting feels forced. It seems so cheesy to say, “Okay, this is the time and place. We’ll meet. You’ll be holding a rose, and I’ll be wearing a blue dress.”

  I want it to feel like fate. I wish we could accidentally run in to each other. That’s sort of what I thought would happen anyway, eventually. One day you’d be at the Getty Museum in LA and turn a corner and there I’d be. And we’d both know.

  And nothing seems an appropriate backdrop. I don’t want to meet here, in my usual places, school and the dorm. Restaurant or bar, no, absolutely no. Hotel, maybe, but I’d feel like a hooker.

  The moon? An Antarctic glacier? The caves at Lascaux? On top of a pyramid?

  Build a tree house, invite me over?

  I’ll keep looking.

  I am reaching for you in the dark.

  xx Rosie

  A cold thought came to me. Could Believer find James? Exposing Anna was one thing, but the idea that Rosie might fall, too, taking James down with her, was unacceptable. I amended my letter, adding:

  PS—The sooner the better. Next week?

  Leah Leary’s phone barked out a command in a stilted Australian accent.

  “In five hundred feet, turn royt on Joymz Street.”

  “What street?” I asked, goose bumps thrilling across my arms.

  “James,” Leah said, turning.

  Before I could properly marvel at this sure sign, a large rectangular building came into view.

  ARROWHEAD NURSING HOME: A MEMORY CARE FACILITY. The building was designed to look like a Colonial house, but the dimensions were supersized. The effect was revolting—a quaint cottage on steroids in the middle of the desert. Two ambulances were parked out front.

  Dread settled in. Memory care. It sounded like science fiction. I pictured rows of elderly people, bodies gelatinous with gravity, bald heads covered with sensors, wires everywhere.

  • • •

  “This terrible guy took us on a tour. He showed us around. And I got lost.”

  “You got lost?”

  Mr. Lauren and I were sitting outside the chapel, where he’d found me avoiding going to lunch after the ride back from Arrowhead.

  “I was texting someone—Kit, the guy I went to the concert with—and I sort of lagged behind. But something so incredibly weird happened.”

  “What?”

  “I met this woman. She grabbed my arm and took me into her room.”

  “Did she really?”

  “It was amazing.”

  • • •

  Kit: What you up to?

  Me: I’m at a nursing home, volunteering

  Kit: For real

  Me: Really. School thing

  Kit: Let’s hang out again soon

  Me: My mom’s gone tomorrow night

  When I looked up, the hallway was empty. I couldn’t remember where we were supposed to go next on our tour of Arrowhead—the pool, the cafeteria, the Zen garden.

  Mary-Kate’s going to be pissed.

  I crept toward a bank of elevators, sounds of coughing fits and daytime television leaking out from behind each closed door.

  “Rosie.” An energetic whisper. I felt dizzy. A hand on my arm, papery skin, a large ruby ring on the middle finger.

  “Come here, Rosie.”

  An old woman led me into a narrow room.

  “I’m just here on a tour. I have to get back to my friends—” I tried to explain.

  “Sit down, Rosie.”

  “I’m not Rosie. My name is Joss. Do you want me to get a nurse for you?”

  “Just sit down.”

  I sat on an overstuffed chair. On the wall opposite, a huge, intricate dream catcher was hanging, threaded through with shells and stones and feathers.

  There was something about the room. A big window with white lace curtains and a wide windowsill with a strange assortment of things displayed on it—an array of grocery store candles with Our Lady of Guadalupe on them, a rosary with faux ivory beads, a dozen potted plants.

  I calmed down. It felt like I’d been there before. Like some version of my bedroom. A room in the Dream Palace. Each object was a symbol. I wanted to rearrange them, play a game I sometimes played with my own things—arrange them the right way, to grant a wish, to make something happen.

  The woman’s name was Irene. She thought I was her sister, Rosie. I tried again to explain who I was, but she didn’t hear it.

  She asked if I remembered when her father came home from the war in the Pacific and gave us both what he said were shark’s teeth, as big as bananas.

  She said, “Rosie, you kept yours with you everywhere you went, until you used it to cut that boy who teased you for your freckles, so Mother took it away.”

  She wanted to go over what was left of her memories, I think, to keep them close. I played along. I shared one of my own.

  “Do you remember when we went to the Grand Canyon and wandered off and nobody could find us? They had a big search party, with police. We’d gone beyond the railings. You saw a nest you said was abandoned by an eagle or a hawk. We sat by it and pretended it was ours. It was dark when they finally found us. We got in so much trouble.”

  Shane and me.

  Irene laughed. “How dangerous! It was so high up!”

  “It didn’t seem too high,” I said. “But it must have been.”

  MK: Where are you?

  MK: We’re in the lobby, hurry up

  “Oh, Rosie.”

  Irene sat on the edge of her neat twin bed, stroking a corner of a crocheted blanket.

  “Oh, Rosie,” she repeated. “Do you remember when you died?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “I put the shark tooth with you, in the hospital. Then you died.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “I really didn’t think you ever would.”

  I wondered, at chance and parallels. I knew that many things were always lining up and falling apart. I sensed, however irrationally, that Irene had access to a different world, just like I did.

  “I’m three hundred years old,” she said, looking at the space in front of my face, onto which she was projecting someone else.

  • • •

  On the drive back to school there was a moment. On the freeway, the Kokopelli whizzed past, a curved flash on the side of a big mud-colored retaining wall. The car and everything in it—the girls, my own body—was unfamiliar.

  I looked at Leah Leary’s face and could not remember her name or how I felt about her. I tried to place her, and doing so made me realize that I didn’t know who I was, either.

  On the Tumblr, two new entries.

  The first was a series of screenshots, captured chat conversations. George and Emma.

  George: We have to get rid of him

  George: Just say the word

  Below the screenshots was a photo. The Marchands—the real Ron and Emma, whose faces I’d taken and used.

  VICTIMS #6 & 7—RON & EMMA

  458 EDGEWORTH COURT

  ATLANTA, GA 30301

  And the latest entry. Another photo. George, smiling in fatigues. A picture he’d sent to Emma when she’d asked him for one. Holding a piece of paper—George <3 Emma

  VICTIM #8—GEORGE

  George is next.

  • • •

  Before I met James on the astral plane, I told him how to get there.

  You’re in bed and you make your body light.

  You think of another person. You let your body long for them. It’s like digging a hole in sand until you hit water, and the water fills
the space, collapsing it. You push up through the collapse and then your body is vibrating with longing.

  Your skin is hot and fizzing with energy. Your eyes are closed. You have to work very hard to keep still.

  Then go.

  • • •

  “Wow,” Mr. Lauren said.

  “I think she saw into my soul,” I said, watching him tug at his right earlobe, at a small scar that looked like it could be from an old piercing.

  Invisible cicadas buzzed, the constant background drone of all my summers.

  How do you know they really exist? Have you ever seen one up close?

  The land where Xavier was built was once an orange grove, and the tough-skinned trees still dotted the campus, their trunks painted white to reflect the sun.

  “Why’d you become a teacher?” I asked, moving closer to the nearest tree, scanning its branches, finding them empty. Mr. Lauren followed, frowning at my question.

  “I wasn’t a teacher in England. I worked in research.”

  “Why’d you move here?”

  “Wasn’t my choice,” he said, and I remembered the way I’d caught him staring hungrily at me, his face bright in the stage lights of the Marquee.

  “Why were you really at the concert?”

  He moved to walk away, then stopped.

  “You left this in class again,” he said, reaching into his pocket and pulling out my iPod, handing it to me.

  He left, and I listened to the cicadas. The sound wasn’t stationary. It was tidal. It echoed internally, doing sonic tricks, bouncing off walls. I still couldn’t see any actual insects. I looked at more trees. Nothing.

  I liked to tell Shane that I believed airplane contrails were poisoning the atmosphere with drugs to keep us complacent consumers. I didn’t really, but conspiracy theories drove him nuts and I liked to see him get all worked up.

  But cicadas, maybe. Their sound pumped in. It did have a mechanical strain. What were they poisoning us with? Or was it a message, to be decoded?

  Mr. Lauren is lying too.

  CHAPTER 13

  The receptionist in Dr. Judson’s office looked like someone I could pretend to be. Maybe she was married to someone I was talking to online. I watched her as my appointment time ticked closer. We’d arrived early, my mom speeding through side streets like a madwoman.

  She was upset. Dylan hadn’t written in two weeks. He usually sent an e-mail every few days. He can barely put a sentence together, but she reads them like they’re Dostoevsky.

  She flipped the pages of a magazine at regular intervals, but I knew she wasn’t reading it. Just flipping. Here I am, taking crazy Joss to the psychiatrist again while Dylan’s probably dead in a ditch somewhere. She hadn’t even asked how my day went. I tried to tell her about “church, mall, school, prison,” but she just interrupted me.

  “There aren’t any prisons around.”

  “Yeah, but if I took out ‘prison’ it would ruin the effect—”

  “I get it, Joss,” she said, annoyed. “You hate living here. I’m sorry.”

  I guessed that her bad mood was compounded by having to leave me at home by myself while she was gone on her work trip. Maybe she was missing my dad more than usual, wishing he was alive and could stay with me.

  Rhiannon and I were texting.

  Me: Mary-Kate hates me

  Rhiannon: She’s uptight. She needs a boyfriend

  Me: That’s your solution to everything

  Rhiannon: She hasn’t really been talking to me, either, and I didn’t do anything to piss her off

  Rhiannon: Is Kit coming over tonight?

  Me: . . . maybe

  Rhiannon: omg you need to stream updates constantly

  Me: He’s weirdly asexual

  Rhiannon: Not for long

  I’d sent Mary-Kate a text hours ago. I tried again.

  Me: I’m sorry about this morning. I finished my part of the proposal thingie and sent it to Braddock, ok?

  Me: Come over tonight and swim and chill?

  I told myself that if she said yes, I’d cancel things with Kit. But when I checked my phone after my session with Dr. Judson, I could see she’d read the text and hadn’t bothered to respond.

  • • •

  James: Weird question. Have you ever been to Phoenix?

  James: I just got roped into doing some work out there. I’ve never been.

  James: But I thought, LA isn’t too far . . . maybe you could drive out?

  James saying Phoenix. Another sign.

  Church, mall, school, prison, James.

  The streets turned golden with his arrival. Walking toward Rosie, desert wildflowers sprouting in his footsteps. The ground would quake and swallow vacant exurb McMansions, golf courses leeched of color, Xavier and Brophy and Dr. Judson’s office.

  I wouldn’t have to go anywhere. He would come to me. Whatever I had to do to preserve the lie would be of secondary importance once we touched.

  Me: Pick a day. I can’t handle the responsibility.

  Me: But okay.

  Me: Send a song to calm me down?

  • • •

  Fifteen minutes after my mom left for Tucson, Kit knocked at the front door.

  “Show me around,” he said, looking up at the vaulted foyer ceiling. I took him through the living room, cool and dark, wooden blinds shut tight. The unused dining room, table stacked with papers, bankers’ boxes towering on top of the buffet.

  In the kitchen, he looked at a row of photographs lining a windowsill.

  “You look just like your mom,” he said, pointing to her.

  “I know.”

  Ferris the cat met us in the hallway, mewing for treats, wrapping herself around Kit’s legs, pawing his jeans, begging him instead of me. He stumbled over her as I opened the door to the den/studio.

  “Your dad was a painter?” he asked, looking around at the old canvases.

  “Yeah,” I said. “He didn’t make any money off it though. So he restored stuff sometimes. None of that’s here now.”

  Now his ashes are in the corner.

  “Do you draw or anything?”

  “I write stories,” I said, without thinking, embarrassed immediately. “And make collages sometimes.”

  “Where are those?”

  “In my room.”

  Ferris followed us upstairs, attached to the new male.

  I sat on the bed while Kit surveyed, tapping Bueller’s tank lightly, brushing the leaves of my plants.

  “This one’s really nice,” he said, pointing to the mandala on the wall, the one I’d used as inspiration for Rosie’s art show.

  Kit came over and sat next to me.

  So this is what it feels like to have a boy in your bed.

  I was surprised at how easy it was to kiss him. The shock of connection. A little bit of guilt, a rush of pride. I didn’t want to stop, but Kit pulled back and led me downstairs.

  I plugged my iPod into the patio speakers, and we went outside to the backyard, where the sun had just set, leaving a pretty indigo sky behind, crisscrossed with lavender contrails, speckled with early stars.

  On top of the nearest mountain, jutting up just beyond the neighborhood, a cluster of radio transmission towers blinked red.

  We uncovered the pool and sat with our legs in the water. Kit pulled out a green prescription bottle full of neatly-rolled joints. He lit one and passed it to me.

  “Do you get stoned a lot?” I asked, exhaling.

  He shrugged. “I go in phases. I was on Ritalin and Adderall from like third grade till halfway through high school. Weed seemed like a miracle compared to that. It’s good for creativity. I do it more often when I’m writing songs.”

  “Are you writing a song now?” I asked.

  “No,” he said shyly, with a smile.

  “Dylan—my brother—he told me not to smoke pot until I was in college. Because my brain’s too open already.”

  Kit laughed.

  Dylan really said that because he know
s it widens the cracks.

  I imagined the drug spreading through my bloodstream and tried to catch a floating leaf with my toes. Kit was so cute it was hard to look at him.

  “I wish I could write songs,” I said, listening to a cricket chirping along to the song playing in the background.

  “Anyone can,” Kit said.

  “I don’t think that’s true.”

  “Maybe you could be a muse?”

  We played footsie in the water, and everywhere we touched was a meeting point of currents.

  “I’m more of a guru,” I went on, remembering something James had written.

  Kit coughed. “A guru?” he asked. “What kind of guru?”

  “Umm.” I thought. “Like, one who guides your ideas and helps shape them. I’d have all these musicians looking to me to give them validation and lead them to the truth.”

  “Oh,” said Kit. “You mean like a cult leader.”

  “You know,” I said, “I can never think of anything to say when people ask me what I want to do with my life, but you’ve figured it out. Cult leader. Perfect.”

  I lifted my legs out of the water and leaned back on the grass.

  “Venus,” I said, pointing at the brightest spot in the sky. “You can tell it’s a planet because they don’t twinkle. And it’s not reddish, so it’s not Mars.”

  “I would join your cult,” Kit said.

  “If someone came up to you and said, ‘Hey, Kit, want to go to Mars? I’ll take you right now,’ would you go?” I asked.

  “Absolutely,” Kit said, and his answer excited me.

  “Oh God,” I said, seeing the stars flat, points on a plane, glitter on a sheet of paper. “What if Venus used to be like Earth, but now it’s burning up? And Mars will be the new Earth, after we burn up? And it keeps going all the way to Neptune?”

  “Yes, cult leader,” Kit said robotically.

  “I’m serious,” I said, ready to make my case.

  I was interrupted by the doorbell ringing in the distance. At the same time, Kit’s phone vibrated between us. I jumped—

  “Who’s that?”

  “I ordered pizza,” Kit said, putting a hand on my shoulder to lever himself up.

  At the front door, Kit paid the delivery guy. I peered over his shoulder.

  “How’d you get in?” I asked. The guy looked at me incredulously, sliding the pizza box out of its warming sleeve.