Bombshell Read online

  That struck me as the most radical thing Mary-Kate had ever said. I didn’t know how to reply.

  “We all got to get our kicks somewhere,” I mumbled.

  “I’m so sick of your kicks!” Mary-Kate yelled. Rhiannon and Trevor walked up to us, holding blue clouds of cotton candy.

  “Are Mommy and Daddy fighting?” Rhiannon asked, before realizing a second later how serious we were.

  “Guys—” she said, trying to calm us.

  “No,” Mary-Kate said. “I’ve wanted to say this for a long time. I didn’t know how, didn’t want to make you feel bad. But I don’t even think it’s possible to make you feel bad. Nothing touches you. You think I’m lame like you think everyone else is lame.”

  I started to object, but something about her accusation rang sort of true, and it made me stop. I wanted the conversation to be over, but I didn’t think I could end it.

  Mary-Kate could.

  “I don’t want to hang out with you anymore. And considering the fact that every time I voice an opinion, you either laugh at it or it annoys you, I’m guessing you’re fine with that. It’s not like we’ve actually spent much time together lately anyway.”

  “How surprising,” I said. “It’s all my fault.”

  “No,” Mary-Kate said. “You don’t get to say that. I’m just going to say it’s all my fault, so you can’t. It’s my fault. I tried out for cheerleading. I made friends with Mae. I showed you all those chat rooms when we were in fourth grade. It’s my fault because I don’t agree with everything you say. It’s my fault that I’ve accepted that yes, this is the world, and this is how things are built and bought and sold and done, and yeah, you can laugh at it all you want, but you don’t instantly become some world-altering rebel just by saying ‘fuck everything and everyone I don’t believe in!’ It’s my fault because I want to be normal.”

  “It’s my fault!” I said, angry more at her using the word “normal” twice than anything else. “And you’re just as dishonest as I am, reading your stupid fashion magazines all the time, secretly in love with a girl—”

  I knew I’d gone too far. Mae took Mary-Kate’s arm, pulling her back. We were inches apart. I waited for Mary-Kate to dig in, to go deeper, to skewer me the way only she could. She got steely-eyed instead.

  “You’re making this so easy,” she said.

  Her face was distorted, masklike. I thought of what my mom said about what happened to Mary-Kate’s mom and her other high school friends. They grew up, they changed, they became these programmed drones. Inside the moment, it seemed impossible that Mary-Kate and I were ever friends in the first place.

  “Fuck you,” I said. “Have fun growing up into nothing.”

  She had tears in her eyes—I noticed just before Mae took her arm and they walked off. Rhiannon tried to comfort me, but I wrenched away from her and she went after Mary-Kate too, with Trevor trailing behind holding her cotton candy.

  The ground seemed unsteady. The footsteps of everyone around me seemed to shake through it. I worried it was all crust, hollow beneath, and would break under my feet. Mary-Kate was a magnet, and the center went with her when she left. I was alone, in the wrong, despised.

  My phone buzzed.

  Believer: How’s your hand, Joss?

  Believer: Still hurting?

  As soon as I read it, I realized my hand did hurt, from the cut I’d gotten on my broken window. I’d lost the bandage covering my palm somewhere on the Slip ’N Slide, and the wound wasn’t ready to be uncovered yet. It was reopening.

  A bright light burst along my peripheral vision and I turned to look at it. The sun had appeared from behind cloud cover and was shining on the row of windows along Xavier’s north side, far across the parking lot.

  The beacon disappeared as the clouds shifted again, and then I saw him. My coyote, moving boldly through the crowd.

  I followed him, keeping my eyes trained on his alert ears as he loped on all fours, zigzagging through the field day maze. Trailing him like a pack animal, I wasn’t sure I could have stopped if I’d wanted to. He was pulling me by an invisible string.

  He led me toward Xavier, and soon I was pushing through metal doors, glimpsing the coyote at the end of an empty hallway. I could still hear music and shouting from the fields, and see the shuddering turrets of bounce house castles through the windows that lined the corridor.

  My phone kept buzzing. Each time I checked it, it seemed less important. The phone was a toy, a piece of plastic. The coyote on his mission was all-consuming.

  Rhiannon: What happened?

  Rhiannon: btw I am on your side. I think . . .

  And from Shane.

  Shane: Do you want a corn dog?

  Shane: nm, there’s no more corn dogs. I eated them all

  The air-conditioning made my wet clothes icy, and I thought of the coyote’s fur, how it might feel if I could touch it. How warm it would be.

  I was very close to him now, walking faster, skin prickled all over with permanent goose bumps.

  He turned a corner in front of me and I took huge strides, sure I would catch him—but when I turned, he was gone and so was the invisible string.

  Why’d you go?

  No answer.

  I continued, passing closed classroom doors. Outside each one was a bronze plaque listing the teacher’s name and the subjects they taught. I read them as I walked by.

  EVELYN HEATH / FRENCH I, II, III & AP FRENCH

  JENNIFER CAREY / ALGEBRA I, II & PRECALC

  SR. DORCAS FRY / LATIN

  I stopped at the next door and cupped my hand against it, listening. I thought I heard something. A low growl, or music? There wasn’t any light coming through the gap at the floor.

  He’s in there.

  The plaque was newer than the others, shinier.

  DR. MILES LAUREN / BIOLOGY, AP BIOLOGY, AP CHEMISTRY & PHYSICS

  BZZZT went my phone.

  Miles: Is that you?

  There it is. The sign you were waiting for. Everything that will ever happen to you is lined up. You can push it a little by jinxing, but this was always going to happen. You’ve known it since the first time you saw him.

  I opened the door.

  Mr. Lauren was sitting at his desk, facing the windows. Wire mesh inside the double-paned glass fractured the view of the back side of the chapel, shading it all over with tiny octagons.

  The lights were off, and there was music playing—coming from his computer, curling through the air. The contents of a brown paper lunch sack were strewn across the messy desk. I knew he brought the same thing every day: an apple, a Tupperware container full of quinoa salad, a stainless-steel water bottle. I focused on the details, standing behind him, before he finally turned around.

  Rosie’s English teacher fell in love with her. She didn’t think anything of it. She liked him too, but what are you going to do in that situation, really? What can you do? Either ignore it or . . . don’t. Rosie chose not to ignore it because she’s always been open and brave.

  The world where I’m Rosie instead of Joss isn’t too far away. It’s right next door, an adjacent parallel universe.

  “How’d you know it was me?” I asked.

  He was still holding his phone. He looked from it to me, then set it down and met my eyes with a steady gaze.

  “I didn’t know,” he answered. “I saw a shadow, and hoped.”

  I smiled.

  “Eating your lunch with the lights off?”

  “It’s been a stressful week.”

  “Why?”

  “Nothing interesting.”

  “Mine too,” I said.

  The sleeves of his white button-down were rolled up. He’d taken his glasses off. His dark hair was getting shaggy around his ears. I took a quick look down to check my own outfit. Blades of grass clung to my ankles. I smelled like sunscreen, but I could tell I’d burned, like I always did on overcast days. Even with the heat trapped in my skin, I was shivering, and I moved to sit on the tab
le where I usually sat during class.

  Rosie was eighteen, I think. Only two years, that’s hardly anything. She didn’t just let it happen, either. She had control. She came out fine. She’s going to meet James. I’m going to meet James. He’ll be able to see through me unless I make myself more like her.

  “I can’t do this,” Mr. Lauren said. He hadn’t moved an inch since I walked in.

  Yes, you can.

  “Try reading my mind,” I said, closing my eyes. “I’m sending my thoughts out.”

  I tried to transmit, to push some mood or a clear sentence his way.

  Mr. Lauren, come over here. I want you to come over here. Pretend I’m Rosie, if that helps. She’s already been here, in this room, in a room like this. Maybe it had different windows though, and I guess it was in California.

  Refine the message, Joss.

  Come. Over. Here.

  I heard him get up, leave his chair, and walk across the linoleum. I kept my eyes shut, but the black void morphed a subtle change with the presence of his body in front of my eyelids. He touched me. I opened my eyes.

  “Grass,” he said, wiping a stray blade off my shoulder. It stuck to his finger.

  “You’re doing it,” I said.

  “This,” he said, returning his hand to my shoulder, running it slowly up and down my arm. “Is already too much. Far too much.”

  Touch him back, Rosie. You’ve done this with how many men? You know what to do. It’s the simplest thing in the world.

  I moved the arm he was touching and reached out to pull him closer. He was rubbing his temple with his other hand—I brushed his hand away and rubbed it for him, putting pressure there, waiting until he could look into my eyes. When he did, I saw the moment he stopped being scared. He wasn’t going to turn back now unless I made him.

  He was gone and so was I. I straightened my back, relaxed my mouth, kept my eyes half-lidded, did the things Rosie would do. It was easy to be her, as I knew it would be.

  Rosie’s movements were confident, assured.

  We were kissing, and his hands were on my arms, then underneath my shirt. He untied my bikini top. I stood up, arms around his neck, as he unbuttoned my shorts.

  I stopped thinking and let Rosie take over.

  I went to the Dream Palace and took her place in one of the lounge chairs around the pool, watching the scene remotely, gathering details I could use later to fill in shallow outlines or deepen other lies.

  CHAPTER 18

  Where Rosie ended and Joss began was a time-slipping mirage. On the other side of meeting James there was another world, and on this side I was with Rhiannon somewhere. Transported somehow. Vague memories of yet another car ride. I kept getting in cars and time kept moving forward, and that was all I knew for sure.

  My feet were in water. That’s what I saw first, my feet in a tub of bubbling green-tinted water. Without looking up from them I sensed the rest of the room. Fluorescent, narrow, some weak natural light leaking in from a source to my right.

  I was sitting up high, a padded chair undulating at my lower back.

  Nail salon.

  Rhiannon driving me home from school. Dropping Trevor at a Walgreens to pick up his grandma’s prescription. She thought I was being quiet because I was sad about fighting with Mary-Kate.

  Nail salon.

  A gigantic off-brand TV was playing an episode of Friends subtitled in Korean. I located Rhiannon, standing in front of a wall display of nail polish bottles organized by color.

  “All these reds are ugly,” Rhiannon was saying. “Reds are so hard to get right, you know?”

  “No,” I said, though I knew the question was rhetorical. Rhiannon ignored me anyway, nodding to herself before choosing a bottle.

  A woman sat at my feet and grabbed one roughly, depositing it on a folded towel. The foot gave off steam, cooked pink by the hot antiseptic water.

  I looked down at the phone in my hands, an auto-saved Notes draft illuminated on the screen.

  Rosie: liked the way her teacher’s eyes clouded over when she took her clothes off. Exchanging powers. This is a story I’ll tell myself when I’m thirty and it will explain who I am. A lizard to a water-holding cactus, a ghost to a new dimension. Witch to a crystal circle

  Joss sloughed off like a snakeskin crust. Rosie new and pink and clean beneath. I was stuck in the in-between, trying to function normally for Rhiannon.

  Then I was next to her, at side-by-side manicurists’ tables, with my feet in paper slippers, toenails like a row of perfect orange wedges.

  I wrenched my hands way from the woman holding them. She snapped her head back, surprised.

  “Never mind,” I said. “Just the toes, okay?”

  “You’ll have to pay for a manicure. I cut and buffed already.”

  “Fine, sorry.”

  Rhiannon cutting in as I stood up. “You’re done?”

  “Yeah, I’m just going to wait.”

  I tried to make a casual expression with my face, but it was hard to move my mouth the way I wanted. Something about it belonging to Rosie.

  I sat on a velvet couch in the salon’s waiting area and watched the Friends episode fade into another one, not the one that came after it in sequence, but one from a different season.

  Rhiannon’s new text alert was a bomb whistling and exploding. It went off three times in quick succession before she apologized to the manicurist and clicked it to silent.

  When she was done we wandered the shaded walkway that wrapped around the strip mall, heading from one end to another, to meet Trevor at the pharmacy.

  Great Clips, vacuum repair, Baja Fresh, another nail place.

  At the main attraction, the grocery store, misters sprayed water above the open entrance. The place where air-conditioning met hot air created a little tornado.

  “Hey, Joss.” Rhiannon turned to me.

  “Have you ever, like, involved people you know in what you do on the Internet? Like use stories from real life? Or pictures?”

  “No,” I said automatically.

  “You swear?”

  “Yeah,” I swore. “Why?”

  She handed me her phone.

  • • •

  I watched Rhiannon and Trevor drive off. As soon as I’d comprehended what was on her phone’s screen, she’d jerked away. Looked me in the eye. Shook her head once, not like she was dismissing me, but like I was something, finally, that she couldn’t understand.

  She’d left me there, hardly saying anything after I saw what she’d seen—a link to the Tumblr, texted to her by a blocked number.

  A new post. Rhiannon’s face, smiling out from a screenshot of a dating site profile. Photos I stole from her Instagram and Facebook, Snapchats she’d sent me. She looked old enough to pass as twenty-one-year-old Greta, a children’s librarian in a tourist town on a picturesque island off South Carolina I’d seen in a Lifetime movie while home sick from school one day.

  “I didn’t even meet anyone as her,” I’d tried to explain, through the new barrier between us.

  VICTIM #9—RHIANNON

  And the rest of the Tumblr below. Rhiannon would show it to Mary-Kate. I pictured them browsing through Believer’s roster of my so-called victims. All the people and nonentities I had ever been now pursued by a shape-shifter—the sometimes-coyote, sometimes-Kokopelli, the all-time trickster god.

  Rhiannon was more hurt than angry, and that made me feel worse than if she’d just started yelling. But she was stunned. She could overlook my eccentricities because they were sometimes funny—dick pics to make fun of and insights into the brain of the average male. But this was different. I’d used her. Shame piled on shame.

  “Who even are you?” she’d muttered. And then she was gone too.

  Believer stepping closer, closer through a grid of backyard squares. Hunting the girl with an encyclopedia’s worth of names and histories in her head, in Word documents and spreadsheets created at two in the morning with twenty browser windows open to twenty di
fferent worlds.

  Something was wrong with the Starbucks in the strip-mall parking lot. It was bleeding noise and light, a seeping yellow aura that competed with the heavy grey dusk outside. Thicker than an aura, more like a stain. The desert prepares for rain by turning up her tough green arms.

  James: So, surprise

  James: I’m already in Phoenix

  James: Got an earlier flight

  I breathed deeply; for the first time, it was the same air James was breathing.

  I twisted around in my seat at the Starbucks and looked out a window at the sun drooping toward a smear of purple clouds along the western horizon. The same clouds James could see, if he were looking up.

  If I listened carefully and filtered out the noise of the coffee shop, I might be able to hear his voice. Maybe he was calling one of his friends to tell them he’d landed and was going to really do it, really meet the girl he’d been chatting with for more than a year.

  A new person walked in—the bored barista and I looked up at the jingling of the bell above the door. A guy the right age and build, a hat hiding what might be the right hair color and cut. He seemed to have the air of recent travel clinging to him. His clothes just slightly too stylish and expensive to belong here. Wearing trendy sunglasses at dusk.

  This was James. Of course we wouldn’t have to set up a meeting place. Of course we would be led to each other by outside forces, by the turning wheel that spins and decides who goes where, and when, and why. Fate put us together virtually, and now she was finishing the job.

  I stood up from the couch and moved toward him as he waited at the counter—finally, my James, and just when I needed him, just when everything was falling apart. He was holding a phone, typing on it too, and when he stopped typing mine buzzed.

  James: This is a weird town.

  “James,” I said, out loud, a whisper.

  At the same moment, the barista spoke—

  “Can I get your name?”

  “Greg,” said the guy. His voice was too high, too guarded and aggressive. When he turned around he took his sunglasses off and his eyes were so close together they looked permanently crossed.