Defy the Dark (4 page)

With that thought running over and over in my mind, I step away from my assigned cubby—one with a lock only I have the key to (right to privacy)—without looking at the full-length mirror affixed to the door.

My heartbeat pounds in my ears as I put one foot in front of the other, traversing the long, romantically lit hall. Everything in this godforsaken building is romantic.

I pause in front of the last door, the door to the room where my snickerdoodles and I humiliated ourselves in front of Jeremy two weeks ago.

As opposed to the bakery, of course, where my bread dough and I humiliated ourselves just this afternoon. The lock says
OCCUPIED
, the red words shining out at me like a searchlight.

Knock?

Walk away?

He said he would make sure this room was available.

I lift my hand and stand like that for a long time, my fist shaking as my courage threatens to fail me. I don't so much knock as let my hand fall in such a way that my knuckles hit the door.

Whatever happens next is gravity's fault.

The sound seems to echo and I wonder if anyone is in there at all. Maybe the lock is just jammed. It would be my luck.

The door opens.

It's Jeremy, and he lets out a breath at the same time as I do. We are a mirror—the fear, the anxiety. It's strange to see it on Jeremy's face, Jeremy who's always so confident. Cocky, even.

Which one is the act? I wish I knew.

His eyes scan the hallway. “Come in,” he says, stretching to let me duck under his arm, the door inches from my back as he almost sweeps me into the room with it.

He turns the lock back to
OCCUPIED
with a sound like the fall of a headsman's ax. It's too late to change my mind. Not too late to run away, but now it
will
be running away, not standing him up.

Jeremy attempts a smile, but it looks awkward. He reaches down and brings out a white box from under a pillow on the bed. A bed that seems to have grown threefold and is the only thing I can look at.

“For you,” he says, handing me the white box with the red ribbon. “I'm sorry it's not a surprise.”

I shrug with one shoulder as I take the box. “If it was a surprise, I probably wouldn't have gotten my favorite.” I'm being nice to him now. Did I do that on purpose?

He stands with his fists on his hips, looking at my feet long enough that I start to squirm.

“My score was 107,” he whispers. “But my chest is forty-eight inches.”

I say nothing, but my hands start to tremble. I study him. His body. He's tall—at least six five. A paragon of virility. No wonder they want him to make strong, healthy babies. His chest is particularly wide, I realize. It tapers to a narrow waist slung with jeans that are tight and loose in all the right places. He's everything any female could want. A perfect Nature.

“I don't want to be here,” he says as though reading my thoughts.

“But—”

“I
know
what it looks like,” he interrupts, and there's a hint of that bubbling anger. I understand now; it's not directed at me. “It's how I hide. In plain sight, you know?” He forces a short bark of a laugh and then is silent again.

He walks over to the bed and reaches for the blanket and I get ready to bolt. He throws back the covers to reveal . . .

Textbooks?

I look at him, questions in my eyes.

“I study,” he answers. “Every night. It's not technically against the rules. I—I have a friend who is a Nurture who gives me—anyway . . .” He waves at the books and stops rambling.

I look over at the books and my hands ache to go stroke their shiny covers. I didn't realize until now how much I miss my classes—crave them.

I don't belong here.

Apparently, neither does Jeremy.

“I hide them up in the box spring,” he says, dropping to his knees and pointing to the hammock-like shelf he's rigged there. “They vacuum under here, but no one ever really looks.” He peers up at me and appears strangely small on the floor before me. “They're always here. You can come study anytime you want. But . . .” He hesitates and the fear is back in his eyes. How does he mask it all the rest of the time? I've never seen even a hint before. “What I'd really like is if you come study with . . .
with
me.”

He's looking down at the ground, and I stand wordless until he looks up and meets my eyes again.

It takes a long time.

“Why me?” I whisper.

“I—I don't know,” he admits. “I haven't been interested in anyone—anyone—since I had to come here. I haven't . . . I never . . . never more than just what people see,” he finishes, and I'm grateful he's looking elsewhere again when my face burns red.

“But you—after that night. You made me
want
something again. Not just, you know, but company. Friendship, Kylie.” He's looking at me again; he wants me to know that he's telling the truth. As if I couldn't already tell with his transparent swimming-pool eyes that can't hide anything.

Not from me. How did I not see that before?

“When I came here, it was like I died inside. And these last couple weeks, watching you— learning you—it's like I might be alive again someday. Maybe.”

His eyes plead with me to say something. Anything. Even rejection.

I don't know what to say. He's laid out all the feelings in
my
heart and they resonate within me like a violin string.

Then a sinking feeling comes over me. “This is how they do it, isn't it?” I choke.

“Do what?” Jeremy asks.

“Keep us happy,” I whisper, admitting to myself that for the first time since I saw the measurement of my hips, I
am
happy. “Someone for everyone. Even us.”

It takes a moment before Jeremy understands and I see the realization dawn in his eyes. He looks down again. “Does it matter?” he murmurs almost too quietly to hear.

“I don't know.”

Silence stretches between us and I'm not sure what to do.

Maybe I should leave.

“Stay.”

It isn't a command. It's a plea.

“Stay with me.” His voice is stronger now.

To stay is to admit I belong. But it also means confessing that I don't.

Is it enough?

I sink to the floor—I'm not ready to share a bed with him, even if that bed is simply a space to sit—and pull the loose end of the deep-red ribbon. Inside the box is the oversized butterscotch chip cookie; the white chocolate is soft but not quite melty against my fingers. I break the cookie in half and hand a piece to Jeremy with a tentative smile.

His eyes sparkle and for a moment I wonder if I see a mist of tears, but he turns away and clears his throat before biting into the sweet confection. He pauses midchew, sets his piece in the white box, and reaches for the ribbon.

“May I?” he asks, and his hands are reaching toward me before I can speak. His fingertips brush the sides of my neck and my breath catches in my throat. When he's done tying the ribbon around my ponytail, he pulls away and again those warm hands touch my skin. “Red looks good in your hair.”

My turn to confess. “That's why I picked it.”

His eyes sparkle and I realize I've given him a gift.

He turns and stretches his long, beautiful arm up to the bed and slides a book down. “Chemistry?” he asks, already leafing through the pages.

I smile and wonder if the innuendo was intended.

But I guess it doesn't matter.

As I sit, my shoulder brushing his, the bliss of butterscotch on my tongue, I know what will happen. I see it laid out before me like a film. Jeremy and me, hiding in plain sight, living our elaborate lie. I'll wear the red ribbon, and no one will even notice. Except Jeremy, who will say nothing. Not in front of anyone, anyway. Never together in the daylight, we will laugh, and drink, and flirt, sharing only the rarest of secret glances.

But at night, we will be here.

Perhaps there will be kisses one day. Perhaps we will be lovers.

But that doesn't matter. Because now I know.

When the sun goes down we will be

Together.

I will be

Myself.

And we will find

Truth.

Dia Reeves

The Dark Side of the Moon

W
hen Cado snuck up on Patricia in her backyard, her first reaction was not to scream but to thwack him over the head with a silver watering can.

And that was what he loved about her.

“Oh my God, Cado!” She dropped the watering can and tried to break his fall as he wilted into the petunias. “I'm so sorry!”

“Not as sorry as me,” said Cado, blinking away stars similar to the red, white, and blue ones he'd seen strung in the redbud trees along the block as he'd driven up.

Charter was less than an hour from Portero, both towns hidden within the East Texas piney woods, but while Charter consisted of unlovely acres of livestock and hay farms, Portero could have been carved out of gingerbread. By pixies. Stars in the trees, cobblestones in the streets, flowers in all the gardens. A place that charmed and disarmed with its tweeness . . . and then thwacked you over the head.

After she'd checked to her satisfaction that she hadn't cracked his skull into a million pieces, Patricia threw herself into Cado's arms and rolled him around in the flowers like she thought she was a milkmaid. “You're not even supposed to be here until tomorrow!”

“I know, but I wanted to sleep over, and I figured your folks wouldn't've agreed if I had asked first.”

“That's amazingly diabolical.” Patricia's kiss was like a stamp of approval. “My influence is finally rubbing off on you.”

But she didn't ask why he'd come early, probably assuming he wanted to catch her in the shower or something predictable like that. Patricia knew a lot, like what all the initials in the
Wall Street Journal
stood for and how to apply lipstick so that it never smeared no matter how hard Cado kissed her. But she didn't know him. Not as well as she thought she did.

He sat up and rescued the bouquet of daylilies from where he'd dropped them after getting clobbered. The petals matched the setting sun and blazed against the black of Patricia's dress as he presented them to her. “I brought this for you.”

“Why?” Patricia asked, hip deep in flowers, yet staring at the daylilies as if they were alien babies.

“Because you like flowers. Duh.”

“Not as a symbol of love. Those are going to wither and die in a week. Is that what you think about our relationship? That it's going to wither and die in a week?”

“No,” he said after realizing the question wasn't rhetorical.

Patricia grabbed the bouquet that he had painstakingly selected and threw it so hard, it sailed over the wrought-iron fence and smacked a passing soccer dad in the face.

Patricia didn't understand him, but sometimes Cado didn't understand her, either.

After she helped him to his feet, he grabbed his duffel bag and flute case from the petunias and followed her through the back door into her home.

“Want a cool drink?”

“Maybe later,” he said, distracted by her outfit, a black dress with no back and shoes that exposed her manicured toes—definitely not a milkmaid. She smelled cold and Parisian. “You look nice.”

Patricia twirled for him, showering the floor with pink petunia petals. “My folks are at a canasta party, but after they've heard all the neighborhood gossip, they'll swing by to pick me up. They're treating me to a farewell dinner at Gitano's before you steal me away. Wanna come?”

They hadn't seen each other since he'd gone to Castelaine to see her perform two months ago. They almost never saw each other except at recitals and band camps, like the one they were driving to tomorrow. Although they talked and texted all the time, the whole long-distance thing was beyond suck. “I'd rather stay here with you.”

“They'll be home any minute,” Patricia insisted, and before he could stop her, she popped the zit on his chin. She was always doing that to him. “I don't care if it scars you,” she'd say whenever he complained. “I'd rather look at scars than pus.”

“We only have enough time to change you into something less transy,” she said, dabbing his chin with a kitchen towel.

Cado held her away and looked down at himself, his worn jeans and new, blue Fourth of July T-shirt. “Transy?”

“It's short for transient.” She put her hand over her mouth briefly, as though she had been impolite. “It doesn't mean anything bad; it's just what we call people who obviously aren't from Portero. Usually Porterenes wear black in public.”

“How can y'all stand it? Especially in the summer.” It had to be close to one hundred degrees outside.

“We're used to it, though it helps not having anything to compare it to.” She led him upstairs and into her room. “I mean, it's not exactly a law, but it may as well be.”

“Why?”

“Because people die all the time here,” she said solemnly, taking his duffel bag and setting it on her bed. “Death surrounds us. Did you pack a suit?”

“Um . . .” He was inclined to take Patricia seriously when she spoke of death and monsters, now more than ever after what he had seen last month, but still, her mix of weirdness and practicality always mystified him.

“I have a black shirt and pants.”

She rummaged through his poorly packed bag, but after finding the shirt and pants, the search continued. “Where're your ties?”

“Ties? I thought we were going to dinner, not Buckingham Palace.”

“You can take the boy out of the country,” she muttered, giving him a pitying look. “I'll get something of my dad's.”

Cado changed clothes while she was gone, noting the real art on the walls, the violin from Austria gleaming in an open case on her desk, the blue silk covering her bed and pillows, and the fresh yellow daylilies ironically scenting the air. He tried his best not to smudge anything.

Patricia returned and gave him her dad's jacket and tie, which he struggled into while she dumped the contents of a red purse into a metal one that reminded him of an anorexic version of his mom's toaster.

Cado examined himself in Patricia's full-length mirror. The jacket fit tightly on his arms; if he flexed, he would burst the seams like the Incredible Hulk.

“I look like a gorilla at the opera.”

“You do not! Don't be so down on yourself. You're handsome and smart”—Patricia jabbed him with the metal purse after each point—“and a soon-to-be world-famous flutist.”

“I guess. You smeared lipstick on your purse.”

“That's not lipstick,” she said, and then applied some to her mouth, as if he had reminded her. “That's blood. And what do you mean, ‘you guess'?”

“Are you bleeding?” He grabbed her hand and she wound up with lipstick on her chin.

“That's not
my
blood, silly.” She swatted him away and fixed her face while he examined the purse. “It's not even fresh; it just looks like it is.”

And it did, dripping across one side of the metal like an open wound but not staining his hands.

“A couple years ago, there was a plague of blood grackles,” Patricia explained through lips that matched the stain on her purse. “They looked just like regular grackles, except blood grackles liked to eat people instead of worms. Fortunately they couldn't abide metal, so for a while, it was all the thing to wear metal accessories as protection. Mama bought me that purse for my birthday, and wouldn't you know that very same night, I had to bash a couple of blood grackles out of the air when they dive-bombed me. On my birthday of all days!”

She finished doing her makeup and fluffed out the curly afro puff resting cloudlike atop her head, not even interested in his reaction to her story.

No one back home would have believed her, but Cado did. Patricia wasn't the type to bullshit anyone or mince words. “Are they still around?” he asked. “Those blood grackles?”

“They got wiped out last year. All the metal was too much for them.” She nodded at the purse in his hands. “That stain is all that's left, as far as I know.” Patricia unknotted the mess he'd made of her father's tie and redid it. “Some of the faculty from the Shepherd School are gonna be at the retreat.”

Patricia's ability to flit nimbly from the bizarre to the mundane floored him yet again. “The Shepherd School at Rice? Why do you care? I thought you wanted to go to Oberlin?”

“Rice is closer. And cheaper.” She smoothed her hand over his now-perfect tie. “Cheap enough even for gorillas who play the flute.”

“It'd be better for my family if I went to A&M and studied farming or—”

“The hell with your family! Just man up and make a decision, Cado, and don't hide behind your family.”

Definitely didn't mince words.

“That's why I came early,” Cado told her. “To man up.”

The car horn startled them both. Patricia peeped through the window blinds; the dying sunlight clawed her face.

“It's my folks.” She took her purse from him and tucked it under her arm. “This conversation isn't over.”

Cado didn't like when she got upset with him, but he didn't mind it—Patricia was cute when she got her back up. He grabbed her hand and held it all the way down the stairs. “Do you have any other magic weapons like that purse?”

“There's no such thing as magic. Otherwise I'd send a wise old elf to tell you to apply to Rice so that we can finally be together. Not a day here or two weeks there, but really together. For as long as we want.”

“I might not get in. It's not a sure thing.”

“You were on
From the Top
, for God's sake. You know how many classical musicians would kill to be on that show? Rice would slit its wrists to have you enroll.”

“But it's so . . . high art. You know? Tuxedos and tea sandwiches.” His hand sweated all over hers just thinking about it. “That's your world, not mine.”

She didn't give Cado a pitying look this time; she looked into him, there on the bottom step, and she liked what she saw. “You're awesome enough to make it in any world.”

And because it was Patricia who'd said it, he believed her.

 

C
ado wanted to stick a fork in his eye, but there were four to choose from, and the Markhams would sneer if he chose wrong.

“A salad fork?” they'd say. “In the eye? Everyone knows salad forks go in the ear.”

At least Patricia's folks were devoted. Not just proud of their daughter but pleased with her. Cado, on the other hand, they seemed to find thoroughly and mouth-twistingly unpleasant.

“So,” said Mr. Markham heavily, as Cado toyed with the overabundance of heirloom cutlery. “Why the flute? Were the ballet classes all filled that day?”

“Don't be tiresome, Daddy.” Patricia rested her foot atop Cado's and sipped from her wineglass. Red wine that looked like blood and tasted like Mardi Gras.

“I don't mind,” Cado told her. “I get it worse at home. You'd be surprised at the numerous and creative ways my dad finds to impugn my manhood.”

His vocabulary impressed the Markhams against their will. Those soul-numbing SAT drills had been good for something at least.

“Have you been to Portero before?” Mrs. Markham asked, her polite tone at odds with her stony expression.

“No, ma'am.”

Mrs. Markham touched her daughter's hand. “Be sure to show him the sights, darling: the Old Mission, Fountain Square. The historic district is always nice.” She gave Cado a tight smile. “You can look at the pretty houses.”

Cado sipped from his own wine, resisting the urge to stick his pinkie out. “That sounds like fun, ma'am.”

“Does it?” Mr. Markham said. “Would you also like to go antiquing with my grandmother this Saturday?”

“Maybe. Is your granny as cute as Patricia?”

Patricia laughed and clinked her glass against Cado's. “Excellent riposte, sir. But no one is as cute as me.”

Cado was saved from Mr. Markham's retort by the arrival of their waiter. While Mr. Markham ordered for everyone, Patricia and Cado began texting each other.

 

Patricia: You're the cute one.

Cado: Not for much longer. Your dad hates my guts.

Patricia: Sure does.

Cado: Why? Cuz I haz white skin?

Patricia: No. Cuz you haz white penis.

 

“I wish the two of you would stop that,” Mrs. Markham said as the table shook with the force of their laughter. “That's incredibly impolite.”

“It is not,” said Patricia, even as she put her phone away. “We're multitasking.” She kissed Mrs. Markham's cheek. “Don't be so twentieth century, Mama.”

Cado considered taking some of the bread that had been left with them—and that had been architecturally arranged with more thought than the Sydney Opera House—but lost his nerve at the last minute.

“Which college are you going to?” Mr. Markham asked him.

“Um . . .”

Patricia said, “He's trying to decide between Rice and A&M.”

“It just depends on how things work out,” Cado added when Mr. Markham kept staring at him.

“With the Young Artists' Retreat or with my daughter?”

“Neither. It all depends on the night trolley.”

The Spanish guitarist seemed deafening in the intense silence that followed Cado's statement.

“What do you know about the”—Patricia lowered her voice—“night trolley?”

“About a month ago I was on a hunting trip with my uncles. We thought we were about to flush a wild hog from the bushes, but it wasn't a hog.

“At first I thought it was a naked man running wild in the woods, a maniac or something. But even as I thought it, I knew it wasn't a man. It wasn't human. It had sick white skin and needle-sharp teeth and a head three times as big as mine.”

Patricia said, “Big as a pumpkin?”

“Yeah!” The recognition on their faces healed something in Cado he hadn't known was damaged. His family had half convinced him he'd been seeing things. Even his uncles who had seen the same thing he had.