The next day is normal, to my surprise. It's rainy, and we are all soaked for most of the day. Everyone else seems pretty down, but the rain puts me in good spirits. I've always liked rain, particularly torrential downpours, because of the tiptoeing cat foot sound it makes on roofs. (Even though I'm a dog person). The best thing about the day, however, is that Sam seems to have gone back to normal. She wears her typical uniform of rumpled jeans and a t-shirt, and is back to her pessimistic attitude. I don't ask her about yesterday, for fear it might upset her. I'm walking on eggshells all day trying to control myself.
Lunch is an average slum of some sort of frozen chicken, which basically no one eats but the teachers. Ellie braids Alicia's hair into an intricate style while chattering nonstop about a book she just read, and Will and Sam get into an animated argument about the merits of shoelaces. Honestly, I tune most of their talking out. Blended together, the combined voices in the cafeteria sound like some sort of rushing brook. I've never really been to a rushing brook, even though there are a ton in Vermont. Due to my inexplicable aversion to bugs, I've never been an outdoor type of person.

After school, Will and Alicia are busy with the myriad of extracurriculars they've signed up for, so only Ellie, Sam and I are free. We decide to get together at my house, due to the fact that Ellie's has an over abundance of Christmas paraphernalia and Sam's is practically falling down. The house is dark when we pull up. My mom must be working overtime today, which she does every Tuesday and Thursday. Our living room is fairly messy, strewn with magazines and various vegetarian cookbooks my mom had tried to make recipes from and failed miserably. I'm suddenly self conscious. Usually, I have time to do a quick cleanup before my friends come over, but this visit is without warning. I breath a quick sigh of relief when Ellie and Sam flop onto the ground with no problems.

"So.... what should we do?" Asks Ellie. This is a problem we always encounter when we meet at each-others' houses. It never happens when we go out into the world, for some reason.

Sam's instinct is to pull out her phone, which has a picture of Bach with a fat red X through this face. I have absolutely no idea what the meaning behind this case is, but she's had it for almost three years. Ellie slaps the phone out of her hands. It clatters onto the beige couch. "Put that mind-sucker away," she Jokes. "Why don't we do something cool and productive, like homework? You love homework!" She's clearly just fooling around, but Sam takes it as seriously as if someone had died.

"I'm expecting an important phone call." She retorts. "If you had a brain half the size of a walnut, you would understand."

She's hit a sore spot. Ellie, who is smart but not motivated to get good grades, has been called dumb by teachers for as long as any of us can remember. She's been told this so often she believes this, even though her considerable intelligence is visible in her unhealthy obsession with reading. Ellie, stunned to silence, pulls a pen out of her pocket and gouges it into the side of the her hand. Sam huffs out, slamming the door like she did yesterday.
"It's okay, " I try to comfort her. "You know she didn't mean that, she never does." Ellie's eyes are beginning to fill with liquid, water pouring down her enviably smooth cheeks.

"What's wrong with her?" She wails. "Why is she so mean to my friend Beethoven?" I literally have no idea what she is talking about? Beethoven? Okay? But I put some classical music on on YouTube, since I know she likes it. It only makes her more upset, her pen drawing crimson blood. Some of it leaks onto the clean beige couch, but I don't have the heart to chastise her.
"Come on, let's go outside or something." I pry her off the couch and into my yard, a haven for wildflowers (and weeds) in a myriad of bright colors. Crickets are just beginning to chirp, and fat bees float lazily between stalks. Ellie is a dark mass of black fabric, weaving between pieces of grass while letting the tears water the plants. I think I maybe read something about salt water killing plants, and enough water is coming out of her to do some serious damage. I wouldn't want to make her feel any worse, though. In a spur of quick thinking, I whip out my phone and turn on classical music (from the baroque era, her favorite). It cheers her up somewhat, though she blubbers something about the key it's in being 'a bad color'. When Ellie was ten she read an article about synesthesia on Wikipedia, and now insists that she has it, as well as perfect pitch. Though she thinks this, she is practically tone deaf and can't identify a single note, let alone the key a song's in. I think she mostly uses this as an excuse to get out of our required band class because the 'ugly color of the music'. Ellie snatches my phone and switches to Verdi's requiem, which I only recognize because of the fact that she plays it on repeat whenever she feels sad (quite often).

"I want to die listening to this song". She also says this quite often. I've never been 100% sure if she's serious about this wish, or if it's just some morbid expression. Knowing Ellie, it's probably the former. I resist the urge to laugh, and immediately feel bad. Am I turning into Sam? Ellie doesn't catch on, though, and flops down onto the grass. Her tears make new tracks sliding down this sides of her face rather than the front.
"Why would she say that?" Bawls Ellie, pulling some grass out of the ground and quivering her hand so that dust falls from the roots and forms freckles on her face. "I hate her so much! She practically murdered me from within!"

"Ok... I'm sorry..." As you could probably already tell, Ellie can be incredibly... eccentric when she gets upset. I try not to think to much of it.

Suddenly, in a burst of energy of some sort, Ellie leaps out off the lawn and bounds towards the screen porch. She knocks over an iron deer we've had forever, breaking off one of its antlers. I decide not to say anything. The thing was ugly and rusted anyway.

"Where're you going?" I call after her. I have a feeling she has an idea. Ellie's ideas are not good or rational. Ever. But she has a way of always getting you to go along with them.

"Come faster Mia!" She calls from inside the house. She's already in the kitchen, cross legged on one of our wobbly kitchen stools. I roll my eyes.

"So," Ellie is suddenly eager, her previous woe forgotten entirely. "I have an idea to get Sam to start acting normal. Wanna hear it?" I don't, but I get the feeling this question is rhetorical. Giving Ellie no for an answer would launch another meltdown.

"Well, I mean I guess it's just a phase or something. She's never exactly been nice. Maybe it's that time of month or something." God, I sound so sexist. But I really need to comfort Ellie, and myself, so this is a good enough excuse for now.

"Rigggghttt," drawls Ellie. "So here's my plan. If we can catch Sam cutting the pep rally tomorrow- obviously she will- then we can bring her to the principal's attention. Then she'll see what's wrong with Sam and the adults will handle it from there! Easy Peasy!" I look at her face for any trace of doubt, but in her nativity she actually seems to believe things are this black and white. I don't want to burst her bubble. "Umm... Okay?..." Ugh. Apparently the question wasn't rhetorical. Ellie's so excited she knocks a book entitled Warrior Princess: how to find the magical vegan in you to the floor. The cover, emblazoned with a rather constipated woman who looks exactly like Jennifer Lawrence, wrinkles a bit. Great. Now my mother will blame me for not supporting her "lifestyle pursuits" and call me a "meat-eating savage." I push those thoughts away. However hard I try to deny them are more important issues to worry about right now. Ugh.

"So we need an exact plan. You're good at that stuff, right? What should we do?" I most certainly am not good at planning. Planning is stupid and boring honestly. I always just dive into stuff head on, which Sam says is counterproductive and the reason I won't get into a good college. Like I even care.

I roll my eyes, but in a quick swoop so Ellie doesn't notice. Ellie's own eyes are wide, golden pools of excitement. "Umm.... why don't we just tell the principal the.... pipe is leaking in the locker room... and she'll go in and find Sam?" I feel a sour pit emerge in my stomach, but I ignore it. There's no reason to feel bad, right? Sam has done much worse to me. This is more of a.... favor for Ellie I guess.

My swirling thoughts are interrupted by the clicking sound of our door being unlocked multiple times. A couple years ago, someone broke in and stole about three bucks worth of tin silverware, which they evidently thought was made of real silver. My mother freaked out about us living in an "unsafe county" and had a myriad of different locks installed on the front door; she completely forgot the back door which has no locks and a huge hole in it from when the previous owner got made and kicked it while wearing a steel-toed boot (at least I think that's how the story goes). She never gave me all the keys, so I've gotten into the habit of climbing over our white picket fence in order to get into the house. Annoying, but routine.

My mom looms over us, almost unnaturally tall at 5'8" with six added inches from her stilettos. Her hair's a perfect shiny bun, dyed auburn with a special vegan hair dye from a salon in New York City she drives to monthly to re-dye her roots. She has the keys to her minivan hanging around her neck on a thin gold chain. She's driven some sort of minivan for as long as I can remember, but recently upgraded to an electric model from Japan. It had to be taken apart and mailed to Vermont, which took a week, much to her annoyance.
"Mia, did you do your homework?" She chides. "And are you wearing a shoelace as a choker again?"

"What? No!.. I mean yes.... but to the homework?" I actually am wearing a shoelace as a choker (those things are expensive!) but I know it annoys her. My mother clip clops over to the hall, where she hangs her blazer on a pink hook. The hook promptly falls to the floor with a carpeted swish, which my mother ignores. She likes to be neat in theory, but doesn't have the motivation to actually clean anything.
"So, I'm making quinoa with vegan cheese for dinner." My mother sweeps a few books off the dining room table. "A healthy alternative to that "mac and cheese" stuff you kids like to eat. Want to stay, Ellie?"
"No thanks," Ellie makes a face. My mother pretends not to notice. "Well that's too bad. Maybe tomorrow?"

"Um mom?" I interrupt. "Can you...leave us alone? We're trying to...uh...do homework?"

My mother's painted eyebrows furrow, her maroon lips pursing. "I thought you just said that you finished. Don't lie to me, young lady!"

I let my eyes drift past her, watching the wispy golden grass interlace with the faded blue of the sky. It's getting later now, so the bees have retired to their snug octagonal houses, and the shadows are elongating into dark, brooding creatures. In a bit, the youngish fireflies will be emerging timidly from the darkness of the weeds. When I was little, the fireflies wouldn't come out until late June, but in the past years they've been coming out earlier and earlier. My mother, annoyingly so, blames this on global warming, which in turn is somehow my fault because I forgot to turn my bedroom light off. Ugh. My mother will be even more maddening one she finds out about Ellie and my’s stupid plan to catch Sam. I grimace at the thought of weeks… no… years… spent in exile, locked in my room my mother. I imagine growing old and grey in then dying and crumbling into a pile of grey dust. Okay, maybe I'm being a bit overdramatic. But still.

While I was distracted, Ellie has somehow, thought maybe it was a miracle of some sort, gotten my mother to leave. Looking behind me, I see her high heels disappear up the carpeted stairs, leaving hoof-like tracks in the nasty peach-colored rug. I'm relieved at first, but my stomach turns when I realize that the only reason Ellie got my mom to leave is because of the stupid plan to get Sam in trouble. I roll my eyes inconspicuously, but somehow Ellie notices, narrowing her own bright green eyes. “What?” She asks, taking out a pen and scrawling crooked bullet points onto the paper in dripping blue ink. She’s left handed, so the end of her hand drags across the ink. It smears over the paper in long cyan tracks. Ellie ignores this, though if I had been writing I would definitely have started over.

“Why don't I, like, get us something to drink?” I don't wait for her response as shuffle my sneakered feet as slow as is humanly possible towards our kitchen. It gets harder to shuffle when I get to the slickly tiled floor of the kitchen, so I resort to walking at the speed of a snail. By now, it's nearly dark in the kitchen, so the cold grey light of the fridge illuminates my face in a way that I imagine makes me look like a ghost In out pale green fridge (with no magnets because my mother thinks they’re “trashy”) I root around for something not too far past its expiration date. My mother buys a myriad of probiotic vitamin things and tons of vegetables in obnoxiously bright colors, but never much else.

After searching around the fridge for an extraneous amount of time (and trying not to gag at the smell of rotting vegetables), I uncover a nearly empty bottle of V8 and some margarita mix.

“Um, Ellie, do want some tomato juice or some…. uh… limeade?” I pick at a cuticle on my nails. As usual, they're unpainted and bitten past the quick. I figure i'll just mix the margarita stuff with water instead of alcohol. Margaritas are basically alcoholic limeade, right?
“Stop stalling Mia!” Ellie whines through the living room. “I need your help! This is life threatening!” My eyes sweep back into my head (gracefully, I might add) and back as I drag myself back to the dining room. Ellie's abandoned the smeary bullet points, and is now drawing a shaky circle in shockingly not pink sharpie. In the center, she draws a square (or something along those lines, it looks more like a diamond). “This,” she pushes a dishwater blond curl out of her face. “Is school.” Her eyes are still red with tears, even though that episode was so long ago. Or was it? I seem to have lost track of time, yet again. It's still late afternoon, so maybe my estimate was wrong.

Ellie draws an X towards the right side of the square. “That’s where Sam goes to smoke during pep rallys. But obviously you know that.”
but loud screaming, is enough to blow your eardrums out. I can see why Sam cuts it, and I probably would too if I weren't so paranoid about getting caught. My mother would really have it out for me then.

Anyway, Ellie drops the marker onto the paper with a hot pink splash. “Okay, I've done my part. I nod. Sam won't cut regular class, but makes an exception for rallys which she thinks are “unessential to the high school experience”. We have a lot of them, one every month, even though are school barely has enough people to fill one football team. The gym, a shabby unpainted excuse for a room, becomes a flurry of yellow and green. Cheap pop music with bass heavy synth beats blasts through the surprising high quality sound system. This, coupled with the rather unenthusiastic Why don't you come up with the rest of the plan?”

Rats. I knew she would do this. Why does Ellie think that I'm any better at formulating plans? She's constantly trying to get out of doing work, that's why. If I had a dollar for every time Ellie cheated of someone on a test or asked to copy my homework, I would probably have enough to bribe my teachers to give me A+’s.

“Come on Ellie, you barely did any work,” I try to shake the acidic knot out of my stomach, but fail miserably. “Why do I have to do it all?” Now it's Ellie’s turn to roll her eyes. “Because! The plan was my idea in the first place, so I already did my fair share!”

I slump back into the torn leather chair in quiet submission. Bending down to rifle through my backpack, I retrieve my only pencil, a broken stubby thing that can barely write. Annoyingly, I can never manage to keep more than one writing utensil in my bag at once. My mother always buys me tons of supplies before every year, making me promise “not to lose it”. Obviously, this doesn't happen.
I half heartedly draw a stick figure that looks vaguely like a potato on in the school, then an arrow coming out of the side of the building and towards the X.
“Um, we need to like, get a teacher or something to… come out and see her,” I'm hoping Ellie will automatically take over with a better (and impossible, thank god) idea. To my relief, she does. Her eyes widen, propelling her eyebrows upward and launching her bangs upward in a chain reaction of sorts. Flurries of frizz, illuminated by the lamp I just turned on because it was getting dark, blow in the wind of the broken fan in the corner.

“I know!” we can tell principal Henrys that there’s a dead bird outside, then bring him out to the back! Then he’ll find Sam smoking, and she'll get in trouble. Then he’ll ask her what's wrong, and we'll find out what's wrong with her!”
At this idea, which might actually work, my relief melts away, replaced with a greyish fog of worry. What if Sam finds out? And then hates me forever? What will I do then? I dig at the carpet with the toe of my grubby yellow sneaker. Should I just tell Ellie it's a bad idea? I decide to say nothing.

“So does that sound good?” Ellie hops of her chair, launching herself nearly two feet into the air. Her mousy brown hair looks like it's mid cartwheel.
“Um, yeah.” (After thinking it over a bit, I can see her plan actually has a few shortcomings. For one, the principal will probably just assume that Sam’s just being a “troublesome teen” by smoking and not ask her if anything’s wrong. Also, even if he did ask her, she wouldn't tell the truth.) “Sounds… good. Call me?”
She nods absentmindedly, whipping out her phone to check the time. “Gotta go. It's almost seven.”
Feeling bad about lying to her, I offer to walk Ellie home. She lives only a couple of blocks away, but in a drastically different neighborhood. Whereas the houses on my street are spindly, aged, Victorians, mostly containing babbling old people over 80, Ellie’s neighborhood is a mind numbingly beige badlands of ranch houses. Her house stands out as the only one which is covered with decorations, as her mom owns a kitschy Christmas decor type store and likes to show off her merchandise in their yard. Despite complaints from neighbors ever since they moved here four years ago, the yard is permanently covered with at least four blow up santas, (at least one of them a dancing one!) and enough Christmas tree lights to genuinely contribute to global warming (I'm not turning into my mother, I promise). Ellie’s mom also throws a few Halloween decorations into the mix around October, and doesn't take them down until around January. I know, crazy.

The sun is just starting to set, a poppy red haze sprinkling itself into the western half of the sky, towards New York State. For some reason, Ellie is wearing a green fleece jacket and fluffy hat with cat ears. (Which I think is kind of stupid considering it's almost June and about 80 degrees out). Sweat is pouring down her forehead like syrup. We reach her house, and I watch as she stumbles up to the door, Christmas lights blinking on and off against her inappropriately heavy coat. Ellie turns around, waving. “See you tomorrow.” she calls. The lights, colors clustering in the nooks and crannies of her face, make her look look almost otherworldly. I forget to be annoyed with her, just for a second. As I walk home, the sun becoming stars and the warm tones of the sky cooling down, I try to put the whole thing out of my mind. Sam’s definitely acted weird before, right? This could all be just a faze, like in seventh grade, when she developed an unhealthy obsession with kpop and stole hundreds of dollars from our school dance fund in order to buy tickets to a concert in New York. If that could end, this certainly could. I'm beginning to feel a bit better when I remember that Mom is making quinoa. Ugh.

When my alarm goes off the next morning, some auto-tuned monstrosity that's playing on the radio, I'm overwhelmed with relief. I've been hungry all night, because of the QUINOA. She decided to put hot peppers in it as well as the vegan cheese, which resulted in my getting sick four times during the night. Hopefully, I can grab something from the bakery in town. (We don't have any food here except for leftover dinner, which I am most definitely NOT going to eat again.) My relief fade when I remember what Ellie is making me so today. I angrily drag a hairbrush through my tangled hair.
Turning on a random radio station, which plays splashy and prancing elevator jazz, I throw on a torn band shirt I got like 4 years ago and some jeans (only semi dirty). My hair color is fading, exposing the brittle straw-like whiteness beneath the indigo. I sigh. I'll have to dye it next week, which is always a hassle because I get permanent dye everywhere and my mother makes me clean it up. For now, I throw it back in a braid and dash out the door, slamming it behind me before my mother can force-feed me leftover quinoa.

The street is empty, (old people like to sleep late apparently) and the pavement glows with evaporating water. It must have rained sometime in the night. I start up my hideous pepto bismol colored ford, backing out of the driveway as it yawns and grumbles. With an insistent chirp, the gas light goes off in a nightmarishly high pitch. I groan. The nearest gas station is on the edge of town, nearly to the highway. If I go there, I’ll have to skip breakfast and endure the aching knaw of my stomach (coupled with the guilt at being a snitch and getting Sam in trouble.) If I don't go, I'll have to walk home and leave my car at school. Hunger wrenching at my innards, I swerve off my root, passing the natural market where my mother buys most of her “food”, and the not so natural strip malls containing various nail salons and fast food restaurants. We don't have many chains actually in town some reason, so most of them clot out here like a cancerous cell.

The gas station is glowing in primary colored lights, even though it's just morning and there's no need for them. I slam open the door, blinking at the brightness of the sky and the loudness of the country music blasting through the gas station’s speakers. I pry the nozzle of the wall, listening to the glugging of the engine filling with gas. I pay, watching as bleary eyed business people sluggishly sip coffee from cardboard cups whilst halfheartedly feeding their cars gasoline. I back out of the gas station, jumping in surprise when a dark figure dashes behind my car, waving its wispy arms. My guts singe with a burnt purplish pang when I realize that it’s Sam. How did she get here? The question whirls about in the fluffy pink interior of my car. Her house is like three miles away!

“Um, Sam, do you want a ride?” I’m half hoping that she’ll say no, and sigh internally when she hops into the car, sporting a black turtleneck (normal) and a homemade looking pin with a maple tree on it (not so normal). “We might be a bit late to school, is that okay?”

She ignores me as she lights a cigarette and starts smoking out the open window. I start to protest, (It’s a fire hazard, for God’s sake!) But give up in a spur of fatigue. “Sooo… what’s up?” She grins, finally looking me in the eyes. Her eyelashes are strangely blondish, standing out against her dark, freckled skin. Smoke drifts up the sides of her cheeks, making her look like a ghost. “Well, I just went for a walk, it was rather enlightening.”

“Um, isn’t your house like, 3 miles away?” I try not to sound to perplexed. She rolls her eyes. “I was just giving myself some divine excersize. I’m so excited for the pep rally. I’m thinking of joining the cheerleading team next year. That’s why I have to lose some weight. I don’t have the right body type right now,” she looks out the window again. We’re passing a farm, strange cows that are practically speckled drifting around a field.

Uh oh. I realize that if Sam’s not going to cut the pep rally, Ellie’s plan won’t work. I guess this should be good, but Ellie’s probably going to blame me for her own shortcomings. I try to focus on the road, which is riddled with scars and potholes. I’ve never noticed it before, but the road is a sort of bluish color. Quite pretty actually, if I weren’t having a god-awful day I would have stopped to photograph it.

We reach school, which looks even more dramatically hideous than usual. The paint on the bricks looks more chipped somehow, the scraggly trees even greyer. I groan. Because of the pep rally, school is going over time today, which adds to the nightmare I’m already living in. Ellie see’s my car, and jumps out of her mother’s nondescript sedan with an unnatural amount of relish.

“Hey Mia!” She calls, smoothing her yellow coat. “How’s it going, excited for the plan?” I cough pointedly, nudging my elbow at the door of the car. When she sees Sam, her eyes widen. “Oh. Hi Sam,” She gingerly films her brown curls, paling so that her freckles become polka dots contrasting sharply with her skin. “How are you?”

“Enlightened, unlike you,” responds Sam, slamming the car door and charging ahead of us. She pries open the yellowed glass door of the school, pinning a senior’s hand in the door. “What the hell?” He calls. “Come back here!” She ignores him.

“Sooo,” Ellie sips her coffee casually. “Not much better?” She unzips her jacket to reveal a t-shirt which reads: “Beethoven is my Homeboy” is obnoxiously large comic sans.

“Yeah,” I bend down to pick up my backpack. “She randomly showed up at the gas station, which is, like, super far away from her house, and asked for a ride. Then she talked about wanting to be ‘enlightened’ and how she wants to lose weight so that she can become a cheerleader. It was super weird, even weirder than yesterday.”

“So should we like, tell Will and Alicia about our plan?” asks Ellie, neurotically smoothing her beethoven shirt. “ ‘Cause we could probably tell Will, but Alicia is kind of a snitch. Remember that time she ratted on us for doing our homework together and we go zeros for ‘plagarism’?”

I nod, recalling that situation, which occurred four years ago when we barely knew Alicia. Will, wanting to be nice, would probably tell Alicia if we told him, which would result in some sort of disciplinary armegedon. “Why don’t we just not?” I start towards the door. Ellie dashes after me, struggling to carry her heavy backpack. “It’ll just complicate things, we don’t need other people to carry out our plan.” What I fail to tell her is that Sam isn’t planning to cut the pep rally. Hopefully, Ellie won’t get too upset. Her plan was stupid, anyway.

In a daze, I wade through a soup of words and math problems. Sam doesn’t show up to lunch, and Ellie and I sit in awkward silence while Will and Alicia try to figure out what’s wrong. “Did you guys fail a test or something?” asks Alicia, picking at her soggy mozzerela sticks. “If it makes you feel any better, I got an 81 on my last algebra test. Now my G.P.A. dropped and I won’t be able to get into any good colleges. I’m considering taking all APs next year to raise it, do you think that’s a good idea?”

“Please stop reminding us what a genius you are, Alicia,” will laughs. “I got a 62 on that test, and I’m a year older than you. But what is wrong with you guys? Did a celebrity you like die or something?”

“Nothing!” says Ellie quickly, braiding her hair into plaits. “We’re just tired is all. It was a late night yesterday, right Mia?” Will raises his eyebrows. We sit there awkwardly for a few more moments, snippets of conversations from other tables drifting in and out of earshot. I’m grateful when the tinny singing of the speaker orders us to come to the gym for a pep rally.
“Okay, plan starts now.” Ellie whispers as we pour down the hall. I bite my lip. Will it work?
The gym is roaring with color and the buzzing of hundreds of voices making a nightmarish symphony. Ellie and I slip away from Will and Alicia, and she makes us sit on the front bleachers. I groan. I usually sit in the back because it’s quieter, and people don’t glare at you for not cheering or standing during the national anthem.
“This way, we can leave without having to climb over people!” Ellie screams over the noise. Someone behind me hits on the shoulder with a yellow and orange flag. I ignore it. It’s probably just a freshmen trying to annoy me. The tapping on my shoulder grows more frequent, to the point where it begins to throb with a dull, aching pain. I whip around. It’s Sam, cheerfully wagging the flag with her hand like she doesn’t even see me there. I nudge Ellie. “Uh oh.”
Her emerald eyes widen, and her forehead wrinkles with like she can’t believe that her plan isn’t going to work. “Nooooo”. Ellie throws her head into her hands, sobbing. Tears fall out of the spaces between her fingers, spattering her light-wash jeans. I few seniors stare at us pointedly, and I return this gesture with a glare.
“It might still work,” I whisper, even though Sam couldn’t hear us even if I was speaking at a normal level. “She might leave halfway through.”
We endure treacherous neon colored torture in the form of being forced to cheer and clap by teachers and untalented cheerleaders, but Sam stubbornly refuses to leave. I watch the huge maple shaped clock in the corner, which was bought instead of funding the art program (Stupid, in my opinion, but nothing I can do about it) There are only a few minutes left in the school day. We failed, and now Ellie’s going to blame me!
I’ve lost all hope, when I see a darkly clothed figure rushing towards the exit. Sam. Better still, a teacher begins to follow her, inconspicuously so that she can’t detect it at all. The teacher slips through the door, and I breathe a sigh of relief, nudging Ellie again. Her tearstained eyes light up like flashbulbs when you’re taking a picture in the dark. “Maybe it will work! And we won’t even have to do any work!” We suffer for a few more moments, until the final bell rings, the sweet noise of freedom cutting into the cheering.
As everyone rushes out of the gym, chattering like drugged monkeys (if drugged monkeys could talk.) Ellie and I wade in the tail end of the noisy stream, looking for Sam. Alicia and Will are long gone, and I feel bad for leaving them in the dark about this whole situation. We round a corner, and there’s Sam, tearstained cheeks illuminated by the smoke of a still-lit cigarette. She glares at us pointedly, as if she almost knows we wanted this. I feel a pang of remorse. Ellie shivers like a cold leaf next to me, even though it’s hot and sweaty and unairconditioned in the tightly packed hall. I search for what is scaring her, and immediately find the answer. Looming over Sam with a disapproving glance, is principal Henrys.
David Henrys is legendary in the whole county, and perhaps the entire state of Vermont, though I’m not 100% sure. A great hulk of a man who stands nearly seven feet tall, principal Henrys is perpetually bald, and even his eyelashes and eyebrows seem incapable of growing. Even his own hair follicles are scared of him. The man carries with him a dark cloud of discipline and hatred, and you can sense his abrasively negative energy when he’s standing behind you. Even parents hate him. Henrys got fired from nearly twenty schools across the east coast before arriving at our almost broke school who couldn’t afford to turn him down. Rumor is it, he killed a kid in Maryland for cutting class in 2004. You might think this is farfetched, but if you knew Henrys you would believe it. I certainly do, so I avoid him at all costs.
Anyway, now Henrys was glaring down at all of us, even though Ellie and I did nothing whatsoever. Sam glowers at us too, dropping her cigarette on the floor ad snuffing it out with her foot. “Miss Zehntner, come with me immediately,” Henrys bends down to pick up the cigarette stub. He smells strongly of tobacco. I laugh dryly to myself. Hypocrite.
“What’s that, Miss Gesano?” Henrys turns his piercing stare on me. His eyes are a grey so pale that they’re nearly white. “Could you repeat that?”
“Um… I have to get going!” I grab the edge of Ellie’s coat, pulling her after me. She doesn’t need any coaxing to scamper after me, though. “Hockey practice. Right Ellie?” I’ve never even ice skated. The thought of it terrifies me. Ellie nods meekly.
“The two of you better stay away from Miss Zehntner, she’s a terrible influence!” He calls down the hallway. “And I’ll deal with you now,” we hear him tell Sam. “This is highly unacceptable and will probably mean suspension.”
Ellie begins to dash through the hallway, the heaviness of her bag suddenly relieved by our success. I struggle to catch up with her. Ellie’s one of the fastest runners I’ve ever encountered, but our school’s lack of a track team means her talents go to waste. We reach the humid brightness of outside, and Ellie collapses against the petal covered trunk of a weeping cherry tree. The trees a few weeks past its prime, so the petals are a sickly brownish grey rather than the beautiful pale pink that they used to be. Ellie drops her black backpack like a sack of potatoes on the rotting petals
“That was close!” enviously I notice that she’s not even short of breath. I have a fiery and painful stitch in my ribcage, and can barely breathe. “Did you see his face?”
I laugh, but it’s a nervous one that gets caught dryly in the back of my throat. “Do you think that she’ll be okay? Principal Henrys is pretty awful. He killed someone before, I heard.”
“Don’t worry, silly!” Ellie heaves herself off the ground again “That’s just a story. Surely you don’t actually think that’s true. Plus, she’s only going to get suspended and given three sessions of rehab. I checked the school handbook this morning. They’re not legally allowed to expel her for smoking, especially since this is the first offence.” I nod, trying to mirror her carefree additude. “Of course.”
“Ice cream?” she asks. “My treat.” We call our parents to ask (Well kind of, I tell my mother we’re going for a nature walk because she doesn’t approve of ice cream.) and take my sputtering pink car into the center of town, finding a convenient parking spot right in front of our town’s only ice cream store, Barney’s. It’s painted a bright lavender, and surprising deserted (see what I did there?). Inside, Ellie orders vanilla ice cream, and I order their signature lavender truffle flavor. I make fun of Ellie for choosing a boring flavor, and she makes fun of me for ordering a ‘weird’ one. We talk about random things for a while (apparently she likes Bach more than Verdi now!!!1!1) and then I toss my empty cup into the ice cream cone shaped trash can. Ellie has to go home to do homework, so we head towards her house. First, though, we stop at the nearest chain drugstore so she can help me pick a new hair color. (Before you blame me for not supporting local small businesses, mom, they don’t stalk unnatural hair dye at the place in town!) Ellie suggests pink, pointing to a small cardboard package with a robotic looking woman emblazoned on it. “Nah. I’d have to bleach it a lot, and my hair’s already so dead it’s about to fall off. How about navy blue?”
“Nope, too close to your hair color now,” Ellie puts the blue dye back on the shelf. How about green? This one’s kind of pretty” I glance at the box, which is bigger than a usual box of hair dye. The guy on it looks exactly like Gerard Way, which makes my heart both happy and sad at the same time. I get the feeling where I just Have To buy it. We toss the hair dye into the the basket, along with a few stray bags of pickle flavoured chips (for Ellie's twelve-year-old brother).
At Ellie’s house, the sun is just starting to slip away. Ellie’s brother, Michael, is having a heated argument with her parents about watching an r-rated movie. Sound ricochets of the walls, swarming our heads in a nest of noise.
Like the outside of Ellie's house, which is always decorated for Christmas, the inside is permanently decorated for Halloween. Paper pumpkins adorn the orange-painted walls, making the entire place look like an orange peel. The weirdest thing, however, are the skulls that adorn the shelves of both of the bathrooms. They look deceptively life-like, so whenever I see them I'm slightly taken aback before I realise that they’re just styrofoam that was put there by Ellie's weird parents. At the end of the tangerine hallway, past a few posters of creepy clowns that make me shiver I bit even though I've see them hundreds of times, lies a portal to another world. Not a literal one, of course, but the door to Ellie's room is as close to a portal as one can get outside of fiction. It’s painted posy pink, with slightly crooked posters of famous (and mostly dead) composers staring down at us. The rug is a neat thatch of purple fluff, dominated mostly by various discarded items of clothing from the previous few days. Ellie flops down on the bed, mousy hair flying.
I leave her to study for a physics test, hauling my car out of the red and green striped driveway. Red lights illuminate it, and nothing else in the blackened night. I turn on my cars lights, filling the rest of the world with a halo of brightness, too. This looks eerily beautiful, so I whip out my camera, an ancient black model with hefty buttons and a strap Alicia embroidered for me when she was still in her sewing faze, and try to snap just the right picture. I try with flash, which makes the colors fade into streaming greyish blobs, then without flash, which makes the picture appear in a pixelated mesh of color. It's maddening, really, trying to get picture into my head onto the camera. People think photographers just click the camera and get what they see in real life, but there are so many variables to consider. A moment like that is something surreal, inconceivable. If you ever get a picture like that, you share it on every social media platform that exists, trying to get the world to see what a miraculous stroke of luck you had. People, having no idea of how unusual the picture is, simply pass it by, scrolling down to look at heavily photoshopped images of Justin Bieber and his latest girlfriend.

When I arrive home, my mother’s making salad, which seems semi-edible until she puts some sort of probiotic grain in it. I pick at the salad, arranging grain in an intricate mandala, while my mother chides me for not appreciating her cooking. I choke down some vinegar coated lettuce leaves to shut her up, then rush upstairs to finish my homework. The workload itself has diminished by this time of year, but finals are coming up and I'm already beginning to feel that lingering weight on my shoulders you get when you know you need to study but have no motivation whatsoever. I hastily flip through my algebra textbook, copying down some formulas to remember before moving onto French verbs. At the beginning of highschool, as a scrawny and pale freshman, I was eager to learn French, in hopes that I would someday become fluent and could go to Paris and order crepes in the native language. As junior year comes to a close, this idea seems more laughable with each passing day. I can barely say a single sentence in French without choking, swallowing my words. The unfamiliar pronunciations simply aren’t meant for my uncultured, burger eating, American tongue, I guess. I retire the French in favor of a YouTube video.
After crawling down the internet hole for a while, I notice that it's nearly nine-o'clock, the pull of fatigue wearing down on the eyes. I can never stay up past nine thirty without collapsing, passing out on whatever surface is closest. It gets really annoying at times such as New Year's Eve, in which I have never once seen the ball drop on T.V. I take a cold shower, almost mindlessly, and crawl into bed shivering. I stare at the ceiling, still worrying about Sam. I hope she got home okay.
The next day, I'm doodling eyes onto my folder while Mrs. Concino gives an unspeakably boring lecture on symbolism in The Great Gastby. Will appears to have genuine interest in the book, diligently taking notes in a beat up marbled notebook. Personally, I thought it was one of the worst books I’ve ever read. (Especially the part where the guy was in love with his cousin. Ew.) I stare through the frosted window. Behind the thick glass, a beautiful day is taunting me. Green grass practically glows, and a cool breeze ruffles the lushly feathered leaves. Suddenly, the window disappears, blocked by the plump figure of Mrs. Cocino. She looks disapproving down at me through her grandmotherly wire rim glasses.
“Mia, would you care to tell us what the significance of the color green in this novel?” She taps her clawlike red fingernails on my desk. “I've asked you several times, so clearly you’ve had time to think about it.”
Ugh. I could care less about what green symbolises. It's just a color, for God’s sake. Desperate to prove her wrong, I rifle around my notes, my eyes falling on something written in green pen.
“Um… confidence, virility and…” I flip the page. “Hope?” I breath a sigh of relief when she sighs, having failed in her efforts to make me feel stupid. Ever since I turned a homework assignment late freshman year, Mrs. Cocino’s had a personal vendetta against me. Since there are so few people in our school, she teaches all grades so I'm stuck with her until I graduate. The bell rings for the next class (sweet freedom!) and I'm relieved that I have a study hall. I stumble into the gym, flopping down near the door and whipping out my ancient laptop so I can look up sparknotes for The Great Gastby. Much to my annoyance, the familiar yellow notice telling me “this website is blocked” appears. According to the internet filter, its categorised as “plagiarism”. Disheartened, I untangle a worry knot of headphones and put my music on shuffle. The bass throbs along with my heartbeat, vibrating the table in a continuous melody. I decide I’ll finish looking up sparknotes for The Great Gastby at home, even though it will cut into my hair dying time.
Since I’m not willing to shell out hundreds of dollars to have someone do it at a salon, and I don't trust anyone I know with my hair, I resort to dying it alone. This is a long and tedious process which involves separating my hair into numerous tiny sections, and then straining my neck trying to get the back. Then, because of my mother’s annoying demands, I'm forced to scrub the tub with her hypoallergenic glass cleaner which is stripped of all its useful ingredients. The bath is stained a sickly grey color from layers and layers of different hair dye. My sheets are also tied-dyed with hair color, because of my unwillingness to sleep with towels over my sheets. Anyway, I'm eager to get the dying over with. I stop for pizza, then speed all the way home. My only obstacle is the NPR is running a series about animal shelters, and I just have to sit idle in front of my house so I can finish the story of a ginger colored kitten named Homer who no one wanted because he was missing a paw. By the time Homer’s adopted by a loving family, tears are streaming down my cheeks, and the shadows of the house are lengthening into purple lines against the gold landscape. Crap. I only have an hour before my mother gets home, and she'll try to make conversation with me while I'm trying to focus on my hair dye. Screw you, Homer. I turn my car off and rush through the fence and through the back door, slamming it behind me.
I change into a grubby old t-shirt, taking out the emerald hair dye and staring mournfully at the Gerard Way lookalike. (If you didn't know, the real Gerard Way’s band broke up in 2013. It was horrible.) I throw the package up with a sweep, keeping the bottle and instructions. “Bye Gerard,” I pour over the directions. They're the typical mumbo jumbo that's on the instructions of every hair dye: leave dye in for an hour before washing it out, don't dye your eyelashes (are people really that stupid?) et cetera. I pin my hair the top of my hair into a tedious bun, then penetrate the fading blue follicles with a fresh squeeze of green. It just looks dark for now, but hopefully it will look green once it's dry. I forgot to test the dye on my hair so that I could be sure there wouldn't be a chemical reaction from the old dye, but whatever. That's never happened to me before.
As I wash out the dye, the bathtub becomes a beautiful emerald forest, the shower water liquid grass pouring into it. If I weren't covered in dye, I would stop to take a picture. I know it wouldn't come out right, though, and I guess that's the beauty in things like this. So beautiful, so temporary. The soap becomes green too, eating up the dye with the relish of a starving toddler. I scrub the imprints off my alien-looking skin, leaving a faint grayish wash of color on my shoulders which makes me look like something out of a horror movie.
My mother calls that she's home, and then stomps up to her office to pay taxes. This leaves me alone to peer in the mirror, careful not to get green dye on the white-painted bathroom tile. My hair is dark in the mirror, leaving a sinister cast on my face like an action movie villain. I forgot to wash my eye makeup off earlier, so it hangs in grey tracks down my face from crying about Homer the kitten. The makeup and green dye pool in the little parts of my neck like a painted on necklace.
I dash up to my room (spilling just a tiny dot of green dye on the carpet), and change, shivering, into a black t-shirt and some old sweatpants that are about eight inches to short. I grab my iPod (a relic from like 2006) and my mother's dysfunctional glass cleaner, then proceed downstairs to carry out the tedious awful task of scrubbing the bathroom. I turn on my Spotify playlist, then set to work prying smears of color off the greyish bathtub. The setting sun sends red and yellow streams of light into the room, making the green dye look sickly greyish brown.
After my mother fails to mention anything about dinner by eight, I decide to take matters in my own hands. After I practically drag her out of her office so we can go out for dinner, she edges the car carefully down our block and into town. She complains about the fact that I'm wearing pajamas and am practically dyed green, but I ignore her, walking towards the one cafe my mother deems appropriate to eat at. It has some nasty vegan food, but, luckily for me, also has some semi-edible things containing animals products.
I slide into a maroon leather booth that perfectly matches my mother’s hair, and she clip clops into the seat across from me, still wearing a pantsuit. She orders some random slum of tofu with alfalfa oil (or something along those lines). I order a burger, for which she gives me a ton of grief, and I side of fries, for which she practically has a conniption fit.
“You know that burger has a soul, right?” She chomps wholeheartedly on a piece of the kale salad she ordered as a side dish. “Think of the innocent life of the cow you took.”
“Mom, it was literally bred for eating,” I roll my eyes pointedly. “The cow wouldn't even exist if it wasn't going to be slaughtered.”
“Well. Just know that you’re doing something cruel,” she waves down the waiter, a mousy looking man with ears the size of dinner plates. “And I don't condone it in any way.”
I stare out the window, noticing the way the fluorescent lights of the store signs pool onto the bluestone sidewalks. The street is pretty deserted, save for a few people in the other restaurants which my mother won't ever go to. One of the people, a girl about my age walking along the sidewalk across the street from us, looks… familiar somehow. I figure it's someone from school who I barely know, because I doubt any of my friends would be caught dead in a long, neon yellow gown that looks like a fancy janitor's uniform.
“Oh, is that Sam?” My mother taps the window, as if making the window shake will somehow attract Sam’s attention. I start to say no, that I have no idea who the person is, but then squinting realize that it is Sam. If the dress weren't weird enough, she's sporting a smile so wide it's practically a grimace. She heads into the pizza place, where she greets a group of darkly shadowed figures.
“Why don't you go say hello?” My mother waves, even though Sam’s already inside and couldn't possibly see her. “I'm sure she would love to see you.”
“Um yeah, but she's like, suspended and they forbade her from talking to anyone at school.” This makes no sense whatsoever, but my mom eats it up like tofu with curry. “Oh, how awful! What did she do?”
“Um… I don't know?” If my mother knew about Sam's smoking she would probably pass out. The waiter gives us the check with a shaky flourish, and my mother signs the paper and whips out her sleek silver credit card.
“Well. If she's suspended, maybe you don't want to talk to her.” My mother takes out a nail file and starts filing her nails into sharp points. In a restaurant! Gross! “She might be a bad influence.”
“Yeah?” I avoid her stare. “Do you want to go home? I'm kind of tired.” In a state of fatigue, I wade back the the car while she trots chipperly. As we pass the pizza place, I watch almost entranced, as the light of our car foods Sam's face. She fails to notice us, chatting away with the darkly clothed figures. I'm drowning in a sea of questions. Who are they? Are they doing this to her, or is it just another gruesome and short lived phase?

The next day is just as boring, but there's an undertone of anxiety as teachers start building us up for finals. Mrs. Concino assigns an eight page essay on The Great Gatsby, which she says, smirking at me, will be 50% of our grade. Ugh. English is already my worst class ( a pitiful C- ), and my essay skills are “less than adequate” as Concino wrote on my last report card. I groan, picking at my pencil’s blackened eraser.
“What was that, Miss Gesano?” Mrs. Concino raises her eyebrows, which are painted and overly dramatic charcoal black. “Do you have something to say to the class?”
“Um, good luck on the essay?” I stare down at my notes, which are grimy and smeared with countless sloppy doodles.
“I thought so,” she scrawls something into her gradebook. I grimace. Mom’s going to kill me. “Please come after school so you can make up the work you overlooked when you were daydreaming.” She practically sneers this, which is almost laughable. I choke a bit in my throat.
I excuse myself to go to the bathroom, stumbling into the grey concrete haven with exhausted clumsiness. Looking in the cracked mirror, I see that my hair is more of a dark turquoise, bordering on black, than the forest green the package advertised. Oh well, it still looks fine. I loiter around the bathroom, looking through my phone’s camera roll mindlessly. A picture from about a year ago jumps out at me, and I scroll back down to look at it after having passed it. At first glance, it appears to be a normal selfie I took with Alicia and Sam. Alicia looks almost the same, with neat auburn braids and a slight smile, but Sam and I both have drastically different hair colors. My hair is a muted peach type color, and Sam’s is a fried egg orange from bleaching. This must have been before she bleached it more to turn it white. None of this is what bothers me, though. Behind us, sitting on a bench perfectly rigidly, is a dark figure like the ones I saw yesterday with Sam, eyes covered in sunglasses. They’re taking notes into a copper colored notebook. I remember this day quite clearly. I even remember taking this picture, and noticing that there was no one in the background. Panicking, I dig my thumb into the part of the screen with the messaging app. What is going on? Who are the dark figures?
I attach the photo to a text message, and start to send it to Will, knowing he'll be the most rational in this situation. I'm about to press send when I change my mind, realizing someone rational is not what I need right now. Will would probably dismiss it as a mere slip of the memory. Hand shaking, I send the picture to Ellie. She responds almost instantly.
Ellie: Did you send this to the wrong person? I'm not even in this picture.
Mia: no do you remember the day we took this?
Ellie: I guess so. That was last summer, right?
Mia: yeah Do you notice anything off?
Ellie: no why
Mia: cause I remember specifically that there was no guy in the background. Also I saw Sam eating dinner yesterday with a bunch of guys who look exactly like him which is kinda weird
Ellie: omg meet me right now
Mia: I can't cut class!
Ellie: we have lunch next, calm down. and I have some URGENT news
Mia: ok outside?
Ellie: yeah
When I arrive outside, I'm practically buzzing to hear Ellie’s “urgent news” When I see her, I scrape me sneakers against the ground in a frantic dash. Ellie's nervously playing with a brown curl, pulling it in and out like a slinky.
“So, what’d you want to tell me?” I breath. She bites her lip so hard, that blood rains down her chin in a nightmarish crimson display. “So, you know how you saw the dark figures?”
I nod frantically. “Did you see them?” She shakes her head, biting her lip even more.The blood has reached her white blouse now, staining it with cranberry tears. “Well I didn't, but someone did. I was watching T.V. last night, when the news came on. They said that a kid was kidnapped in Arbor, and several witnesses saw people dressed in dark clothes, their faces like, hidden or something.”
“Weird,” honestly, I'm skeptical that they were the same people. Most criminals dress like that. I'm a bit disappointed, honestly. I thought we might really have had a lead.
“They also so someone wearing like a really long yellow dress,” says Ellie. “Did you see anyone like-”
“Really? Oh my God!” I'm sweating, overcome with some sort emotion I can't quite identify. “That's exactly what Sam was wearing last night when I saw her! She helped kidnap a baby!”
Ellie's eyes fill with fear. “Should we like, go to the police? We wouldn't really be able to prove who did it, and we don't even know who the dark figures are.”
I have a sinking feeling of dread, that the police won't be able to help us, and will actually hinder. “I think we’re going to have to do this on our own.”
Ellie’s eyebrows knit together a bit. “What do we do?” For once, I'm happy to be the one making plans. “This might be hard, but we’re going to have to search her house.”
After school the next day, Ellie rings my door with a dogged insistence. I'd feigned illness, too anxious to go to school, but miraculously gotten better for the “nature walk” Ellie and I were planning to attend.
“You've certainly been going on a lot of nature walks lately,” peers at me suspiciously over her mug of tea. “Are you sure that you're up for this? You've been feeling under the weather all day.”
“Yep! Good as new!” I throw on a hideous orange sweater my grandma bought me last year. “Good luck with the taxes!”
As we stumble into my car, Ellie’s tongue flaps with questions. “What will we do?” “How will we do it?” “What if her family’ there?” And, most importantly “What are we looking for, exactly?”
I brush the questions off, hoping my feigned calm will rub off on her. I'm not worried about Sam’s family being home (They almost never are), but a myriad of questions tug at my brain, too. I wish I hadn't worn my day-glo orange jacket; it's way too tight and strangles my wrists and neck, along with being hideously ugly.
“Well, here we are!” I try to sound cheery, the words dry in my throat. “We haven't been here in awhile, right?” Sam's house is a tumbledown structure made of grey painted boards, with a ice grey slate roof that's missing several shingles. The yard is flooded with acres and acres of grass and leaves, swarming the house with greenery. A scuffed satellite dish is perched on the railing of the porch, and it's clearly been out of use for quite sometimefor some time. Just as I expected, the windows are dark and clouded, the driveway empty. Thank God that no one’s home.
“How’re we getting in?” Ellie bites her nails with feverish tension. “Do you have any idea?” Luckily, I remember from years ago that the used to keep a key under the cracked ceramic turtle on the doorstep. To my relief, it’s still there, a spidery rusted thing that scratches my hand into a white spider web.
The trouble comes, however, when I try to unlock the door. The key seems to fit, but I can’t seem to turn it. When I finally manage to budge the key a bit, it stubbornly refuses to open the door. Disheartened, I hand the key to Ellie, who suffers the same dilemma.
“I’ve never actually opened a lock before,” She laughs “Have you?!” Thinking about it, I actually haven’t. I always go through the back of my house to avoid my mother’s multiple locks door, and I’ve never had a reason to open anyone else’s lock. It’s ironic, I guess, that we have the key and everything but no way to use it.
“We’re going to have to find another way to get in,” Ellie’s nails are seeping purple blood, which she willfully ignores. “How about the… fire escape?”
“Yes!” for once she has a good idea. The entire back of Sam’s house is draped with metallic stairs, in case the sorry structure went up in flames and you had to get out quickly. To my knowledge, the only person who’s ever actually used it is Sam, in her nightime sneaking endevours. It must be stable enough, I figure.
We wade through the sea of yellowing grass, Ellie whining about ticks. I shush her, rolling my eyes. Paranoia is the last thing we need right now. To get anything done, you have to be rash, jump without thinking. Careful, neat, people never accomplish anything.
The fire escape looms over us, a chipping purple hulk, trembling in the wind. The railings are twisting around each other in a nightmarish waltz, looking much less stable than I imagined.
“Uh?” I desperately hope Ellie won’t chicken out. “Who should go?” She trembles, wiping bleeding fingernails on her jeans. “You go, Mia. You’re... lighter.”
I’m actually about six inches taller than she is, so I doubt that this is true. Desperate to avoid abandonment, I nod, draping a shaking sneakered toe over the first rung. With my weight, it creaks and groans like a banshee.
“Are you sure about this, Ellie?” I shift my weight back to ground. “I could die!” She rolls her eyes. “You’re being overdramatic. This thing was literally built to hold people. Nothing’s gonna happen.”
Hesitantly, I place my hands on the cold metal, grimacing at the noisy creaking. I try to ignore the swaying of the structure like a dandelion in the wind. After climbing up a few spindly silver rungs, I’m caught in a web of metal, strangling me. It’s a living, breathing, creature, trembling as it digests me. Ellie’s face is hidden by the metallic mess, gazing apprehensively up at me. God, this is terrifying. I’ve gotten to the point where I could die if I fell, but I’m not even halfway up to the second floor window. Wind rattles the fire escape, and my teeth are flung together with the force.
After what feels like an eternity, but most have only been about a minute, a grasp the window, grateful to be able to cling to a (at least partially) stable structure. Mustering up all my energy, I shove the window. To my relief, the glass pushes inward, falling, unbroken, onto the cold hardwood floor.
The inside of Sam’s house is a ghost, fragile cobwebs draped over the furniture like ghostly tapestries. The furniture is dusty with disuse, the windows clouded with grime. Everything has a greyish blue cast, and not just from the darkness. It reminds me of the Upside Down from Stranger Things. I flip on the light, which turns the room from grey to pale dun. The hallway is less dusty than the room I came into, but still relatively grimy with disuse.
Sam’s room is painted a purple so dark that it borders on black, and littered with cigarette butts and dark clothing. I hesitate, not sure what to look for? A diary? Her phone? It's unlikely that I’ll find either, since she isn't the type to keep a diary and wouldn't leave her phone at home. But wait… a few days ago she mentioned that she hated phones, so she might have given it up! I can use the find iPhone thing on her computer to find it, if it's here. In a spurt of enthusiasm, I dash over to her computer (a terribly old model that takes FOREVER to load) and light the glowing screen. It doesn't take long to guess the password: her birthday March 23rd. The wallpaper is still the default photoshopped landscape, and the search history reveals she hasn't used the computer in almost two weeks. Frantically, I click open the find iPhone application. To my relief, a resolute beeping develops in the corner. I uncover the phone, nestled in a maple drawer next to her bed. It still has the Bach case with the big red X, and her password is the exact same one as her computer. I unlock the phone, but then change my mind. I'll look at it later with Ellie.
In an effort to get out of the house quickly, I drop the phone into the pocket of my awful orange jacket, then launch myself out of the window and onto the trembling insect like fire escape. I shimmy down, with more confidence than I had going up. Ellie’s waiting expectantly, but the look on her face fades into confusion when she sees my empty hands.
“Did you find anything?” She wrings her hands, pressing her boots into the ground with worry.
I nod. “I got her phone, she hasn't used it since we were at my house a few days ago, it looks like. But that's the best I could do, at least for now.”
“U-” Before she can finish her sentence or even her word, the entire flimsy fire escape folds in on itself again and again, collapsing into a pile of bonelike metal. We’re met with a cosmic noise that drills into my ears with painful force. Dust clouds us with tan fog, sending Ellie into fits of coughing and blinding my stinging eyes.
Trembling, we survey the scene. In the darkness, the forest behind the house disappears, the metal of what used to be the fire escape gleams ominously. The grass around it stripes the silver with bits of blackish-green.
“What do we do?” Ellie asks me. “They'll know we broke in.” The nervously chews a curl of her hair. I shake my head.
“They’ll either think that it was the wind-the thing was going to fall anyway- or that it was Sam using it. Even if, for some reason, they found out someone broke in, they wouldn't suspect us. They have like, no reason to.”
“Whatever you say.” She scampers back to the car. I unlock the car with a click and a beep. “What are we going to do with her phone anyway?” She dives into the backseat, ‘cause she's paranoid about the airbags and refuses to sit into the front. “Read her texts?”
“I guess.” I'm suddenly hyper aware of all my shortcomings. She probably hasn't texted in forever, based on what she said about phones before. I, personally haven't gotten a text from her in almost a month. “How did you even get here, Ellie? It's way past seven.”
She grins nervously. “My parents are at a holiday decorating convention, and I bribed my brother with dinosaur shaped chicken nuggets not to tell them.”
I laugh hesitantly. “He actually gave into that? Isn't he like twelve? And those dino chicken nuggets are gross!”
“I know, but he loves them! I swear they're made of plastic.” I drop her off at her house, her figure spilling out of the car and onto the driveway. “See you soon! We can look through the phone, call me!”
At home, I barely have enough energy to drop myself onto my bed, mumbling a lie about a nature walk to calm my mother’s nerves. Looking at the clock with bleary and clouded eyes, I see that it's barely nine o’clock, a half hour before my usual bedtime. I'm already in the warm blue cocoon of my bed when I realize that the lights are still on in my room, and that Sam's phone is still wedged into the pocket of my orange sweater. It lies at the foot of my bed, begging to be unlocked. I ignore everything, retreating into a blanket of sleep.
A minute buzzing bores into my head, interrupting my blissful rest. I groan, rolling over and trying to ignore it. The sound is emanating from the orange coat’s pocket. Sam's phone!
I wipe sleep from my bleary eyes, stumbling towards the foot of my bed. The bluish cast of the phone shocks my eyes, sending me blinking into the darkness again. On my second try, I manage to keep my eyes open long enough to read the text on her lock screen.
Ronan: tomorrow?
My brow wrinkles. I'm pretty sure that Ronan is a fourth grader that goes to the elementary school in our town. I wonder why Sam would be texting him. But wait, how stupid am I? It's obviously not the same person. Even if it was the nine year old Ronan, than that wouldn't be an excuse for the weird behaviour, dark figures and the kidnapping of a child. That part still shocks me, with a cruel jolt of electricity rushing through my brain whenever I think of it. I can imagine Sam doing things that are mean, but something so cold blooded is unthinkable. I hope to God that it wasn't her idea. And there's still the prying question: why?

The glowing red clock reads 3:48, and I'm suddenly conscious of how heavy my eyelids are, how limp and flat my limbs feel. I let my body drop onto the bed with relief, dreaming of Ronan the fourth grader, dressed in a dark suit, and Sam kidnapping babies all around town while she wears a long yellow dress. What is going to happen tomorrow? My sleep is restless, ineffective.
Ellie and I meet at the park the next day, which is sunny and hot and so humid I feel like my skin is melting off my body. Ellie’s green eyes widen when I tell her about the text from Ronan.
“Do you have any idea of who he is?” Her nails are barely even there, they've been bitten down so much in the past few days. “Maybe one of her friends from work?”
I doubt it. Last year, Sam had a job at the local gas station (The very same one I ran into her at… was it really only three days ago?) but quit, so she could “focus on her studies.” This seemed incredibly stupid to me, and I later found out that the real reason she quit was that Clarence, an exceedingly annoying senior with unreasonably gelled hair, also worked there.
“Hmm, I don't think so. Why don't we go through her phone?” I'm grateful that I mustered up the self control to wait for Ellie before opening the phone, because if I hadn't, her anger would be a whole other issue to deal with.
Sam’s wallpaper is the default, a view of Earth from space. It's photoshopped glow makes the apps almost invisible. I notice that she has her iMessage app hidden in an obscure folder on the third page of her apps (which are mostly note taking and textbook things for school). The folder contains only this one app, and it's simply labelled “entertainment”.
Sam hasn't texted anyone besides Ronan in a while. The glowing dates next to the names, mainly me, Will, Ellie, and Alicia, are from fairly long ago. Ronan, who has no contact picture, has a New York City area code. Weird. His recent texts are short, concise. Sam hasn't texted him back in a while either, just reading the messages. I recite them out loud to Ellie, who needs glasses but refuses to get them.
Ronan: tomorrow?
Ronan: good job
Ronan: who?
Ronan: 43 maple avenue
Ronan: yes, quite enlightening
Ronan: well that's a little harsh!
Ronan: hope you liked the dress
Ronan: we don't value intelligence!
Ronan: suspended? That's too bad.
Ronan:
Ronan:
“Is he texting blank spaces?” Ellie asks, squinting at the screen. It's hard to see in the bright daylight, so I turn the brightness all the way up. “It looks like Sam deleted all her messages, why would she want to do that?”
“My guess is as good as yours.” I scroll up to the very top of Sam and Ronan’s messages. “Why don't we start from the beginning? It'll make much more sense, even if she deleted all of her texts.”
The first text Ronan sent is from a few months ago. “Wow, it’s been going on for a long time.” The brightness is starting to hurt my eyes, so I turn it back down. Sam hasn't gotten to texts up here or something, because they aren't deleted.
Ronan: So you're the girl from the philosophy convention. Cool!
Sam: yeah ur Ronan, right?
Ronan: yep. So I was wondering, I'm opening a new philosophy group in Arbor. Interested in joining?
The next text is from a week later.
Sam: interesting philosophy, I can't say I agree.
Ronan: oh, you know you do!
Sam: not really!
Ronan: yes!
Sam: I guess so?
Ronan: good for you!
They exchange a few emojis, mostly brightly colored animals and smiley faces. I don't think anything of it. The next texts that make any sense at all are from just last week, right after I picked her up from that party.
Sam: that was fun. I'm understanding what you're getting that.
Ronan: cool
From there, there are naked gaps in the conversation where Sam’s words should be. I wonder why she took the time to wipe her words from existence. Did she know someone would be reading her texts? Surely her parents, buried in a daze of work, wouldn't care enough to.
“How are we going to find out who Ronan is?” Ellie goes to bite a nail, but finds nothing there. She resorts to biting on her hair instead, wetting the mousy curl into a dark and shiny thing. “We could just… ask Sam?”
“Of course not!” I'm shocked at how naive this idea, but knowing Ellie, I shouldn't be. “She wouldn't tell us the truth. We can't let her, or anyone, know that we're onto her.”
“Whatever you say.” She blinks nervously. “Um… can we go for pizza? I'm starving.”
Over pizza, which feels sour and sticky in my turning stomach, we try to act like everything's normal. Ellie chatters frantically about classical music, and I play candy crush on my phone, beating a few levels with almost zero. Brightly colored candies pop on the screen, which reminds me of the emojis Ronan and Sam sent to each other. Ugh, I can't get this whole thing out of my head, even just for a second.
In a daze, we order Italian ices, barely tasting the synthetic sweetness of the blue raspberry. Why did Sam have to do this, get us all messed up in her business with that stupid guy Ronan? The question twists my pizza filled insides. Why couldn't this be any other teenager in the entire U.S., the entire world? What even is going on.
In the car, I force Ellie to listen to my music, which she dismisses as emo trash. “Classical is better.” I sigh, pressing my nails into the soft leather of the steering wheel.
“This song is positively scandalous!” Ellie cries from the back seat. “Why would someone say that?”
“Please not now, Ellie.” I roll my eyes, then resume staring at the deeply damaged road. She leans back in her chair, hair almost completely wet from nervous chewing. “I wish I'd brought headphones!”
We drive around aimlessly for awhile, golden light flowing through the trees. Bass from the songs shakes us a bit, the cars shaking melding with the music in a melodious songs. As the sun starts to set, I realize that it's been hours, and we have to get home before arising suspicions from our parents. We begin the drive back to Curlice Hill, not getting very far before my gas light starts to glow and bee with an annoying urgency.
“Ellie, can you turn on the GPS?” I call into the backseat. “I’m not sure where we are. She nods, flipping through her phone to the maps app. Without warning, her eyes widen into saucers.
“Um Mia?” She calls frantically. “We’re an hour and a half away from home!” I grab the phone from her. I mean, I knew we were far, but not that far! What the heck?
“Ok.” I try to remain calm, but the pizza I inhaled earlier is creeping up my throat with anxiety. “Can you just... find a gas station?”
New York is prettier than Vermont, in my opinion. Even though we're hours away from the city, it feels more clean cut, sophisticated. The houses are painted with bright colors, the stores still open at this lateish hour.
“Oh no! I'm way past curfew!” Ellie cries suddenly. “My parents are going to kill me!”
We reach a gas station, the glowing fluorescent lights washing out the trees around it. I pay for gas while Ellie rushes into the store to buy ginger ale, which is apparently good for your stomach. This seems to be an urban legend or something, because it amplifies the painful stew in my stomach.
The sky is an ombré of light to dark, the horizon lit with just a tad of gold. Ellie is snoring in the back seat, and even though it's not even that late, I feel my own eyelids drooping. I try to formulate an excuse in my head “we were going on another nature walk.” Not again. “We went to an ice cream store.” My mother would kill me for that. “We were looking for a book we couldn't find at any nearby libraries.” Not plausible at ALL.
I finally give up, slumping back in my car seat and watching as the yellowish strip in the sky melts away. We re enter the state of Vermont, thank God, and set off on the highway back to Curlice Hill. This has been a weird day, but no weirder that every other day this week. I sigh deeply, my stomach bubbling with discomfort and fatigue. It's 9:00 now, I should be safe at home, getting ready for bed.
“How did this happen?” Ellie groans from the backseat. “Did we lose track of time or something?”
“I nod, wiping my eyes, which are glazed over with a thick and yellowish liquid. “It was really weird, almost like I was… in a daze or something? It’s probably just nerves that led us to this. Did you zone out too?”
She nods. “I felt like I was in a dream or something. And then the fog of the dream faded, and all of a sudden hours had passed like it was no time at all, and we were in New York State. What do you think happened?”
“It was nothing,” I try to convince myself of this, shoo other thoughts out of my tumultuous brain. Surely it was just a weird trick of the mind.
When we reach Curlice Hill, the sky is ink black, the streets gleaming with humidity. I quietly drop Ellie off, carefully driving so as to minimize the insistent whining of my engine. The lights of my car illuminate her face, drooped with fatigue and worry. I wave goodbye, edging my car down the deserted street towards my spindly Victorian house.
Luckily, my mother is at some sort of real estate convention, so I'm able to snuggle into bed without any chiding on her part. My whole body twitches with worry, muscles tight and painful. My sleep is tortured, restless. The covers become a slimy snake ready to digest me and send me into strange and disturbing dreams.
I wake up, panting with fear. The glowing red clock reads 4:31, and I squint to see my mother's electric car nestled in the driveway. My forehead is sticky with cold sweat, my brow wrinkled with worry.
I'd been dreaming, at least to the best of my memory, of a queen, striking the heads of her subjects and clouding their memories with grey fog. The queen looked just like Sam, ebony skin glowing against a brightly colored gown. The dream makes me shiver, teeth chattering with imaginary cold. I collapse into the thin blanket, drowning my thoughts in polyester. Without warning, my conscience floods with dark sleep again, catapulting me into another dream. This one’s about my teeth falling to the ground in pools of blood.
The next morning, my hair is a turquoise swamp of strings, my eyes shaded darkly with purple. “It was a really tiring nature walk,” I tell my mother over bitter green tea. “Ellie and I were both nearly collapsed by the end.”
By noon Ellie calls me in tears. She's grounded, apparently, for staying out hours and hours past her curfew.
“It was horrible!” She wails, blowing wet snot into the phone. I grimace. “I could have died!!”I roll my eyes, which she somehow seems to be able to sense through the phone, tension building up in her breathing. “And you don't even care!”
“Ellie, I’m really sorry, but I think you could use some sleep.” I hanging up the phone with an abrupt click, cutting of her strangled wail. I feel sort of bad about this, but I really don't have time for her complaints right now. I have research to do.
The Curlice Hill library is a navy blue bungalow structure, lined with narrow booked filled hallways. It has a disproportionately large amount of books for such a small town, a fact that my mother always blames on “foolish intellectuals.” I think that's sort of an oxymoron, but she gets mad when I tell her that.
The librarian, a complete and utter stereotype straight down to the horn rimmed glasses and piercing glare, looms over me. Her ruffled blouse and grey hair blow sinisterly in the air conditioning, and I decide not to approach her.
I make a beeline for the newspaper archive section, a shelf full of crackling yellowed plastic and faded black and white covers dating back to the 1800s. I guess I could do this more quickly online, but I've always liked the smell and the crackle of old paper. When I was really little and still in my bratty faze, I would rip off the corners of the papers of books I read, letting the cream colored sheets melt on my tongue with a distinctive savory taste. Gross, I know.
After my initial awe at the sheer amount of material there is to look through, I realize I have no idea what I'm looking for. Ronan could have been around since the 1940s, and there are thousands of issues from each year alone. I sigh deeply, letting the yellowish paper blow in the wind of the air conditioning vent. This is going to take hours!
After rifling through 1943 to 1980 with no avail, I realize that I'm not going to get anywhere with this. Biting my lip with frustration, I shift over to the computers. They're ancient silver models riddled with scratches and scars. I open to the Vermont census, which is similarly daunting until I search in the name “Ronan.” There are only eight in the entire state, two in our county. I click on the first one rapidly.
Ronan Evans is 28 years old, and has lived in Vermont for his entire short life. A grainy mugshot shows that he's barely five feet tall, with a generous red beard and bloodshot eyes. He seems in the right demographic, but the only flaw is that he's been in prison for the shooting death of his neighbor (yikes) since 2008. I rule him out begrudgingly, and click on the other Ronan.
This Ronan is much younger than the first one, just a few weeks shy of his 19th birthday. He has no criminal record, but a pixelated photo on a blue background (school photo or something?) reveals a slight man with dark hair and blue eyes that are piercing even in the low quality image. There's really no way to tell if Ronan is one of the people who Sam was with, so I make a rather unenthusiastic move to print the page out. I mean, this could be the dude, but it also could be a Ronan who lives in Kalamazoo. I prepare myself for another crappy day.
The librarian peers at me disapprovingly as I rifle through my pockets, turning up lint and the necessary ten cents that the printer costs. (What a waste of ten cents).
As the printer sputters and shakes, the librarian raises her grey eyebrows. “What's a girl like you wasting her time in the library for? It's a beautiful day, get off the computer and play outside.”
The grainy sheet of paper zooms out of the slot in the printer. The librarian glances at it curiously. I pull the paper away with a swish. “Um… school project! We’re researching… our ancestors!”
She blinks her glassy dark eyes, bug-like behind her horn rimmed spectacles. “Oh, well just let me know if you need anything. And stay out of trouble! Kids these days get themselves entangled in all sorts of situations that could be easily avoided! Don't let that happen to you!” I sigh. If only she knew.
Compared to the dry cool of the library, the air outside is heated molasses, heavy and uncomfortable on my skin. It was cooler outside before, so I made the mistake of walking. Now, I'm one and a half miles (most of it without sidewalk) away from home, stuffed in an unreasonably heavy pair of jeans and a cotton shirt that sticks to my shoulders. Plus, my best friend’s in some mysterious situation that I can't seem to find answers about, and it may or may not be messing with my head. Could it really get any worse?