TWENTY-TWO

I THOUGHT I’D BE FINE driving Mom’s silver Toyota Camry to Applebee’s that night, but I couldn’t shake memories of the accident. It seemed surreal and miraculous to me that so many cars could drive past one another without colliding, and I felt certain that each set of headlights headed my way would inevitably veer into my path. Remembered the crunching sound of Harold’s death, the silence that followed, the agony in my ribs. Thought about the biggest part being the part that hurts, about my dad’s phone, gone forever. Tried to let myself have the thoughts, because to deny them was to just let them take over. It sort of worked—like everything else.

I made it to Applebee’s fifteen minutes early. Davis was already there, and he hugged me in the entryway before we got seated. A thought appeared in my mind undeniable as the sun in a clear sky: He’s going to want to put his bacteria in your mouth.

“Hi,” I said.

“I missed you,” he said.

After the nervous-making car trip, my brain was revving up. I told myself that having a thought was not dangerous, that thoughts aren’t actions, that thoughts are just thoughts.

Dr. Karen Singh liked to say that an unwanted thought was like a car driving past you when you’re standing on the side of the road, and I told myself I didn’t have to get into that car, that my moment of choice was not whether to have the thought, but whether to be carried away by it.

And then I got in the car.

I sat down in the booth and instead of sitting across from me, he sat next to me, his hip against mine. “I talked to your mom a few times,” he said. “I think she’s coming around to me.”

Who cares if he wants his bacteria in my mouth? Kissing is nice. Kissing feels good. I want to kiss him. But you don’t want to get campylobacter. I won’t. You’ll be sick for weeks. Might have to take antibiotics. Stop. Then you’ll get C. diff. Or you’ll get Epstein-Barr from the campylobacter. Stop. That could paralyze you, all because you kissed him when you didn’t even actually want to because it’s fucking gross, inserting your tongue into someone else’s mouth. “Are you there?” he asked.

“What, yeah,” I said.

“I asked how you’re feeling.”

“Good,” I said. “Honestly not good right now, but good in general.”

“Why not good right now?”

“Can you sit across from me?”

“Um, yeah, of course.” He got up and moved around to the opposite bench, which made me feel better. For a moment, anyway.

“I can’t do this,” I said.

“Can’t do what?”

“This,” I said. “I can’t, Davis. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to. Like, I know you’re waiting for me to get better, and I really appreciate all your texts and everything. It’s . . . it’s incredibly sweet, but, like, this is probably what better looks like for me.”

“I like this you.”

“No, you don’t. You want to make out and sit on the same side of the table and do other normal couple things. Because of course you do.”

He didn’t say anything for a minute. “Maybe you just don’t find me attractive?”

“It’s not that,” I said.

“But maybe it is.”

“It’s not. It’s not that I don’t want to kiss you or that I don’t like kissing or whatever. I . . . my brain says that kissing is one of a bunch of things that will, like, kill me. Like, actually kill me. But it’s not even about dying, really—like, if I knew I was dying, and I kissed you good-bye, literally my last thought wouldn’t be about the fact that I was dying; it would be about the eighty million microbes that we’d just exchanged. I know that when you just touched me, it didn’t give me a disease, or it probably didn’t. God, I can’t even say that it definitely didn’t because I’m so fucking scared of it. I can’t even call it anything but it, you know? I just can’t.”

I could tell I was hurting him. I could see it in the way he kept blinking. I could see that he didn’t understand it, that he couldn’t. I didn’t blame him. It made no sense. I was a story riddled with plot holes.

“That sounds really scary,” he said. I just nodded. “Do you feel like you’re getting better?” Everyone wanted me to feed them that story—darkness to light, weakness to strength, broken to whole. I wanted it, too.

“Maybe,” I said. “Honestly, I feel really fragile. I feel like I’ve been taped back together.”

“I know that feeling.”

“How are you?” I asked.

He shrugged.

“How’s Noah?” I asked.

“Not good.”

“Um, unpack that for me,” I said.

“He just misses Dad. It’s like Noah’s two people, almost: There’s the miniature dudebro who drinks bad vodka and is the king of his little gang of eighth-grade pseudo-badasses. And then the kid who crawls into bed with me some nights and cries. It’s almost like Noah thinks if he screws up enough, Dad will be forced to come out of hiding.”

“He’s heartbroken,” I said.

“Yeah, well. Aren’t we all. It’s . . . I don’t really want to talk about my life, if that’s okay.” It occurred to me that Davis probably liked what infuriated Daisy—that I didn’t ask too many questions. Everyone else was so relentlessly curious about the life of the billionaire boy, but I’d always been too stuck inside myself to interrogate him.

Slowly, the conversation sputtered. We started talking to each other like people who used to be close—catching each other up on our lives rather than living them together. By the time he paid the bill, I knew that whatever we’d been, we weren’t anymore.

Still, once I was home and under the covers, I texted him. You around?

You can’t do it the other way, he replied. And I can’t do it this way.

Me: Why?

Him: It makes me feel like you only like me at a distance. I need to be liked close up.

I kept typing and deleting, typing and deleting. I never ended up replying.

—

The next day at school, I was walking across the cafeteria to our lunch table when I was intercepted by Daisy. “Holmesy, we have to talk privately.” She sat me down at a mostly empty lunch table, a few seats away from some freshmen.

“Did you break up with Mychal again?”

“No, of course not. The magic of being Just Friends is that you can’t break up. I feel like I’ve unlocked the secret of the universe with this Just Friends thing. But no, we’re going on an adventure.”

“We are?”

“Do you feel like you’ve recovered your wits enough that you could, for instance, sneak underneath the city of Indianapolis to attend a guerrilla art show?”

“A what?”

“Okay, so remember how I had that idea for Mychal to make those photographic montages of exonerated prisoners?”

“Well, it was mostly his i—”

“Let’s not get lost in the details, Holmesy. The point is he made it and submitted it to this supercool arts collective Known City, and they are putting it in this one-night-only gallery show they’re doing Friday night called Underground Art, where they turn part of the Pogue’s Run tunnel into an art gallery.” Pogue’s Run was the tunnel that emptied into the White River that Pickett’s company had been hired to expand, the work they’d never finished. Seemed an odd place for an art show.

“I don’t really want to spend Friday night at an illegal art gallery.”

“It’s not illegal. They have permission. It’s just super underground. Like, literally underground.” I scrunched up my face. “It’s like the coolest thing ever to happen in Indianapolis, and my Just Friend has art in the show. Obviously don’t feel obligated to be there, but . . . do be there.”

“I don’t want to be a third wheel.”

“I am going to be nervous and surrounded by people cooler than me and I’d really like my best friend to be there.”

I opened the Ziploc bag containing my peanut butter and honey sandwich and took a bite.

“You’re thinking about it,” she said, excitement in her voice.

“I’m thinking about it,” I allowed.

And then, after I swallowed, I said, “All right, let’s do it.”

“Yes! Yes! We will pick you up at six fifteen on Friday; it’s going to be amazing.”

The way she smiled at me made it impossible not to smile back. In a quiet voice, not even sure she could hear me, I said, “I love you, Daisy. I know you say that to me all the time and I never say it, but I do. I love you.”

“Ahh, fuck. Don’t go all soft on me, Holmesy.”

—

Mychal and Daisy showed up at my doorstep at six fifteen sharp. She was wearing a dress-and-tights combo dwarfed by her huge puffer coat, and Mychal was wearing a silver-gray suit that was slightly too big for him. I had on a long-sleeve T-shirt, jeans, and a coat. “I didn’t know I was supposed to dress up for the sewer,” I said sheepishly.

“The art sewer.” Daisy smiled. I wondered whether maybe I should change, but she just grabbed me and said, “Holmesy, you look radiant. You look like . . . like yourself.”

I sat in one of the backseats in Mychal’s minivan, and as he drove south on Michigan Road, Daisy started playing one of our favorite songs, “You’re the One.” Mychal was laughing as Daisy and I screamed the lyrics to each other. She sang lead, and I belted out the background voice that just repeated, “You’re everything everything everything,” and I felt like I was. You’re both the fire and the water that extinguishes it. You’re the narrator, the protagonist, and the sidekick. You’re the storyteller and the story told. You are somebody’s something, but you are also your you.

As Daisy switched the song to a romantic ballad that she and Mychal were singing, I started thinking about turtles all the way down. I was thinking that maybe the old lady and the scientist were both right. Like, the world is billions of years old, and life is a product of nucleotide mutation and everything. But the world is also the stories we tell about it.

—

Mychal turned off Michigan at Tenth Street, and we drove for a while until we reached a pool supply store with a flickering backlit sign saying ROSENTHAL POOLS. The parking lot was already half full. Daisy stopped the music as Mychal pulled into a spot. We got out and found ourselves surrounded by a weird mix of twenty-something hipsters and middle-aged couples. Everyone but us seemed to know one another, and the three of us stood next to Mychal’s car for a long time in silence, just watching the scene, until a middle-aged woman in an all-black outfit walked over and said, “Are you here for the event?”

“I’m, um, Mychal Turner,” Mychal said. “I have a, um, a picture in the show.”

“Prisoner 101?”

“Yeah. That’s me.”

“I’m Frances Oliver. I think Prisoner 101 is one of the strongest pieces in the gallery. And I’m the curator, so I should know. Come, come, let’s head on down together. I would be fascinated to learn more about your process.”

Frances and Mychal began walking across the parking lot, but every few seconds Frances would pause and say, “Oh, I must introduce you to . . .” and we’d stop for a while to meet an artist or a collector or a “funding partner.” Slowly, he was swallowed by all the people who loved Prisoner 101 and wanted to talk with him about it, and after we stood behind him for a while, Daisy finally grabbed him by the hand and said, “We’re gonna head down to the show. Enjoy this. I’m so proud of you.”

“I can come with,” he said, turning away from a gaggle of art students from Herron, the art college in town.

“No, have fun. You gotta meet all these people, so they’ll buy your pictures.” He smiled, kissed her, and returned to his crowd of fans.

When Daisy and I reached the edge of the parking lot, we saw through the trees a flashlight waving back and forth in the air, so we wound our way down a little hill toward the light until the brush opened up into a wide concrete basin. A tiny stream of water—I could easily step over it—bubbled along its bottom. We walked toward the bearded man waving the flashlight, who introduced himself as Kip and handed us hard hats with lanterns and a flashlight. “Follow the tunnel in for two hundred yards, then take your first left, and you’ll be in the gallery.”

The light from my helmet followed the creek downstream. In the distance, I could see the start of the tunnel, a light-sucking square cut into a hillside. There was an overturned shopping cart just outside the start of the culvert, trapped against a moss-covered boulder. As we walked toward the tunnel’s entrance, I looked up at the black silhouettes of leafless maple trees splitting up the sky.

The creek ran along the left side of the Pogue’s Run tunnel; we walked on a slightly elevated concrete sidewalk to the right of the creek. The smell enveloped us immediately—sewage and the sickly sweet smell of rot. I thought my nose would get used to it, but it never did.

A few steps in, we began to hear rodents scurrying along the creek bed. We could hear voices, too—echoey, unintelligible conversations that seemed to be coming from all sides of us. Our headlamps lit up the graffiti that lined the walls—spray-painted tags in bubble letters, but also stenciled images and messages. Daisy’s light lingered on one image featuring a portly rat drinking a bottle of wine with the caption, THE RAT KING KNOWS YOUR SECRETS. Another message, scrawled in what looked like white house paint, read, IT’S NOT HOW YOU DIE. IT’S WHO YOU DIE.

“This is a little creepy,” Daisy whispered.

“Why are you whispering?”

“Scared,” she whispered. “Has it been two hundred yards yet?”

“Dunno,” I said. “But I hear people up there.” I turned around and shone my light back toward the tunnel’s entrance, and a couple of middle-aged men behind us waved. “See, it’s fine.”

The creek wasn’t really a body of water anymore so much as a slow-moving puddle; I watched a rat scamper across it without ever getting its nose wet. “That was a rat,” Daisy said, her voice clenched.

“It lives here,” I said. “We’re the invaders.” We kept walking. The only light in the world seemed to be the yellow beams of headlamps and flashlights—it was almost like everyone down there had become beams of light, bouncing along the tunnel in little groups.

—

Ahead of us, I saw headlamps turning to the left, into a square side tunnel, about eight feet high. We jumped over the trickling creek, past a sign that read, A PICKETT ENGINEERING PROJECT, and into the concrete side tunnel.

You could only see the artwork by the light of headlamps and flashlights, so the paintings and photographs lining the walls seemed to come in and out of focus. To see all of Mychal’s picture, you had to stand against the opposite wall of the tunnel. It really was an amazing artwork—Prisoner 101 looked as real as anyone, but he was made from pieces of the one hundred mugshots Mychal had found of men convicted of murder and then exonerated. Even up close, I couldn’t tell that Prisoner 101 wasn’t real.

The rest of the art was cool, too—big abstract paintings of hard-edged geometric shapes, an assemblage of old wooden chairs precariously stacked to the ceiling, a huge photograph of a kid jumping on a trampoline alone in a vast harvested cornfield—but Mychal’s was my favorite, and not just because I knew him.

After a while, we heard a clamor of voices approach, and the gallery became crowded. Someone had set up a stereo, and music began reverberating through the tunnel. Plastic cups were passed around, and then bottles of wine, and the place got louder and louder, and even though it was freezing down there, I started to feel sweaty, so I asked Daisy if she wanted to go for a walk.

“A walk?”

“Yeah, just, I don’t know, down the tunnel or something.”

“You want to go for a walk down the tunnel.”

“Yeah. I mean, we don’t have to.”

She pointed into the darkness beyond the reach of our headlamps. “You’re proposing that we just walk into that void.”

“Not for like a mile or anything. Just to see what there is to see.”

Daisy sighed. “Yeah, okay. Let’s go for a walk.”

—

It only took a minute for the air to feel crisper. The tunnel ahead of us was pitch-black, and it curved in a long, slow arc away from the party until we couldn’t see the light from it anymore. We could still hear the music and the people talking over it, but it felt distant, like a party you drive past.

“I don’t understand how you can be so inhumanly calm down here, fifteen feet below downtown Indianapolis, ankle deep in rat shit, but you have a panic attack when you think your finger is infected.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “This just isn’t scary.”

“It objectively is,” she said.

I reached up and clicked off my headlamp. “Turn off your light,” I said.

“Hell, no.”

“Turn it off. Nothing bad will happen.” She clicked off her light, and the world went dark. I felt my eyes trying to adjust, but there was no light to adjust to. “Now you can’t see the walls, right? Can’t see the rats. Spin around a few times and you won’t know which way is in and which way is out. This is scary. Now imagine if we couldn’t talk, if we couldn’t hear each other’s breathing. Imagine if we had no sense of touch, so even if we were standing next to each other, we’d never know it.

“Imagine you’re trying to find someone, or even you’re trying to find yourself, but you have no senses, no way to know where the walls are, which way is forward or backward, what is water and what is air. You’re senseless and shapeless—you feel like you can only describe what you are by identifying what you’re not, and you’re floating around in a body with no control. You don’t get to decide who you like or where you live or when you eat or what you fear. You’re just stuck in there, totally alone, in this darkness. That’s scary. This,” I said, and turned on the flashlight. “This is control. This is power. There may be rats and spiders and whatever the hell. But we shine the light on them, not the other way around. We know where the walls are, which way is in and which way is out. This,” I said, turning off my light again, “is what I feel like when I’m scared. This”—I turned the flashlight back on—“is a walk in the fucking park.”

We walked for a while in silence. “It’s that bad?” she asked finally.

“Sometimes,” I said.

“But then your flashlight starts working again,” she said.

“So far.”

—

As we kept walking, through the tunnel, the music behind us growing fainter, Daisy calmed down a bit. “I’m thinking of killing off Ayala,” she said. “Would you take that personally?”

“Nah,” I said. “I was just starting to like her, though.”

“Did you read the most recent one?”

“The one where they go to Ryloth to deliver power converters? I loved the scene where Rey and Ayala are waiting for that dude in a bar, and they’re just talking. I like your action scenes and everything, but the just talking is my favorite. Also, I liked that I got to hook up with a Twi’lek. Or, Ayala did, I guess. Your writing makes me feel like it’s real, like I’m really there.”

“Thanks,” she said. “Now you’re making me think maybe I shouldn’t kill her.”

“I don’t mind if you kill her. Just make her die a hero.”

“Oh, of course. She has to. I was thinking I’d make it some Rogue One–style sacrifice for the common good. If that sounds okay?”

“Works for me,” I told her.

“God, is the smell getting worse?” she asked.

“It’s not getting better,” I acknowledged. It smelled more like rotting garbage and unflushed toilets, and as we passed an offshoot to the tunnel, Daisy said she wanted to turn around, but in the distance ahead of us I could see a pinprick of gray light, and I wanted to see what was at the end.

As we walked, the sounds of the city grew slowly louder and the smell improved because we were close to open air. The gray light grew larger until we reached the edge of the tunnel. It was open and unfinished—the tiny trickle of water that was supposed to be diverted from the White River was instead dripping down into it, two stories below us.

I looked up. It was past ten o’clock, but I’d never seen the city look so blindingly bright. I could see everything: the green moss on the boulders in the river below; the golden frothy bubbles at the base of the waterfall; the trees in the distance bent over the water like the roof of a chapel; the power lines sagging across the river below us; a great silver grain mill absurdly still in the moonlight; neon Speedway and Chase Bank signs in the distance.

Indianapolis is so flat you can never really look down on it; it’s not a town with million-dollar views. But now I had one, in the most unexpected place, the city stretching out below and beyond me, and it took a minute before I remembered that this was nighttime, that this silver-lit landscape is what passed, aboveground, for darkness.

Daisy surprised me by sitting down, her legs dangling over the concrete edge. I sat down on the other side of the trickle of water, and we looked at the same scene together for a long time.

We went out to the meadow that night, talking about college and kissing and religion and art, and I didn’t feel like I was watching a movie of our conversation. I was having it. I could listen to her, and I knew she was listening to me.

“I wonder if they’ll ever finish this thing,” Daisy said at one point.

“I kind of hope not,” I said. “I mean, I’m all for clean water, but I kind of want to be able to come here again in like ten or twenty years or something. Like, instead of going to my high school reunion, I want to be here.” With you, I wanted to say.

“Yeah,” she said. “Keep Pogue’s Run filthy, because the view from the unfinished water treatment tunnel is spectacular. Thanks, Russell Pickett, for your corruption and incompetence.”

“Pogue’s Run,” I mumbled. “Wait, where does Pogue’s Run start? Where is its mouth?”

“The mouth of a river is where it ends, not where it begins. This is the mouth.” I watched her realize it. “Pogue’s Run. Holy shit, Holmesy. We’re in the jogger’s mouth.”

I stood up. I felt for some reason like Pickett might be right behind us, like he might push us off the edge of his tunnel and into the river below. “Now I’m a little freaked out,” I said.

“What are we gonna do?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing. We’re gonna turn around, walk back to the party, hang out with fancy art people, and get home by curfew.” I started walking back toward the distant music. “I’ll tell Davis, so he knows. We let him decide whether to tell Noah. Other than that, we don’t say a word.”

“All right,” she said, hustling to catch up to me. “I mean, is he down here right now?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t think it’s for us to know.”

“Right,” she said. “How could he have been down here this whole time, though?” I had a guess, but didn’t say anything. “God, that smell . . .” she said, her voice trailing off as she said it.

—

You’d think solving mysteries would bring you closure, that closing the loop would comfort and quiet your mind. But it never does. The truth always disappoints. As we circulated around the gallery, looking for Mychal, I didn’t feel like I’d found the solid nesting doll or anything. Nothing had been fixed, not really. It was like the zoologist said about science: You never really find answers, just new and deeper questions.

We finally found Mychal leaning against the wall opposite his photograph, talking to two older women. Daisy cut in and took his hand. “I hate to break up this party,” she said, “but this famous artist has a curfew.”

Mychal laughed, and the three of us made our way out of the tunnel, into the silver-bright parking lot, and then into Mychal’s minivan. The moment my door slid shut, he said, “That was the best night of my life thank you for being there oh my God that was just the best thing that’s ever happened to me I feel like I might be an artist, like a proper one. That was so, so amazing. Did you guys have fun?”

“Tell us all about it,” Daisy said, not exactly answering his question.

—

When I got home, Mom was sitting at the kitchen table, drinking a mug of tea. “What is that smell?” she asked.

“Sewage, body odor, mold—a mix of things.”

“I’m worried, Aza. I’m worried you’re losing your connection to reality.”

“I’m not,” I said. “I’m just tired.”

“Tonight, you’re gonna stay up and talk to me.”

“About what?”

“About where you were, what you were doing, who you were doing it with. About your life.”

So I told her. I told her that Daisy and Mychal and I had attended a one-night art show beneath downtown, and that Daisy and I had walked to the end of Pickett’s unfinished tunnel, and I told her about going out to the meadow, and I told her about the jogger’s mouth, about thinking Pickett was maybe down there, about the stench.

“You’re going to tell Davis?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“But not the police?”

“No,” I said. “If I tell the police, and he is dead down there, Davis and Noah’s house won’t even be theirs anymore. It’ll be owned by a tuatara.”

“A tua-what-a?”

“A tuatara. It looks like a lizard, but it isn’t a lizard. Descended from the dinosaurs. They live for like a hundred and fifty years, and Pickett’s will leaves everything to his pet tuatara. The house, the business, everything.”

“The madness of wealth,” my mother mumbled. “Sometimes you think you’re spending money, but all along the money’s spending you.” She glanced down at her cup of tea, and then back up to me. “But only if you worship it. You serve whatever you worship.”

“So we gotta be careful what we worship,” I said. She smiled, then shooed me off to the shower. As I stood underneath the water, I wondered what I’d worship as I got older, and how that would end up bending the arc of my life this way or that. I was still at the beginning. I could still be anybody.