I must have lain in bed for an hour, considering texting my mother and not going through with it, not even reaching for my phone to check again if she’d tried to contact me. My head pulsed, a faint knob of pain in the back from the night before, though I couldn’t remember if a foot or something else had hit it. A beer bottle maybe. Green glass. I pressed the spot, trying to massage it, but that didn’t help. My eyes closed, and I let them stay that way. I was curled up on my side, lying diagonally on the bed so I could catch the slight breeze from the window. I felt it rustle my hair the way a hand would. My mother used to do that to my hair when I was a little girl. In the background, five stories below, I heard the blare of a siren, cars honking in the street, some random weirdo shouting, maybe at nobody. City noises, gloriously alien in my ears—the way I’d always imagined them.
Lying there, stretched out on my bed, listening to what was outside and the growing sounds inside in the common area as my new housemates came back to their rooms and started to get dressed for the party, I noticed a smell. So faint at first, a tickle in my throat. Then a rising wave, much stronger. A distinct, sweet, cloying stink.
That wasn’t cigarette smoke. I breathed it in, and it calmed me. Definitely weed. I started sniffing, seeking out its origin. It seemed to be coming from the floor, seeping up through the cracks between the floorboards, from the room directly below mine.
I pressed my body to the floor, not minding the smell so much, not minding at all. I heard humming. The girl below me. She started by humming a melody, but I couldn’t catch the song. I tried to make the sound clearer by suctioning one ear to the floorboards and plugging the other, straining to catch it.
The vow made it clear that there was to be no smoking. Smoking weed would surely get the girl kicked out—if anyone told.
I kept my ear to the ground, and the smell teased my nostrils. I sneezed. Right up against the floorboards.
She stopped the song midnote.
I held very still, sensing movement beneath me, some rustling, a scraping sound, then a careful silence. It felt as if someone had an ear pressed opposite mine, to the ceiling. How could anyone have climbed up there—on the dresser, with the desk chair balanced on top? I had no idea, except I sensed the proximity. A sensation of warmth spread from the floorboard through the pressed side of my face until it was so hot I had to pull my cheek away.
Whoever my downstairs neighbor was, she was flouting the rules. She was doing what she wanted and only what she wanted, and I wondered what kind of life that might be like to walk around in, how dazzling were those shoes.
That was when I heard it.
It sounded distinctly like knuckles knocking on wood, and it was coming from the small white-painted door behind my mattress.
I crawled close and put my ear to it. I was sure I’d heard three sharp raps against the wood, coming from the other side, but now there was silence.
I leaned forward and put my eye to the keyhole. Only darkness. I listened, concentrating with all my might, and . . . nothing.
When I was backing my eye away from the keyhole, assuming I had imagined it all, I heard a sound that could only be human coming from the other side, in the dark pocket inside the wall.
A sneeze. Someone was in there.
I jumped up and grabbed the whole top mattress and flipped it sideways. Same with the box spring, which had a frilly skirt that flopped over my head like a white sheet as if I were playing ghost. I dove for the knob and turned it. The door creaked outward, and I didn’t have the space to open it the whole way, but I had room enough to see if anyone was standing there.
There was no one and nothing. Only shadows.
The sound must have been the house settling. The air ducts breathing. A hollow trick from inside the walls.
But wait. What had this door revealed? A closet? An unnecessary and very, very dark closet? I tried to wedge it open wider, but the box spring was in the way, so I pushed myself through, into the darkness.
━━━━━
It was dark behind that short white door until I found the string dangling above me. I pulled it and, click, a lightbulb blazed to life, allowing me to see the walls—plain red brick—and the width of the area, which was narrow, only space enough for maybe two people to stand shoulder to shoulder, as long as their shoulders touched. Then I noticed the stairs.
This was a stairwell, not a storage closet.
I gazed up into the black, where the steps got erased. If I’d discovered a hidden staircase at home, and the stairs led into complete and total darkness, and there was nothing that forced me inside, I would do the sensible thing and hustle out of there, close the door, seal it shut, never open it again. Yet only the first day of my new life, and already I felt a different sensibility taking up residence in me, this unfamiliar electricity, this growing, humming charge.
The stairs lifted only as far as the ceiling of my room, and then stopped in a blind corner. I’d have to go up there to see.
One step at a time, the string connected to the bare lightbulb ticking as it swung, the wooden stairs cool beneath my bare feet, I reached the crook at the top, where they turned. The landing was narrow, and the next flight twisted again. It had to lead to an attic. I didn’t know why I kept going, why it mattered so much that I made sure.
I kept my hands on the wall, one on either side, both sides brick. It was like climbing the inside of a chimney.
At the top of the second flight, I expected to find a door—otherwise why a hidden set of stairs at all?—and there was a doorframe, the tall outline of it clearly visible in the wall. A doorframe, but where a door should have been was a bricked-up section of wall, blocking off any way of getting to the other side. The bricks were sloppy, as if they’d been hastily stacked, with fear and with force. Mortar sealed every crack.
I pressed my ear against a cool patch of wall, but bricks were solid, dense—they didn’t carry sound.
I pressed my hands to the bricks, seeking a hollow in the mortar somewhere, a crevice or breakaway where I might be able to peer in. Down on my knees, I found a hole, black and gaping, and I lifted my eye to it. Inside was more black, soft and somehow inviting.
I slipped my finger inside to see if it was indeed a hole, and my finger went in all the way to the knuckle—the hole was deeper than I could reach.
I snatched my hand back.
When I put my eye to it one more time, I swore there was movement, a shifting of the shadows, from darker to darkest. Then it came into focus. I saw a girl in that darkness, but far away, farther than possible, as if I were peering through a telescope trained on a distant spot. Her back was to me as she walked down a dense, wooded road. Something tugged at me, something familiar, and I was tumbling forward.
━━━━━
Time behind my eyelids has ricocheted backward, to the night before.
I am walking down the road, around the bend from the willow—the old highway that has no streetlights or real shoulder. I’m on foot, because I don’t have a driver’s license anymore, or a car to borrow. My mother told me not to go, but here I am, seeking it out—the party.
The air smells so clean. I’m wearing the same clothes, gripping the same small flashlight from a keychain without any keys. I’m vibrating with purpose. The anger is fresh, not yet sour and puckered. I picture two figures on a target in the distance, and that steers me on.
In summer, parties here are always outdoors, the night sky open to shouting, the ground of dirt and moss gone damp with spills of cheap liquor and beer. That means there are no visible walls or edges, no door to keep someone out.
I know where to find the party, concealed in the woods and away from the road so prying adults won’t be alerted and shut it down. When I stand on the outskirts, watching the group gathered too close to the campfire, I feel the pull at my ankle, as if something from deep down in the soil wants to hold me back. But it’s only the snarl of a tree root, and I tug my foot free and head into the noise, nearer to the flames.
I don’t belong, though it’s dark enough that I’m able to blend in, fish out a beer from the cooler, take a perch on a rock at a distance from the fire. I’m searching for them. Light flickers over faces, creating sinister eyebrows and beaked noses, mouths shadow-shaped into leering sneers. The bottle in my hand is as green as the tree canopy in daylight. I’m holding it to my lips, tipping it back. Next I know, the bottle is empty and I’m getting another. The plan is wobbling. Or I am. I came to confront the sisters, but I’ve lost the bottle and I’m too far from the cooler to grab one more. I hear my name. Some guy from school is calling. I hear a group of girls at the fire, talking loud, though not at me, never at me, and beneath that, the far-off howl of some kind of animal. I think of being mauled by a wolf and living in its skin all through winter, which would mean I’d never make it out of here, not ever.
But listen—some guy is calling my name.
“Who’s there?”
My body goes looking. Away from the fire, from the cooler of beer and the people not welcoming me in.
Something’s not right. I’ve been lured into a dark clearing, but no boy is here.
What happens next is swift. The alcohol may confuse things, and maybe words were exchanged, maybe there were warnings and threats, but the first thing I understand is a low kick from a green sneaker with clean white laces that seem to glow in the dark like teeth. Then other kinds, all kinds of shoes in all colors, multiple feet.
I hear myself cry out and stand to take it, but I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do. The girls have grown countless arms in the dark. The trees themselves have joined in. I can’t fight them off, can’t keep them away. Among the girls are two I’ve grown up with since I moved into their house when I was nine. My older stepsister—a year older, a head taller—is wiry and strong, with solid radar in the night. My other stepsister uses fingernails. Their friends are along for the ride. A sparse stand of birch trees sways above and behind them. The attack lasts a few minutes. It lasts all night. The world goes dark for a second, but I blink and come to.
Go home. We don’t want you here, someone says from above me. Someone else pours warm beer over me and then drops the bottle, not caring where it lands. Beer has leaked into my ear and pooled in my head, making my thoughts float.
When I next lift my eyes, the girls hold sticks aloft, grabbed from the ground and torn from trees, to show what’s in store if I don’t leave. My arms are up, and I’m scrambling away. As soon as there’s room enough to bolt, I run.
I feel them behind me, giving chase. Fuzzy patches of movement in the darkness, gray. Howls carrying through the air, coming after me.
By the time I reach the break in the woods and see a glimpse of paved road, I haven’t heard anyone behind me for a while.
I wait, bracing myself. I’m wielding my own stick now. I’m waving it in the air, not sure where to aim.
Nobody’s there.
Nobody’s even close. The trees swish in response, but I’m alone now. Sounds of the party filter through the brush—oblivious and going on without me, as it should have all along. It’s far away in the distance, separate from me.
I can’t catch my breath, and every part of my body feels hot, the pain rushing through me from one place to the next, swallowing me in waves. I can’t see clearly through my eyes. One is a pinhole of low light, not usable at all. The other side is blurry. My ankle gives out, and I sit down within view of the road.
“I’m right here,” I yell into the woods, as if someone might still be coming for me. “Where’d you go? I’m right here.”
━━━━━
Wake up. Those two words again at my ear like the lightest touch of a hand. I bolted up with a sting, as if someone had pulled my hair.
I’d forgotten where I was so completely that it took many blinks of my eyes before I recognized the four solid walls around me (three white, one exposed brick), the window, the desk and chair, the mirror, the dresser, the suitcase my mother packed for me, the closed and locked door.
The door behind my bed was sealed shut, the mattress and box spring in front of it as before. I was not on a set of stairs in the dark. I was on my back, in my tiny room. My eyes were cloudy, as if my ability to see were brand-new.
I waited for my heartbeat to return to normal. I waited for my thoughts to clear. I breathed.
As I was lying there coming to realize I couldn’t possibly go downstairs tonight and I would have to skip the party—it wasn’t like I had a single thing to wear—I heard a voice coming from the window over my bed.
The voice of a girl.
“I heard you moved in. I have something for you.” Followed by a whisper of movement.
“Hello?” I said, but she didn’t answer, she didn’t say who she was.
When I rolled over, I found the dress dangling off the windowsill, half hanging onto the fire escape, half draped on my pillow. It shifted in a gust of wind, shimmering slightly. A black dress with iridescent accents of deep blue. Cocktail-style—I was sure of it, though I’d never before thought about what that might mean. The note folded up around one of the straps didn’t have my name, but in an awkward burst of bad handwriting it said this:
Black and blue. Made me think of you. Borrow this and see you at the party?
—Monet