11

SHAKESPEARE, STARS, AND AN AQUATIC OPTIMUS PRIME

“NOT FAR from here,” as it turned out, was an overstatement. Jonah’s house wasn’t much closer to the center of town than Esther’s, but the subdivision was newer. His street was nice, but his house looked more sad and disheveled than the rest, like one of the starters you move into at the beginning of The Sims when you’ve got no money, six children, and no other choice.

They didn’t go inside. They ran through the rain to the backyard. The lawn backed onto unkempt wilderness; the grass was taller than Esther’s head.

Jonah let her in the door to the screened-in back porch.

“Well, this is my kingdom,” he said, taking off his wet jacket.

Esther took off her dripping jacket and wrung out her hair and tried to find something safe to start a conversation with. She didn’t stare at the fist-sized hole punched through the plasterboard, or how one of the screens had been boarded up with cardboard and duct tape. Her eye was taken and held by the walls and ceiling. Every square inch of available space was painted. The ceiling was a sea scene in swirling green and bright coral, Starry Night if it were an ocean. In the eddies were mermaids and fish and sharks and, strangely, Optimus Prime with a tail. Jonah saw her staring at it.

“It’s not as bad as it looks. We just try to hang out here and stay out of Holland’s way,” he said as he pulled blankets down from the top of a bookshelf. “My sister Remy likes pictures, so I paint her what she wants. Sometimes that means giving Transformers gills.”

There were the stories from Esther’s own childhood, mixed with the tales of a kid who’d either a) grown up too fast, or b) had impeccable taste in entertainment, depending on your perspective on what’s appropriate for elementary schoolers. There was a picture of Vincent Vega holding a gun to Oscar the Grouch’s head, Ryuk from Death Note hovering in one corner, and Deadpool singing Christmas carols with Justin Bieber.

Even patches of the floor had been painted so that it appeared the walls were waterfalls.

And behind her, painted on the door that led into the rest of the house, was the Grim Reaper from Esther’s head: darkly robed, dripping tar, scythe resting gently in his long-boned hands. But—like every other story on the walls—this one had been changed, hybridized, made ridiculous. Death wore a flower crown of orange and purple blooms, and around his neck was strung a plaque that read: BALL SO HARD MUHFUCKAS WANNA FIND ME. Two small figures danced at his feet, tying his toe bones up in a web of twine: a small, peach-haired girl and a small, dark-skinned boy. Both tricksters. Both unafraid of Death.

“Oh yeah. The newest edition,” Jonah said, and his voice was strange, almost like he was . . . sheepish? Since when was Jonah Smallwood sheepish? He cleared his throat. “I, uh . . . I kind of painted that one for you.”

Esther had already guessed this, because although the Reaper took up the whole door, it was the girl—no larger than a forearm—who shone with the most detail. The outline of her body was spun gold, and even the numerous freckles that dotted her skin glistened in the light.

Esther was pretty sure most teenage girls had fantasied about the idea of some guy painting a goddamn mural with them in it, but this was dangerous territory. Murals were a well-known gateway drug to feelings, and she couldn’t have any of that. Losing him the first time had sucked, and had taught her a valuable life lesson: If you didn’t let people get close to you, they couldn’t hurt you when they left. So that’s what she’d done, and what she intended to continue doing now.

You couldn’t tell people that when they’d painted you into a mural, though. You couldn’t immediately throw the gesture back in their face and be all like, “Sorry, but I’m far too emotionally damaged for my likeness to be included in murals.” So she said, as he draped a blanket around her shuddering shoulders, “It’s beautiful.” Because it was.

Outside, the sun was setting, its dull orange beams leaking through the screens of the porch, casting their long shadows on the wall so that they were taller than the Reaper. For a moment they were very close together, her chest almost pressed to his, both larger than Death, and she supposed it would be very easy to kiss him, and she thought he very much wanted her to, but she didn’t. Mural notwithstanding.

When the sun set, they turned on the lights and lay on the floor together, staring up at the ceiling. Jonah pointed out all the little hidden Easter eggs around the room that she’d missed the first time around. He had been working on the painting for years, he told her, changing parts of it every few weeks. There were constellations up there, hidden in the tumbling waves, one for his sister and his mother and himself. Jonah pointed them out. Virgo. Scorpio. Cancer. He couldn’t always be there to read to Remy or help her with her homework, so he did the next best thing—he gave her the stars.

“Tell me about them,” Esther said, so he did, smiling to himself as he talked. His mom, Kim, had died in a car accident nine years ago. Esther, who’d only met her a handful of times as a child, remembered her as a short yet commanding woman whose laugh was so ridiculous and infectious it would leave anyone in the room smiling. Jonah said she liked to wear coral: coral clothes, coral shoes, coral lipstick. She liked the way the color popped against her black skin, said it made her feel like a sunrise.

Remy, now nine, was her mother all over: fiercely intelligent, a little rebellious, halfway obsessed with Shakespeare. She was independent during the day but at night she demanded to be within hand-holding distance of Jonah at all times.

“Why you wear costumes everywhere, Jackie O?” he said when he’d finished.

Esther didn’t want to tell Jonah the truth. That the costumes were, in part, because of him. After he left elementary school, left her to the cruelty of their classmates, she couldn’t bear it anymore. Couldn’t bear the name-calling, and the unkind laughter, and the way eyes left hot tracks on her body as they moved across her skin. People were going to tease her no matter how she dressed, so one morning not long after Jonah disappeared, Esther decided to dress as someone else entirely: a witch.

Kids were still mean, but somehow, when she was in costume, it hurt less. The words were meant for whatever character she was outfitted as, not Esther herself; eyes and words slid over her, a weapon glancing off armor.

And then later, when the curse had befallen her brother and mother and father, Esther kept wearing the costumes as a way to hide from fear. Death was looking for Esther Solar; as long as she never dressed as herself, she hoped he’d always have trouble finding her.

Esther wouldn’t tell Jonah this though, of course, so she gave him the only explanation that made sense to her: “I guess I don’t like people . . . looking at me.”

“Got a funny way of showing it.” He ran his fingers over the pearls at her neck. “You stand out in a crowd. People look at you everywhere you go.”

“Yeah, but they don’t see me when they look at the costumes. They see a historical figure or a cartoon character or whatever.”

“I see you.”

Esther laughed. “No, you don’t.”

“Yeah I do.”

“Then you see way too much.”

“You wanna see what I see?”

“What are you gonna do, draw me like one of your Optimus Primes?”

“Why not?” he said, and then he stood and disappeared through the Death door into the dark house. “Close your eyes,” he said a few minutes later. There were footfalls, a door closing, the sound of something heavy scraping against the wooden floor. “Okay, open.”

Esther opened her eyes. Jonah had set up an easel in the corner of the room and draped it with a sheet so that she couldn’t see the size or shape of the canvas.

“How long will it take?” she said. “Can I move?”

“I’m thinking it’ll take a while, so yeah, you can move.”

A little girl wandered out of the house then—Remy, she assumed—and came to sit on Jonah’s lap while he painted. She looked so much like him: warm black skin, dark hair, full lips, wide brown eyes that made her kind of appear like she’d been drawn for a Disney movie. Remy giggled as she looked from the canvas to Esther. Jonah put his finger to his lips—not shushing her, but asking her to share the secret—and she grinned widely and slipped out of his fingers and went into the backyard to play. Esther cocooned the blanket around herself and sat in a chair by one of the screens and leaned on the sill and watched Jonah’s sister, as quiet as she’d ever heard a child play.

She wondered how he’d paint her. As Eleanor Roosevelt? As a ’60s flight attendant? As Little Red Riding Hood? Optimus Prime with gills? And then she started to worry. What if the version he painted was not how she thought of herself at all? Worse yet, what if he painted her exactly as she thought of herself, all freckled and awkward and anxious about everything? In truth, she wanted to see what Jonah saw, because she didn’t know anymore. She didn’t know what was left under the costumes she wore every day.

It was a short session, only twenty minutes, because the front door slammed and a light turned on in the belly of the house and the sound of heavy footsteps came from the hall, which made Jonah jump and say, “You should probably leave.”

“Can I see it?” Esther asked as he dumped all of his paints and brushes in a corner and covered them with a sheet.

“It’s not finished yet.”

“When will it be done?”

“When you’re ready to see it.”

“You’re so cryptic.”

The storm had long passed and their clothes were almost dry, so she shrugged off the blanket and snuck out the back door with him. Remy watched them go. Esther waved good-bye. Remy didn’t wave back.

“Wait for me at the end of the street,” Jonah said when he let her out the side gate.

Esther wandered in the warm, damp evening, her jacket slung over her shoulder, and watched as the clouds peeled back in strips to reveal the stars. Then she stood under a streetlamp, walking in slow circles around the perimeter of light. Occasionally she let her fingertips drift out into the darkness, to see if she could feel what Eugene felt in the shadows.

They weren’t empty, he said. There were things that moved in the dark that only he could see. Only he could hear. Terrible, thin creatures that lurked in the dim corners of his bedroom, waiting for him to fall asleep. And right at the moment he couldn’t keep his eyes open anymore, that’s when they came for him. Sometimes he saw them, watching him. Sometimes he felt them resting heavily on the end of his bed, even when the lights were on. Crawling up his body. Sitting on his chest and draping their long black hair over his face.

Eugene said it was sleep paralysis. A trick of the mind. Esther knew it was the curse.

A dog barked down the street. Esther snatched her hand back, afraid that something would clamp down on her fingers and drag her into the abyss.

“Scared the dark will bite you?” Jonah said from behind her, and she jumped.

“Don’t do that.” She looked back at his house. “Why are we sneaking around like the von Trapp family fleeing Austria?”

“Give me the list.”

She did. Jonah tore off 49. Moths, struck a match, and set the little piece of paper alight in his hands.

“Not gonna eat it this time?”

“It occurred to me after I ate it that that paper was super old and probably nasty as hell. If I die of Ebola or something, I’m coming back to haunt you.”

“I don’t think you can get Ebola from eating paper.” 49. Moths burned, flickered, turned to ashes in a couple of seconds. Esther felt herself being released from her fear of moths. They both watched the particles drift into the night sky, and she thought, for the first time, that this might actually work. “So, when do I get to see the footage from today?”

“In about forty-eight weeks.”

“What?”

“That’s the deal. You don’t get to see the rest of my genius filmmaking skills until the end. I need some kind of bargaining chip to keep you coming back every Sunday, Solar.”

“Why are you even doing this? I mean, what do you get out of it?”

Jonah seemed to think very carefully about his answer. “You’ve seen my house. I know what it’s like to live in fear. I can’t help my sister, not yet, but I can help you.”

That was just about the best reason Esther could think of.

They walked back to the now-closed butterfly farm and Jonah drove her home in the muggy nighttime.

“See you on Sunday,” he said when he parked in front of her house, which was bright as ever on the dark street.

“Sorry. I’m busy this Sunday. I have to urgently deface public property.”

Jonah grinned. “I’ll believe that when I see it.”

Esther went inside, and even though every light was taped on, and even though Peter was a pasty basement dweller, and even though Rosemary was at the casino and wouldn’t be back for hours, and even though Eugene said there were demons waiting in the dark for all of them, and even though Fred the rooster was in the kitchen pecking at ants and screeching at the rabbits because he was terrified of them, and even though the upstairs was blocked with shopping carts and furniture and there was potentially a vengeful ghost up there, she felt safe. She didn’t fear the slam of front doors or the sound of heavy boots, and despite how weird her family was, she’d never really stopped to appreciate that before.

That night, she only checked that all the doors were locked five times before she went to bed.