The Shadow Society

  I glanced at her and fought a foolish urge to tell her everything. I remembered how it felt to not feel Conn’s fingertips touch my hair. And I knew the exact nature of my hope. I saw its shape. I saw its size.

  The microwave chimed. Marsha slurped down the milk at the bottom of her bowl and switched off the television. “Oh!” She looked at the clock. “I’m running late. Bye, Darcy.”

  I lifted a hand and made myself wave. “Bye,” I said as she hustled out the door.

  Alone in the sudden quiet, I dumped the remaining contents of a jar of coffee crystals into my mug, stirred, and choked it down.

  Then I waited.

  Stage One of waiting for Conn was a hot shower, during which I was so sleep-deprived and nervous that I used Marsha’s purple shower gel and emerged from the bathroom smelling flowery and way too flirty.

  Stage Two was selecting clothes that would make me seem unimpressed by Conn’s presence. Something simple, careless. Black cargo pants and a long-sleeved black T-shirt. Done.

  Stage Three was revising my strategy. Maybe I should look like I cared, a little? I tried to reproduce the elegant hairstyle Lily had concocted for me in the girls’ bathroom.

  Stage Four: I failed. I looked ridiculous. I tore the pins from my hair and brushed it loose and smooth.

  Stage Five: I curled up on the sofa with my sketchbook and cracked it open to a bare page. I drew a low stone house framed by a wrought-iron fence. The lines came heavy, hard, and fast, and I began to relax until I realized that this house, like everything else I’d been sketching lately, looked familiar yet impossible to recognize.

  Stage Six: I threw the sketchbook onto the shag carpet.

  Stage Seven: there was a knock at the door.

  I stood slowly, moved toward the door slowly, and opened it slowly—not just because I didn’t want to seem eager, but also because I sensed that the moment Conn came inside, everything would change.

  He held a cardboard box in his arms. Conn’s face was grim, and his breath fogged the air.

  When he stepped into the living room, his gaze flickered, pausing on the three closed doors down the hallway: the bathroom, Marsha’s room, my bedroom. He raised the cardboard box, which ticked like a bomb. “Where should I put this?”

  “The rest of the sculpture is in my bedroom.” I led the way. Determined to speak lightly, I added, “Marsha doesn’t like art to get all over the house, unless it comes in the form of an adorable portrait of a furry woodland creature.”

  My room was small, but I kept it neat—except for the desk, which was strewn with pencils, a stylus, and an X-Acto knife, everything clustered around a tall, rectangular object I had sheathed in a pillowcase.

  Conn set the box on the bed, and when the mattress sloshed he lifted his brows. “Is that … filled with water?”

  “Very 1970s, isn’t it? Marsha was so proud when she first showed me this room. She thinks everybody wants a waterbed.”

  Conn pressed his fingers against it, bewildered, as if he’d never seen a waterbed before. Then he shrugged and turned to shut the bedroom door. The sound thumped somewhere deep inside me.

  He pushed up the sleeves of his gray sweater, revealing the tight muscles of his forearms, and slipped both hands into the back pockets of his jeans. “We should get started,” he said, his tone all business. He nodded at the pillowcased object on my desk. “Is that it?”

  Grateful for something to do, I unveiled the sculpture.

  It was a glass box encasing a human figure made from plaster, pinned by its feet to a wooden bottom. It was J. Alfred, and he could barely be seen through the ocean I had painted on the glass panes. Above the water, the glass walls were clear and speckled with tiny, gold-colored watch gears that I had wheedled out of the manager at the local jewelers. I had superglued the gears, one by one, into constellations above the ocean. The box had no lid.

  Conn stepped closer and touched the painted mermaids swimming in the waves, their tails flowing like long dresses. “‘We have lingered in the chambers of the sea,’” he quoted the poem’s final lines. “‘By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown / Till human voices wake us, and we drown.’ Darcy.” He looked at me. “This is beautiful.” His gaze held mine so fully that I felt as if his hands had cupped my face.

  I forced myself to speak. “The shadow box isn’t sturdy. I used a hot glue gun to fit the four panes of glass into a rectangle, so the box won’t last forever, but I reinforced the base with copper wire. We’ll do the same to the top once you’ve inserted the clock mechanism. I should have used a small propane torch to fuse the glass together, but I don’t have one, and anyway, open flames make me twitchy. I don’t like … that is, I’m…” I trailed off.

  “You’re afraid of fire,” he said gently.

  “Yes,” I muttered, embarrassed.

  “Don’t worry. We all have our weaknesses. I think the sculpture is perfect.”

  “No, it isn’t.” I opened Conn’s cardboard box and lifted out a small, narrow machine. “But it will be.”

  Reluctantly, Conn removed his hands from his pockets and took the clock. Once he held it, though, his shoulders relaxed. Maybe, like me, he was grateful to have something to do. He sat at the desk, lowered the clock into the shadow box, and began to attach it by squeezing metal clamps onto the glass edges. His fingers were quick and sure. Gifted. I watched them dance, and it was easy, too easy, to fall under their spell.

  A bad idea. I tore my gaze away. I looked at the clock instead. As I studied its intricacy, I realized that Conn was an artist, too.

  Then he leaned back, and I could see what we had done together. There were the coffee spoons, one painted and one plain, measuring the hours and minutes. There was the clock’s pendulum: the rusted spring we’d salvaged from the train tracks, dangling over J. Alfred’s head in a spiral like a strange halo. There was everything we had planned for a month, everything except—

  “The planet,” I said. “Where should we put it? Maybe we could fix it to the top of the box, tilted at an angle? Or—”

  “You should keep it for yourself.”

  “But you made it for the sculpture.”

  The sharp angles of his face softened. “I made it for you.”

  I became acutely aware of the ticking of the clock, and another sound: my heartbeat, skipping in a quick rhythm. I nodded, and knew that now I needed the spool of copper wire, and should get it, I really should, but it was in the desk drawer and Conn was sitting in front of it like a lion I’d have to creep past. I hesitated, then stretched out my arm and reached for the drawer.

  His hand caught mine. “What’s this?” He eased back my sleeve, exposing the black and blue mark on my wrist.

  “Just a bruise.”

  “A bruise,” he repeated.

  “Yeah. Really clumsy of me. I got it this morning.” Conn was examining my skin with wonder. His dark golden head bowed over my hand in his as I stood before him, begging my body not to tremble, begging my voice not to break. “What’s the big deal?” I tried to sound nonchalant. “Everybody gets bruises.”

  “Not you. Never you. You shouldn’t allow it.”

  Which was, obviously, a bizarre thing to say. But before I could make a comment to that effect, Conn grazed his thumb over the bruise and swept his fingers up the tender skin of my inner arm. I forgot to speak. I forgot to breathe.

  Still seated, still caressing the pale hollow of my elbow with a palm as rough as a cat’s tongue, Conn looked up at me. His eyes were the color of storm clouds, and alive with a question.

  My answer?

  I kissed him.

  He sighed. It was a tired sound, and so brief that I might have imagined it if that breath hadn’t brushed against my mouth. If I hadn’t inhaled it, tasted it, and made it mine. Then Conn pulled me into his arms, and I was invaded by an emotion as fierce as fear. I touched the prickle and velvet of his shorn hair. This is what it means to kiss, I thought. This is what it means to—

  Conn shi
fted. His lips hardened, grew eager. Almost angry. He grasped my fingers, lowered them to his waist, and seized my upper arm. Gripped it to the bone.

  Yet I didn’t pull away. I couldn’t. He crushed me close. I strained closer. Our kiss was a deep, dark well, and I fell into it, and never wanted to see the sun again. It didn’t matter that my arm hurt. It didn’t matter that Conn’s other hand was reaching behind him, searching for something in his back pocket.

  Something that flashed through the air and bit into my wrists.

  A pair of handcuffs.

  “You’re under arrest, Shade.” Conn tightened the cuffs. “You have no rights.”

  15

  What had he called me?

  Why was he acting like a cop?

  Were those handcuffs made of glass?

  My mind groped for something that made sense. Nothing did. I lifted my cuffed hands and stared at the transparent device that chained them together. An orange light coursed through the cuffs and the links between them. “What the hell,” I hissed.

  Conn was silent. Stony. A suddenly menacing stranger.

  I wrenched away from him and raised my hands high.

  “No!” Conn’s eyes filled with horror. He moved to stop me.

  Too late. I smashed the handcuffs against the edge of the desk.

  My hands burst into flames.

  I screamed. My fingers curled into fists of agony. The ends of my hair caught on fire. An acrid smell filled the air, and I remembered it from my nightmares. Now I knew what that stench was. The smoke of burning hair, of burning flesh.

  Conn snatched the X-Acto knife from where it lay on the desk. He barreled into me, shoving me onto the bed.

  “Don’t!” I cried. “Please!” My breath came in heaving sobs as he tried to pin me down and the waterbed rocked beneath us. I struggled, but struggling didn’t help. He was heavy, and I was on fire.

  Conn raised the knife. Terror beat its wings inside me, and I heard my voice begging him not to do this, to let me go, to stop, please stop—

  He drove the knife down, slashing into the mattress.

  Water gushed over us. Conn flung the knife away, ripped the mattress wide open, and pressed my body into the wet ruins of the waterbed.

  I choked, coughing up water that tasted like moldy plastic. The fire was gone, but I still twisted beneath Conn. His chest was a hard weight against mine.

  “Darcy?” His face dripped water onto my cheeks. “Are you all right?”

  His hold loosened.

  I hitched up my knees and kicked him in the stomach. He slammed onto the sodden carpet, and I was up, I was free, I was careening toward the door.

  He seized my ankle, but before I fell against the desk I wrapped my scorched fingers around a weapon: the stylus.

  Conn scrambled to his feet, but so did I. He inched closer, hands empty and low, signaling that I should calm down and drop the stylus. Some of my fear had burned out with the fire, and the thick smoke in my lungs began to taste like anger as I listened to him gasp, trying to speak. I had knocked the wind out of him.

  Well. That wasn’t much, but it was a start.

  I swept my arm against the sculpture and flung it at him. The four glass panes split apart, the plaster man broke. Conn reeled as I drew my hand back and drove the stylus deep into his bicep.

  He cried out. As much as I hated him then, I hated myself more, for my last move had been stupid. I had just given him possession of my only weapon.

  But maybe he was stupid, too. Shuddering, he yanked the stylus from his arm and tossed it into a far corner of the room. Blood seeped through his sweater.

  “Listen,” he rasped, but I had already thrown open the bedroom door.

  I ran into the living room and had made it halfway to the front door when Conn snagged the waist of my pants and hauled me back.

  “Listen,” he said again, this time into my ear, his breath hot against my neck.

  Depending on your point of view, this was either the best or worst time for Marsha to come home early.

  Conn swore, but didn’t let go. He snaked an arm around my waist and cinched me close.

  Marsha let the front door swing wide until it banged against the outside of the house and cold air poured into the living room. She stood, staring. She sucked in a huge breath, and I could feel uncertainty in Conn’s body against mine. Then Marsha did something very sensible. In a voice as shrill as a train whistle, she yelled, “HELP! POLICE!”

  Maybe a neighbor would hear. In the meantime, I rammed my elbow into Conn’s ribs as hard as I could, and heard something crack. He staggered back, and everything might have turned out differently if Marsha hadn’t done something very not sensible, which was to run into the kitchen, grab a knife from the butcher block, and throw it.

  I knew she meant to hit Conn, yet even though the knife spun through the air like it had been thrown by a ninja, Marsha’s aim was really, really bad. The blade was whirling straight toward my chest.

  For a moment, every sensation and thought was a sharp, clear crystal. The sound of Marsha’s scream. The blistering ache of my hands. A bitterness on my tongue. Conn stumbling toward me. The shining blade.

  My heart shrank, curling into itself. But a knife couldn’t hurt it more than it already had been.

  Then, just as the knife should have pierced my skin, I vanished.

  I had been looking down, unable to tear my eyes away from my soaked shirt and the blade about to rip through it, when suddenly I wasn’t there anymore. I was gone. I was air. I was nothing.

  The knife cracked into the fish tank behind me. The glass broke, spilling water and panicked angelfish onto the patch of carpet where my feet had been.

  “No.” Conn whispered. “No, no, no.”

  Was I insane? Had my mind snapped during Conn’s attack? Maybe my five missing, forgotten years, and the ones that came after that, the times when I appeared in one foster home only to disappear months later, had led to this. To believing that I had truly become a ghost.

  Conn stared at the place where I should have been. Not in disbelief. More as if everything was lost.

  “Darcy?” Marsha’s voice wavered. “Where are you?”

  I didn’t understand what had happened. But I knew this: I needed to get away from Conn.

  Could I run? Could I do that, without legs?

  Yes.

  I leaped over the sofa and rushed out the front door. I had made it to the street when something dragged me down. My own feet. They flickered into being: solid, heavy. I tripped, and fell onto the heels of my brutalized hands. Shrieked.

  I tried to bite back the sound, but Conn had heard me. He had seen me. He was racing across the brown grass.

  Get up. Get up.

  Then I was running again, slightly ahead of him. My legs blurred and vanished once more.

  It was dizzying, being invisible. Staring at the ground as I ran gave me vertigo, and I didn’t have the courage to look back at Conn, so I kept my eyes trained on the wide streets. The pastel houses. The cars parked neatly in their driveways.

  The neighborhood was deserted. Everyone was tucked inside on this chilly Saturday, playing video games or watching TV or doing anything except noticing a bloodied young man chasing nothing at all.

  The quick thud of Conn’s footfalls stopped. I glanced over my shoulder. He wasn’t there. Had he given up?

  The roar of a motorcycle.

  No. He hadn’t.

  I sprinted through the narrow spaces between houses, zigzagged through backyards littered with toolsheds and swing sets. I turned a corner, and an unexpected fence loomed in front of me. I tried to slow and stop, but apparently that wasn’t necessary. I flew through the wooden wall.

  Some small kernel of me was fascinated and thought that maybe Conn didn’t have a chance if I could zoom through solid objects. But I remembered how my feet had materialized beneath me, and realized that I couldn’t control this. This thing. Evaporating. Ghosting. Whatever it was, I didn’t want to be in
the middle of a wall when it stopped working. So I skimmed through open spaces.

  Then it happened: quiet. No more motorcycle. Only the scratchy rustle of a squirrel stealing from a bird feeder.

  Maybe Conn had driven off in the wrong direction.

  Or maybe he had parked somewhere and was hunting among the houses.

  I skirted an aboveground swimming pool and slipped through an open gate to a front yard. Hugging the driveway, I moved slowly toward the street. I looked left. I looked right. I didn’t see Conn or his motorcycle.

  I felt weak and heavy with relief.

  No, not felt. I was heavy. Heavy, solid. There. My body had returned. My damaged self. The misery of my burned fingers.

  I saw my reflection in a car window. This was what Marsha had seen when she’d come home, when she’d parked her rusted Camry and strolled toward the front door, completely unaware of the wreckage inside. She had seen a girl soaked from head to toe. A girl with burned, jagged hair. Torn clothes. Hands red, puffy, blackened in some spots and oozing blood in others. A welt on her chin from where it had hit the desk. Neck smeared with Conn’s blood. Eyes wide, black, animal.

  Shaken by the sight of myself, I had nearly turned away when I noticed something. There, lying on the passenger seat of the car, was a cell phone.

  I should hide. Now that Conn might see me, I should hide.

  I weighed temptation and risk. Call for help? Or find some dark corner to hole up in?

  First get the phone. Then run and hide.

  Holding my breath against the pain, I tugged at the handle of the passenger door. Locked. The windows were closed.

  I scoured the area for some kind of tool, and my gaze fell on a stone garden gnome in the front yard, dressed in a painted blue coat and hat. I scooped up the gnome and hurled him through the car window. It smashed, the car alarm blared, and I reached through the shards to grab the phone. Then I ran down the street, away from the scene that would surely catch Conn’s attention if he was still nearby. I ducked into a backyard and saw that the door of a toolshed had been left wide open. I hurtled into the shed, slammed the door behind me, and took stock of what was inside. Bags of dirt. Fertilizer. And weapons: a rake, a shovel, a trowel.