This Darkness Mine

  I roll onto my back and check my phone again, spotting the message from Shanna in the Notes app about the crib that ended up on the curb. I’m about to answer her when the phone vibrates in my hand and Brooke’s face—with a hot dog jammed in her mouth and the most innocent expression in the world—fills the screen.

  “Hey,” I answer.

  “Yeah, hey,” she says. “So listen, you’ve really got to answer Lilly’s texts because she keeps texting me asking why you won’t text her back. And I told her it’s not like I know because you’re not responding to mine either.”

  “You sent me poop,” I tell her.

  “I sent you a visual representation of my solidarity with you on a crappy day.”

  “Only you would interpret it that way.”

  “That’s because I speak the language. I’m good at talking shit,” she says, purposefully leaving a pause so I can laugh. I don’t.

  “Seriously, Lilly cried her body weight in tears already. She’s been punished.”

  “Mmmm . . .” is all I can give on that one, because I’m not so sure. “I’ve got to go,” I tell Brooke, gaze landing once again on the case under my desk. “I need to practice.”

  “Atta girl,” Brooke says. “Reclaim that throne.”

  “I will,” I say.

  Because that’s what Sasha Stone would do. Reclaim what’s hers, planting a flag so deep it grows roots that grip and twine, becoming one with whatever I choose to align myself with until extraction would only kill us both. That’s who I am, and Charity Newell needs to be reminded of that.

  Maybe I do, too. Especially after Isaac Harver carved my name next to his in stone.

  I snap together my clarinet, wetting a fresh reed and taking a pic of myself with it resting alluringly on my tongue, elbows pushing together my cleavage just enough to make it obvious it’s on purpose, and send it to Heath. It’s not exactly an apology, but there’s enough mixed imagery there to distract him for a while so I can practice in peace.

  The music does what it does best, swelling the air around me into a protective bubble, floating though my brain and soothing all the jagged edges that have hooved up lately. I remember this, and miss it. The placidity of Heath and me, the predictableness of Lilly, the assurance that Brooke will offend me at least once a day; all of it is wound up with music, our lives dictated by notes we know by heart, our feet in step.

  It has a beauty, this pattern. I lived it so long that the monotony was all I felt, ignoring the stability of the structure underneath. My fingers need little reminder once the stiffness has worked its way out after the first two hours. I’ll hurt tomorrow, and deservedly. My wrists will creak and joints will snap; my fingers will curl into themselves, resting in a loose fist because they’ve wrapped around a clarinet for so long they don’t know how else to be.

  Except I like the way Isaac feels in my hand. Suddenly my fingers slip and put a sharp where no sharp should be, the safety of my old life whisked away with one irreverent thought.

  “Stop it,” I say, teeth clenched onto the reed even though I know I’ll be picking more splinters out of my gums tomorrow.

  But there’s a compulsion in me, buried deep. I check my phone again, not even kidding myself that I’m hoping Isaac has texted me. Instead I’ve got a notification on my Notes app.

  Spl-in-ters are bones. I will rise er{up}tion. One day you h{ate} me.

  Now you’re not making any sense.

  I write back blindly with one hand, the other still on the clarinet as my eyes follow music notes, my mind turning it into music in my head, a Schumann piece that everyone should know and nobody plays anymore. I’ve almost reclaimed serenity when my phone lights up with a text from Lilly that I’m going to ignore. But there’s a response from Shanna in Notes.

  Heath’s is not the only bone mINe y(our) mouth. Mine you pull white from pink extr/a-action. I am dEEP. Your teeth have roots in my skeleton. W!ill! find my way to Yo(ur surface), I am her-e.

  I toss the phone away from me, but I can’t get Shanna’s words out of my head as easily. Schumann has lost his grace, my fingers are suddenly quite dumb, and my teeth crack down on the reed in frustration, sending fragments across my tongue. I pick away the tiny white pieces, triggering a gag reflex as I go after the farthest ones.

  My phone vibrates against the floor, and I can see Brooke’s face from across the room. I wipe my hands on my jeans, wondering what she would say if I told her that it hasn’t been bits of reed she’s watched me tweeze from my gums, but the soft fetal bones of my twin sister, forcing their way to the light.

  The truth is she would probably think it was awesome.

  I grab the phone, answering just in time. “What’s up?”

  “Wanna three-way later with me and Lilly? Skype, that is. I know you’re not into chicks. Or displays of affection.”

  I thumb across my screen, erasing the note from Shanna. “Yeah, that’s fine.”

  “Wow, that was simple.”

  “Sasha?” Mom’s voice sails up the stairs.

  “Gotta go,” I tell Brooke.

  I flex my hands as I go downstairs, easing out the kinks that I should have never allowed to settle, weeks without practice ending in my first chair loss. Dad looks up from the table, an attempted smile aborted into a mild grimace when he realizes he can’t quite force it.

  “Well, look who it is,” he says, which is a stupid thing to say under any circumstance and particularly confusing in ours.

  “Seriously?” I sit in my usual chair, making sure that the back hits the wall so I can see him wince. Instead he reaches out, his hand resting on my wrist. We haven’t touched since I got boobs and it made things weird, so I forget to roll my eyes.

  “Sasha, honey,” he says, his voice low like when he used to read to me at bedtime. My heart stutters again, as if Shanna had been listening then too, examining the letters that turned into words that he helped me learn.

  “What?” I say it with no edge, an honest exclamation of curiosity, just as Mom’s hip hits the swinging door from the kitchen and she brings in dinner.

  “Chicken,” she announces, setting a platter on the table that has more food in it than we could eat in the next three days.

  “Mom, I’ve still only got one stomach,” I tell her.

  “I know that,” she says, with forced cheer. “I just . . .” She looks over at Shanna’s empty chair, and I wonder if she’s disappointed that I sat here instead.

  Dad clears his throat, “How was your day, honey?”

  Mom and I are both so surprised we look at each other, not sure which of us he’s speaking to. We’re off script. Dad stopped asking me how my day was after one time in junior high when I answered with a real-time explanation of tuning my clarinet.

  “Uh . . . fine,” I say. It wasn’t fine. I lost first chair and a friend defected. But it’s the answer I’m supposed to give, so I do.

  Dad sucks in a breath and I wonder if he’s about to ask me how Shanna’s day was, when Mom reaches out and brushes her fingers against my cheek. “Everything okay?”

  My phone vibrates and I slide it out of my pocket to see a text from Isaac.

  Sorry. See you later?

  “Yeah,” I tell her, a piece of reed still jammed inside my cheek. “Everything is good.”

  sixteen

  I power up my laptop, happy enough to forgive Lilly now that I know I’ll be seeing Isaac later. Brooke calls first. She’s wearing a sports bra and has her hair up in a wet ponytail.

  “Are you going to put a shirt on?”

  “Why?” She looks mystified as she bites into a pizza pocket. “Oh, there’s Lilly.”

  Our friend pops up on the other side of the screen. She’s got on a hoodie from last year’s band camp and too much concealer around her eyes. I personally think the mea culpa would go over better if she went ahead and let me see she’s been crying, but whatever. Isaac texted me again to say he’d be over in about an hour, so she’s got plenty of time to apologize. r />
  “Hey, Sasha,” Lilly says cautiously. “How’s it going?”

  “Fine,” I tell her. “I came home and practiced a ton. Charity’s only keeping the seat warm for me.”

  “Damn straight,” Brooke says, some pepperoni falling out of her mouth to land in her bra. She fishes it out and pops it back in her mouth.

  “Oh my God, Brooke,” Lilly says, ignoring my jab at her cousin. “You’re so gross.”

  “Whatever, dude. I was looking for some pumpkin recipes for foods class last week and typed pump king instead. Skewed my results. Now that’s gross.”

  “I don’t want to know,” Lilly says, but I think maybe she does.

  “Seriously, Sasha, you doing okay?”

  Brooke asks this while holding her pizza pocket up into the air and examining the remaining contents as if they might be more interesting than my answer.

  “I’m fine. Really, guys.” I look at Lilly, but she only nods. Apparently I’m going to have to dig for this admission of wrongdoing the way I fish for compliments from Heath.

  “So did you know?”

  Lilly doesn’t feign innocence or pretend she doesn’t know what I’m talking about. I’ll give her that.

  “Yeah.” She drops her eyes, and Brooke pops the rest of her dinner into her mouth.

  “And you didn’t tell me Charity was going to challenge?”

  “Sasha . . .”

  I’m so tired of hearing an ellipsis after my name, as if everyone is trying to be delicate with me. Isaac certainly isn’t, and I’m so distracted by the idea of him being here soon that I have to mentally review what Lilly says next before I realize she’s not following the script for making up with me.

  “Charity’s trying to get into Ashland. Her GPA isn’t that great but if she takes first chair it might help.”

  “You mean usurps,” I correct her. “Usurps first chair.”

  “It’s not yours,” Lilly shoots back. “She beat you in the challenge, fair and square. You couldn’t have landed a spot in a church choir with that performance.”

  My heart clenches in surprise, a surge of rage is injected into my veins along with blood. “And you can’t land Cole,” I tell her.

  “Hey, whoa, ladies,” Brooke says, the conversation clearly taking a turn from what she expected as well.

  “Screw you, Sasha,” Lilly yells, tears sending her makeup into a discolored flood. “Why do you have to be so damn mean?”

  Next to the laptop, my phone lights up with a text from Isaac.

  here

  He’s early. It’s barely dark enough for us to slip out into the trees without being seen, and if he thinks he’s coming inside to meet my parents he has grossly misjudged the situation.

  “Lilly, where did you learn those words? Certainly not from me,” Brooke says, trying hard to alleviate a situation that has gone all the way off the rails.

  “Screw you too, Brooke,” Lilly says, tears that match her skin now dripping onto her shirt. “If you won’t tell Sasha what you really think of her, then you’re a shitty friend too.”

  “Dude,” Brooke’s eyebrows have shot up to her wet hairline, mouth that typically has a retort ready to fire stuck in an open O.

  here

  Isaac’s second text doesn’t sit well with me, the inference that I’m supposed to leap at his call combined with Lilly’s suggestion that perhaps Brooke has said some not-so-perfect things about me behind my back makes me take a pic of my middle finger as a reply.

  THERE, I type.

  “Who are you texting?” Brooke asks.

  “Not your business.” I put my phone in my lap so she can’t see it. “But anything you said about me to Lilly is mine.”

  “You think everything is yours,” Lilly says, before Brooke can even open her mouth.

  “Were backbones on sale at Walmart or something?” I ask.

  “Fuck you, Sasha.” Lilly’s face is melting along with her clean vocabulary, streams of concealer now slipping into the sides of her mouth and coating her tongue when she speaks.

  “Guys, I think we should—”

  “No,” I cut Brooke off. “I think you should tell me exactly what you think of me. Right now. To my face. Anything you can say to Lilly you can say to me.”

  Kinda what I had in mind but need you down here for that . . .

  Isaac’s text lights up in my lap, in response to my middle finger pic.

  “Tell her, Brooke,” Lilly says.

  “Sasha . . .” Brooke’s voice is unsure, watery, something I’ve never heard from her. “It’s just that . . .”

  “Say it,” Lilly pushes. “Everyone thinks it anyway.”

  Brooke straightens and looks right at me, regal as hell even with a smear of pizza grease across her chest and a pimple in the middle of her forehead.

  “You’re a bitch,” she says, just as my phone vibrates, tumbling from my lap.

  Gotta go

  I hear the low purr of a motorcycle as he fires up the engine, the noise sending my heart into a patter to match, black spots careening across everything I see as I push back from my desk, chair rolling across my phone and crunching the screen.

  “A total bitch,” Lilly agrees, her face briefly visible between flashes of black as I run to the window, my heart leading the way. It’s pushing, beating frantically in a voiceless scream to tell him to come back, to stay, to lay with me in the moonlight and mold me into what I want to be.

  The fastest way between two points is a straight line. Shanna knows this because I know this, and her heart feeds my brain, blood pulsing up and coming back down, knowledge and need combining to create the perfect storm as our body hits the window.

  My head hits first, skull shattering the glass and making way for hands that search for purchase, feet kicking as if the air may suddenly coalesce. It doesn’t, and I fall, branches tearing at my limbs, blood and blackness in my vision and two girls’ voices from above calling . . .

  Sasha?

  Sasha?

  Sasha?

  I hit the ground and all the air is knocked out of me, a perpetual exhale that won’t let me pull anything back in, my lungs flattened by the impact. I try but get only a hissing sound and the coppery taste of blood as I suck in streams of warmth running down both sides of my face. I try again to breathe, and this time it’s a gurgle as blood surges up from inside as well, rising to meet what I’m swallowing.

  I’ve managed a third breath when Mom and Dad come running, the side door slamming behind them. Mom’s hands are on me, touching, pulling, pushing, grabbing, but they come back slick with blood so dark it’s as black as the sky, fragments of glass sparkling with their own constellations on her palms.

  “Don’t touch her,” Dad is yelling. “They said don’t try to move her.”

  He’s got one hand on his cell and the other on Mom’s shoulder, but it’s too late. She’s already done everything she can think of: propped my head, wiped my face, told me it’s going to be okay. All the things that got me through fevers and colds, chicken pox and strep throat. But I didn’t have a tree branch stuck in my side then, or a flap of my scalp hanging to one side.

  I move my hands, for what I don’t know. I don’t have the strength to raise my arms, so I dig into the ground, making ten tiny holes on either side of my body as I try to find something to root myself to. Mom is hurting more than helping, Dad keeps saying our address over and over, even though surely emergency services has got it by now, and still I can hear my friends through what’s left of my window, vaguely calling for me.

  What I don’t hear is Isaac coming back.

  I clench my teeth as Mom reaches for my face, trying to find some way to put my head back together. Maybe something she picked up in one of her crafting classes will finally be useful.

  “Don’t touch her,” Dad says again, leaning over us both. “You’ll make it worse.”

  “Jesus Christ, Mark,” Mom says. “How? Look at her!”

  “They’ll be here,” Dad says, repe
ating it as if it will make the ambulance come faster. “They’ll be here. They’re on their way.”

  “They’re on the way.” Mom puts her face right down to mine and says it a third time, in case I hadn’t picked up on that fact.

  The sirens can be heard from miles away. Dad leaves Mom and me under the tree to wave them down, just in case GPS fails them, I suppose. Mom puts her cheek next to mine, coating her own in blood and accidentally inhaling some of my hair, which hurts like hell when she finally pulls back and part of my scalp follows.

  “Sasha,” she whispers. “What have you done?”

  My fingers dig deeper into the dirt, the cold solidness of it giving me more comfort than she can. I’ve done nothing, and I know it. It was Shanna who made this leap, her heart leading the way though our body shared the fall. Spasmodic light fills the yard, the branches of the tree we lie under dancing across the side of the house.

  “Ma’am, we need you to move aside,” a woman says, replacing my panicking mother with something I can relate to. She’s all calculation, her eyes skimming over me in a moment, decisions being made immediately.

  I like her.

  Her partner hovers on the other side of me, his gloved fingers barely touching me as a cool assessment is made. They have their own language in glances and unspoken words, but the ones they do speak I must refute so that they will understand. Blood pressure. Heart rate.

  “It’s not mine,” I say. These are my first words after falling, and they are tinged with copper. Still, the truth tastes good.

  “Yes, it’s going to be fine,” the female medic says.

  “No.” I let go of a fistful of earth, grimy blood-streaked hand capturing her wrist so that she is forced to hear me. “My heart is not mine.”

  “Whoever’s it is, it needs blood,” she says matter-of-factly. “You don’t have much left.”