Of Starlight

Chapter 1

“Avenge me,” whispered
the girl standing in my bedroom who should have been dead.

Her name was Ashley Lacroix, fifteen years old, blue eyed and blonde. I knew she should have been dead because I had seen her rotting corpse two hours ago in the wilderness around Rattlesnake Canyon Trail. I knew she should have been dead because I had killed her three months ago and dumped her body.

Now she stood in my bedroom, alive.

It wasn’t possible.

I stuttered, “How are . . . how are you . . . ?”

Her expression remained blank, like she wasn’t all there.

“Are you alive?” I finally blurted out.

“Alive?” She looked down at her arms. “I . . . I don’t actually know.”

“What do you want?” I croaked.

“I want you to avenge me,” she said. “I want you to kill it . . .
please
 . . . it’s not too late. You can still avenge me.”

Something was wrong. Something was very wrong. This girl in my bedroom, she couldn’t possibly be here. Those were
her
remains in the woods. I had left her there.

I was also naked.

Instead of clothes, I wore dark matter stretched over my skin to make me invisible, and I still hadn’t taken it off. Yet she had spoken to me. She had
seen
me.

“Are you real?” I asked. “Or am I just imagining this?”

“It’s like a dream . . .” She touched her forearm, her eyebrows pinched together. “You wonder if you’re dreaming . . . because you’re really not sure. It’s like that now . . . like I’m in a dream.”

“But I’m not dreaming.” I hesitated, then edged toward her and reached a trembling hand toward her arm. My finger contacted cool skin, and I jerked back. “I can touch you. You’re
real.
”

“I don’t know anymore,” she said.

“So you’re
not
real.” That had to be what she was saying. Just my imagination. “Did I kill you? Are you a ghost?”

“I don’t remember . . .” Her voice carried the melancholy tone of someone who had given up. “I think I’m only a memory.”

A chill crept up my spine. “But how are you here? You’re . . . you’re dead, right?”

She said nothing.

“You can’t be a memory,” I said. “I don’t remember you. I never even met you.”

“Not
your
memory,” she said.

Her words caught me off guard, and I offered, “Emory’s?”

“You can still avenge me,” she whispered. “It’s not too late.”

“But I killed you,” I said. “Do you want me to kill myself?”

She continued to stare at me, and suddenly, my heart began beating much faster. “I
didn’t
kill you?” I breathed. 

No, this was fantasy. My subconscious was making things up, grasping for meaning when there was none. This couldn’t be real. I had seen her bones tonight.

Or had
that
been fake?

Suddenly, Ashley straightened up and spoke in a robotic voice. “My name is Ashley Lacroix, and I am attempting to communicate with you. I’m trapped in a dark room, which I think is my bedroom, but I’m still not sure. I can feel things around me—all my stuff and my bed and my pet mouse cage—but it’s like it’s all dead. I have no idea how I got here, or how long I’ve been here, or what this place even is, but I know something terrible has happened, and I think it’s all my fault. Is there anyone else out there? If you receive this message, please help me.” Her eyes swam in and out of focus. “I think I might be dead . . .”

She was in some kind of trance, speaking from beyond the grave.

I stared at her in disbelief. I was seeing her
right now, hearing her, touching her . . . and yet, something about this Ashley didn’t feel right. Like a projection, almost.

Dark matter.

My hand shot to my face, and my fingernail sliced down the bridge of my nose, cutting the dark matter like a knife. I widened the seam and began to peel it back. First my nose, then my cheeks, then my eyes. It unsuctioned from my eyeballs like a contact lens. I blinked.

My room was empty.

I lowered it back over my eyes, and Ashley Lacroix was still there, her eyes wide.

When I pulled it off, she vanished. But I could still touch her.

Because dark matter was still on my hands. I peeled it off like a pair of tight gloves, stripped down to my hips, then groped the place where she’d been standing. Just empty air. Heavy breaths slipped in and out of my lungs.

She wasn’t really there.

But part of me could still feel her. Like there was still a presence in my room. My own fear, probably. I quickly put away the dark matter and changed into pajamas, feeling a self-conscious heat on the back of my neck despite being alone. So dark matter was showing me things that weren’t actually there.

Or maybe it showed me what
was
truly there?

Could Ashley Lacroix, whom I had murdered, be standing a few feet away in an alternate plane of existence, just watching me? The image gave me the willies.

“She wants us
to avenge her,” I told my best friend Megan the next morning, pushing past her into her house. “I saw her again last night.”

“What?” Megan followed me into her bedroom and closed the door behind us. “Who?”

“Ashley. When I put it on, I saw her.”

“You saw
Ashley?
” she said.

“Like that time in Broida Hall,” I said, pacing the room. “Remember that blonde girl we saw? That was
her.
We saw her because we were wearing dark matter. It messes with our eyes, it shows us things.”

“You wore it again last night?” Her eyes narrowed. “I thought you were going for a moonlit walk on the beach with your new boy toy?”

“He’s not my boy toy,” I snapped. “Besides, he cancelled.”

“Oh boo hoo,” she said. “So instead you got invisible. Was that you in my room last night? I could feel something in my room.”

“I didn’t go anywhere near your room,” I said.

She put her hands on her hips. “Where’d you go, then?”

“Uh . . . nowhere.” I glanced away. “I just wanted to put it on, that’s all.” If she knew I had used it to lead Emory straight to Ashley’s dead body, she would kill me.

“Leona, we need to talk about this.”

“About what?”

“You and Emory. You hanging out with him. You can’t do that.”

“I’m not an idiot, Megan.”

“Yeah, because that would be creepy and wrong on so many levels, seeing as he has no idea you murdered his sister.”

I stared at her. “Oh, so now it’s just me who killed her? What happened to
us?
”

“
Us
, whatever.” She rolled her eyes. “I’m not the one trying to suck his dick.”

“I’m not trying to suck his dick,” I snapped. “I’m just trying to be nice to him after . . . you know, after what we did. How’d we get on this topic, anyway?”

“You brought it up,” she said, arms crossed.

“Megan, I
saw
her last night. She was standing in my room, just standing there, but I could only see her when I had the dark matter on. Otherwise she was invisible. We had a whole conversation. But it seemed like she was only half there or something. She kept saying,
Avenge me
.” 

“So you were talking to yourself?” said Megan.

“Well, yeah. She wasn’t
actually
there.”

“Or her ghost?”

“I think I was talking to my subconscious,” I said. “I’ve been thinking a lot about Ashley lately, and I think dark matter showed me what I’d been thinking about. She told me to avenge her, which I think was my subconscious telling me what I needed to do . . . what
we
need to do.” 

“She wants us to avenge her?”

“Yeah. I mean, she would, if she was alive.”

“But we’re the ones that killed her,” said Megan. “Avenging her would mean killing us, right?”

“I know, it’s weird. But I think I’ve figured it out. I want to show you something.” I dug out my smartphone.  

“You’re not going to kill
me
, are you Leona?”

“Shh—” I said, tapping to my web browser. “I looked up the word
avenge
, and here’s what it means . . .” I read from the screen, “Inflict harm on behalf of oneself or someone else previously wronged or harmed.”

“I could have told you that,” she said.

I looked up at her. “But see, it’s not like
revenge
, where you get back at someone specific.
Avenge
is more general. It would just mean violence on her behalf, on Ashley’s behalf.”

“I don’t get it,” said Megan.

I took a deep breath and put away the phone. “What it means is we need to go out and hurt people that are hurting others, like criminals and rapists and stuff. We need to make up for the fact that we killed her by doing good.”

“By killing rapists . . .” Megan cocked her head to the side, considering it. “I could get into that.”

“Yeah, but not by killing them,” I said. “We’d just stop them from committing crimes. That way we’d actually be doing good.”

“And we’d earn back our heaven points?” she said hopefully.

“Think about it. Who better to tackle crime than someone who’s invisible?”

Her eyes widened. “We have a superpower! We could be like superheroes.”

This is why dark matter found us,” I said. “So we could avenge Ashley’s death. So we could use invisibility to do good.”

“Hold on, hold on,” said Megan, holding up her palm. “Maybe we’re taking this a little fast, Leona. Yesterday, you were terrified of this stuff. You thought it was telling you things. I mean, we still don’t even know what happened to Sarah. Now you want to use it? Like
really
use it?”

I thought back to the episode in Megan’s bathroom, which seemed like a lifetime ago even though it was only yesterday. Someone invisible had written
help me
in the mirror—she had identified herself as Sarah using a Ouija board.

But Sarah’s ashes were interred in the Forest Glade columbarium. We had checked.

Now I saw the similarities.

The corpse of Ashley Lacroix lay rotting in Rattlesnake Canyon, I had seen it. But last night she had appeared in my bedroom.

“No, this is different,” I muttered. “Sarah was real. We weren’t wearing dark matter when we saw her message. She left footprints, she was there. But Ashley wasn’t. When I took off the dark matter, there was nothing in my room. No sign of her. I think she’s just a part of my subconscious.”

“But I saw her too,” Megan said softly. “When we snuck into USCB . . . that blonde girl.”

I nodded grimly. “She appeared to both of us. All I know is we need to avenge her. That’s what she would have wanted. I know that’s what she would have wanted. Maybe then we’ll be able to sleep at night.”

“Santa Barbara doesn’t have any crime,” said Megan. “We won’t do much good around here.”

“What about Oxnard?” I offered. “We could drive out there and plant ourselves in a bad neighborhood, wait for something to go down.”

A smile crept over Megan’s face. “We could go tonight . . .”

My phone buzzed in my pocket. I pulled it out. One look at the text message from Emory Lacroix sent my heart galloping.

Meet me at Thousand Steps. I need to talk to you.

Recessed in the
cliffs and nicknamed
Thousand Steps
, the crumbling concrete staircase from the Mesa to the beach a few hundred feet below wasn’t nearly a thousand steps. A few hundred, maybe. But it felt like ten thousand as I descended risers slimy with standing pools of algae behind Emory Lacroix, my legs trembling.

Last night, I had led him to his sister’s body.

Today he hadn’t said a word. Had he pieced it together? Did he know I was the one who had dumped her there?

The bottom few stairs eroded away into a slimy rock face, where I would surely eat shit. Emory hopped onto the sand and reached back to help me. I took his hand and navigated the last few stairs, skidded an inch, then lost my balance and pitched forward. He caught me and held me a split-second too long before he set me down on my feet, leaving me lightheaded from his touch.

I knelt and fumbled with my shoelaces so I wouldn’t have to look at him, my pulse racing. But I did look at him in my periphery. He kicked off his sandals and rolled his jeans up over sinewy calves, then stood and tossed blond hair off his forehead, gazing out at the waves. I tugged and tugged at the double knot in my laces, but it might as well have been iron.

“The reason I wanted to talk to you,” he said, stooping to heft a baseball-sized stone—was he going to crack my head open with it? He turned the stone over in his hand, his fingers seeking out the best grip. “Something happened last night . . . something fucking weird.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, still struggling with my shoelaces, my eyes frozen on the rock in his hand.

His forearm tensed suddenly, knuckles white, tendons pulling against his veiny skin like cables about to snap. Through gritted teeth, he said, “And now I know the truth. Now I know what happened to her.”

Forget the laces. I yanked the shoes off without untying them, tossed them aside, and stuck my toes in warm sand. When I stood up next to him, the nausea rushed back from last night, and I gave in to the urge to swallow.

The rock in his hand, I decided, was actually a boulder.

He was going to kill me with it, he was going to bash my brains in and pitch me into the ocean, where the sharks would tear me apart limb by limb. He had brought me here to die.

Emory drew the rock back at the same time he lunged forward, and his arm unfurled like a whip. The rock took off like a bullet over the waves and seemed to hang in the air forever before it crashed into the sea out by the buoys.

“Whoa,” I said. “You got an arm.”

“Quarterback,” he said.

I gaped at him. “Really?”

He crouched and scooped up a handful of sand. “Nah, never got much playing time. I was second string last year.” He let the sand slip through his fingers. “This would have been my year.”