Translucent (15 page)

Chapter 15

“Oh God, oh
God . . .” Trembling from head to toe, I collapsed to my knees in front of the body. The girl sprawled on her side, not moving, not breathing, her skin a bleached white under the glare of my headlights. Drops of blood seeped into her blonde hair and crawled down her cheeks like hideous black beetles.
Drip . . . drip . . . drip . . .

I was aware of Megan stooping next to me. For once, speechless.

Strange details registered. The gentle mist settling through the high beams, the whir of a fan under the hood, the new car smell wafting from the open door. Those details seemed to belong to another life, another universe. To which I no longer belonged.

“She was just standing there,” said Megan, her breath pungent with marijuana. “Why was she just standing there?”

“I . . . I didn’t see her,” I said.

“Should I check her pulse?” she asked.

I nodded, my throat too dry to form words. Megan reached in, probed under her neck, held her finger there.

But I already knew. I’d hit her way too fast. Hadn’t been looking, hadn’t been paying attention.

Megan shook her head and pulled her hand away.
Dead.

A sick dread welled up in my stomach.

What had we done?

I scanned our surroundings. Gnarled oak trees, lonely streetlamps, a windy road.

No one saw
.

I pushed the thought from my head.

We’d stopped in the middle of the street. Someone would come soon. Someone would come, and everything would be okay.

9-1-1.

Call 9-1-1.

Everything would be okay.

I pulled out my phone, but my hands shook so badly I dropped it. The phone bounced on the asphalt, the case cracked off. I picked it up again, began pressing buttons. The home screen, my contacts list, the home screen, my contacts list, my recent calls, the home screen. My fingers moved randomly, didn’t know where to go.

I couldn’t think, couldn’t make a call.

My insides seemed to be shrinking, like I was going to throw up.

“Leona, we’re high,” Megan breathed. “They’re going to come, and we’re going to be high. They’re going to smell it. That’s like a year in prison.”

I dropped the phone again and began shaking violently, my teeth chattering. So cold, so cold inside. “I’m . . . I’m not supposed to drive anyone. I was speeding.”

She looked at me. “What do we do?”

“Megan . . .” my voice cracked, “Megan, I killed her.”

“It was both of us,” she said firmly. “I was the one who . . . it was both of us, okay?”

I nodded. It was both of us.

“What do we do?” she said again.

I glanced around again. It was past midnight, a Wednesday morning. No one around. Only a few houses nestled back in the trees, their windows dark.

“No one saw, right?” I whispered.

Megan peered sideways at me. “You mean . . . if we just left her here?”

“We should call 9-1-1,” I said.

“Yeah,” she croaked. “We should.”

My eyes welled with tears, and I cradled my face in my hands. “Oh Jesus, oh Jesus . . .”

She rubbed my back. “It’s going to be okay.”

“No, it’s not!” I snapped, jerking my head up. “She’s
dead
, Megan.”

She stared at me. “What do you want to do, Leona?”

“If we went home . . .” I swallowed hard. “If we went home and pretended it never happened . . . I mean, it wasn’t our fault, right? How would they know?”

Megan nodded. “She was just standing there . . . like
she
was high.”

I glanced up, hopeful. “You think she was high?”

“I don’t know, she just looked . . . like . . . in a trance.”

My gaze went back to the girl’s face. The full horror of it had only begun to hit me. “A hit and run,” I said. “That’s manslaughter . . . if they find the body . . .”

“How are they going to know it’s us?” she said. “Your parents don’t even know we drove the car.”

“They’ll know, they always know,” I moaned, and a tear dropped off my cheeks. “I don’t want to go to jail!”

“I’m going to go to jail too,” she said.

“What if we hide it?” I said. “Hide the body?”

“Isn’t that even worse?”

I nodded slowly, and the sickness in my stomach deepened, became an aching chasm. “I’ll grab her arms, you grab her legs.”

She said nothing for a long time, and humiliation flared in my cheeks. I was a monster to even suggest it.

But then she said quietly, “We’re really going to do this?”

“Do you want to go to jail?” I said. “Do you really want to go to jail?”

“What if we get caught?”

“Grab her legs,” I said, frantic now. “Before someone comes.”

Megan shuffled to the girl’s feet, and I looped my arms under her shoulders, running off pure adrenaline now. We lifted together, and the girl’s head lulled backward, scraping my shirt with blood.
Evidence.

I cursed and hauled her faster, scurrying, half stumbling, to the back of my car. Trunk open, we piled her in, readjusted her limbs so she’d fit. I gave her one more lookover—she was really pretty—then slammed the trunk.

That sound echoed off the trees, a sound that could never be taken back, and I knew right then that life would never, ever be the same again. The silence of the night throbbed in my ears.

Megan shook me gently. “Where should we take her?”

“I know a place,” I said.

“Something’s wrong,” said
Megan, feeling around the bottom of her terrarium with pinched eyebrows. “I can’t feel Salamander.”

“Your snake?” I sat up on her bed and shoved my homework aside, instantly alert.

“I think she’s gone.”

“You mean . . . she’s dead?”

“No, I can’t feel her body anywhere. She’s not in her favorite spots, or along the sides . . . or anywhere.”

A wave of prickles swept down my arms. I leapt off her bed, suddenly feeling the creepy-crawlies everywhere, and brushed my arms and legs frantically.

Megan withdrew her hand and sealed the terrarium. “That’s so weird.”

“Could she . . . could it have gotten out?” I shuddered and pushed aside the image of Ashley Lacroix’s body in my trunk, shelving it for later.

“Look, the screen was sealed the whole time,” she said. “No holes.”

“Shake the cage. Maybe she’s hiding.”

Megan hesitated, then she rocked the terrarium back and forth. Water sloshed from the bowl, and wood chips skittered around. She stopped rocking.

Nothing moved.

I tapped the glass with my knuckles. “Salamander, wake up!”

She grabbed my hand. “Don’t tap on the glass. That’s mean.”

“You just said she was gone.”

“Yeah, well . . .”

I stared at her. “Megan, where’s your invisible snake?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Did it die? Did it get out? Did its body dissolve?”

“I don’t know, Leona. She was there yesterday, she’s not there today. I don’t know what happened to her.”

I went back
to the Lacroix residence the next night.

And the next. And the one after that. I put the dark matter on after my parents fell asleep, after their low voices faded off, and slipped out the back door, a nervous thrill buzzing in my veins.

As summer drew to an end and fall began, the nights took on a numbing chill, and my forays across town became icy, shivering affairs, nearly ending in hypothermia. I did it anyway. Soon it would be October, the season of Halloween and ghosts and all things spooky.

The best time to be invisible.

I could do anything, go anywhere, see anything. But really, I only wanted to see Emory Lacroix.

In the corner of his bedroom, I sat and watched him. I watched him pore over clues to Ashley’s murder, unaware that the murderer sat ten feet away. I watched him mourn for her. I studied him, learned his habits, became fascinated by him.

I got better at being quiet, and he didn’t notice me anymore.

Even though part of me wished he would.

I could help him.

Why did I keep coming? Why did I obsess over him and crave the knife twisting in my heart when he sobbed for her? Looking for closure, maybe. Sometimes, I fell asleep in his room and jolted awake at 3:00 a.m., shivering and terrified.

I never went back to her room.

But I knew why the dark matter had led me there, why it kept coaxing me back to their house, why it spoke to me and urged me to put it on night after night. Invisibility allowed me to experience things no human could ever experience, to see things no human could see, to hover over him like a ghost and look all I wanted, but never touch. Only by getting this close would I feel his pain, and only then would the urge begin to overpower me.

Now I understood where it was leading me.

I wanted to confess.

“Paper’s squishy, right?”
I said to Megan after school on Friday. “Like a sponge. When you write on it, it does this—” I held up a sheet of lined paper on which I’d penned an English free write, showing her the letters clearly indented on the back.

“Yeah, so?” she said.

“Now that I wrote on it, it’s thinner there, right?” I pointed to a letter stamped into the paper, excitement in my voice. “My pen compressed the paper.”

Her eyes narrowed. “You okay?”

“Sarah’s apparatus, it measures interference,” I said. “Interference happens when light passes through something invisible and skips to the other side, getting out of sync. So if something’s covered in dark matter, the thicker it is, the more it’ll offset the light, and the more interference you’ll get. Megan, it will measure
thickness
. Her apparatus will measure thickness.”

“And this is important . . .
why?
” she said, cocking her head.

“We can use it to read the journal. It was your idea, remember?”

“Oh come on, it’s never going to pick that up,” said Megan. “Paper’s already paper-thin to begin with. It doesn’t even have a thickness. It has zero thickness. It’s one atom thick.”

“No, it’s not,” I said.

“It’s not going to work, Leona.”

“I bet it will,” I said boastfully. “Come on, let’s try it.”

So we rummaged around for the invisible journal, shut the blinds and turned off the lights, and gathered around the apparatus. I opened the journal and began flipping through invisible pages, but hesitated, realizing the flaw in my plan. “We’re going to have to go letter by letter . . . this is going to take hours.”

“How about the last thing she wrote?” Megan suggested. “The last thing before she killed herself? That’s where the crazy’s going to be.”

“Brilliant.” Now how to find the last page she’d written on . . .

I picked a page at random and rubbed it between my fingers, closing my eyes to focus. The surface felt bumpy and pock-marked.

Writing
.

My pulse accelerated. I flipped another twenty pages or so and gently trailed my fingertips down the sheet. Again, bumpy.

So I flipped another twenty, and this time, the paper felt smooth and unblemished. A blank page.

I flipped back ten pages, concentration tight in my eyebrows. Bumpy.

Forward five. Smooth.

Back two. Smooth.

Back another two. A rutted texture mottled the top half of the page, but then the pad of my finger slid onto smooth ground. My eyes flew open. She’d written on the top half, but not the bottom.

This was the last page she’d written on.

My index finger slid horizontally, like I was reading braille out of thin air. At last, I honed in on the very last letter.

“Got it,” I said, bending the journal back so just that page hung down. I dipped it into the laser beam.

On the wall, the square edge of the paper swam through the red light, seeding tiny ripples. I moved it down until my index finger blocked the beam, then removed my finger.

A haze of red pulsated on the wall, random interference, but no letters.

“Move it around a bit,” said Megan.

I made tiny circles with the paper.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” she said. “It’s huge . . .”

“What? Where?” I said.

“Keep moving it—there! I think I see a P, but it’s reversed.”

And then I saw it too. A jagged shape floating in the smudge, barely visible—about a hundred times bigger than I’d expected. Only by moving it around did my eyes even register the pattern. Looping out of view was a monstrous letter P.

Megan grabbed a loose receipt and a pencil. “First letter . . . P . . . keep going.”

Thumbs sweaty on the page, I continued to slide it through the beam, making a circular motion. Huge letters flicked across the wall, tiny pieces at a time.

“That’s an I, and an H, and . . . an
S?
” Letter by letter, Megan copied it down, then stared at what she’d written. “Piss?”

“What?” I said, and the projected image jerked wildly. “No, no, no, keep going.” I resumed sliding the journal through the beam, trying not to shake so much. My hands were beginning to cramp up.

“A . . . G . . . N . . . T,” Megan muttered. “Wait, back up. That’s an I.” Her pencil eraser tore the receipt. “Okay, keep going.”

Sweat beaded on my forehead, and a gnawing ache spread through my stiffening knuckles. I needed to shake them out, but then we’d lose our place.

“D . . . L . . . I . . . U, maybe, then . . . uh . . .” she screwed up her eyes, “the number
eight? Dude, hold still.”

“I’m trying,” I said, my fingers twitching badly. I needed a break.

“Okay . . . E . . . R . . . Y . . . um, then . . . E . . . H . . . T . . .”

“Screw this.” I collapsed against her bed, exhausted, and leaned Sarah’s journal back against the nightstand. “What do we have so far?”

Megan sounded out what she’d written. “Piss ah nidliub ery eht. Is that a different language?”

“We scanned it backward,” I said. “Reverse the letters.”

“Oh. Duh.” She stared at the receipt another moment. “They’re building a ship.”

“What?”

“That’s what it says . . . they’re building a ship.”

“Did you hear
that?” Megan whispered, fumbling with the remote to pause the movie.

“Hear what?” I sat up in my sleeping bag and scanned her dark bedroom, lit in spooky shades of blue from the television. I was spending the night at her house again, since it was Friday. For the time being, we’d given up on translating Sarah’s journal . . . and figuring out what she’d meant about building a ship.

“I thought I heard footsteps,” said Megan.