Beautiful Darkness
Page 15

I was trying not to listen, when I smel ed something burning, maybe an overheating engine or a lighter. I looked around the room. It wasn't coming from Mr. Lee, the most frequent source of any horrible smel in my history class. No one else seemed to notice it.
The noise grew louder, into a confusing blur of crashing -- ripping, talking, yel ing. Lena.
L?
No answer. Above the noise, I heard Lena mumbling lines of poetry, and not the kind you send someone for Valentine's Day.
Not waving but drowning ...
I recognized the poem, and it wasn't good. Lena reading Stevie Smith was only one step up from the darkest Sylvia Plath and The Bell Jar kind of day. It was Lena's red flag, like Link listening to the Dead Kennedys or Amma chopping vegetables for spring rol s with her cleaver.
Hang on, L. I'm coming.
Something had changed, and before it could change back, I grabbed my books and took off running. I was out of the room before Mr. Lee's next sigh.
Reece wouldn't look at me when I walked through the door. She pointed to the stairs. Ryan, Lena's youngest cousin, was sitting on the bottom step with Boo, looking sad. When I tousled her hair, she held her finger to her lips. "Lena's having a nerve breakup. We're supposed to be quiet until Gramma and Mamma get home."
That was an understatement.
The door was open a crack, and when I pushed on it, the hinges creaked, like I was walking into a crime scene. It looked like the room had been tossed. The furniture was upside down or busted up or missing altogether. The entire room was covered with pages of books, pages torn and ripped and plastered al along the wal s and ceiling and floor. Not a book was left on the shelf. It looked like a library had exploded. Some of the charred pages piled on the floor were stil smoking. The only thing I didn't see was Lena.
L? Where are you?
I scanned the room. The wal over her bed wasn't covered with the remnants of the books Lena loved. It was covered in something else.
Nobody the dead man & Nobody the living
Nobody is giving in & Nobody is giving
Nobody hears me but just Nobody cares
Nobody fears me but Nobody just stares
Nobody belongs to me & Nobody remains
No Nobody knows Nothing
All that remains are remains
Nobody and Nobody. One of them was Macon, right? The dead man.
Who was the other? Me?
Was that who I was now, Nobody?
Did al guys have to work this hard to figure out their girlfriends? Untwisting the twisted poems written al over their wal s in Sharpie or cracked plaster?
All that remains are remains.
I touched the wal , smearing away the word remains.
Because al that remained was not remains. There had to be more than that -- more to Lena and me, more to everything. It wasn't just Macon. My mom was gone, but as the last few months had shown, some part of her was with me. I had been thinking about her more and more.
Claim yourself. It had been my mom's message to Lena, written in the page numbers of books, scattered across the floor of her favorite room at Wate's Landing. Her message to me didn't have to be written anywhere, not in numbers or letters or even dreams.
Lena's floor looked a little like the study that day, books lying open al over the place. Except these books were missing their pages, which sent a different message altogether.
Pain and guilt. It was the second chapter of every book my Aunt Caroline had given me about the five stages of grief, or however many stages of grief people say there are. Lena had covered shock and denial, the first two, so I should've seen this one coming. For her, I guess it meant giving up one of the things she loved the most. Books.
At least, I hoped that's what it meant. I stepped careful y around the empty, burnt book jackets. I heard the muffled sobs before I saw her.
I opened the closet door. She was huddled in the darkness, hugging her knees to her chest.
It's okay, L.
She looked up at me, but I wasn't sure what she was seeing.
My books all sounded like him. I couldn't make them stop.
It doesn't matter. Everything's okay now.
I knew things wouldn't stay that way for long. Nothing was okay. Somewhere along the way between angry and scared and miserable, she had turned a corner. I knew from experience there was no turning back.
Gramma had final y intervened. Lena would be going back to school next week, like it or not. Her choice was school or the thing nobody said out loud. Blue Horizons, or whatever the Caster equivalent was. Until then, I was only al owed to see her when I dropped off her homework. I trudged al the way up to her house with a Stop & Steal bag's worth of meaningless worksheets and essay questions.
Why me? What did I do?
I guess I'm not supposed to be around anyone who gets me worked up. That's what Reece said.
I'm what gets you worked up?
I could feel something like a smile tugging at the back of my mind.
Of course you are. Just not the way they think.
When her bedroom door final y swung open, I dropped the sack and pul ed her into my arms. It had only been a few days since I'd seen her in person, but I missed the smel of her hair, the lemons and rosemary. The familiar things. Today I couldn't smel it, though. I buried my face in her neck.
I missed you, too.
Lena looked up at me. She was wearing a black T-shirt and black tights, cut into al kinds of crazy slits up and down her legs. Her hair was squirming loose from the clasp at the back of her neck. Her necklace hung down, twisting on its chain. Her eyes were ringed with darkness that wasn't makeup. I was worried. But when I looked past her to her bedroom, I was even more worried.