My dearest darkest, p.7
My Dearest Darkest, page 7
“So,” Finch finally said. “What made you interested in learning about all this weird stuff around Rainwater? I didn’t take you for the type to get into ghost stories—or whatever this is.”
Selena’s lips twitched into a small frown. Finch instantly regretted the question.
“I was bored,” she finally said. “And I think it makes Simon happy to talk to someone about this kind of thing.”
Finch waited for Selena to ask her what had drawn her there, but instead, she kept walking.
Finch gulped. Come on, Finch. You can keep a conversation going for fifteen minutes. It’s not that far to Ulalume.
“H-How do you know Simon?” Finch finally managed.
Based on the way Selena’s eyes fluttered and briefly rolled into the back of her head, Finch wondered if maybe she should have stayed quiet. But after a second, she sighed, seeming to admit to herself that she couldn’t just ignore Finch when she spoke to her.
“His parents are divorced. Mom lives here, dad lives in Boston. My parents are his dad’s neighbors. Simon’s been spending summers there since we were kids, and we naturally became friends. Now that I go to Ulalume, I get to bug him all year round.”
“Oh.” Finch smiled. “Boston. That’s cool. I always wanted to live in the big city.”
Selena shot her a sideways look. “It’s not that big of a city.”
“I grew up in a town of under two thousand people. It’s big to me.”
“Rainwater must be a real bustling metropolis to you then.”
Finch laughed, but a moment later, the silence returned. Selena took out her phone to text, and Finch worried at a loose string on the hem of her skirt.
“You know,” Finch said after a minute, “I’m sorry if I made a bad impression the first time we met—I really didn’t mean to get you in trouble. I feel terrible about it.”
Selena scoffed, though it wasn’t a wholly unfriendly sound. “You’ve really got to stop apologizing so much. You sound like a total suck-up.”
“You think I’m a suck-up?”
Selena bit back a laugh. “One of the worst I’ve ever met.”
Finch laughed at that, too, even if it was probably meant to be an insult. She snuck a glance at Selena to find her biting her lip and looking at the pavement and the plant debris under their feet. This close, Finch could see a few zits on her jawline carefully hidden under her makeup. The breeze tousled the ends of her hair.
“Um.” Finch pursed her lips and took a breath. She suddenly felt quite warm—it must be the humidity. “There’s, um, something I should tell you.”
Selena wrinkled her nose and bunched her mouth up in a small smile. “You like Simon, right? I think half the goal of that meetup was to woo you with his awkward allure. I’d say it was the whole point if I didn’t know how obsessed with all of that stuff he actually is.”
“What? No.” Finch shook her head. “I just met him.”
Selena bit the tip of her tongue and chuckled. “Fair enough. Is that a taste thing or a gay thing?”
“A gay thi—um, no. Not so much.” Not thinking, Finch blurted out, “But I saw you and your girlfriend earlier.”
Selena froze. Her steps stopped and an empty look passed over her face.
“I saw you kissing that redhead this morning when I was walking to Simon’s,” Finch admitted. Not entirely knowing why, she added, “I’m sorry.”
Out of nowhere, Selena was grabbing Finch by the wrist and pulling her into the forest. Finch yelped and tried desperately not to trip on roots as Selena dragged her along. Finally, once they were hidden from the road, Selena let go and whipped around, golden blond hair spinning with her.
Finch pressed her back into a tree. The bark bit at her skin through her dress. Selena got up close to her face, looming over her. One arm pressed into the tree, trapping her, while the other pointed a finger between her eyes.
“If you breathe a word of that to anyone,” she snarled, “I will end you. I’ll—”
Finch threw up her hands. “Selena, I’m not going to tell anyone. I would never do that.”
Selena drew back a bit, eyebrows pinched. “What?”
“If you’re not comfortable with people knowing you’re with a girl, I won’t tell anyone.” Finch slowly lowered her hand. “Promise.”
Selena blinked, furrowing her eyebrows. Her stare was piercing, made more so by the way the fog rolling in made her green eyes seem to glow. She slowly moved away, running her hands through her hair and pinching the bridge of her nose. She gazed out at the pines, jaw working. Finch eased away from the tree, wrapping her arms around herself.
Almost a minute passed of Finch waiting for Selena to snap at her again. Instead, the other girl hardened her expression—maybe, to stop herself from crying. Finch hadn’t considered how tender of an issue this would be.
“You want to go back to school?” Finch finally asked.
Selena shook her head as if it would dislodge a thought. “Yeah. Right, yeah.”
Slowly, they made their way out of the woods, and once they were by the road again, a silence fell over them. Cars sped around the bends to their left and looked as if they were about to go up on two wheels and flip. The sky grew darker with clouds overhead, and mist blew in thicker from the sea.
“It’s not that I’m afraid of people knowing I’m bi,” Selena finally said, looking straight ahead. Her shoulders relaxed. “It’s…Kyra. The girl you saw. I don’t want people to think we’re together. Because we’re not, and we have a…messy history.”
“Oh.” Finch nodded. “I see.”
“That’s it? You don’t want to know why?”
“Do you want to talk about it?” Finch asked.
Selena hesitated. “I—no. Not really.”
“Then no, I don’t. But…thank you for trusting me with that.”
Selena tilted her face toward the sky, taking a breath and exhaling it as a sigh.
“Don’t make me regret it.”
Six
The next night, Finch was almost out the door when Sumera said, “Hey, are you headed somewhere?”
She turned. Sumera paused the true crime documentary she’d been watching—she seemed to have quite a thing for them, Finch had discovered, which was nice seeing as they had that in common. She had her dark brown hair up in a bun and a white sheet mask over her face.
“Oh—yeah.” Finch rubbed the back of her neck. “Going to the tunnels.”
“By yourself?” Sumera frowned.
“I, um, forgot something down there the other day. Going to find it.” Finch opened the door. “Anyway—”
“Let me send you a map.” Sumera pulled out her phone and AirDropped a picture to Finch. “That way you won’t get lost. It can get confusing down there.”
“Thanks, Sumera.” Finch saved the picture, a hand-drawn map of the tunnels that looked fairly weathered, like maybe it had been passed around a fair amount, shoved in Ulalume girls’ pockets and backpacks as they navigated beneath the school. “That’s super nice of you.”
She shrugged. “Any time. I used to go down to the tunnels a lot last year—mapped out most of them. If you ever need a guide, let me know.”
Finch shook her head. “I-I’m okay. Thank you, though.”
Sumera studied her for a second, fingers twisting a blanket thread around her finger over and over. Finally, she said, “Are you all right? You seem…tense.”
“Me? Tense? Never,” Finch lied, voice cracking. She held up a hand and waved. “Anyway, I’ll just be a minute. Maybe I can catch the end of that documentary.”
“Sounds like a plan. See you later, Finch.”
“See ya!”
Finch closed the door behind her, her pale eyes a little brighter than before. She wasn’t exactly the most popular person back home, so it was still a little surprising to have someone who wanted to spend time with her. She definitely liked the idea of being friends with someone as cool as Sumera, though.
After making her way down to the tunnels, Finch was drawn to Nerosi’s room the same way as before. Concrete walls soon shifted into dirt, the thick, white roots with their flickering lights knotted in the ceiling above her, casting their strange light down onto her.
When she reached the end of the passageway, Nerosi appeared from a shimmering ripple in the air. She was in the middle of braiding her hair, her lithe fingers taking their time weaving the strands together.
“You’re back!” She grinned. “It feels like it’s been so long.”
Finch tried not to wince at that—being trapped in this room with no one to talk to for days on end must be absolute torture. Maybe she should start making a point of coming down here more, if only to preserve Nerosi’s sanity.
“Sorry it took so long—I wanted to wait until I’d actually found something.”
Nerosi’s face brightened. “Oh? Any luck?”
Finch nodded. She took out her phone, which she’d used to take a few pictures of Simon’s closet door, and held the screen up for Nerosi to see.
She cocked her head to the side. “That’s…a lot of string.”
“Oh, yes. My friend’s methods are a little eccentric.”
Finch almost stumbled over the word. Could she call him that? They’d only spoken a few times over the week Finch had been in Rainwater. At what point did she get to call someone a friend?
She restarted, “Anyway, he found evidence that, maybe, something happened to a group of teenagers down here. Does the name Killing Howard ring any bells?”
Nerosi’s eyes widened. She was quiet for a moment before she began to bob her head, slow at first, then quicker as she said, “I—yes. I think I remember…that they were like you. Humans who came down here and spoke to me sometimes the last time I was here.” She blinked, looking around the room. “I forgot I was here before. But that can’t have been too long ago. Do you know when they might have been here last? A couple months?”
Finch bit her lip. “Um. Not exactly. Think more in the ballpark of…two decades. Give or take.”
“What?” Nerosi’s mouth hung open. “Two decades? That can’t be true. How could I have been in the void for…” she trailed off, mouth curving into a frown. She wrapped her arms around herself. “Almost twenty years.”
Not knowing what else to say, Finch whispered, “I’m so sorry.”
“Time moves in strange ways when you’re alone.” Nerosi righted herself, straightening her shoulders. “I suppose that explains why my memories are so foggy. But Killing Howard—I definitely remember them. They came down here to see me and play their music. Honestly, they were pretty bad at first.”
“You don’t know what happened to them, would you?” Finch asked. “Or any information about them? Like their names?”
“Names…no, not right now. I’m sorry.” Nerosi blinked, as if just realizing what Finch had said before that. “Something happened to them?”
Finch inhaled sharply. Maybe she needed to stop asking Nerosi these kinds of questions. “They vanished. Nobody has seen them since 2004.”
“That’s awful.” Nerosi sank down, sitting back and crossing her legs. She still floated a few inches off the ground, weightless as always. “They were my friends, I think. I used to…help them. With little favors.”
Finch paused. “Favors? What do you mean?”
“Oh, yes! I meant to tell you.” Nerosi hopped back up. She held out her hand, and the air around it began to distort, rippling and turning shades of blue and pink and green. “It seems I’m not totally powerless after all.”
Finch drew back. While entering the room hadn’t given her a headache like it had the last few times, staring into the distortion in Nerosi’s hand did. “What is that?”
“I’m not exactly sure, but when I control it, I can…change things.” She pointed to one of the candles. “Watch this.”
Her hands shimmered as she spun them around each other slowly as if through water. A colorful ripple appeared around some of the fallen candles, blurring them from view. Nerosi focused, pursing her lips, before throwing her hands out.
When the distortion vanished, the candles had doubled in size, the white wax now starkly black.
While Finch’s jaw fell open, Nerosi shot her a grin. “See?”
“That’s impossible,” Finch breathed. She reached down and picked up one of the candles. She rubbed the wax with her thumb, expecting a fine layer of black to come off, but it didn’t. It was solid in her hand.
Nerosi shrugged. “Maybe not. When you mentioned Killing Howard, I remembered how I used to do things like that for them. Little favors—polishing their guitars, fixing their amps, turning one-dollar bills into twenties…”
Finch’s mouth hung open. “So you can…change reality? Manipulate it to your will?”
“Yes—that seems like a good way to describe it.” Nerosi stared down at her hands, eyes tracing the scars along her arms. “I couldn’t tell you how, and I don’t think I could do more than change little things, but I know that when Killing Howard used to come down here, helping them made me feel more…grounded. Like there was more of me in this world than just this little fragment. And I didn’t fade away like I did the other night.”
While Finch was listening, she still couldn’t tear her eyes away from the candle in her hand. Ghosts, she could understand. She could maybe even wrap her head around strange deer with too many eyes lurking in the woods. But this? It seemed too much like—well, magic.
Nerosi went on, “Maybe, we could make a sort of…trade. If I’m lucky, helping you will be the key to getting myself out of this room.”
“Trade what, exactly?” Finch asked.
Nerosi shrugged. “That depends. What do you want, Finch?”
Finch paused. She hadn’t thought about that in some time. For so long, her goal had been getting into Ulalume. Now that she had it, it was hard to imagine what else she could want.
Aside from the obvious. But Finch doubted that Nerosi could use her ability to bring back the dead.
“I…I’m not sure.” Finch bit her lip. “Let me think about it. Maybe I can find a little more information about Killing Howard and come back in a day or two.”
Nerosi nodded, smiling. “I’d like that. It’s always nice to see you, Finch. And really—think about it. I’d like to use these powers to help you if I can.”
“That’s very kind of you.” Finch set the candle down with the others, brushing the wax off on her pants. “I should probably get going, but I’ll be back soon.”
Nerosi grinned. “I’ll be waiting.”
Finch said her goodbyes and left the room, waving to Nerosi as she turned the corner into the dirt corridor. As she made her way back to the tunnels, she wondered how anything of what she’d seen could be possible. Could a ghost really do something like alter reality on a whim? Sure, it had been something small, but Finch had never heard of anything like that before.
Of course, it wasn’t like all the stories were true, per se. She certainly hadn’t ever heard anything about a creature even close to Nerosi.
She was exhaling a breath when the sound of footsteps halted her in her tracks. Sumera’s warning about being out after dark flashed through her mind again—if lurking outside of Ulalume at night was bad, Finch couldn’t even imagine how much trouble she’d be in getting caught in the tunnels, seeing as they were technically off-limits to students.
She barely had time to slip into a small passageway and tuck herself around the corner before someone stepped into view. Finch silently reached into her pocket and withdrew her phone, sticking it around the corner so the only the very top of it poked out.
The screen showed nothing but darkness.
But then, the footsteps grew louder, and Finch quickly snapped a picture before ducking back around the wall, heart slamming in her chest. The person walked past, shoes clicking on the concrete with each step. It sounded distinctly like the echo of high heels.
As the sound of them slowly grew quiet, Finch exhaled the breath she had been holding. What was someone else doing down here at this hour?
Her phone clicked as she went to her photos, opening up the one she’d snapped before hiding. The hallway was just bright enough for her to make out the color of the girl’s hair and the color painted across her lips. Both were red.
Finch’s heart shuddered. She recognized this girl from yesterday morning—the one who’d been kissing Selena outside the lighthouse.
Kyra.
***
The next morning, Selena woke up to find Kyra, Risa, and Amber finishing up breakfast in the living room. Selena barely had time to say good morning before Kyra shot up out of her chair, bounding toward Selena with uncharacteristic enthusiasm.
“You’re awake,” Kyra said, flashing a smile. “I was hoping you’d be up soon.”
Selena studied her, taken aback. “You…look nice.”
Kyra beamed, revealing a mouth full of brilliant white teeth. Selena could have sworn that weren’t that white yesterday. She also could have sworn that Kyra had at least a little bit of acne on her forehead. And breakage from the bad bleach job.
But now those tiny flaws were gone. This version of Kyra had the most flawless skin Selena had ever seen, along with flowing, fiery red hair no longer muddied by the auburn dye and completely devoid of broken baby hairs. The smattering of freckles across her nose stood out like she’d been in the sun recently—it was maddeningly cute. Selena couldn’t explain it, but she looked as if someone had used a photo editor on her actual face.
Selena’s cheeks felt hot. It was downright unfair for Kyra to look this good at 8 a.m.
