Dark Parties (2 page)

“If you don’t want to join us, you should leave now.” We hoped the anonymity of the dark would be enough, but now I feel exposed.
“Even if you don’t want to join us—and it’s totally legit if you can’t or won’ t—I’m trusting that you’ll keep your traps
shut.”

I hear someone moving. I wait for them to pass, but they
don’t. I wave my arms in front of me like a blind man without a cane. Our outstretched fingertips touch, and the person walks
right into my arms. I think it might be Ethan, until fingers gently trace the line of my necklace and pause at the snowflake
pendent that rests between my breasts. A hand cups my neck and tilts my head ever so slightly. I am being kissed, not soft
and sweet like Ethan’s kisses. This kiss is insistent and passionate. He slips strong arms around me. Our bodies mold together.
My body aches in a way I’ve never felt before. I try to pull away, but his kisses don’t relent. He holds me tighter. I wrap
my arms around this stranger. I kiss him until I’m breathless. I have never felt so alive. I should stop, but I kiss him again
and again.

Bodies are bumping into us. People are leaving, but I don’t care. For the first time in a long time, I feel as if my life
could be different; I could be different. I hesitate before I release him. My knees are weak. I melt to the floor.

As he passes, his foot brushes my hand. I feel the unmistakable smooth leather and shape of Braydon’s boots.

I touch my lips. Braydon?

The alarm clock buzzes to signal the end of our party. Sanna turns on the lights as planned. I am blinded momentarily. The
room is nearly empty; less than a dozen people squint nervously at one another.

Braydon is hugging Sanna. He glances at me. I look away. Why was he kissing a stranger in the dark? Does he know it was me?

I look for Ethan, but he is gone. I hoped he would stay. But it was too much to ask of this Ethan. The old Ethan
would have stood by me. But this Ethan’s given up, given in to our government-sanctioned future.

Sanna tells our ragtag group of revolutionaries where and when to meet tomorrow.

I feel as if the light has stripped me bare and everyone is staring at the betrayal etched on my skin. I’ve betrayed my dad,
my best friend, and Ethan.

“You better go before my parents get home,” I say, and look anywhere but at Braydon.

A darkness is growing inside me now.

A crystal snowflake nightlight glows in the corner of my bedroom. It casts triangles of light on the ceiling. I can’t sleep.
Every thought circles back to earlier—the announcement and the kiss.

It’s as if I’ve lit a fuse and I’m waiting for the explosion.

I remove the journal from under my pillow. The cover is faded shades of pink. Two long cracks, like jagged scars, expose the
brown cardboard below. The plastic coating curls away from the cover and flakes like scaly, dry skin. Its spine crackles when
I open it. I run my finger over my name
printed on the inside cover. Grandma wrote it there, the last in a column of scribbled-out names. Several pages have been
ripped unevenly from the front of the journal. Other people’s secrets so easily erased. The paper is rough and its edges raw.
She gave this to me the night before she disappeared.

“Thanks,” I’d said without understanding what it was. I was six and had never seen a book of blank pages before. I hugged
Grandma and felt the scratchy knit of her polyester suit. “I love it.”

“You’re welcome, my little snowflake,” she whispered, even though we were alone in my bedroom. She kissed me on my forehead.
“Best to keep it hidden,” she said, and slipped the journal under my pillow.

I smiled. I liked secrets. I didn’t have many of them back then. As I nodded in agreement, a lock of hair fell across my face.
She tucked it behind my ear, tracing the curl over and over with her finger.

“I love you, Neva,” she said. “Remember that. No matter what.”

She smelled like rose petals. She hugged me and wouldn’t let go until I wriggled free when the warmth and the scent became
suffocating.

The first journal page is still blank. Even at six I understood the importance of camouflage. If someone ever found my hiding
place, they might think the book was empty. Every night I tuck it among the globs of matted cotton in my mattress. The hole
was already there, as if I wasn’t the first to use it. I’m never the first.

I flip to the next page, a page I read every night. There’s my grandma’s name and the date of the last time I saw her. I didn’t
write it down until months later, when I was sure she wasn’t coming back. I wrote it down so I wouldn’t forget. No one else
seems to remember she was here. But she was real. I know it. My six-year-old self drew a picture—a circle with curlicues of
hair, big round eyes and a broad smile. That’s still her somehow.

I have listed things that I remember about her. She comes back to me in small fragments—a sound or smell will trigger something
and I’ll rush to capture it in my journal. I saw a gray-haired lady in a turquoise suit and recalled the way Grandma dressed.
She loved bold colors—colors were brighter back when we could buy new clothes, instead of recycling the life out of everything.
She wore blue, purple, orange, and red suits with matching glittery brooches and big earrings that covered each lobe.

I read the list again. I added the last item a few weeks ago. I was applying some of Sanna’s homemade lip gloss. I rubbed
my lips together and made a smacking sound. That’s when I remembered. Grandma used to make that sound when she’d apply her
peach sparkle lipstick, sucking air through the corners of her pursed lips. I couldn’t replicate it exactly, but I’d forgotten
the sound and the way the lipstick collected in the wrinkles around her lips.

I’ve left the next few pages blank, hoping to fill in pieces of her and complete an ever-fading picture. I turn to my List
of The Missing. The words are written in the erratic print of a child: Maud Riker, the lunch lady with the chipped
tooth, Tommy Donovan, Lukas Freely, the man in the brown suit who used to visit my dad every weekend, Jemma Johnson. The list
goes on for pages. My handwriting is cramped. I include the date I noticed each person went missing, even if I didn’t know
their name.

When I asked about Maud Riker, my dad said she died. She was sixty years old, but I’ve searched the church’s graveyard, and
I’ve never found her tombstone. Jemma Johnson was my age. I sat next to her in Mrs. Powell’s class. She never came back after
summer vacation. My mom expected me to believe that her family moved up North.

Sometimes I’m mistaken. A few weeks ago, I wrote:
The man at church who smells like cheese and always offers me peppermints
. I found out that he was visiting his daughter. So I draw a long straight line and write
FOUND
in big bold letters, tracing the letters multiple times without tearing the paper.

I reread the last page: Megan, Abbey, Tamryn, Jill, Madeline, Vanessa, Kelley, Morgan, Victoria, Molly. All girls about my
age. Megan and Victoria graduated a few years ahead of me. Sanna told me about Madeline and Kelley, although she said that
they both moved across town. Tamryn used to work at the coffee shop around the corner. Molly was the daughter of one of my
mom’s friends. I haven’t seen her around in a while. I used to add someone once every few months, but now it’s almost once
a week. I press my palm on the page as if I could stop the trickle of names from becoming a flood.

Only Sanna knows about my list. Everyone she loves dis
appears, one way or another. Her mother died when she was eight. At least she knows what happened to her. When her dad went
missing a few years later, Sanna and her brother had to live with guardians, Mr. and Mrs. Jones, good patriots whose ancestors
died in The Terror. Sanna’s brother went underground a few years ago. He’s like this rebel angel who watches over her.

I caress my snowflake pendant between my fingers. I wear it to remind me of my grandma and all The Missing. The police didn’t
take the necklace because they couldn’t find it. When they were confiscating my movie collection and anything else my grandma
gave me, I had slipped the necklace off and put it in my mouth. The entire time they were robbing me of my grandma, I was
tracing the snowflake pendant with my tongue.

The next morning when Mom and Dad returned from wherever the police took them, they acted as if nothing had happened. I asked
Mom about Grandma. She pretended she didn’t know who I was talking about. I asked Dad, but he left the room. From that minute,
she was erased from my life. Erased on the surface, but captured memory by memory in my journal.

I hear the rattle of keys and the click of the front door lock. My parents are home. I close the book and slide off the bed.
If she thinks I’m still up, Mom will want details and what would I say? I kissed my best friend’s boyfriend and broke the
law? A guilty sludge oozes through my veins.

I remove several large clumps of cotton from my mattress,
tuck my journal deep into the center of my bed and dive under the covers. Sometimes I think I can feel its rounded corners
beneath me. I guess in some ways I’m like my dad, recording history so I never forget. But it’s not enough anymore.

I’m up early the next morning to meet Sanna at her mom’s grave. It’s one of the places we meet when we want to make sure no
one’s watching or listening. I stroll down the hill in the church graveyard. Most people are superstitious about walking on
graves. Not me. I imagine the people below whisper their wisdom to me as I pass. They want to be remembered. I read each tombstone.
I subtract the date of birth and death. The numbers are getting closer together. The oldest dead person I find is sixty-two
years old. There are also more small plots for children. I tiptoe across the
tiny graves. Mom had four miscarriages before she accepted that I’d be an only child. Our graveyards are filling up too quickly,
but no one talks about it. I heard the government is secretly cremating people to obscure the fact that our population is
shrinking.

“Hi, Mrs. Garcia.” I plop down on Sanna’s mom’s grave. She died during childbirth, but there’s no marker for Sanna’s dead
sister. They don’t bury anyone under a year old anymore.

I lie down next to her grave and admire her view. The sun catches the Protectosphere, and it seems to twinkle like a sky full
of cubic zirconium. The first time I saw, really saw, the Protectosphere was when we passed near the border on a family vacation
when I was eight. Dad stopped the car, flashed his badge at the Border Patrol, and we walked the rest of the way. He wanted
me to be proud of my heritage. We walked for about a mile before we saw the final warning signs. When you’re that close you
can see the edges of each triangular Protectosphere panel. Dad stood tall and rested his hands on his hips. He stared skyward
as if enjoying a Protectosphere light show. I looked at the cracked, dusty ground, dotted with dead animal carcasses. Dad
explained that animals don’t always see the Protectosphere, just like birds don’t always see windowpanes. If they run into
it, they get electrocuted. Dad wanted me to see this shining example of technology and progress. All I saw was a clear cage
and a line of rotting corpses.

The memory still gives me the creeps. It’s when I first felt trapped. Back then, I thought the Protectosphere might col
lapse or explode, killing everyone instantly like those poor animals. Now it feels as if it’s killing us slowly. Sanna’s brother
says it’s genetics. We are too alike. He says
inbred
. We come from a limited gene pool, which makes us weak. But the government insists that the Protectosphere is a safe haven,
not a prison.

“Oh! My! God!” Sanna calls from near the church. She doesn’t bother with greetings. When I’m around her I feel like everything
is for the first, last, or only time. She comes bounding down the hill, her huge patchwork handbag banging against the tombstones.
“Hey, Mom,” she says when she reaches her mother’s grave. She sits next to the marker, one hand resting on her mom’s name.