Translucent (11 page)

Chapter 10

I will always
remember that night.

A thousand times I’d replayed it in my mind, wishing I could go back and undo it, rewind all the way to that sudden impulse to shake Megan awake and say those six words, “Want to go for a drive?”

“Drive . . . drive . . . ?” Her eyes focused, then widened. “You can
drive!
” She shimmied out of her sleeping bag.

The clock on the Blu-ray player read 12:40 a.m.

July 1.

“But if your parents catch us, you’re taking the heat,” she said.

“They’ll never know.” I grabbed my keys, already sliding on my shoes. “It’s so crazy that I can actually do this now . . .
legally
. I can drive off in the middle of the night without anyone’s permission.”

“Road trip,” she said, grinning.

“We’re definitely planning one tomorrow.”

Outside, hands shaking with excitement, I slid my key into the ignition and started the Corolla. The engine purred, and a bunch of instrument lights came into view. The sight made me giddy.

My own car.

And as of yesterday, I had a license.

“I can’t believe they bought you a car,” said Megan, voice tinged with envy.

“Hey, they said if I got straight A’s last year, they’d buy me a car.” I pulled into the street, taking it slow at first. I’d aced the driving test by being careful, and still had all those bad habits.

“So we’re saying fuck you to the probationary period, right?” said Megan. “You know, no driving anyone under twenty-five for the first six months?”

“Oh, come on. No one follows that rule. I don’t even think cops know about that rule.” I hit the accelerator, and the mighty Corolla revved up and pressed me back into my seat. Dark houses whooshed by.

“It’s a Corolla, Leona. Not a Corvette.”

“I’m going to take it up Foothill, see how fast this baby can go.”

“Mind if I pack a bowl?”

“Go ahead.” I drummed the steering wheel, feeling a rising thrill as the needle climbed past thirty, then forty. I had a license . . . holy shit, I actually had a license! I turned onto Foothill Road and floored it. The black asphalt curved away from me, completely deserted at this hour, hardly any stoplights. With some reluctance, the car crept up to forty-five. Bright white paint stripes slithered out of the night, gleamed in my headlights for a moment, and vanished behind me.

Freedom.

Next to me, Megan extracted weed from a plastic bag and packed her pipe, then held a lighter flame up to the bowl. Instantly, the smell of marijuana filled the car.

“There goes the new car smell,” I muttered.

“I’m christening it.” She handed me the pipe, which I waved away.

Trying to smoke less these days. But the smell of marijuana conjured up old memories. “Actually, why the hell not?” I was feeling good.

I took the pipe from her, plugged the carb hole, and inhaled. The smoke burned deep in my lungs, but I held it in, then let it out slowly with only a small cough.

We passed it back and forth, and the high crept up on me like sleep until I lost track of my own thoughts.

Instead, the needle of the speedometer occupied a great deal of my attention.

Fifty miles per hour.

The purr of my new car brought out my sense of daring. “Let’s see how fast this baby can go,” I said. The pedal bottomed out under my toes, and the car raced around a curve.

A red light glowed ahead.

“Leona!” Megan shouted.

I slammed on the brakes, and the car shuddered to a stop just shy of the line. “Brake check.” I peered left, then right. Two abandoned residential streets. No one about.

The light turned green, and we glided forward.

The needle climbed past forty, then fifty, then sixty. The car began to lean around the curves, barely holding on. All I could focus on was the thrill, nothing else.

“Let me get another hit,” I said.

Megan offered me the pipe again, but this time I missed the handoff. The glass struck my fingers and bounced from my grip, tipping hot ashes into my lap.

I shrieked and tore my eyes off the road, swerved a little as I swatted at the red coals burning through my jeans.

“Crap . . . sorry,” she said.

The coals tumbled onto the upholstery, leaving back welts. “You idiot,” I gasped, frantically snuffing them out. “You spilled coals all over my new seats.”

She leaned in to help. “Sorry, sorry, sorry . . .”

I checked to make sure we were still following the curve of the road, then began picking the coals out one by one, ignoring the burns.

Megan sat up. “Uh, Leona . . .”

“No more smoking in my car, okay?”

“Leona,
Leona . . .
STOP!”

I jolted upright and squinted out the windshield, just as a figure materialized out of the night, bathed in the glow of my headlights.

An angel
 . . . white skin, long blonde hair, white robes.

Just standing in the middle of the road.

I crushed my toe into the brakes. 

The car slowed, and my insides were thrown forward . . . followed by the sickening realization that I wasn’t going to stop in time. My headlights blazed over her.

Not an angel.

Just a girl in pajamas, eyes wide open, staring straight ahead in some kind of vacant trance.

Then . . . WHAM!

The sound of metal impacting flesh.

A sound I would never, ever forget.

The ghost of
Ashley Lacroix.

She had come for me.

I stared at nothing, just my empty living room, lost in mind-numbing horror. An invisible hand closed around my neck. I closed my eyes and shrank back against the wall, waiting for death.

But the hand didn’t squeeze.

Instead I heard laughter, and the hand let go.

The voice changed. “Leona, I’m
kidding!
”

And now I recognized it.

Megan
.

In that moment, my brain did one complete cycle, connecting all the dots at lightning speed. Her text earlier saying she was busy, her cell phone wedged between the cushions, the spare key swinging on the hook, Megan rubbing her fingers together at some point—
it grows in the presence of human tissue
—the way it could be stretched around objects like the eraser, the nail, rendering them invisible.

Dark matter
.

She was wearing it.

“Megan?” I gasped. My eyes darting around the room, unable to glimpse even a hint of her outline.

A line of skin appeared in thin air, hovering five feet off the ground. It widened into a nose, a cheek, an eye, then a grinning mouth, as she peeled back the dark matter. Her hair came loose next, swinging freely. She extracted her arms from an invisible sleeve, then went to work on her shoulders as if shimmying out of a very tight leotard. 

She got down to her collar bone, and hesitated. “Can I borrow some clothes?” she said.

I gaped at her floating head and shoulders, mesmerized. “What?”

“I’m naked underneath. That was the only way it would go on. It doesn’t go on over fabric very well.”

“Yet you brought your cell phone?”

“I made it invisible too, but then you called, so I unwrapped it and—”

“Buried it between the seat cushions, I know.” I fetched her some clothes, and she peeled off the rest.

Finally, dressed in a T-shirt and sweats, her skin bright pink like she’d just showered, she unstuck the last bit of dark matter from her pinky toe and rolled it into an invisible ball between her fingers. “You still have that case?”

“How much is there?” I said. “In your hand . . . how much did it take to wrap you?”

“It’s not even that much,” she said, holding it up. “Like a marble’s worth. I just started pulling it down my arm, and it kept stretching and sticking to my skin. I thought it would break, but it didn’t.”

I got the contact lens case, and she deposited her droplet of dark matter in the bowl for the left eye. Next to mine. Right and left eyes.

Mine and hers
.

“And you could see?” I asked.

“It’s invisible, of course I could see.”

“That doesn’t even make sense,” I said, folding my arms. “If light’s passing right through you, then it can’t be hitting your eyeball.”

She shrugged. “I don’t know, I’m not a physicist.”

“That was really, really mean, Megan.”

“Yeah, it was supposed to be funny . . . sorry.”

I rolled my eyes. “In what universe is that
funny?
Making yourself invisible and pretending to be the girl I murdered? How is that fucking funny?”

“You are so missing the point,” she said. “Did you see that? I was invisible. I was
invisibl
e, Leona. We can make ourselves invisible!”

I shook my head. “Don’t ever do that again.”

She sighed and shook out her hair. “Why did I have the feeling this was exactly how you’d react?”

“I’m serious, Megan.”

“Okay. I’ll knock next time and ask for candy. Trick-or-treat.”

“No, don’t put it on,” I said firmly. “Don’t touch it, don’t play with it. Don’t
look
at it. We don’t know what its chemical properties are, so we don’t know what it does to skin. Look at you. You’re all pink. That’s a sign of irritation. It was irritating your skin.”

“Oh come on, I have skin creams that do worse.”

“How can you be so cavalier?” I said, my voice rising. “This stuff—whatever it is, dark matter or whatever—it’s not normal.”

“You’re just jealous,” she taunted.

“I’m not jealous.”

“Yeah, you’re jealous. Because I came up with the idea first.”

“
You’re
jealous,” I said hotly. “The fact that you even thought I would be jealous means you’re jealous. That’s psychology, for your information,
Megan
.”

“Leona, I was invisible. I was
invisible
.”

“So go rob a bank. See if I care.”

“Wow, you
are
jealous,” she said.

“I’m
not
jealous,” I spat. “I’m . . . I’m angry. Because you’re being stupid and reckless, just like at the beginning of summer, and that’s why we hit her in the first place, you fucking stoner.” The words tasted like acid, and I regretted them immediately.

Hurt flashed in her eyes. “Oh, now we’re blaming that on me? Now we’re blaming the whole thing on me?”

“Megan, I didn’t mean that. I’m sorry.”

She turned away, and I thought she might cry. But Megan didn’t cry. Megan never cried. “It’s too late. You already said it.”

“Megan . . .” I touched her arm.

She shook me off. “I just wanted to have something that was my own,” she said softly. “It’s like this with everything we do. You’re crazy and you jump right into danger and then you own it, and it’s like I’m just your dumb sidekick. And I finally do something first, I finally do something brave, and you take a big dump all over it.”

“Megan, I’m sorry,” I begged.

“I actually feel like I was meant to wear this stuff. Just having it on makes me braver, it feels like I’m wearing a shield. I don’t know, there’s this connection . . .” She looked up. “It feels like I’m a superhero and this is my suit.”

Her words gave me chills. But before I could respond, a buzzing from the couch distracted us.

Megan was getting another call.

“Get it,” I said. “It’s probably Sarah.”

“No, it’s my sister.” She took the call. “Hey.”

Her sister’s tinny voice hissed from the other end. Something about her tone set off alarms in my brain, even though I couldn’t make out the words.

Something was wrong.

“Yeah, we saw her just a few days ago,” said Megan. “Why?”

I edged closer.

“
What?
” Megan’s face went into shock, and she turned her back to me. “When? Oh God . . . yeah, no . . . thanks for calling.”

She ended the call, her expression troubled.

“Everything okay?” I said.

She stared blankly at her phone. “It was about Sarah.”

A quiver ran through my heart. “Is . . . is she okay?”

“No, she’s . . . she’s . . .”

“Yeah?” I croaked.

Finally Megan looked up at me. “She’s dead.”

Chapter 11

“How?” I said,
surprised at the calm in my voice. “How did it happen?”

“They think she was poisoned, and that’s it . . . that’s all they know. She died in the hospital . . .” Megan trailed off, and we stared at each other for a second.

Then our eyes widened.

“The dark matter,” I breathed.

“She drank it,” said Megan.

A terrible lump rose in my throat. “Wait, wait, let’s just think. Maybe it was something else.”

Another girl dead, because of us.

I couldn’t bear it.

“She dipped it in her cup and drank it,” Megan said. “We tried to stop her, but she drank it.”

“Let’s just think, let’s just think,” I said, running my fingers through my hair and down the back of my neck. “We just need to think.”

“We tried to stop her, right?”

I looked at Megan. “It didn’t . . . it didn’t do anything to you, did it?”

Her face paled. “I
wore
it.”

“But you’re fine, right?”

She shook her head, a haunted look coming over her eyes, which slid to the pink, puffy skin on her forearms. She touched her wrists, leaving white spots of discoloration.

“Megan . . . you’re fine, right?”

“I don’t know!” she cried.

“We all touched it. Maybe it’s only if you ingest it. I mean, you only wore it for a little bit, right?”

Her terrified gaze met mine. “I put it in my mouth.”

“What?
Why?
” My jaw fell open. “Why would you do that?”

“I had to,” she said. “When I stretched it over my face, it’s like having a plastic bag over your mouth. I couldn’t breathe. I kind of freaked out, and I couldn’t get it off, and I accidentally inhaled it. It’s weird, it coats the inside of your mouth, and you feel it crawling down your throat, and then you can breathe again. Because it has to coat everything.”

“You
inhaled
it,” I said in disbelief.

“Not on purpose.”

“Did you swallow it?”

“Yeah, I probably swallowed some too.”

My gaze went to the contact lens case, now capped, then back to Megan.

It was inside her.

In her throat, in her lungs, in her intestines.

“You’re so stupid,” I said. “You are so stupid.”

It’s inside you too, Leona.

“I don’t want to die,” Megan whimpered.

I reached for my pocket. “We have to call Major Connor.”

“No!” she shouted, grabbing my hand.

“Megan, we need to call him.”

She hesitated. “Okay. Call him. But don’t tell him I put it on.”

“No, I’ll let you tell him that yourself.” I dug out my phone, and almost dropped it. “Eugh, it’s sticky . . .” I passed it to my other hand, clutching it through my shirt, and wiped off my fingers, which felt like they were coated with honey. “How’d it get on my phone?”

Don’t tell him.

I jammed my thumbnail into the power button. The screen stayed black. “What the hell?”

“It’s always been on your phone,” said Megan.

Don’t tell him, Leona.

“Shut up.” I battled what felt like sticky tar, but only managed to spread the contamination to my shirt. “What is this crap? Why’s it so sticky? It was slippery before . . . Screw this.” I carried the phone to the kitchen, yanked out a trash bag, and dumped the phone. Next I yanked off my shirt, rolled it into a ball, and discarded it, then washed my hands with soap and water and went for the cordless.

Megan came and stood next to me, looking uncertain.

I dialed the cell number on the business card, but my finger halted at the last digit.

You need it, Leona.

Don’t tell him.

I shook the weird voice out of my head and pressed the last digit.

Major Rod Connor answered after two rings. “Connor here.” The deep voice of authority.

“Hi, uh . . . Major Connor . . . it’s Leona. Leona Hewitt.”

A pause. Did he even remember me? Why would he remember me? He probably visited fifty houses a day—No, he’d visited mine and Megan’s.

No one else’s.

Ours were the contaminated ones.

Finally, he cleared his throat and said, “Leona.”

“And Megan!” Megan shouted toward the receiver.

“Shh!” I said impatiently, shooing her away. “I was calling . . . we were calling because . . . because . . .”

I met Megan’s gaze. She was chewing her fingernails.

It can make you invisible, Leona.

You need it, Leona.

“Because what?” he said. An eagerness in his voice. I pictured him leaning forward at his desk in the Space and Missile Systems Center.

It reminded me of my conversation with Emory.

They’re not destroying it, they’re collecting it.

“Um . . .” I swallowed. “Never mind.”

And I hung up the phone.

Good, Leona . . . very good.

Megan stared at me. “You didn’t tell him.”

“I don’t know. Something didn’t feel right. Just . . . I don’t know. Let’s just try to contain it ourselves until we figure this out.” I yanked the cordless phone out of the wall socket and dumped it in the plastic bag, then headed back to the living room. “Come on, everything we’ve touched, it’s got to go . . . before this stuff leeches into our bodies and kills us.”

“Did you touch
the remote?” Megan asked.

“I don’t remember,” I said.

“Did you watch TV?”

“I think so.”

“Then you touched the remote.” She threw it into a full bag, which she tied off and piled in the corner of the living room.

“I watched a movie, not TV,” I said, wrestling the couch cushion that had butted up against Megan’s phone into too-small a trash bag, like wrestling a whale. It brushed my bra.

God damnit.

Now I’d have to ditch that, too.

“The Blu-ray remote . . .” Megan dangled a second remote over a fresh trash bag and released it with relish. “
Gone
.”

I had started on the second cushion, but paused to watch her, wiping sweat off my forehead. She got to put it on, and I hadn’t.

Why hadn’t I thought of it first?

She flicked her hair out of her face and sprayed Windex on the glass top of the entertainment center, where the remote had been sitting, and wiped it down with a paper towel.

Connor’s men had had hazmat suits, paint remover, power saws.

We had napkins and Windex.

“You’re going to have to take a shower, too,” I said. “And then we have to do your house.”

“I know,” she said. “I’m not stupid.”

“I never said you were stupid.”

“Yes you did,” she said. “You said, ‘You’re so stupid. You are so stupid.’ That’s what you said.”

“I didn’t mean it.” I yanked the bag over the edge of the cushion, but too hard. It ripped. “You’ve called me stupid before too, you know.”

“Yeah . . . how about we not do that anymore?”

“Deal,” I said.

“And put a shirt on. You’re making me jealous.”

“You should be,” I teased back. “Actually, I don’t have any left.”

“Oh, how convenient, you little skank.”

“What’d you touch when you came in here?” I said.

“The doorknob.”

“I’ll get my dad’s toolbox,” I muttered, ditching the impossible cushion.

“And get bigger bags,” she said. “Those big black garbage bags.”

I made a detour to my bedroom on the way to the front door. Nothing much in there to contaminate, thankfully. Just the rug, which I grabbed, and
The Great Gatsby
—which I was happy to destroy.

And my backpack.

And my bedding.

And my remaining clothes.

Who were we kidding? This was going to be impossible.

I dragged on a tank top and ventured outside to the toolshed, where the cold nipped at my skin. The night sky tugged at my gaze. Somewhere up there, filling the huge voids between those billions and billions of stars, was a whole lot more of this stuff.

“The spare key—” I plucked it off the hook on my way back to the living room and tossed it in Megan’s growing pile of soiled paper towels. Then I went to work on the front door, unscrewing the doorknob and latch and extracting the dead bolt. I dumped the brass pieces in one of the new garbage bags.

The door swung on its hinges, no longer able to latch. Which meant we’d have to drive to Megan’s house with my front door swinging wide open.

“Do I have to clean my car?” said Megan.

I glanced up. “You
drove
here?”

“I wasn’t going to walk a mile butt naked,” she scoffed.

“I thought you had your special superhero suit on?”

“Shut up.”

“So if I was out there, I would have seen your car cruising along without anyone in the driver’s seat. That’s what you’re telling me?”

“Driverless technology. Google has it.”

“Was it hard to drive without being able to see yourself?”

“It’s weird looking down and not seeing your own legs. You feel like you’re floating. Why?” She gave me a knowing look. “You want to try it?”

“No,” I sad quickly. “I’m just curious.”

“Might as well get it over with,” she grumbled, scrubbing at the hardwood floor, “so we don’t have to do this all over again.”

“What, you don’t think I’ll be able to resist?”

“Leona, you’re addicted to risk. I’m just trying to keep up and win a round. I
know
you won’t be able to resist.”

That shut me up. I heaved the rug into a bundle and stuffed in in a garbage bag, dark thoughts swirling through my brain.

“What movie did you watch?” she asked.

“Beauty and the Beast,” I muttered.

Megan slid the Blu-ray case from the collection and dropped it into the trash, which overflowed at her feet. She stared at it. “This feels oddly familiar.”

“What?”

“Cleaning up evidence when we should be going to the police.”

I stilled at her words. “This is
different
.”

But what she’d said hung uncomfortably in the air, drawing out the silence between us. I had to fill it. “Was your sister sad about her?”

“They were like best friends,” she said.

“It might not have been us,” I said. “I mean, it might not have been dark matter . . . that killed her. Who knows, maybe it’s not dangerous to living things.”

Megan swatted her loose hair and breathed out a sigh. “If only there was a way to test it, so we knew whether we had to get rid of it or not.”

I shook my head grimly. “It’s no use. We can’t possibly get it all. By now, we’ve touched
everything
in house. Let’s just put this stuff back and . . . I don’t know, we’ll keep an eye on it, see if it spreads. I don’t want my parents to freak out.”

“A test . . . ” Megan’s eyes brightened. “Why the hell are we even doing this? That’s a way better idea . . . a
test
.”

“That is so
creepy,” said Megan, leaning over her bedroom terrarium, which contained Salamander the garden snake. The creature slithered around the bark chips, oblivious to its tail being gone—invisible, actually—and the fact that we were looking at a cross section of its reptilian stomach. “Well, if we ever need an X-ray . . .”

She had used an eyedropper to administer a drop of dark matter to its tail.

“Maybe making an invisible snake isn’t the best idea,” I said.

“It’s a garden snake, Leona. Completely harmless.”

“Until it slithers down your throat in the night and chokes you.”

“Yeah, because that’s exactly what snakes do. They crawl down your throat into a pool of stomach acid. Real smart.”

“Just saying.”

As the dark matter spread across the snake’s skin, the creature shrank before my eyes, giving the impression it was dissolving into nothing.

“Did it do that on you?” I asked. “Spread like that?”

“Yeah, once you coax it a little bit, it kind of gets the idea and keeps on spreading.”

“You’re talking about it like it’s alive.”

“So?”

“Stop that. It’s disturbing. It’s like Sarah said . . .” I stumbled over her name, my throat tight. “It’s like that grad student said. It’s in some kind of state where it has zero viscosity. The molecules or whatever it’s made of aren’t very attracted to each other, so it naturally spreads out. It’s just physics, okay?”

“Suit yourself, Einstein.”

By now, Salamander was just a disembodied green head zigzagging around the terrarium. We were seeing the quivering cross section of its neck now.

“He’s like, all muscle,” I said.

“It’s a
she
,” she corrected.

I gave a chuckle. “I always kind of thought a snake would be hollow. They’re not.”

“Obviously.”

“At least he doesn’t look like he’s in any pain,” I observed hopefully.

“She
.”

“Why’d you name it
Salamander?
” I said. “It’s a snake.”

“Yeah, well, I wanted a salamander.”

“Clearly.”

“Don’t be mean,” she said.

We continued to watch, hovering over the terrarium. Then Salamander was just a tiny forked tongue, flicking in thin air. Then nothing. Woodchips continued to scoot around in its wake, the only clue to its presence.

“Now what?” said Megan.

“Now we wait, see how long it takes for it to drop dead.”

“She’s not going to drop dead.”

“That is so weird. I can’t believe you actually
wore
this stuff—” One of the fake plants up on a rock flicked to the side . . .
climbing
. “Close the lid,
close it
,” I said, my voice frantic. “I don’t want that thing in my bed.”

Megan rolled her eyes and slid the screen shut. “It’s a garden snake.”

“Yeah, and it’s invisible.” I watched the glass, my whole body tense, and only when I saw the bark stir at the bottom did I let myself relax.

Still in its cage.

“She committed suicide,”
Megan said when I climbed into her car after school the next day. “That’s how she died.”

I knew instantly she meant Sarah, and a disturbing chill went down my spine. For some reason it didn’t surprise me. “Why?”

“No idea. The police found a note in her lab desk . . .” Megan rubbed her face as she pulled out into the mad Friday afterschool rush, parents gridlocking the intersection and cutting each other off to pick up their kids first. “It mentioned my sister.”

I sat in silence, my brain processing too slow. “Did it mention us?”

“Why would it?” she said, throwing me a sharp look.