The numbers on the marquee don’t mean that, I tell myself.Not necessarily. Remember, it could just be the time everything stopped.
One of my mom’s eyeliner pencils is on the floor under the sink with me. She must have dropped it. The shade is one sheused to wear a couple of years ago—brown, not black. Without getting up, without lifting my head, I pick up the pencil and make a mark on the underside of the vanity like a prisoner would. A notch.
I have that sick feeling you get when you wake up and you know something bad has happened. And you have to remember what it is.
But I’ve already remembered that I’m alone. That everyone else is gone. What more could there be?
I crawl out and stand, yanking up the blind and looking through the bathroom window at the tangle of mint and thyme in the herb garden along the fence, at the trees in the yard. Empty. I push open the window. Nothing. Still no sound.
I have to find someone.
20.
My therapist handed me a Post-it. Fluorescent pink. I’ve always hated neon colors. My mom bought me a hot-pink T-shirt when I was little, and I would never wear it, not even once. I told her, “I don’t like that color! It’s screaming at my eyes!”
“Write down the names of the most important people to you,” my therapist said. She handed me a black Sharpie pen, fine point. That, I liked. It was so smooth across the paper.
“Do you need to see the names?” I asked her when I finished. I wondered if she’d say, “Who on earth do you know that is named Yolo?” and then I would say, “It’s my cat,” and if she would try to tell me that a cat was not a person.
But she said no. Instead, she asked, “What does this list tell you?”
I knew she wanted me to say something like, these are the people I love who love me back and they’re the only people whose opinions matter. So that’s what I said, and she liked it.
“Does it help?” she asked me.
I knew she wanted me to say yes it does so I said that.
“Good,” she said. “You can put it with your list of ways to be okay.”
Yes, yes, I nodded, showing her I understood and would forsure and definitely do that. I would put both the ways to be okay list and the people who love me list on my mirror so I could see them every day. Absolutely. Of course.
I did not tell her that the lists never really worked.
Or that maybe I had never been okay.
21.
now
I know where Alex’s family keeps their spare key. It’s in a fake rock in the backyard flower bed. I push away the heavy-leaved peony plants, their blossoms gone since June. My fingers are dappled with still-clinging dew, though the sun on my back is already hot. Their dog, Bo, would absolutely be barking his way toward me right now if things were normal, but all I hear is the snick-snack of me sliding open the secret compartment in the rock to get the key.
It’s not breaking into someone’s house if everyone in town has disappeared and you have to find out what happened. Like, if ever there were extenuating circumstances, that’s what’s happening here.
Near the back steps, there is a tangle of Queen Anne’s lace that Alex’s mom likes to keep wild because she uses it in floral arrangements. She’s a nurse and very clean, so everything else, inside and outside of the house, is shipshape and tidy. I put the key in the lock and push it open and head straight for their kitchen.
It’s the same as my house. No plates on the table. Chairs tucked in. A framed photo of Alex, his parents, and his sister visiting family in India sits neatly on the sideboard where it’s always been. Cookbooks line the kitchen shelves, not a one out of place.
“Hey?” I call out. “Alex?”
I hear a creak upstairs and my heart thumps with fear and excitement. I should have come straight here last night, when everything first happened. I shouldn’t have let the marquee freak me out. I pound up the stairs two at a time, rounding the corner to Alex’s room.
Alex Dhawan and I became best friends in seventh grade. We both played saxophone in middle school band. We bonded over how bad we were. We were so bad the band teacher asked us not to return the next year. We weren’t even mad. We understood.
It feels like snooping to actually look inside the drawers of Alex’s desk or his dresser. There’s a stack of notebooks on the corner of his desk, the black-and-white composition kind. I don’t open one, but I know what I’d see if I did—lines and lines of his oddly beautiful handwriting in fine-point black Sharpie, his favorite kind of pen. I don’t see his phone anywhere. I do see the set of mini-golf clubs I gave him as kind of a joke one year. We always went mini-golfing on the Fourth of July at National Wonders, this awesomely crappy place at the edge of town. The people who built it were obsessed with national parks. So each hole represents a different park. And if you get a hole in one at Yellowstone, you get a free pass for the next time.
Creak.
The sound, again.
