Let me out, Lee.
It was only a dream, so he went back to sleep.
But after he woke up, and his mother didn’t return, he realized it wasn’t.
Lee sat on the floor just in front of the porch and stared at a small bloodstain that he knew hadn’t been there that morning.
There it was—a dark, narrow line, as if red wine had splashed and then dripped down, or perhaps a thin finger had smeared it like a tally mark.
Let me out, Lee.
His gaze traced the winding path of the suitcase wheels across the sand. He could follow them. He could stand up right that moment and run until he found their endpoint.
But if he followed the tracks and found the suitcase and opened it up, then none of it was a dream. His mother had called for him and he’d closed his eyes, and she’d died alone in the dark.
No, that wasn’t right.
His mother had simply blinked out of existence, like a light switch turned off. She was, and then she wasn’t. His father would spend the next decade searching for her because that was what love was—inextinguishable hope, traversing years and countries and logic. Lee told himself the story again and again until the truth became a dream and the sedatives blurred the wallsbetween sleeping and waking and he forgot what, exactly, he was so afraid of remembering.
Lee did not have a mother anymore, but at least he had a father. And for many years, that was enough.
Until the day Lee’s roommate left the balcony door open.
Your light grows dark by losing of your eyes, Lee thought as he sat in the stairwell. He dropped his erasers and pencils into the hungry darkness and wondered how it would feel to fall.
It wasn’t that he wanted to die, though he almost certainly would from that height. He’d read that 50 percent of people survived a fall of fifty feet. The fourteenth floor was close to one hundred and forty feet. Lee did not crave the moment of impact, only the fall. How would it feel to be weightless? Would the darkness fold around him and catch him in a pillow of nothingness? How wet was the mouth of darkness before it devoured you?
Before he knew it, he was leaning over the railing. His center of gravity shifted and he teetered over the darkness.
His foot slipped out from under him, and the darkness yawned wider.
A hand yanked him back.
“You okay, man?”
His roommate was standing there, one hand on Lee’s shirt, the other holding open the door, letting in all the light Lee had been trying to escape.
“Shut the door,” Lee said.
James blinked his perfect green eyes. Except, in this light, they almost looked hazel. Maybe they were more brown than green.
“I didn’t mean to chase you out, dude,” he said. “Your phoneis ringing and you just disappeared like you’d been abducted by aliens or something.”
He laughed, and Lee didn’t, and something inside Lee started to splinter. Lee’s gaze focused on the stain on James’s shirt. Dark maroon, just slightly above his heart. A dark, narrow line.
“James,” Lee said slowly, “what’s that from?”
But his roommate looked at him like he’d spoken another language. “James?” he echoed, then laughed stiffly. “Did you forget my name? It’s been two weeks, dude.”
James leaned to the side, and in this light his eyes were definitely brown, deep and dark like the earth.His name is Matt, Lee realized. Matt Baldridge. Why had Lee called him James?
Lee’s vision felt skewed, like he was seeing two Matts at once, the stairs spiraling up above him and down below, the darkness unlatching its jaw. He ground his palms into his eyes, where an unbearable ache had bloomed. What good was it having eyes anyway if he couldn’t trust them?Your light grows dark by losing of your eyes.
Are you okay?Matt Baldridge said.
Let me out, Lee, the suitcase said.
Please, Jim, his mother said.
