Defy the Dark

Sarah Ockler The Moth and the Spider

Moths sucked at dying.

Cali had read somewhere that a gypsy moth’s whole purpose in life was to mate. That their entire life span was less than a week, and that as long as the female laid eggs, seven days was considered a good run. Way to go. Mission accomplished.

It didn’t make sense to Cali, but then, at least the creature knew why she was put on this earth. Cheek pressed against the naked, dusty floorboards beneath her bed, Cali was eye level with a moth right now, one she’d seen flitting above her head the night before. Dried up, feet curled in toward its belly.

She hoped the thing had at least accomplished its purpose before it ended up under her bed, and as she mashed the carcass between her thumb and finger, she wondered if God would do the same to her. If at the end of her whole entire life, she’d leave nothing but a silky, silver-white stain on his fingertips.

Doctor Berg would call that a morbid and unhealthy thought, detrimental to the delicate recovery process, but it made Cali smile. That was something, anyway.

Cali blew the remains of the moth across the floor, and the stairs outside her bedroom door groaned. It was definitely her mother—the floorboards didn’t protest otherwise. She never heard anyone else coming or going. Take the baby, for example. By the time she was aware of his presence, he was right there in front of her, messing with her things, chattering endlessly about Elmo or hot dogs or the black-and-white cats next door. This was normal for two-year-olds, Cali’d read, but it didn’t make things any better for Cali.

Maybe if she lay still, she thought tonight, held her breath, her mother would think she’d gone out.

Cali almost smiled, twice in one day. That lying-still trick never worked on anyone.

Her mother knocked four times, hard-hard-soft-soft, then pushed open the door the rest of the way. Cali wasn’t allowed to keep it totally closed, anyway, so the knocking part was just a courtesy her mother thought would show Cali they were starting to trust her again.

Her mother set the tray on Cali’s desk with a clatter, pills hopping around in their opaque orange containers. Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe millions even. She flicked on the big overhead light and gently tapped Cali’s bedpost with her slippered foot.

“Calista. You’ll catch cold under there.”

“Not possible.” Cali ran her thumb over the ropy half-bracelet scar on her wrist. The ridge was comforting and familiar against the pad of her thumb, as much a part of her now as her wavy brownish hair and naturally straight teeth and the smell of her armpits. “It’s a virus.”

“Out,” her mother said quietly. It was almost a plea. Cali had read about colds and viruses and how germs attack your immune system, and she knew what she was talking about. But apparently her mother didn’t read about that stuff, and now she stood in a cloud of silent disappointment and waited. I could do this all night, her mother would probably say next.

But Cali stayed put and still her mother didn’t say it.

Fine. Cali didn’t feel like playing the game tonight, anyway. She sighed and wormed her way along the floor until her upper body birthed its way out from beneath the footboard, bathed suddenly in harsh yellow light. She propped her head up, elbows on the floor, chin in hands, and watched her mother count three little white pills into a napkin. Under the bed, her legs stretched out behind her, limp. She wasn’t ready to disturb them just yet.

“How are you feeling tonight?” her mother asked. She stirred soup in the plastic bowl, scraping the sides as she went. Steam curled and coiled from the rubber-coated baby spoon like twin serpents.

Cali closed her eyes. After being away for three months, it was easier to talk to her mother that way. “Fine. Better. Soup smells good.”

“Carrot ginger,” her mother said. “Your favorite.”

Was it? Cali nodded, but she couldn’t remember. Maybe her stomach remembered. Dinner was later than usual tonight, and Cali’s insides growled impatiently as she crawled the rest of the way out from under the bed.

“Ready?” her mother said when Cali finally stood and they faced each other. Her mother had spent the last hour reading the baby one bedtime story after another; Cali’d heard it through the wall. She’d cooed about wolves and little pigs and then bears and monsters and fairies, and now she was standing in Cali’s room, offering up the watery, reheated boxed soup and pills as if either could fix anything.

“Ready?” her mother said again.

Cali nodded. She’d been home almost two weeks now, and they were still tiptoeing around each other like strangers. Cali swore her mother sounded different before everything happened, but she couldn’t for the life of her remember how. It was like the old voice had been replaced with this different version, tighter, less confident somehow, slipped in and changed like the locks while she was away. It was normal for everyone else who’d been here for the transition. Just not for Cali.

“Open up,” her mother said after Cali had tossed the pills into her mouth. The part her mother didn’t speak out loud was still there in the tone, just beneath the “I know what’s best for you” surface. Being back home is a privilege. It was granted. It can be taken away.

Cali did as instructed, swallowing hard and then lifting her tongue so her mother could inspect the hidden regions of her mouth. Her mother was short—only reached Cali’s collarbone—so she stretched and tilted her head and scoped out the situation.

“Good girl,” her mother finally said.

The moths that circled Cali’s room heard that a lot.

Cali closed her mouth. She tried to smile, but it felt like a grimace, so she just nodded again and hoped it was enough. Mercifully, her mother left the bowl of soup and a cup of water and waddled out of the bedroom, into the hall, back down the protesting stairs, the pill bottles rattling in her pocket. Cali shut her door as far as she was allowed and jammed her fingers down into her throat, probing the soft flesh until she located the chalky lumps. She’d read about this somewhere, too—maybe on the same encyclopedic site where she’d read about the poor gypsy moths. How to hide the pills behind the bend in her tongue, how to act mellow and even-keeled, to fake the intended results as if she’d been taking them all along.

Good girl.

She listened outside the door again. No one was there. She forced the damp pills through the tiny tear in her mattress into the hole with the others, a hidden cache tucked behind the handle they sewed on to help you flip it when one side started to sag.

Attention-seeking behavior. That’s what Doctor Berg had called this kind of thing after she’d been at the center for a month. Not a real attempt, he’d told her parents in their first family session, some kind of tough love, let’s-all-face-the-facts-here-shall-we bullshit that was supposed to get Cali to admit her mistakes—because that’s what they were, after all—and kick off the delicate recovery process. Cali had carved a ditch in the worn leather couch with her fingernail and nodded at his wise counsel. Her parents frowned and cocked their heads, watching her cautiously from behind the red rims of their eyes as if she were a poor, dumb animal.

The thing was, Cali wasn’t dumb. She knew you were supposed to cut the long way if you really meant it, to follow the lifeline on your palm, press the blade in at the base of the wrist and slice down hard and deep toward the elbow. She’d gone crossways, though, hoping it would hurt less but still get the job done.

It didn’t. And it didn’t.

Now, again, she traced her silver souvenir with her moth-stained fingers.

Cali sucked at dying, too.

It was the note, see. That’s where the whole problem started.

Dear Everyone I Know,

By the time you read this, I’ll be . . .

It had occurred to Cali sometime last month, not long before she was released for good behavior and unexpected mental-health progress, that maybe Doctor Berg and her parents and everyone else would realize she’d meant it if she’d left a note. She’d skipped some of those vital steps last time. Skipped the note, skipped the part where you gave away your prized possessions while expressing a string of fatalistic thoughts to those around you. She hadn’t known those were requirements, benchmarks, the things that separated the attention seekers from the real pros.

But now she knew. The living thought they deserved some sort of reasonable explanation for this very unreasonable action by the dead, and they needed to check off, in retrospect, all the warning signs they should’ve recognized.

So this time Cali had a book of Sylvia Plath poems her roommate at the center had given her and a list of the few nice things she still owned: her iPod with wireless speakers (wires were dangerous), some of her art supplies, the gift certificate to Macy’s her aunt had sent to celebrate her return home. Next to each, she’d designated its new rightful owner.

The funny thing about the gift card was that she hated almost everything in Macy’s, and she hated almost everything in her aunt, and it would probably take her an entire decade to cash the card in, one pair of nonoffensive socks or rubber-backed clip-on earrings at a time. And the funny thing about the poems was that reading them didn’t make her feel morbid at all. They made her feel understood, less alone. Those words got her; they marched in and grabbed her and held on. But you couldn’t walk through life with a book in front of your nose at every breath and turn, words tucked under your arm like the warm touch of a best friend, and whoever found the poems would jump to the right kinds of conclusions, and they’d see the note and the makeshift will and they’d nod somberly and say they should’ve known, they should’ve seen the signs. But at least they’d finally understand she wasn’t screwing around, and maybe they would tell Doctor Berg, too, when they called for the medical files or whatever they were supposed to do in that kind of situation.

Tonight was the night, and after her mother had left the soup and probed her mouth and looked at her once more with those sorrowful eyes, Cali was ready to sit down and write the all-important note.

There were no sharp things left in her bedroom. If her father could’ve sanded the corners of the walls into harmless curves, he would’ve, but ultimately they concluded, over family dinner one night, that if Cali wanted to hurt herself using the corners of her walls, she couldn’t possibly do it in silence. They’d be able to intervene. Still, her dangerous books were all paperbacks now, her dangerous glasses had been fitted with kid-friendly plastic lenses, her dangerous colored pencils had been confiscated. Cali had to settle for a new box of crayons, presented to her on her first night back home with a stack of soft, white stationery on which Cali had already written her list of valuable items. The crayons made Cali smile yet again, and she thought she should add those to the list as well. They were the most extravagant box of Crayolas she’d ever owned. She’d begged her mother for the ninety-six-color pack every year for a decade, back when things like crayons mattered. But her mother always said forty-eight was more than enough for any scenario a girl growing up in the great state of Maine might encounter.

Cali pulled a fresh sheet of stationery from her desk drawer and explored the color palette in the yellow-and-green box before her. Her fingers passed over the reds, which she felt were melodramatic and would detract from her message, and the blues, which were too overtly symbolic. Black was typical and uninspired and she hated the way it looked on her cloud-colored paper. She finally settled on a pink-orange one called Mango Tango and gripped the crayon between cold fingers, thinking. She didn’t want to address the letter to her parents directly, even though they’d undoubtedly be the ones to find it. Her. It.

To Whom It Concerns

May Concern . . .

Cali inspected the script, fat and slanty. Like the baby’s attempt at writing his own name. She thought about his pudgy little hand holding on to a spoon or a crayon like this, drawing lopsided circles and stars with too many points. A weak pulse tingled at the bottom of her heart, a pressure, a squeeze she almost recognized, like a memory you didn’t know whether you’d actually experienced or only seen in a photo. But it disappeared quickly and she underlined her words on the page twice, off to a good start.

The wind shifted and pressed itself against Cali’s bedroom window. The black pines in the backyard swayed, their branches forced apart, then mashed together, and just inside the screen, a spider scurried across the sill. An orb weaver, Cali realized. She’d read about them somewhere, read that some of them didn’t even make webs, despite their names. They didn’t need anything so elaborate, that particular kind; they simply dangled a sticky substance from their front legs and enticed the unsuspecting little moths to approach. The moths got ensnared and the spider casually reeled them in, closer and closer. Then, predator devoured prey.

Cali appreciated that. Nature protected some, eliminated others, and left the rest to fend for themselves. Beautiful and terrible at once.

The spider explored a corner of the sill, and Cali thought this one was likely the kind that made webs, the kind that ate their own silky strands every twenty-four hours. They’d evolved from the Jurassic period, Cali remembered. A hundred and forty million years of doing the same thing every day: making a web, destroying it, making another, destroying it. The creature’s bulbous body was orange and black like a tiger’s, and now that Cali’d spotted it, she couldn’t unsee it. The spider paced back to the other corner. The thing was trapped; she’d probably starve. Cali should do something, she thought. Open the window and the screen, maybe. Show her the way out.

Her phone buzzed against the desk and she jumped. She checked the caller ID after the vibrating stopped. Wrong number.

No one called her on purpose anymore.

Cali returned to her letter and scrawled out the next part.

by the time you read this I’ll

I don’t know how to

sorry I am so messed up

everything with the

Damn it. This was already the twenty-third draft, if you counted all the versions she’d written in her head. She’d probably have to start over. She had to get the words right. She had to get all of it right—nothing left to chance tonight, nothing misinterpreted by family, law enforcement, or medical professionals as anything less than the real thing.

Cali’s eyes found the spider again. The creature dangled from the bottom of the upper sash now, suspended on a single, silky thread. Behind her, the sky was velvety purple and blue, smudged in places with hazy dark clouds. The summer sun must’ve set hours earlier, but Cali had no recollection of it. The whole day had been a blur, same as all the others, and now Cali tried to remember the last time she’d watched the sun go down. Really watched it, noticed the oranges and reds like fire in the sky.

Briefly, she wondered if she would miss it. She didn’t think so.

Her phone buzzed again with that same stupid number. She hit IGNORE. The phone was kind of pointless, but Cali couldn’t get rid of it. Memories, she guessed. Or maybe inertia. Her parents had kept the account for her while she was away, and after she’d returned, she’d checked an empty voice mail box, scrolled through a list of no missed calls from all the friends she used to have.

Crazy is contagious, didn’t you hear?

The floorboards on the other side of the door moaned again, and Cali slipped her note into the desk drawer beneath a celebrity gossip magazine whose staples had been removed. She waited for her mother to pass, watched the shadow of her shrink and fade. Soon her mother would slip beneath the threadbare comforter in her own bedroom and watch Conan O’Brien until she passed out, keeping the television on low so she could still hear the baby monitor in Cali’s room, just in case.

As if to remind her, the red light blinked from atop the squishy beanbag chair near the bed, and Cali sighed. She grabbed her water cup, downed what was left. Then she had to pee.

Cali slipped into the hall. She had to walk past her parents’ bedroom to get to the bathroom, and her mother always kept the door open a crack.

Just in case.

“That you, Calista?” she said as Cali passed. Cali had mouthed the words right along with her.

“Yep.” She rolled her eyes. It’s not like she could do anything in there. Just like her bedroom, the bathroom had been carefully modified prior to her return home. No prescriptions. No nail polish remover or mouthwash or toilet bowl cleaner. No hair dryer cord or manicure scissors. No shower curtain rod from which something could hang. It was safe enough for the baby to toddle into unsupervised. In fact, there was another baby monitor on the shelf over the sink, and if Cali took longer than five minutes, her mother would barge in unannounced.

Just in case.

There was no lock on the door.

Just in case.

Cali did what she had to do, washed her hands, refilled her water cup, and quickly returned to her bedroom, pushing the door partway closed behind her. On the desk by the window, her phone glowed blue-green. MESSAGE, the screen said. 12 MISSED CALLS. Same number as before.

Cali pressed the button for voice mail and shoved the phone between her ear and her shoulder. As she waited for the message, she dug out her letter and picked up the Mango Tango crayon.

but I don’t didn’t know what else to do and

“You. Have. Twelve. New. Messages,” the robotic voice mail system informed her.

then I realized maybe it’s best for everyone if I just

“You have a collect call from Eastport Juvenile Detention Facility,” a disembodied recording on the other end said. “To accept the charges, press one. To decline the charges, hang up.”

A thrill jolted Cali’s heart and she almost screamed at the unfamiliar sensation, but the feeling was fast and fleeting. She held her breath, hoping to conjure that brief spark again, a pulse in her heart, but it didn’t return. All twelve messages were the same. She set the phone back on the desk and watched it, waiting for another call, another thrill. None came.

go away. Vanish. You

can get back to your normal life

lives and I will follow the

White light flooded the backyard that stretched beyond Cali’s window. The trunks of the swaying pines were illuminated, two low spotlights cutting through the blue-black night. They blinked out and a car engine hummed and quieted and ticked itself down to silence. The car door opened. The car door closed. Footsteps on the path. Downstairs, keys jingled and jammed into the lock. The front door opened. The front door closed.

Her father’s footsteps crossed the living room floor, heavy and full of purpose.

Cali pressed her hand to her chest, surprised as always to feel her heart’s drumbeat against her palm. Thinking of her father did that to her now. She’d tried to snuff out her life force that night, and as far as her father was concerned, she’d succeeded. He’d shown up for the family session with Dr. Berg, kept her cell phone up-to-date, allowed her to live in the house and eat his food. But he hadn’t looked her in the eyes since. Hadn’t spoken to her. Hadn’t come home from work earlier than eleven or midnight, lest he risk crashing into her in the hallway or brushing his fingers against hers as they simultaneously reached for the television remote.

Like the natural cadence of her mother’s voice, Cali had forgotten the warmth of her father’s strong hand on her shoulder, his gentle stroke on her soft, brown hair.

Her phone started up again just as the air shifted in her bedroom and two long shadows slipped beneath the door, spreading across her room, darkening the hardwood floor like a spill. The skin on her arms prickled and her phone kept rattling. She felt her father’s presence, saw the shape of him through the gap of the partially open door. He wasn’t moving. The phone buzzed and whirred, its angry green-blue light blinking from the desk. She imagined his hand against the wood, his eyes closed, disappointment pinching his face. Buzz buzz buzz. If he had any words for her, they were lost, broken on the fortress of his anger, on his inability to understand or forgive. Say something, goddamn you. Say something to me. She willed it and wished buzz buzz buzz and crossed her heart and hoped to die buzz buzz buzz but the words never came. His shadow didn’t move, his breath banging down the door with all the force of a feather. Buzz buzz buzz her father didn’t speak, the phone didn’t stop, and finally she answered, pressing number one to accept the charges and then speaking loud and clear into the receiver. Excited, as if she were receiving an expected but overdue call from an old friend.

The shadows outside her room disappeared and the moths circling her overhead light heaved a sigh of a relief.

“Mom?” a girl on the other end was saying.

Cali didn’t respond at first. She’d expected a boy. A gruff, horny boy sneaking around the detention facility after lights-out, hoping to find a little company on the other end of a random phone number in the middle of the night.

“Ma?” the high voice came again. She sounded like a little kid, Cali thought. A scared little kid.

“Who is this?” Cali finally said.

“Don’t hang up. Please don’t hang up.” The girl’s words came out in a tinkling rush, like glass shattering against the floor. There was no sound after that, and Cali thought the girl must be holding her breath. The absence of voice and air jabbed at Cali’s insides, sent a passing tingle from the base of her spine to her scalp.

“Who is this?” Cali asked again. In the background, there was a muffled echo, an intercom system of some sort. If the robot voice on the phone hadn’t announced the caller’s location first, Cali might wonder if she was in the hospital or maybe the airport. Coming or going. Staying or leaving. “Hello?”

“It’s . . . Mom, it’s me.” The girl added that me part at the end, her voice cracking into a whisper. She said it like a question, like she wasn’t even certain herself.

Cali lifted her crayon from the paper. She hadn’t realized she’d been doodling. Beneath her pathetic scrawl and strikeouts was an asymmetrical spiderweb, a moth ensnared in its silky, Mango Tango threads.

Now she’d definitely have to start over. Once she figured out the rest of what she wanted to say. Absently, she went back to her words.

other path. disappear.

there are things you don’t know and

“It’s me,” the girl was saying again, more forcefully now. “Your—”

“Wrong number.” Cali didn’t know why she’d accepted the charges. Desperate for a momentary connection, maybe. Curiosity, that was part of it, too. But her parents were in their room now and the baby was tucked away and the monitor’s red light blinked from her beanbag chair and Cali had work to do. Solitary, important work.

She pulled the phone away from her ear to hang up, but the girl persisted, screeching across the wires. Her voice had somehow strengthened. Clarified.

“Fine. Okay,” Cali told the girl. The letter stared up at her from the desk, messy and incomplete, littered with her absentminded drawing, and she didn’t know what else to say. The girl was crying now, sniffling and trying to hide it and act tough or whatever you were supposed to do in those situations, which, like lots of things, Cali had read about somewhere but didn’t actually know.

“Thank you,” the girl said. She kept sniffling and Cali pictured her wiping her nose on the part of her hand where palm met wrist. She looked at her own wrist again, turned the silvery scar back and forth in the light.

“I don’t know what else to do,” the girl said quietly. “I need to find her.”

“Your mother?”

“Do you know her?”

“I don’t know.”

“Her name is Laura Zelnick. Unless she got married again. Maybe she got married again.” The girl’s voice was giving out on her, the momentary strength of it spent. She couldn’t have been more than fifteen or sixteen, Cali figured, and she sounded so broken, so lost. How could you not know if your own mother was married or what her phone number was, even?

Cali dragged the crayon across her letter, hovering in loops and swirls in the bottom left corner. Her hand wanted to draw a flower, a heart, a bird. She forced it into other shapes.

“I don’t know,” Cali said again. “I’ve had this number a few years. Sorry,” she added at the end. And she kind of was.

There was a sigh on the other end. Then the squeaky, muffled sound of a receiver shifting from one ear to the other. “You were my one phone call.”

The one phone call. Cali had read enough crime novels to know what that meant.

“It’s the only number I have,” the girl whispered. “I mean, it used to be . . . it’s the one I remember.”

things that maybe are

different in your memories.

memories always lie. there are

other things,

too, but

“What did you do, anyway?” Cali wanted to know. Her crayon pressed against the paper, still scribbling, alternating between her words and the drawing that crept along the bottom.

“Oh, you know. Whatever.” The girl laughed, but not in a funny way. It was more like a dry cough. “What did you do?”

I can’t couldn’t didn’t tell you. things

about that night and

“I cut my wrist.” The response was automatic, Cali’s lips and tongue conditioned to form the words after all those weeks in group. My name is Calista. I’m here because I cut my wrist. I cut my wrist because I thought I wanted to die. I thought I wanted to die because—

“I’m . . . shit. Sorry.”

Cali sighed. They were both just there, connected by wires and waves, breathing into the phone and adding things at the end that you were supposed to say but didn’t really mean.

it’s not your fault, so please

don’t blame yourself.

I need it not to

hurt anymore and I know

it can be could’ve been like that but I feel like

everyone thinks

“It’s fine,” Cali said. The tip of her Mango Tango crayon had snapped on the last word, and she flipped the Crayola box around to the back. The built-in sharpener had been pried out, even though it was only a plastic one, too narrow for even her pinkie finger.

She selected another color at random. Outer Space, this one was called. She got back to work, scribbled messy words and long, wispy strokes like the trees outside her window, bending and blowing and almost black.

“What will you do?” Cali asked the girl. “About your mom, I mean.” She wanted to ask again about how the girl had landed at the facility. She wondered what someone had to do to end up so alone, stuck in a messed-up place like Eastport with no one to call but a total stranger in the middle of the night. For a second she imagined what it might be like if the two traded places—if Cali could be left alone there, finally forgotten, and this girl could surround herself with parents and a baby and crayons and nosy next-door neighbors who liked cats and got involved in all the wrong things. Maybe their separate lives weren’t so bad as far as lives went. Maybe they were just being lived by the wrong girls.

Anyway, whatever this girl did, Cali thought it must’ve been pretty bad. And now it was after midnight, and Cali had things to do. Soon she’d be somewhere else. Something else. Dust, maybe. Way to go. Mission accomplished. This girl and her mother and her sad story would go on without her and there was nothing she could do, even if she wanted to help. Which she really didn’t.

Plus she still had to figure out her note.

“I don’t know,” the girl said after a while.

There was another long pause, dead air, the intercom beeping and echoing. It sounded like the girl was in a small room with the door open. Cali imagined the gray-green walls, the busy hallways, and file cabinets full of records. It probably looked a lot like the center. She wondered if Dr. Berg visited Eastport. Talked to the girls about their mistakes, their attention-seeking behavior, their delicate recovery process.

“Do you know what’s gonna happen to you after this?” Cali asked.

“No idea,” the girl said. “But what about . . . I mean, do you know what you’re gonna do?”

I’m crazy. maybe I am, but all I can

tell you

is it’s like

I’m trapped and

the walls are closing

in. yeah, I know that sounds

cliché, right?

Yes. The thing was, Cali did know. Like the gypsy moth, her destiny was short-lived, but she knew her purpose now. She’d decided when and how it would end.

but the words

don’t always come

out

Across the wires and waves, another voice shattered the quiet. An adult voice laced with impatience. Cali could practically feel the woman standing over this girl, arms crossed, giving directives with her eyes.

“I have to go,” the girl whispered, mouth close to the receiver. The line cut out, and Cali shrugged and closed her eyes.

Cali lifted her head from the desk. Her cheek had been resting against the waxy crayon lines on her paper. She’d fallen asleep, drifted off in the midst of her work.

She checked her phone, confirmed what her stiff neck and sticky eyes already knew: three hours had passed. If Cali dreamed, she didn’t remember it, and now she was behind schedule and her body was anxious to continue with the plan.

She listened at the crack in her door again, humid air from the hallway tickling her ear. It was quiet; her parents snored softly from the room down the hall, the baby kicked rhythmically in his big-boy bed as his Sesame Street CD reset itself. Cali knew all the words, but it was late, and she didn’t feel like singing along.

She crossed the room, found the rubber spoon from her dinner, and fished out her collection of pills, transferring them two or three at a time from their tight little mattress cave into her palm. She slid open her desk drawer and tipped the pills inside the plastic cup that used to hold thumbtacks and paper clips, counting them twice to be sure. Nineteen. She’d accidentally swallowed them the first few times when she was still learning the trick. But nineteen was good. More than enough. And Cali knew to take them with water. Alcohol, she’d learned from one of the guys in group, often induced vomiting, often expelled the pills. Attention seeking, the wise doctor would say. Not a real attempt.

The drawer whispered as Cali slid it shut. The spider in the window had started another web in the left corner, maybe a better one this time. It occurred to Cali that the moth under her bed, had it not ended up there, would’ve made a tasty meal for the orb weaver. The moths flitting around her ceiling light were too far away. Maybe too smart to go near the spider. Or maybe they’d get caught in the dish that covered the bulb and sizzle to death.

Cali picked up her Outer Space crayon.

right and original—like when you’re

suffocating, burning up inside, when your

blood is

A memory floated into Cali’s mind from earlier in the night. She’d almost forgotten about the phone call. The girl. And now her phone was buzzing again, screen lit up with same area code as Eastport, but a different number. Cali answered, but there was no recording asking her to accept the charges.

“Hello. My name is Regina Simmons.”

Cali knew the woman was a social worker, probably the one who’d made the girl hang up before. It was the lilt in her voice, the strange combination of authoritarianism, compassion, and exhaustion. Cali drew another tree as she waited for Regina Simmons to continue, a sweeping trunk with feathery boughs. Some of the branches overlapped her words; she pulled out a different crayon and traced new ones over the treetops in Midnight Blue.

on fire, when your chest hurts and you

don’t can’t

remember who you are. or if you even

exist at all. I’m

“Sorry to disturb you at this late hour. I’m a social worker for the state of Maine,” Regina Simmons went on. “I work in the Eastport Juvenile Detention Facility. I understand you may be in contact with a woman named Laura Zelnick?”

“Yes,” Cali said. Deceit was easy if you knew you wouldn’t be around when the truth came out. Cali glanced at her bookshelf, scanned the author last names until she found one she liked. “My name is Wolff. Um, Gypsy Wolff.”

sorry I lie lied

about

what happened last summer. sometimes I think

maybe

“I have an unusual situation here, Gypsy,” Regina Simmons said. Papers rustled in the background, and Cali imagined the woman sitting at a big industrial-looking desk, the cheap laminate kind with metal legs like the tables and chairs at school. There was probably a cup of cold, old coffee on the desk and a picture of two little kids in a dented gold frame and maybe an award for something, if they gave awards for social work things. Cali didn’t know.

“What’s going on?” Cali asked.

“How old are you?” the woman wanted to know.

I was born in the wrong time, to the wrong

family.

And I do did this thing, and I pretended

I’m I was

“Twenty-six,” Cali said. It felt like a good age. She’d used it before. “Just turned.”

Pen scratched paper. More shuffling. “Gypsy, do you think you can locate Laura Zelnick? Ask her to contact me at this number as soon as possible?”

“Possibly. Can I . . . May I speak with . . . the daughter again?”

“Theresa. That’s her name, the daughter.”

“I have a few questions for Theresa,” Cali said. “The answers might help me locate her mother.”

“Of course.” Regina Simmons gave Cali the number to her direct line again, made Cali promise she’d call with an update as soon as she heard from the mother. Then she was gone.

someone else, maybe.

I make made up these stories about

The girl, Theresa, breathed into the phone. She looked different in Cali’s mind now that she had a name. Softer, somehow. Prettier. “Is your name really Gypsy?” she asked.

“No. I don’t know your mom,” Cali said. Shame crept up her neck, heat spread to her cheeks.

things. in my head, you know,

I made them up, someone from the

right time, the right place.

And for a little while, you know,

“Yeah. I know.” The girl’s voice broke again. “She left when I was . . . I don’t know. A few years ago. I don’t really remember.”

Cali nodded, even though the girl couldn’t see. The phone slipped a little, and Cali shifted it to her other ear. Her mouth opened and closed, opened and closed. Now that she had Theresa back on the line, she really didn’t know what to say, didn’t know why she was messing around with this girl and her messed-up situation.

it was almost like

they were real. But then they told me, or I don’t know,

not

them exactly, but someone

something said

“I have to go,” the girl said. “That social worker is giving me the signal.”

“Yeah?”

“It’s just that we’re not supposed to be on the office phone like this,” the girl said. “Not like this. Sorry.”

“Okay,” Cali said.

Cali, it said. Cali, it won’t last. And I knew.

But I forgot. I

forgot the parts

that happened, and the parts

that weren’t real, and

I tried

to make the rest make sense, but

Outside the window, the orb weaver worked on the next strand of her intricate web. Cali turned her paper to a clean white spot in the corner and kept scribbling as Theresa sighed into the phone, waiting like there was anything left to say.

everything

that matters mattered matters

stopped.

And then

Cali set down her crayon. There was no more space. She couldn’t even read the last three words she’d written. She needed a new piece of paper. She slid her drawer open and shuffled through the contents with her free hand, still holding the phone with the other. She couldn’t find the rest of the paper. She went back to her letter, tried again.

“Okay. I really have to go,” Theresa said. “The social worker keeps looking at me.”

I stopped,

too. And

now

“I hope you find her,” Cali said. She wanted to add something else about the girl’s mother, but there was a murmur and muffled sounds and then the line cut out, and the phone blinked off. Cali set it on the desk. It was warm from her ear, moist from all those words and her skin and her breath. The battery icon blinked.

LOW LOW LOW.

Cali shoved the Midnight Blue crayon back into the cardboard sleeve, right between Razzle Dazzle Rose and Tickle Me Pink, and folded the yellow-and-green hood over the box.

She flicked her phone into a backspin, watched it twirl over her letter. Beneath the blur of metal and graphite, colors scrawled across the paper, trees and clouds, stars, spiderwebs. Her words had been totally enveloped. The original orangey-pink Mango Tango letters were nearly lost, peeking out now in thin fingers behind the sky, like the sky outside her window. The sun would be up soon, on the drawing and on the outside. The darkness was slipping through her fingers.

Cali slid the window sash up, then the screen. The breeze tickled her cheeks, her eyes. She shivered. The orb weaver approached the edge cautiously and tested the surface, untrusting.

Cali could close the screen. Hard. End the creature’s uncertainty, the aching and pointless need to survive. She curled her fingers over the edge, tips turning white as she held on and considered it. The spider stopped, perched on the ledge. It seemed to Cali that the creature was weighing her options. Stay, go. Hello, good-bye.

Suddenly, without warning or lead-in, pain flooded Cali’s heart. It ripped through her flesh as though she’d pressed the blade to her chest instead of her wrist, as though this bright new hurt would be the death of her now, rather than the pills rattling in the cup in the desk drawer. Her lungs filled with warm liquid, a searing, sticky feeling she didn’t recognize. Her insides burned, throat tightened. Her heart thudded and blood whooshed through veins, blue and taut beneath the scar on her wrist. Her ears rang and the room spun and she looked again at the spider, then her drawing, searching for a focal point. She found the only remaining clear words on the page and stared until they, too, swirled before her eyes, as unrecognizable in their simplicity as a foreign language.

matters

now

Cali’s cheeks were wet but the dizziness finally passed. She relaxed her fingers, slid them off the lip of the window screen, the spider still in limbo on the ledge. She’d read somewhere that nature didn’t like interruptions. Interference. But she raised the screen higher and blew a gentle breeze across the spider’s tiger belly, anyway. The sun was rising now, its bright orange fingers reaching across the sky. Cali closed her eyes and let them warm her tear-streaked face and the orb weaver scampered out over the ledge, out into the unknown.

Cali opened her eyes. The spider was gone, the remnants of her web drifting lazily and unfinished in the window.

Cali’s phone blinked off, finally spent. She’d have to get the charger from her mother later. Cali slipped it into her desk drawer on top of the magazine and pushed the drawer closed. She left the window open, though; closed her eyes again and inhaled the dawn breeze.

She hoped the spider would be okay.