Ellie was in my car. I had no idea how she got there, because I’d locked it. She still looked like she was losing her mind, evident by the fact that she was sitting my car in the hot parking lot with the windows up. It had to be a hundred degrees in there, easily.
I opened the door and sat in the driver’s seat. “Hi.”
“I want it to go away,” she said.
“I’m seeing a civil war. And other stuff. Today I saw an intergalactic war with photon torpedoes. I think it’s kinda cool.”
“I’m seeing things I don’t care about.”
“Like?”
“Naked people.”
“Naked people?”
I looked at Ellie then and noticed that she’d worn her favorite sundress but she’d left the buttons in the front open. And she wasn’t wearing a bra. Come to think of it, I don’t know if anyone on the commune wore a bra. Maybe bras were like atomic bombs, too.
I looked down at my seersucker Dust Bowl dress and bobby socks. I knew I couldn’t compete, but I never wanted to compete. I liked how white my legs were. I planned on keeping them sun free by spending my entire summer in the darkroom becoming Darla. I didn’t remember Darla’s legs, but I’d seen pictures, and in them her legs were white too. She had knobby knees.
Only there, on graduation day in the car with Ellie, did I realize I had knobby knees too.
When I thought about it, no one I ever saw on TV or in a magazine or on a billboard had knobby white knees or a Dust Bowl dress.
“What are we going to do?” Ellie asked. “I can’t just avoid people for the rest of my life.”
Of course, I could. I totally could avoid people for the rest of my life. “Just chill out. We’ll be fine. Everything is happening for a reason.”
“We’re going crazy for a reason? What the fuck? I got fucking crabs off some asshole for a reason? I’m nearly eighteen and I don’t have a high school diploma for a reason?”
I put the car in reverse. “Okay, if you can’t chill out then just shut up. Or maybe say congratulations or something appropriate. Or just something not insane,” I said. “Because you’re not insane, you know. I see it too, okay? You’re not anything special.”
She looked hurt. “I’m not anything special?”
“I am no one special. You are no one special. Can you handle that?” I said. “Most people can’t handle it.”
“Shit,” she said.
Then I backed out of the parking space, drove to the parking lot’s exit and got stuck in the dumb postceremony traffic jam that had built up while I was making small talk with Stacy Cullen. I wished I’d left with Dad, who was surely home by now in a tie-dyed shirt and a pair of baggy pajama shorts on the couch with his laptop.
“Congratulations,” she said, finally.
“Thanks.” I thought about how Ellie wasn’t going to be my friend soon. How I’d planned to get away from her somehow. How she didn’t know my biggest secret—about becoming Darla.
I pointed to her arms. “Where’d you get that idea?” I asked. “Free yourself, have the courage?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “The bat gave it to me. Saturday night, remember?”
We let silence fall between us for a minute.
After a while, she said, “We should tell someone.”
“No one would believe us if we told them.” I put the car in park and waited for traffic. I grabbed my camera and took a picture of Ellie’s arms. I’d call it: The Consequence of the Bat.
Once I pulled out of the traffic and onto the small highway that would get us home, Ellie started with small talk and I started to compile a timeline in my head. If Stacy Cullen’s granddaughters would be sacrificed in the Second Civil War, then that would happen around the late twenty-first century or so, depending on when people have kids, I guessed. They looked young, like most parents did in the transmissions—like all those old pictures from the East where daughters are sold as teenagers to men. That’s what it looked like.
It scared me and yet it seemed like a worthy project or something—to document it, even if it was some hallucinatory reaction to the bat. What else did I have to do?
Before Max Black, the future seemed boring and there wasn’t much to think about. After Max Black, it was like I was looking at a negative, a stack of photographic paper, a jar full of emulsion, a paintbrush, and trays full of chemistry. There was now so much to do.
So much to do.