THROWING PIECES OF GRAVEL at a second-story window belonging to a family who probably hates me isn’t my best idea, but Hannah isn’t answering my texts and there’s no way in hell I’m ringing the doorbell.
Sheer curtains frame the dimly lit window. I toss up another pebble and it plinks against the glass. A few seconds later, a shadow interrupts the amber light. Hannah’s face appears. She stares down at me, expressionless. I gaze back, but eventually I manage to lift my hand in greeting, curling my fingers and waving her down. She disappears and I pace circles around her side yard, avoiding eye contact with the lake and breathing in the smoky leftover scent of burning leaves.
Too many minutes pass and I’m just about to head back to my car parked on the street when I hear the creak of the screened-in porch’s door at the back of the house. Edging around some juniper bushes, I see Hannah’s form inching the door shut carefully behind her. She holds a finger up to her lips and I nod as she freezes, listening. Then she tiptoes down the stairs and falls into step beside me. She’s in jeans and a sweatshirt, her hair in a sleek and boring ponytail. I didn’t even know Hannah owned a pair of jeans. Hell, I didn’t even know she owned a hair elastic.
Wordlessly, we move away from the lake and down the neatly trimmed grass running alongside her driveway. We don’t speak until we’re safely closed inside my car.
“Are you going to get into trouble?” I ask.
She shrugs, sighing and leaning her head back on the seat. “I told my parents I was going to bed, then snuck down the back stairs. Doesn’t matter.”
“I think your parents would disagree.”
“They disagree with a lot of things these days.”
“I’m sorry.” The words slip out, but they feel right. I am sorry, and I feel as though I need to say it to her, over and over, even if I’m not sure what I’m apologizing for.
“Where are we going?” she asks. Her eyes find mine in the dark, and I don’t know why, but I feel myself relax as we watch each other. Truthfully, I didn’t come over here with any sort of plan. I just wanted to see her, something in me reaching out for something in her. As we sit in the silence, exhaustion and powerlessness physical things lying heavy on our skin, I smile.
“I think I know a place we can go,” I say.
We drive through Frederick’s tiny downtown, all softly glowing streetlights and cobbled sidewalks, the air deceptively gentle and accepting. I park on a side street near the centuries-old Presbyterian church and we walk south, staying off the main road, heading away from the city center and restaurant patrons out for dinner.
Finally, our destination looms before us, a white ghost against the black sky. A wordless marquee, save for the name THE MENAGERIE at the very top, wraps around the front of the old abandoned theater. The front façade is almost cathedral-like, whitewashed stone and turreted roof reaching toward the heavens.
I cup my hands around my eyes, peering through the darkened brass-lined doors. Inside, I see ragged red carpet covered in dust and littered with old movie tickets and popcorn cartons. This theater has been around since movies were called moving pictures, but it closed for repairs a few years ago, much to the town’s chagrin. It housed one auditorium, which had curtains lining the screen, velvety seat cushions, and ushers dressed like fancy hotel bellhops. They used to show old movies and serve Italian ices and chocolate malts at the concession counter. I saw The Wizard of Oz for the first time in this theater, my excited feet swinging from the seat next to Owen’s, my toes never even grazing the ground.
“What are we doing here?” Hannah asks.
I turn back toward her, expecting to find a mischievous glimmer in her eyes, like that first day I met her and she took off running with my hand in hers, hurling us into the lake.
But her eyes are wary, flitting from my face to our surroundings.
I walk back to her and lace both of my hands with hers. I do it slowly, reaching out carefully, making sure she sees my every move. When she doesn’t pull away, I squeeze her fingers. “We’re going to break into this theater and explore and remember being girls watching old black-and-white movies. We’re going to do something stupid and wild and fun.”
“Why?”
“Because we still can.”
She stares at me for a few long seconds and I think she’s going to say no. We can’t. Maybe we never could. But then the tiniest smile lightens the tight set of her mouth, eyes flaring briefly with a bit of her old self. The smile grows, spreading to me and catching like fire until we’re both laughing. We keep our hands linked as we run around to the side of the building, searching for a way in and giggling the entire time.
Finally, at the back of the building, in an alleyway piled with old trash bins and a dumpster filled with theater seats and rat-gnawed velvet ropes, we see a window that’s cracked open about an inch. It’s a couple of feet above our heads, but with the help of the dumpster’s rim, I’m pretty sure I can reach it.
“Can you give me a boost?” I ask Hannah, and I step into her linked fingers. She tosses me up and I nearly overshoot the dumpster and land inside of the damn thing. I manage to hang on to keep my stomach on the edge and then hoist myself onto my feet.
“Oh my god.” Hannah laughs. “Sorry.”
“Yeah, sure you are.” I grin down at her.
Balancing with my arms out, I make my way to the window. Dust and dirt and something that looks disturbingly like small animal bones line the sill. I brush it all aside with my sleeve and wiggle the window up. Peeling paint sprinkles to the ground, but I get the window open enough to crawl through. Hannah finds an old milk crate behind the dumpster and climbs up behind me. Soon, we’re both tumbling into a men’s restroom.
“Ugh,” Hannah says, getting to her feet and smoothing her hair. “Smells like piss.”
“Don’t most men’s rooms smell like piss?”
“Exactly how many men’s rooms have you been in, Mara?”
“Oh, loads.”
She offers a smile and it feels like a victory.
The city is supposed to be renovating the theater, so they keep the electricity running and there are already a few lights illuminating the hallways. I find a set of switches and flip the rest of the lights on, filling the lobby ahead of us with a sepia glow. We wander around for a while, stepping around unidentifiable crap all over the floor, looking at old movie posters I remember as a kid still attached to the peeling walls. There is even a smattering of personal items long forgotten—a tattered black and white polka-dotted umbrella, a faded Atlanta Braves baseball cap, one of those ancient flip cell phones. It’s like touring the inside of a ghost, seeing all the things that used to make it a real live person. For some reason, it makes me sad, but a cleansing kind of sadness, a sickness that needed to get out.
Eventually we find our way upstairs. The ceiling in the auditorium is domed and textured, dark pink paint bleeding in between ornate cream-colored swirls of plaster, all of it worn and molting like a bird sloughing off its old feathers. We stand side by side at the balcony edge, the wide expanse of the theater spread out before us.
“Is it just me, or is this depressingly beautiful?” Hannah asks.
“It’s not just you.” I clap my hands once and the sound echoes through the space at least five times. “And tonight, all this depressing beauty is ours alone.”
I say it as a joke, but neither of us laughs. Because this feels right, being here with Hannah. This place, hollowed out and still standing, full of history but nearly forgotten.
“I heard about what the state attorney decided,” I say.
Hannah inhales a sharp breath. “Yeah.”
“Are you okay?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t want a big mess, you know? But . . . the fact that some stranger gets to decide whether or not he thinks anyone would believe me, whether or not it actually happened? It’s just . . . fuck.”
“Yeah.”
“They told me they found some pubic hairs during that god-awful examination, but you know what? The state attorney said they’re not even going to test them because Owen used a condom.”
“Oh.”
“I told you I said no pretty far into it.”
“No, I know.”
“The attorney also said that even though the hairs could prove he had sex with me, the condom is problematic. That’s what he said—problematic—like we’re talking about some political opinion or something.”
“That’s fucked-up.”
“Yeah. Everyone thinks that when someone gets ra—” She swallows hard and takes a deep breath. “That when someone gets raped, it’s this quick, spontaneous thing, always violent with bruises and black eyes. But I guess that’s not always the case, you know? Even my wrist? Problematic. Because we were outside on a stone bench and hey, you know, awkward teenage sex.”
“God.”
She shrugs, but the motion is stiff, exhausted. “The fact that he was my boyfriend and we’d slept together before is a huge issue. Of course no one would believe me.”
“I do.”
Her eyebrows bunch together. “Why? He’s your brother. You guys are close. He adores you, Mara. And you adore him, I know you do.”
I don’t answer right away. Instead, I sit down on an aisle step and lie back, eyes tracing the intricate patterns on the ceiling. Hannah joins me, linking her hands over her stomach.
“Sometimes, I don’t know why,” I say. “I even hate that I believe you. Like, he’s my brother, right? He’s my twin. I’ve felt sick since all of this happened and I can’t help but feel that it’s because he feels sick too. That any minute, he’s going to sit us all down and explain what happened. Confess. Do something to make this anything other than what it is.”
Silence fills the tiny space between us as tears clog up my throat, but then I just say it. I say it because I need to, because I have to, because it’s the truth.
“I don’t want to believe you.”
A beat of too-quiet. “I don’t want to believe me either.”
“But I can’t not. I tried, at first. Who wants to believe that about their own brother? But I . . . couldn’t. I hate either option.”
She takes my hand and squeezes. “Me too.”
We sit there for a while, letting that settle around us.
“I still love him,” I say, like a confession.
“Mara. God, of course you do.”
“But you shouldn’t have to say that.” My throat aches, the wellspring of tears pushing at every cell. “You should be able to hate him and let all your friends hate him with you.”
A million seconds go by before she speaks again. When she does, her voice is soft, almost a whisper. “Can I tell you something messed up?”
“Yeah.”
“I miss him. The guy I knew before that night. The guy I think I loved. He was always a little spoiled, a little arrogant, but that was just . . .”
“That was just Owen.”
“Yeah. It was sort of cute, you know?”
I nod, my mouth suddenly dry.
Hannah rubs at her eyes. “God, it’s like he’s two different people. And I should’ve known. Dammit, I should’ve known.”
“How could you have known this would happen?”
“Well, not this. But he’s a Gemini. I’m a Scorpio. Air and water, two different elements trying to blend. I thought we’d defied the stars, you know? I mean, I know a lot of people think astrology is silly, but I like it. I like the cosmic balance and purpose to it all. And I thought . . . I don’t know what I thought. I thought we worked. Right up until the moment we didn’t.”
“It’s okay that you like astrology, Hannah. I like it too.” I think about Owen’s and my stories on the roof. Twins adventuring in the sky. We’ve never paid much attention to our horoscope or how our sign might influence our lives like Hannah has, but the stars—the stars have always been a part of us.
“And none of this is your fault,” I say. “Please tell me you know that.”
She nods, fingers pressing into her eyes again.
“I don’t think it’s messed up that you miss him.”
Brother and boy. Family and stranger. Friend and enemy. It is messed up, but not because we’re splitting him apart in our minds. It’s messed up because we have to.
“I can only say that about missing him to you, Mara. So, don’t feel bad, okay? About feeling . . . the way you do about him.”
I find her hand, twining us together and holding on as tightly as I can.
“Thank you,” she says.
“For what?”
“For this.” She holds up our hands and I squeeze her fingers.
“Would you have told anyone?” I ask. “If Charlie hadn’t found you that night?”
She sighs heavily. “I don’t know. I really don’t. A huge part of me thinks I wouldn’t have, even though I know that’s the wrong answer. I should tell, right? It’s a crime and I’ll never be the same because of it. A lot of people will never be the same. My mom keeps telling me I’m so brave, but I’m not. I’m just trying to survive, to get from sunup to sundown. But . . . I never got it before, you know? All the stories I’ve heard other women tell about how much shame there is in being the one it happens to. But there is. There’s this weight of responsibility, of . . . god, I don’t know. Of just existing. Like somehow, if I’d just stopped breathing at some point, everyone would be better off. And I don’t mean that like I want to not exist . . . just like . . . I don’t know. Like I shouldn’t. Like I feel stupid because I do exist. It’s messed up.”
Stupid little bitch echoes inside of me, an old companion, too close and too sharp. And then I can’t help it. Sobs leak out of me, ugly and wet and loud. They reverberate through the empty theater. Hannah props herself on one elbow and I can’t even look at her. I cover my face, shuddering into my palms.
“Mara. What is it?”
I shake my head because this isn’t her burden. She shouldn’t bear the weight of my story—she has her own, fresher, more raw, more invasive, her abuser’s sister lying right next to her. But there’s that something inside of me—stardust and silent tears—reaching out again for that something in her, something we share, something only the two of us in all the world can really understand.
And that’s why everything that happened with Mr. Knoll spills out of me. Not only to gain some comfort, but also to give it.
She doesn’t speak when I’m done. I don’t even think she breathes. The silence is oppressive, so loud I’m about to scream. But then Hannah curls into my side, her arm slung carefully over my stomach. She lays her head on my shoulder and starts humming gently, softly, beautifully. It’s so perfect, water keeps streaming down my face, mingling with the tears I can hear in her own voice. Until this moment, I didn’t realize how much I needed this, just someone to listen.
Soon, I blend my alto voice with her sweet soprano. We hum “Sing Me to Heaven,” an a cappella song our choir performed last year at the spring concert. It’s gorgeous and poetic and sad and powerful. Words form and wrap around the notes and soon we’re sitting up, standing, though I don’t remember getting to my feet. Our fingers wrap around the balcony railing, our voices finding the perfect tones as they fill the abandoned room.
In my heart’s sequestered chambers lie truths stripped of poet’s gloss . . .
The lyrics flow out of us, surreal and too real all at once. The sound is beautiful, our voices perfectly blended until I can’t tell who’s singing melody and who’s harmonizing. Our fingers are knotted together, refusing to part as the emotion of the song—of unspeakable things—finds this strange release.
It’s such a serious, sober song, written for perfectly controlled and trained voices, firm whispers and prayers.
Sing me a lullaby, a love song, a requiem . . .
But as Hannah and I sing, our voices grow louder and bolder, smiles lighting across our faces. A few gulps of laughter mixed with tears begin to escape every few notes, and soon our song is anything but reverent.
It’s a battle cry.
We sing it again and again, our arms lifted above our heads, our bodies raised up on tiptoes and nearly bouncing, a musical echo swirling around us as if we’ve woken the dead.
And I can’t help but hope that maybe we really have.
On our way back to the car, Hannah pulls the hair elastic from her ponytail and flicks the rubber band to the asphalt. She never breaks her stride, but she slides her fingers through her shiny strands and tousles them into something slightly less smooth and tame.
It’s not the beautiful, tangled mess it usually is.
But it’s close.