DERRICK didn’t look surprised to see her at their door, but he didn’t look happy, either. He didn’t look much of anything, not even awake, as he stepped aside for her to come in. Then he slouched back off to bed without a word, leaving her alone in the living room. She heard his door shut and then lock. Lee sat on the sofa, thinking about the destroyed van with all her stuff, about the stolen museum piece, and about the fact that she was about to put herself at the mercy of a guy she hardly knew.
A clock above the TV read just half past seven, and it was another hour before the girl housemate shuffled past to make herself coffee. She smiled blearily at Lee and disappeared into the kitchen. Fifteen minutes later she appeared with a mug for herself and one for Lee.
“I’m Allison,” she said.
“We met last night.”
“Oh, yeah. Sorry. I’m barely awake. What’s your name again?”
“Lee.”
“That doesn’t sound right. Are you sure?”
“Pretty sure.”
Allison shrugged, took a sip, and grimaced. “Jesus, I make terrible coffee. Can you make good coffee?”
“I don’t drink much coffee,” Lee said. “So I guess I don’t know the difference. It tastes fine to me.”
Allison smiled. “I like you. Will? My boyfriend? He wouldn’t drink this. He’d pour it out and then spend half an hour hand grinding the beans, boiling water to a precise temperature, blooming the grounds, pouring a bit at a time with that precious little swirling motion . . . I swear I’m usually asleep by the time he’s finished. I mean, I get it, he wants to be a chef, and that’s his thing, but sometimes I just want to have a fucking sandwich, you know?”
Lee was trying to follow, with mixed results, but it didn’t seem to matter. Allison just seemed to like to talk.
“Is that vintage?” Allison asked.
Lee looked down at the wedding dress, now soiled and torn. She wanted to cover it up.
“You’re rocking it,” Allison said. “I couldn’t get away with that, but I get what you’re doing. It’s, like, Riot Grrrl redux. So how do you know Tomi?”
“We just kind of met.”
“You guys just friends? Because Tomi doesn’t bring a lot of ladies home.”
“Just friends.”
“Well, don’t hurt him, is all I’ll say. Or I’ll have to murder you.”
Lee was deciding how to respond when she saw Allison looking over her shoulder.
“Speak of the devil,” Allison said. “You could have at least given her a blanket.”
Lee turned to see Tomi, his confused expression turning to delight. “When did you get here?”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I . . .”
“Is everything all right? You need a place to stay or something?”
Lee was glad she didn’t have to ask. She didn’t even have to respond. She watched Tomi look at Allison, and Allison’s shrug seemed to settle it.
“As long as you need, honey,” she said. “And if you ever need anyone to talk to, I’m a freaking vault.”
“Is there more?” Tomi asked, nodding at Allison’s coffee. He went into the kitchen without waiting for an answer.
“Tomi is the only one who can stomach my coffee,” she said. “But he’s Czech. He makes it worse than I do.”
• • •
Lee stayed on the couch again that night, beneath a blanket that Allison gave her that smelled of old milk. Over the next several days she tried to keep herself inconspicuous within the small apartment. She read novels she found around the house and watched cooking shows with Will on TV. She learned that Will and Allison had a silent channel of communication running between them, that they seemed to read each other’s minds in a way that was spooky. Lee hated the idea of someone else inside her mind, but their closeness tugged at her. Allison liked her, Lee could tell, but she also had a jealous streak. Lee learned to avoid getting too close to Will and not to borrow his clothes, which fit her better, and to accept Allison’s instead, which left Lee in overlarge gingham prairie dresses and lumpy sweaters. Lee stuck with Tomi’s thick gray hoodie, and after a while it was understood to be hers.
She found herself spending most of her time with Tomi, too. He liked having her around as he worked at his laptop, pressing his face to the screen and typing clumsily while he’d spin stories to her of his childhood in a small southern Bohemian town, of his sister’s Doolittle-like rapport with animals, or of his crazy uncle Sasha, who seemed always at the end of these stories to be covered in shit. And sometimes after his work she’d meet him down at the Water Works and hang out in his studio while he’d work on his paintings.
• • •
They all had occupations that brought them in and out of the apartment at various times—Tomi had a day job at a data recovery firm, Allison was studying architecture at Philadelphia University, Will worked in the kitchen of a Whole Foods, and Derrick was supposedly a barista, though he spent much of his time in his room with his door closed—and Lee found herself alone in the apartment for long stretches. She liked to clean the place when they were out; it made her feel like she was contributing.
Dinners were communal, and Will, the aspiring chef, cooked most of them. Lee couldn’t cook a thing, but she liked to help him prep and happily washed the dishes afterward. When she asked Allison if she could borrow a shirt, Allison told her she didn’t have to ask, to just go help herself, which made Lee unexpectedly happy. By the end of the week everyone but Derrick seemed to have warmed to her.
As the days went on Lee began to feel that she was becoming less a boarder and more a part of the family. Will revealed that he was saving to go to a culinary academy and that his five-year plan was to open a restaurant that Allison would design. Tomi wanted to save money and someday return to his hometown, where living was cheap and he could afford to paint full time. Tomi kept weird hours. She’d wake up from her spot on the couch and find him slipping out or coming back in at all times of the night. She always pretended to be asleep. One day she asked him where he went at night.
“You want to come with me sometime?”
“You haven’t told me what you do.”
“We’ll see,” he said. “Maybe one of these nights I will take you.” He left it at that.
Even Derrick could be charming when he wanted to be, especially when he was talking about his own dreams: he wanted to start his own data security business and make a lot of money. When she asked him what he would do with a lot of money, he told her he would take care of his autistic younger brother, whom his parents had stuck in a group home. Lee thought she might cry, until he started laughing at her gullibility.
Lee couldn’t figure Derrick out at all. Most days he treated her like a stray cat who’d wandered into the apartment, but every now and then, when the others were gone, he’d open up and actually be a human being. One night he came home late from a party and Lee was still up, reading one of Tomi’s science fiction novels on the couch.
He was dressed in a thin but expensive-looking leather jacket with a white V-neck beneath and wore thick eye shadow and dark lipstick that had smudged across his face. His freshly dyed hair was blue-black and messy. He took two beers from the fridge and offered her one without her asking. She didn’t want a beer, but he had never offered her anything before, so she took it.
He slumped down in a chair and pulled it up close to the couch, putting his feet up on it and arranging himself into a position that seemed at once studied and louche.
“Good party?” she asked.
Derrick leaned his head back and talked to the ceiling. “The DJ was spinning all retro jungle bullshit, but the teenyboppers like it.” He looked at Lee and smiled. “No offense.”
“None taken.”
“You go to school in the city?” he asked, looking away now, as though it was a casual question and not the interrogation it felt like. He had been trying clumsily to siphon information about her past from her since she’d arrived.
Lee thought carefully about how to answer. “I was homeschooled,” she said.
“Your parents some kind of religious nuts?”
“Something like that, yeah.”
“Well, you didn’t miss much. I hated high school.”
“How come?”
Derrick smirked wistfully. “Nobody can take a joke. I got expelled my senior year and never looked back.”
“For what?”
“For hacking into the school’s network and changing all the links to live webcam porn. They could never prove it was me, but they found a way to expel me anyway. Best thing that ever could have happened to me. I used it as a calling card to join a hacker crew after that. That’s how I met Tomi.”
“He was part of that crew?”
“No, he was a lone operator. But we both happened to be hacking into the same system at the same time. It’s like if you were spelunking some network of hidden caves way out in the middle of Buttfuck, Nowhere, and just happened to run into some dude. You bond.”
“So you took to each other right away, huh?”
“We hated each other at first. Each of us tried to sabotage the other at every turn. But it was just good-natured rivalry. So we decided to meet IRL and teamed up. We started our own crew not too long after. We figured out we both love the same things about hacking—the social engineering, the personal risk, the codes of ethics. And the cryptography. That’s where Tomi and I really found our common ground.”
Derrick stared at her, in a way that began to feel uncomfortable. She thought about the object she had found and the code on it.
“But then he got into that goofy urbex shit, and the hacking world pretty much passed him by. That world moves fast. He’s pretty much nothing but a script kiddie these days.” Derrick looked down at his beer and puckered his lips. “Anyway,” he said, finishing it, “you want to come to bed with me?” He asked it as if he were asking if she wanted to share a smoke.
“That’s okay,” Lee said, amused but trying not to let the smile go to her face. “I think I’ll go to sleep.”
“Suit yourself.” Derrick left his bottle on the table and disappeared down the hall. She could hear the clicking lock of his door.
Lee went back to the novel. It was a book about a man who was hired to investigate another man, unaware that the man he was investigating was himself. Only the man being investigated knew that the man doing the investigation was himself. Lee was on the last chapter when a large card slipped out from behind the back cover. At first she thought it was a postcard, until she picked it up. It was a Société Anonyme invite. Just like the one that the man had given to her and Edie at the café, over a year ago.
• • •
She confronted Tomi the next day, removing the card from the book and dropping it onto his laptop keyboard as he sat hunched into the screen. Tomi stopped typing, picked up the card, and squinted at it. If he was taken off guard, he didn’t look it.
“What’s this?” he said.
“You told me you’d never been to one of these things before you met me.”
He turned the card over, then handed it back to her. “I hadn’t.”
“This is your book, right? I took it from your bookshelf.”
“I was telling the truth. But I don’t see why it matters. What would the difference be?”
“The difference would be . . .” Lee realized she couldn’t tell him why it made a difference without telling him about the Crystal Castle and the Station Master. Or her missing friend Edie. Or Claire. The Thrumm kids. Her escape from Juvie. And she wasn’t ready to do that. Not until she knew she could trust him. “The difference would be that you lied to me. Why?”
“I told you a friend gave me the ticket.”
“So?”
“So that friend was Derrick. He borrowed that book a while back. He must have left it in there. You want me to ask him about it?”
“Forget it,” Lee said, feeling foolish. “I’m going out for a walk.”
It was midafternoon, and Lee kept her hoodie up. As she walked she began to think about Derrick in ways that she hadn’t bothered to before. Derrick always locked his door, both when he was in the room and when he’d leave, and she wondered what kind of person did that. He was hiding something, but was he part of all this? She wondered if there was a way to get into his room.
When Lee returned, the house was empty. She was tired from a night of no sleep, but when she tried to take a nap, it wouldn’t come. She couldn’t get the idea out of her head that this wasn’t just a coincidence. That Derrick was in with the S.A. in some way, or at the very least knew more than he was letting on.
She called out a few times to make sure the house was empty, and knocked on all the doors. She knocked on Derrick’s the loudest. When Lee was a young girl, her father kept an old locked chest in the back of the closet. She used to obsess over what could be in it, until one day when she was home alone she figured out how to pick the lock with a paper clip. There wasn’t much in the chest, just a lot of photographs and some things that seemed to be from a past life, and she was disappointed when this mystery was solved, but she liked that she had been able to figure out how to get past the lock, and every now and then she’d pick it again just for fun.
The deadbolt on Derrick’s door was not some old chest lock, and it was not going to give way to a few jiggles from a paper clip, no matter how much Lee tried. She tried a nail file and a hair clip, too, but soon realized that, despite her previous success, she knew nothing about locks. The door remained closed.
• • •
For a good while none of them asked her outright about where she came from, about her past or her family. They were obviously curious, but she was cagey enough that they must have decided collectively to leave it alone. But when Allison offered to help Lee with the dishes one night, Lee knew something was up—Allison never offered help with the dishes. And Allison didn’t waste any time. “You know we have no problem with your staying here. You stay as long as you need to. But we’re all wondering, you know . . .”
“Yeah?” Lee made a big show of scraping off a bit of pasta barnacled to a plate.
“What’s your story?”
She scrubbed harder at the now-invisible spot of food. “My story is I ran away from home a few months ago.”
Allison nodded, as if this was the answer she was expecting. “How old are you?”
“Eighteen, now. But I was seventeen when I left home, and not finished with high school. I’m an adult now, free to do what I want, so it’s not like you’re harboring a real runaway or anything. I just can’t go home.”
Allison had stopped even the pretense of washing dishes and now leaned against the refrigerator, looking not at Lee but at Lee’s reflection in the window over the sink. “Where were you staying before this?”
Lee knew she couldn’t tell Allison about any of it, but Edie once told her that to get away with a lie, you mix it with truth. “I was sleeping in an abandoned van. In a junkyard.”
“Seriously?”
Lee smiled. “Here is better.”
“Yeah, I mean, of course . . . can I ask you, what . . . I mean, why . . .”
“Why I left home?”
“Yeah.”
“You won’t tell anyone?”
“Steel vault, remember?”
Lee just said, “My mom’s boyfriend,” and Allison let her leave it at that.
• • •
That night Lee felt a hand on her shoulder, shaking her awake. She rolled over to see Tomi squatting down, his face right up in hers. “What’s going on?” she said.
“Get dressed.”
“Now? What time is it?”
“A little after two.”
Lee sat up and reached for her jeans. “Where are we going?”
He just handed her a dark hoodie and shouldered a backpack. “You said you wanted to come with me sometime. Now’s the time.”
She hadn’t said anything of the sort, but she pulled on the hoodie and followed him out the door.
They rode bicycles through the city, Lee just trying to keep up, all her tiredness gone, invigorated by the cool wind. Tomi stopped suddenly, veering his bike onto the sidewalk and dropping it behind a hedge. The street was well lit, and an enormous stone wall, maybe thirty feet high, ran the entire block, paralleled by the hedge, which spanned its length. Lee followed.
Tomi walked along the inside of the hedge, his eyes to the ground, until he stopped, bent down, and took a short metal tool from his pack. He squatted, and Lee watched him use the tool to unscrew a bolt in a grate at his feet. He inserted his fingers in the grate and lifted.
A concrete tube with a rebar ladder went straight down into darkness. Tomi pulled a headlamp from his back and strapped it on, then handed one to her. He went down first. Lee put on her headlamp and followed. About twenty feet down the ladder deposited her onto the floor of a square concrete tunnel.
A ways down they found another rebar ladder and climbed up, emerging onto a patchy yard. It was hard to tell in the moonlight, but the wall seemed to contain within it nearly an entire city block. Across the yard she could barely make out the top of a smokestack, and below it a long, low building. “Wait here,” he said. “I’m going to go take a leak.”
She watched him walk off to the wall. Why did guys always need something to pee against? Lee turned back to the structure, curious what it was, and headed toward it. The building was old, made of the same stone as the walls, and there was an enormous, gaping doorway at its center. The doors were wide open. Before she knew it, Lee was walking down a long hall. When it got too dark to see, she turned on her headlamp again. Along both sides were cells, with wood-slatted doors set into tracks. The place had to be an old prison. Lee shined her light into one of the cells, then walked in. The walls were peeling gray plaster, and a rusted iron bed frame sat in one corner. It smelled damp and old, and she imagined what these walls had absorbed over so many years: the fear and anger and loneliness of decades of prisoners. Lee could hear Tomi calling to her in the distance and turned toward his voice, but then she tripped over something and was hurled headfirst into a wall. Her headlamp saved her forehead, but the lens cracked, sending her into total darkness.
Lee felt a moment of weightlessness, the ground gone beneath her feet. She reminded herself to breathe, then felt around until she could make out the door to the cell. Back in the hallway, she could still hear Tomi’s voice, but it was growing more distant. Which way had she come from? She could no longer remember. She tried to follow the direction of the voice, but it was hard to tell where it was coming from.
As she inched her way down the hallway, fear began to take hold. She should have hit the doorway by now. She couldn’t see any light or hear anything but her own breathing. Her breaths grew shallower until they stopped bringing air in at all. She put out her hand to find the wall, but there was no wall. She stumbled, hands out, but there was nothing in front of her and she fell, skidding to the ground and feeling the cool flash of a scraped knee. Her palms burned. She got onto her hands and knees and crawled, ignoring the pain, needing the ground, the only solid thing to cling to. Then something sharp bit into her knee and she collapsed there on the concrete floor.
She could wait here until morning, lying on her side and holding herself. Or she could get it the fuck together. Lee got up onto her feet. She thought back to the time she was four and her father was looking after her while her mother was working a graveyard shift. Late at night he had woken her to go to the store with him, and he had left her in the car, telling her, “Be right back.” She had waited there for what felt like an hour but could have been minutes, slouched low in her seat and watching rats move in and out of the park that bordered the parking lot, before she let herself out of the car. Lee went into the convenience store, but her father wasn’t there. When she came out, she followed sounds from the park, then stood in the middle of the grass watching her father hugging another man against a tree. Both men had their backs to her, and Lee could hear her father whispering something into the man’s ear. When she got back to the car, she found that she had locked herself out of it. As she walked back home she remembered wishing he had shared secrets with her, too. It was an unfamiliar route, and yet she had hummed a made-up song and found her way back without thinking about it. When she let herself in, her father was home waiting for her. He was wild-eyed, pacing, and he had hugged her so tightly she thought he would squeeze the air out of her as he promised never to leave her alone again.
As she remembered again the sensation of walking home by herself that night, she slowly became aware of something happening. Her surroundings, even in the dark, were becoming clear. She was not in a hallway but in a room. The room was circular. She could not see this, but nevertheless she knew it to be true. Lee took a step, then three, then turned. There was a wall in front of her, maybe four feet away. She could sense it. She took two steps, put her hand out, and felt it. Lee backed away and turned. She walked forward again. She could feel a hallway to her left. She kept walking. Another hallway. Lee made a circuit of the room, and by the end she could see it in her head: a circular room with a series of hallways leading into it, like spokes into a wheel hub. She circled the room again and counted. Nine of them. Incredibly, she knew which of them was the hallway she had come through, and she also knew in which direction the grate was and even in which direction the apartment was.
Lee spun herself around in circles for thirty seconds, then stopped. She was a little dizzy, but she still knew the direction of the hall she’d come through and the direction of the grate. She knew that the room was empty except for something solid about six feet to her left. She walked in that direction and felt around. Her hands touched something made of wood and glass, a display case of some kind.
Lee started walking. She picked a direction and went down one of the other hallways, slowly at first, afraid of bumping into something, then picking up speed, faster and faster until she was running full tilt through the dark. A blob of light took shape at the end, and she ran toward it. When she emerged back out into the yard, she was laughing. She looked down at herself. Her jeans were torn and her knee was scraped raw, bleeding into her shoes. She saw then that something had caught against the bottom of her sneakers and torn the canvas nearly straight through. She pulled off her shoes and tossed them one at a time across the yard. Standing there in the dark space, barefoot in the grass, Lee was happier than she could remember ever being.
She found Tomi ten minutes later, by his flashlight. He was so angry with her he said nothing the whole way back, but Lee didn’t care. She had discovered another world.
• • •
Over the next few days, Lee wanted to ask Tomi everything about this hobby of his. She’d heard about people who explored abandoned places, but nothing about it had appealed to her in the abstract. Now she wanted to do another one, as soon as possible. Lee couldn’t explain the feeling of freedom and power she’d had, knowing her way in the dark, but she knew she wanted to experience it again. She was on her way out of the apartment, intending to surprise Tomi with a sandwich at his studio, hoping to convince him to take her again, when she heard voices in the stairwell below. Lee backed away and listened.
“She said she didn’t have anywhere else to go. What was I supposed to do, just turn her away?” She heard Tomi say.
“So what, she’s homeless? Do you even know how old she is?”
“Are you asking did I card her, Derrick?”
“She could be fourteen for all we know. You know what that would make you?”
Lee bristled at the implication of what Tomi might have told them.
“She’s eighteen,” Allison said. “She told me.”
“What else would she say? I’d be willing to bet she hasn’t even seen sixteen yet. Just find out who her parents are and call them to come pick her up,” Derrick said.
“We don’t know anything about where she came from,” Allison said. “Maybe she was abused or something. You just want to send her back?”
“Not our problem,” said Derrick. “Look, she’s a nice kid. But we’re not running a shelter, and we don’t know anything about her. We could get into trouble just for having her here.”
“I told her she could stay here,” said Tomi. “She’s my responsibility.”
“For a few days. It’s been weeks now. Are you going to start paying her rent, too? Paying for the food she eats?”
“I don’t mind sharing my food.” This was Will. “It’s mostly stuff from Whole Foods they’re gonna throw out anyway.”
“Fine,” said Derrick. “I don’t care about the money, either. I just don’t want to go to jail for harboring some teen runaway. I’m getting too old for this shit.”
“You’re twenty-seven, Derrick.”
“Exactly.”
“I told you she’s my responsibility,” Tomi said. “I’ll take care of her.”
Lee went back in to the apartment before she could be found out. She was quiet all that night, the conversation burning a hole in her stomach. She felt shitty enough about not contributing any money. She did what she could around the house, but it didn’t seem enough. That night, when they were all asleep, she put her shoes on and took them off twice, always on the verge of just slipping away. But Tomi was right: she didn’t have any place else to go.
• • •
A few days later she was coming home from the supermarket when Derrick came up behind her, taking a shopping bag and opening the door. “Let me get one of those for you,” he said.
She thanked him and followed him up the stairs, but then he stopped, so suddenly she walked into him. Lee tried to move past, but he blocked the way.
“How long you planning on staying with us?” he said. “By the way.”
Lee tried again to get past, but he blocked her again. “I don’t know.”
“Because everyone here pays rent, utilities, groceries. You’re in a hard place and I understand. I’m not a bad guy, you know. You need a place to crash until you get your shit sorted out, I get it. But sooner or later everyone has to pay their own way.”
“I know, Derrick. And thank you. Really and truly. And that’s exactly what I’m doing, trying to sort my shit out so that I can pay my own way.”
“So you’re looking for work?”
Lee was not looking for work, she couldn’t, but she also couldn’t tell him that. “Yes.”
“Where?”
“Where?”
“What kind of work? Maybe I can help.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Anything.”
“You ever do any acting?”
“What do you mean?”
“Movie acting.”
“What? No. Why?”
“Or more like webcam acting. Anything like that?”
It took Lee a moment to understand. She could tell he was enjoying this.
He leaned against the wall and ran a hand through his hair. “You’re eighteen, right? I know some guys. I could hook you up.”
Lee heard the door open and close upstairs, then the sound of footsteps. Derrick turned as Tomi rounded the staircase. “I was just looking for you,” he said to Lee. “I’m going to my studio. You want to come?”
Lee turned to Derrick. “Bring this one up for me, too?” She handed the other bag to him without waiting for a reply, then followed Tomi down the stairs.
• • •
Tomi called the excursions creeps, and over the next two weeks Lee went on eight more with him. They visited a derelict hospital, an abandoned aquarium on an island, the rooftop of a half-constructed high-rise, an old theater in ruins, a crumbling hotel, two factories, and a network of tunnels beneath a rail yard that seemed like a vast catacomb of industrial corpses. Like any explorers, they sought out places unsullied by the footprints of previous urban explorers. Posting the first photos of a site on an urbex forum was like planting a flag. Others could explore it now, but they would always be following in another crew’s footsteps.
He called his crew the Philadelphia Urbex Society, and when she asked who else was in it, he said, “Just you. Assuming you’d like to join.”
“Really?”
“It’s a very exclusive crew.”
“So before I came in, you were a society of one?”
Tomi smiled. “No one else has made the cut.”
Urban exploration altered the way Lee saw the world. The corner of Oxford and Broad was no longer an office high-rise under construction, a movie theater, a subway station, and a department store. Now when she passed by she saw a ladder of scaffolding leading to rooftop access, open windows like invitations, and minimally secured underground access tunnels.
Lee loved the feeling of being lost in an empty building, the nebulous, directionless sensation of passing through an unknown space with no idea what might be ahead. The funny thing was that her internal compass always knew where she was and where the exits were. She’d challenge herself by going as deep into a building as she could, sometimes turning her flashlight off for minutes on end or closing her eyes and spinning in circles. But she always found her way in the end.
One night she and Tomi were exploring a crumbling high school, empty since the mid-’80s. As Lee ran her flashlight over old lockers and along the heaps of trash and sludge at the bottom of the drained swimming pool, she found herself by the pool bleachers, remembering that last moment with Edie before the cops came to take her away. It seemed so long ago. What a child she was then.
Tomi had gone on ahead, and she caught up and followed him down a stairwell. At the bottom they emerged into an enormous basement warehouse, shining their lights over a block of old textbooks as massive as a Greyhound bus. Decomposed to near disintegration, the stacked volumes looked fungal, like something growing in a forest. She wandered the damp room on a floor of books as soft as moss, the smell—earthy and thick with mold—making her lightheaded. It was fantastical down here, like an enormous underground cave.
Lee lay on her back in the middle of the room, her flashlight pointing up, losing herself in the dark expanse of the peeling ceiling. Down here the JDC was a distant memory, her mother was a character in a book she’d read a long time ago, and the Crystal Castle was a dream, the Station Master a phantom within it.
Tomi sank into a spongy pile of books that collapsed around him like a beanbag and lay back next to her. They listened to the faint ticking of the decomposition around them. She loved how alone she could be here. It was different being alone in the real world; there she just felt missed, invisible. But here, in the underground darkness, she felt whole. She didn’t mind that Tomi was here, too, because he saw her. It was as though he made it real just by witnessing it. Lee picked up an old geometry textbook, so soggy it came apart in her hand.
“It’s like a necropolis of the written word down here,” he said finally.
It wasn’t anything like that here. And he’d ruined her moment by saying it. He must not see her after all, she thought. “You’ve been waiting this whole time to say that, haven’t you? Why does everything need a headline?” Lee felt bad the moment the words left her mouth. She didn’t know why she sometimes felt the urge to be mean to Tomi. He made it no secret that he had feelings for her, that he wanted more from her; maybe it was his nakedness that drove her to swipe at him as she did. He was never hiding anything of himself, which made Lee uncomfortable.
She thought she’d hurt his feelings, but after a pause Tomi laughed and told her what a bitch she was, and she figured they were okay. “What’s Derrick’s story?” she asked.
“Why? You like him?” Tomi looked resigned to the idea, as if he had come to the conclusion some time ago.
Lee wanted to laugh. “What are you talking about?”
“You told me you thought he was handsome.”
“He’s also a fucking creep. Did I not tell you that, too?”
“So you’re not into him?”
Lee found Tomi’s palpable relief kind of sweet. He’d never brought up their tryst in the museum and hadn’t made a move, though she’d expected him to and half dreaded it, hating the idea of hurting him. She braced herself for a move now, but Tomi just got up and walked toward the stairs. Even in the darkness she could tell he was smiling.
As they walked back to the apartment that night, Tomi told her about his crazy Czech family, his three childhood cats—Bolo, Tomo, and Gogo—and the reasons why, if he could pick any year in history to travel back in time to, it would be 1917. He rarely pried into her life, and she liked it that way, but tonight he ventured a few questions about her past and Lee was forced to choose her words carefully, offering details that she didn’t think could ever be used to pin her down. She could sense the rawness of his nerves around her, and she liked watching him weigh her answers, as though there were something in them to weigh.
• • •
Some nights they’d go out and eat sandwiches by the pier or picnic in a half-constructed office building, in the middle of an emptied public pool, in a derelict bank’s vault. Once they snuck into a Cineplex to view a late-night showing from the rafters up behind the screen, legs dangling and staring down at the film in mirror image. Tomi opened his backpack to show it stuffed with popcorn, then reached in and pulled out a flask of whiskey buried inside. As they passed the flask, Lee watched his face, his skin pale silver under the reflected light of the projector, and felt a tenderness for him she hadn’t known was there.
Most of all she liked coming to his studio at the Water Works, liked to watch him work as he moved back and forth along the length of the canvas, which he’d tack down on the floor across the entire room. He didn’t talk when he painted, but he would when he took breaks. He asked her opinions on things. He asked her if she’d felt anything like aura when they’d creeped the museum that night, and seemed delighted when she told him she thought she’d felt something standing in front of the big glass sculpture by Duchamp.
“What happened that night? After the museum. When you showed up at the apartment the next morning.” When she didn’t answer he said, “Allison told me you were living in a van in a junkyard.”
Some vault. But Lee didn’t blame Allison. “I was. After you dropped me off, I came back to find it flat as a pancake.” She tried to laugh, but he just looked at her sadly.
“All your stuff, too?”
Lee brought her hands together in a crushing motion.
“What was in there?”
Lee thought about her clothes, her sleeping bag, the girl’s diary. “Everything I owned.” She shrugged. “Not much.”
Tomi held that sad look on his face and returned to his work.
She liked that Tomi saw her, and yet he seemed always to know when she needed to be alone, too. She liked especially when he’d turn off the lights and plug in one of his paintings. She’d hear a hum, then the little vibrating tendrils would come to life. In the dark the white fields glowed radium green and seemed to free-float in the air like small, trembling clouds.
• • •
At first she thought it was a random, possibly accidental, blip of a highlighter pen: someone had highlighted the word hello halfway through the book she was reading. The book was a bloated paperback historical novel that Allison had plucked from her bookshelf for Lee to keep herself occupied with, and Lee was burning through it. A half-dozen pages past the highlighted greeting was another word, lee, highlighted in that sickly neon yellow, extracted from the word “bleep.” Lee flipped forward, finding what highlighted a few pages in, do on the page after that. The word you was highlighted a few pages later, followed by see on the same page. She flipped forward until the word through jumped out at her, followed by your a few pages after. Lee couldn’t find another highlighted word until nearly the end of the book, when she landed on the word windows. A bit down the page was a highlighted question mark. Then there were no more highlighted words.
Lee shut the book and sat there, listening to the hum of the silent apartment. It was three in the morning and everyone was asleep. “Hello Lee what do you see through your windows?” Was this Tomi’s doing? It seemed the kind of coy, oblique game he might play. But what did it mean? It could have been someone else. Allison could be playful like that. Derrick had been agitating to kick her out since the beginning; maybe this was just him trying to fuck with her head. She had been out earlier that day, without the book. It could have been any of them. Lee scanned the living room, landing on the windows. She got off the couch, dragging the blanket with her, and pulled up the shade.
All she saw was her own face staring back at her in reflection. It took her a moment to realize that she was seeing, beyond that, her face again. Lee turned off the light. A picture was taped to the glass from the outside: a rectangle made of photographs of men—black-and-white and from another time, all of them in old-fashioned suits and ties and overcoats, all of them with their eyes closed—surrounding a single Polaroid photo: the same one Ester had taken of Lee in the cafeteria of the Crystal Castle. Someone had cut out her eyes, replacing them with big, sightless engorged eyes that sucked all sentience from her face. Lee tried to open the window, but it was painted shut. They were four floors up.