The first night Ana slept, really slept, again, she did dream of Dad. Rather than the empty abyss, she fell into a memory.
It was a specific memory, altered by the dreaming. Ana remembered the day Dad drove her to Walmart to pick out a Christmas gift for Mom. Ana was probably eight, because she remembered dawdling, obsessing over cartoon folders in the school supplies aisle until Dad led her to the accessories section. Someone had gone on a rampage in the hosiery aisle—except, in the dream, all the tights on the floor became wriggling larvae.
“Help me out here, Ana.” Dad gestured at the wall of jewelry. The junk glimmered in scuttling patches, caught the light like beetled backs. “Which bracelet, do you think?”
“Mom doesn’t wear bracelets. She says they get in the way.”
“See, that’s why I need you here. You pay attention to the girl stuff.”
Ana couldn’t see how being a girl had anything to do with it. But she pointed at a necklace and he grabbed it. On the way to the checkout line, Dad tugged her ponytail and thanked her. His phone rang; Dad told Ana that if she was quick, he’d let her run back to pick out a sparkling folder for herself.
In the dream and in the memory, Ana clutched the fish-scaled folder tight when she returned to the checkout. Dad clutched his phone even tighter.
Ana woke up next to her mother. Her hands were empty.
Dad had never given as much as he’d taken.
When Ana told Dr. Ruby about the dream, she stopped jotting notes.
“Your dreams are very important to you, aren’t they, Ana?”
Ana shrugged. She didn’t find Dr. Ruby threatening like Milo did, and she didn’t see any point in refusing to speak with her like Hank did. But now that she’d slept on it a bit, Ana did wonder what drew this cryptic woman to the Vasquezes. What was the point of the performance?
Dad would have thought Ana already knew. Ana and Dr. Ruby were both girls, right? And Dad always thought that meant they’d be the same.
Dr. Ruby set down her pen. “They say creative people process their feelings while they sleep.”
“Who says?”
“I’m not certain, actually. They. I could be making it up. But it’s something I can believe. What have you been processing in your sleep, Ana?”
“Dad stuff, I guess. Same as always.”
“Hopefully it won’t be always.” A note of unwarranted emotion entered Dr. Ruby’s voice. She put fingers on her melted face. “Hopefully you’ll let him go when you need to. If you’re lucky.”
Ana didn’t ask. With the plucking of her pen from the table, Dr. Ruby shook herself free of the anger. She was back to talking about the marked improvement in Ana’s habits, back to discussing the clarity of Ana’s eyes now that Ana blinked more.
Ana had seen a lot of movies and a lot of people acting like scientists and doctors. Very few actors pulled it off. Dr. Ruby was no different. Yet Ana understood that though her eyes were fair game, Dr. Ruby’s scars were not.
Even if they were the only real thing about her.
“For the love of Olivier! Which part of ‘only twenty-three days until opening night’ don’t you heathens understand?”
Even from the wings Ana saw spit arcing upward from the front row of busted auditorium seats. Not that Mr. Oldman was sitting so much as hovering.
“I think we understand the passage of time better than he does, actually.” Brendan’s breath warmed the left side of Ana’s neck, softer than the velvety old curtains on her right.
Brendan didn’t have to speak so quietly. Mr. Oldman couldn’t hear them from his ungodly half-crouching perch, probably wouldn’t even if he dragged his skinny self closer to harangue the chorus members petrified upstage. “He does realize only fifty people will see this musical, and at least forty-seven of them will be the miscellaneous aunties of Skid Row Chorus Girl Number Four, correct?”
Ana snorted. She arched her shoulder to cover the patch where Brendan’s breath tickled. He asked her more questions these days. It made her blink sometimes.
It made her forget to mind the blinking.
Are you trying to forget me, Ana? Luz might have said, through Milo or Hank or through recollections of lost things: her mother slumped over at the kitchen table, the sensation of the first needle tearing through an unscarred thigh and changing it forever, a fridge with nothing in it.
Yes. Ana deliberately closed her eyes.
Upon reopening, Ana’s eyes watched members of the chorus fall back into starting positions. The number restarted at a clip much faster than the script called for. The pace became frantic. Sara, the junior pianist from the pit orchestra, began beating the keys like they were egg whites, she was on a cooking show, and by god she had better produce some gorgeous meringues.
Dark as it was in the wings, onstage the lights cut warm yellow circles into the floor. When Ana stood directly under those orphaned suns, there was no such thing as an abyss behind eyelids. There were sunspots, flashes of red and green and white.
Mr. Oldman was a lot to handle, consigning them to additional practice during homeroom. But his being a lot to handle was precisely why every practice involved a stage afire in spotlights. Rumor had it that the school had threatened to send Mr. Oldman the electricity bill. Brendan said he’d seen Mr. Oldman scoff at that, had seen him twirl his formidable mustache in disdain and reply, “Over my dead cadaver.”
“He likes being redundant. Claims it really puts a final dead doornail in life’s coffin.”
“Idiotic imbecile,” Ana drily replied.
Brendan’s chuckle—you could set it to music, build a score around it.
“Seymour! WHERE’S MY SEYMOUR!”
“There’s my deadly death-knell bell.” Brendan squeezed Ana’s shoulder once, before scurrying to his peeling blue-tape mark.
That natural, frenetic unease of his was more in character than acting could have been. The shopkeep wore anxiety like a second skin. Brendan really didn’t have the comedy down. But when he sang about his life as an orphan, he had conviction.
“We’re all orphans of something.”
“Well, chanting that in the dark to no one’s not creepy at all, Vasquez.” Platinum leaned her weight against the ropes. She ignored Mr. Oldman’s shriek about not rattling the curtains. “This might seem like the most obvious thing in the world, but since your eyes look like shit, maybe you see like shit. So take a good look at our friend Bren.”
“I’m already—”
“Oh, I know. You’re already looking.” Platinum wore white glow-in-the-dark lipstick; this far from the spotlights her mouth seemed disembodied, Rocky Horror–esque. “But look at him. Take him all in.”
Ana did.
Those pointed elbows. That long avian neck craning forward to meet Mr. Oldman’s endless critiques, and Ana could see the little hairs on the nape of it. The sharpness of shoulder blades branching below it. She saw the strangeness of his anatomy even through a shirt-and-vest combination, noted the way Brendan stood perpetually on the balls of his feet as if waiting on the edge of something unseen, ready to dive right into it, though uncertainty also emanated from him, like he’d dive and shatter and that was fine with him, because it was all about the plummet, not how the plummet ended.
Feathers and breaking glass: Brendan Nesbitt, in Ana’s eyes.
“Okay. So what?”
“Now tell me.” Platinum’s sardonic lilt abruptly abandoned her. “Will our friend Bren ever look at you like you just looked at him?”
“No.” This time the blackness behind Ana’s eyes seemed fitting. “I know that.”
“Well.” Platinum shook her head. “Don’t be so macabre about it.”
The two of them watched Brendan belt a few lines, slightly off-key. They watched him apologize. Singing remained something other than his forte. He’d won the leading role solely on the basis of his Brendan-ness.
“Now I feel like a bitch,” Platinum added. “Thanks for that.”
“You’re not.”
Brendan returned to his first mark.
“Not trying to be. It’s basically a front. Goes well with all the bleach.”
“And the lipstick?” Ana meandered.
Platinum laughed, low on her breath. “That’s to spook the jocks. Why, is it spooking you, too?”
Brendan Nesbitt and Platinum (Arlene) Watson were a package deal. Sometimes they coordinated their outfits, although Platinum insisted on wearing only white and black. They split KitKats on a biweekly basis and engaged in deep, analytical conversations about RuPaul’s Drag Race for hours on end.
Brendan first patted an empty patch of bench at their lunch table for Ana’s sake on the second day of school, declaring, “Ms. Vasquez has a set of pipes!”
“Then she should probably see a plumber.” The carrot stick in Platinum’s mouth looked suddenly like the cigar of the irritable fat cat in the old gangster movies Ana and Marissa had temporarily obsessed over.
But she made room.
By the next day she wasn’t grumbling, and by the third day she offered her carrot sticks to Ana. As if they were elementary schoolers. It was impossible for Ana to tell whether or not this was sarcasm.
“Carrots are good for your eyesight,” Platinum reminded her.
“Brendan is good people. That’s why he used to hang out with me even back when I hated myself and wore cargo pants. But Ana, he’s … so very Brendan Nesbitt, you know.” Platinum’s tone was meaningful. “You shouldn’t forget it.”
“Hard to forget when you’re whispering it in my ear.”
Platinum went quiet. “Yeah, well. I won’t be forever.”
Before Ana could reply, Platinum dragged her feet and took her time stretching on her way to center stage.
“AUDREY! WHERE IS MY AUDREY I?”
“Hey, Mr. Oldman.” Platinum yawned. “You rang?”
“Obviously! You’re our leading lady and god help us all, you’re the one thing going right in this travesty of theatah.”
“About that. I’m sort of moving to Italy next week. You should dust off my understudy, Mr. Oldman.”
Brendan dropped his script.
“But—what? I didn’t cast an understudy!”
Platinum pushed her hands into her overall pockets. “Oops.”
Had Mr. Oldman any hair, he might have torn it out.
Ana didn’t feel like singing. She was looking at Platinum, not at Brendan. For two months, Platinum had been anywhere Brendan was. After school in the auditorium, at lunch, in the hallways, until Ana would have given a lot not to see her.
Wanting something to leave rarely made it so.
When she and Hank had emerged from Nameless Canyon on June 7, dragging Milo between them, the three cleared the barricade and sank immediately to the ground. All three vomited, all three gasped.
Ana knew she should rush inside, should call Mom, but her eyeballs itched, or were bleeding, it felt like, and when she closed them—
She saw things.
At first it was this: A faceless body, waving. Her father’s silhouette, but the face wasn’t quite—
Ana rubbed her sockets on Repeat. Each time she closed her eyes, the face on that silhouette solidified. Eventually it did not look unlike Brendan Nesbitt.
Ana pulled herself to her feet. She held her eyelids between her thumbs and forefingers. “Hank. What happened with Brendan?”
“What?” Hank, curling and uncurling his fingers. “Sorry, Ana. Something’s up with my hands. Give me a second?”
Ana didn’t want to let her lids fall, but she couldn’t stand watching Milo push his fists into his ears.
She blinked again; the waving figure had vanished. Where he’d been, Ana was treated to a memory all but forgotten: picking blueberries with Grandma in Wisconsin woods.
“There’s something in my eyes. It’s in my eyes. Milo, could you please be quiet?”
“I am quiet! But no one else is! Shh! I’m trying to hear the termites.” Milo pressed his head against the earth.
An hour ago she’d have hollered, dragged him off the ground, her idiot little brother. But—
Blink: The thing in Ana’s eyes recalled Milo’s prune-y baby face, the first time she felt his weight in her lap.
Ana opened her eyes.
“Get out of my head,” she said, through gritted teeth, though her heart swelled at the memory. Maybe because her heart swelled.
“It’s almost like the sound in your mouth at the dentist.”
“Get up, Milo.” Ana refused to blink. “Hank, can you—”
“One second, Ana,” Hank said, rubbing his hands together.
“Not one second! Stop twiddling your thumbs and help me get him inside!”
“Um. I can’t, though.” When had Hank last admitted he couldn’t do something? “I’m not the one twiddling them.”
Ana watched Hank’s fingers interlock; Hank watched them too, his face, usually so controlled, shaken to blank surprise. Hank didn’t look so big.
Blink: Hank and Ana bickering over a bag of circus peanuts, and the tug-of-war that left Dad rumbling with laughter once the bag exploded and orange hailstones rained down on the three of them.
The thing in her eyes was finding its bearings. Ana’s stomach flipped over.
“My eyes. Your hands. And Milo’s—”
“Dad,” Milo said, “don’t you think termites sound like the dentist’s?”
Ears.
Both of her brothers, rendered useless in this crisis. They didn’t know the dark so well as Ana. Pain remained alarming to them, was no friend.
But even as pain laid them low, Ana awoke.
She grabbed one brother by the hand and the other by the elbow. She stomped them away from the hole in the world, back up their driveway, past the untouched piñata dangling from the basketball hoop, and through the front door.
The air shifted when they reached the landing, and Ana had to—
Blink: The three of them, stuck together with cotton candy. Years ago, at the Eustace County Fair, watching Mom and Dad hold hands, walking just in front of them—
“Stop it!” Ana opened her eyes wide. “Get out. Get out right now.”
“Ana, what are you—?” Hank’s hands danced strangely, but he’d forced his arms against his sides. His fingers could only do so much from there. They pitter-pattered on his jeans.
“Ana,” Milo cried. “Ana, why is your heart racing? Are you scared? You’re not scared of Dad, are you?”
Hank said what Ana wanted to. “Whatever this thing is, it isn’t Dad, Milo.”
Milo wasn’t listening to them; he was listening to something else.
Ana heard a vehicle pull into the driveway. A van, not a Chevy, and Mom must be hysterical. Who knew how long they’d been gone? Ana should rush outside and reassure her they were alive and whole—
That was the trouble. They were more than whole.
Blink: Ana’s mother on the day Ana started her period, the warm embrace Mom gave her, the way she dried Ana’s tears with a turkey-patterned paper towel. “Honey, it’s a good thing, really.” And Ana felt that Mom didn’t understand. Couldn’t understand.
How could she understand now, Ana? it was asking.
“Enough!”
In the kitchen, Ana knew exactly which drawer to reach for. Ana knew how to cut. She hadn’t used a knife before, but the scars on her thighs had to count for something, and damn it, Ana could still hurt herself if she needed to—
Blink: The thing in Ana’s eyelids countered this thought with a vision of the first yanking of a safety pin through her flesh, the deep but hair-thin slice, reminding her of how little it had made her feel better last year—
“That’s not the point, shut up and get out!”
“Ana!” Hank cried, but he was wrestling with his own hands.
Blink: The faceless thing swinging her around, Dad linking his elbow with Ana’s at the Eustace Elementary Kindergarten Hoedown.
Ana wanted that do-si-do to exist.
But that only reminded her of all the things others had wanted her to want: how the things she and Marissa once loved, the long-legged anime girls and snippets of stop-motion animation, had fallen to the wayside. Because Ana was supposed to want boys, and a laugh that ran ripples through her classmates, and to be pretty, of all stupid things.
Hank was trying to regain his composure, to put the mask back on. Something about the knife seemed to still his hands. “Ana … please. Put it down.”
“You’re right. This isn’t it.” She dropped the knife and pulled a matchbox from among the cutlery. “Know how you get rid of a deer tick?”
Milo raised his hand. “Please will you both stop shouting?!”
Blink: Ana tasted hot chocolate on a rainy day, saw herself playing my house, foot matching foot, with Milo.
“Dad’s trying to tell me what moth wings say.”
Next to Ana, Hank’s hand lifted a Sharpie from the pen mug on the counter and began scrawling something out. Ana struck a match and held it close to her eyeball, so that the flame singed her eyelashes—
Blink: Visions of Ana and Marissa whipping past each other on swings, the final time Mom let Ana loose in a McDonald’s ball pit, even though they both knew Ana was too big for it and Mom looked twice over her shoulders and the instant Ana crawled into a claustrophobic plastic tube it felt like she was trying to submerge herself in a childhood that was much too small for her, and she knew where she didn’t fit.
She couldn’t open her eyes, though the flame had reached the end of the matchstick. It stung her fingertips.
Blink: Her brothers’ toothy smiles through the ages, the recollection of Grandma’s hands and how they were almost Ana’s, except Grandma’s were tissue paper.
Ana pried her lids upward.
All these memories were not enough, she knew. None of them had been before, when Ana threaded safety pins through her skin and squeezed them shut.
Why should anything be different now?
Blink: Ana saw herself on tiptoe, pudgy hands clutching the edge of her mother’s vanity. After a struggle, Ana caught sight of herself in the mirror. Four years old, with Mom’s lipstick smeared all over her face and her little teeth.
Ana primped and preened. She blew herself a kiss.
I’m so beautiful, every gesture said, as if she’d never doubt it.
As if no one, least of all Ana herself, ever possibly could.
Ana dropped the spent match. Her tears had little to do with the heat.
Her brothers and the kitchen. The tiny glass animals on the shelf by the window. Her mother’s voice on the phone outside. The streetlight illuminating plastic counters and plastic floor. Everything and nothing.
Hank held her hand. Milo wrapped arms around her leg.
“Ana, look,” Hank whispered, but she already was. On the counter, in a scrawl not so different from the handwriting that adorned Hank’s old homemade Christmas ornaments, Ana’s too, Milo’s now—the scrawl of a first grader:
STaY plEAS?
Ana didn’t just blink; she held her eyes shut.
A vision of Mom, praying for Ana the day after Ana was hospitalized. Less than a year ago, because Ana started cutting around the holidays. Mom wasn’t religious, said her only gods were Virginia Woolf and coffee. That was how desperate she was.
How desperate this newcomer was.
“Dad just asked me if he can stay,” Milo murmured.
“It’s not Dad, but yeah. I’m getting that message, too,” Hank said.
“Someone wants to be here? That’s new.”
Hank wheezed and Milo smiled, not quite getting the joke but feeling that it was one. Not quite getting that it was the furthest thing from one.
They three inhaled, exhaled.
The kitchen light flipped on.
Ana started. This wasn’t the thing beneath her eyelids—this was Mom, dropping her phone in the doorway, piecing together the sight of them in their canyon-dirtied clothing. Hank, drawing on the counter. Ana standing over a spent match. “Where have you—”
“Mom, moth wings sound like flip books,” Milo declared.
And Mom was embracing them and scolding them and sobbing onto them. They weren’t looking at her. They were with one another, and when Ana gave a tiny nod, the thing behind her eyelids replayed a memory of applause. Hank’s hands settled down. Milo made a shushing motion.
Fine. Stay, if you want.
Platinum was leaving.
“What the hell am I supposed to do about this?” Mr. Oldman bawled.
“You want my advice?” Platinum pointed directly at Ana in the wings. “Give Ana my part. She’s got pipes and a little fight in her.”
“… Ana?”
“Yeah. Little Miss Sunglasses, Random Chorus Member Number Seven? Her.”
The bell for second hour rang. Mr. Oldman barked, “Chorus Member Number Seven! Come see me after school.”
Ana didn’t just blink; she held her eyes shut.