FOURTEEN
I DON’T KNOW what kind of car my mom drives, so every vehicle that slows down near the entrance of the theater parking lot makes all the bubbles inside me rise up to my throat. I swallow them down again after the red Mustang pulls back onto the street, using the parking lot to make a U-turn.
I can’t check the time, since I gave my tablet to Roger, but it feels like I’ve been standing here for eons. The sky is dark. The air is cold. My shoulders are already achy from the weight of my messenger bag and backpack together—I packed my mom’s orange box of artwork, and all the clothes I could fit. Aunt Nic can ship the rest of my stuff later. I stick my hands in my coat pockets for warmth, and the knuckles of my right hand knock against the cement mushroom cap. Another car slows near the entrance, then speeds off.
Where is she?
I wonder what sort of show-stopping reveal Roger has planned for this evening, and whether it’s already begun. I wonder if Aunt Nic will be mad or sad or guilty once she knows I helped ruin her career. I wonder if she’ll ever try to talk to me again.
I wait and wait, but no cars turn into the parking lot.
The theater lobby is warm and bright when I step inside, and empty, too—except for the woman in the box office, who is very friendly. “You’re Monica Ames’s niece, right?” she asks me, a big smile on her face.
Behind the theater doors at the far end of the lobby, I hear the muffled rumble of Aunt Nic’s voice. “Yeah,” I say. “Can I use your phone?”
“I just love your aunt,” the woman tells me as she ushers me inside the box office. “She’s amazing.”
I memorized my mom’s number as soon as she gave it to me yesterday. I memorized her address, too, so I know the theater’s only a short drive away. She should be here by now.
The phone rings once. Then twice. Three times.
Six.
“You’ve reached the one and only James Darek,” her voice mail picks up. “Leave your message at the beep, and I’ll think about calling you back!”
“Mom?” I say to the recording. “It’s me. CJ. You probably didn’t answer your phone because you’re driving here. Aunt Nic never picks up when she’s driving.” I hear a roar of laughter from inside the theater, then applause. “I bet traffic’s pretty bad. I was just checking that you’re okay, because you’re late.” Spirit wouldn’t let anything happen to her, not after all this. “I mean, not too late. It’s fine. Only.” The woman beside me is doing a terrible job pretending not to listen. “It’s fine.” I make my voice as chipper as I can. “Okay, great, see you soon!”
I hang up the phone.
“I thought your mom died when you were a baby,” the box office woman says as she takes back her phone.
“Nope,” I reply.
Her eyebrows shoot up on her forehead.
“If you think that’s shocking,” I tell her, “then you’ll definitely want to watch the news tomorrow morning. Cable 9.”
I should wait outside, but it’s cold. More laughter trickles in from the audience.
What is Roger waiting for?
I pick my way across the lobby and pull open the heavy door to the theater. The houselights are down on the audience, but the stage is bright, with Oscar’s spotlight trained on Aunt Nic in her lime-green tracksuit. Jax is probably freaking out backstage, with only a few minutes left before he joins her down on the floor.
“And so your loved ones are gonna tell me things,” Aunt Nic is explaining to the crowd, “and I’m gonna pass those words on to you, exactly how I hear them. Sometimes what they say won’t make a whole lotta sense to me, so you might have to help me out a little.” I’ve heard this speech a thousand times before. Why did I never question if any of it was true? “And just so you know, these spirits have minds of their own. Sometimes you wanna talk about Dad’s will, but all he wants to talk about is his azalea bushes. So don’t get mad at me if he won’t shut up about gardening. I swear I find flowers just as boring as you do.” That last bit gets a big laugh.
The bubbles inside me are bitter like poison. All these words I knew so well that always seemed silly or interesting or insignificant—now they just seem mean. Like my aunt carefully selected every single one so she could make her audience believe exactly what she wanted.
“Psst!” someone hisses at me. I look over, and there’s a tech operator leaning his head out of the booth, his annoyed expression clearly saying, Close that door already!
My hand is still propping open the lobby door, letting in a sliver of light. I should leave. My mom will be here any second.
“Who’s ready to talk to their loved ones?” Aunt Nic calls from the stage. The audience cheers wildly. The tech guy glares at me.
I step deeper into the audience, letting the door close behind me.
It doesn’t happen right away. First, Aunt Nic reads for a couple who lost a close friend. Then she moves on to a high school teacher whose mother died when she was a kid. The whole time, Jax is right behind her, filming and swapping mics and actually doing a pretty decent job. He doesn’t have any free hands to scratch his arm with, but from where I stand at the back of the theater, he doesn’t look like he wants to.
I wonder how he can work for Aunt Nic when he knows she’s lying. I wonder how Oscar can, or Cyrus. I wonder how Aunt Nic can even look in the mirror, let alone gaze into the high school teacher’s eyes and tell her, “Your mom says you were always such a special girl.”
I’m about to leave when I notice the flash on the projection screen onstage. Something unusual, just for a second. But as soon as I spot it it’s gone, and all that appears on the screen is the live feed from Jax’s camera, of Aunt Nic talking to the teacher.
“Your mom’s telling me you have dreams about her,” Aunt Nic is saying to the woman. “You worry about her, all the time, how she’s doing now that she’s passed. But she says, Don’t worry about me, kid! I’m fine! It’s my job to worry about you!”
An image flashes on the screen again. I catch it this time, though it’s quick. It’s a photo of the woman Aunt Nic is talking to, the teacher, only she’s wearing a totally different outfit, standing in a totally different room. In the photo, she’s happy and smiling, holding a book over her head the way you’d hold a trophy. And there’s text underneath it, typed, like from a file of some sort.
Seat 4Q: Barbara Donovan, age 53, English teacher
As soon as they appear, the words and the photo flash away, returning to the regular image. I hear hums and murmurs in the audience, although it’s clear lots of people missed it.
“Where’s the big tree?” Aunt Nic is asking, unaware of the flashing screen behind her. “Your mom’s showing me the big tree. She says you shared some happy memories there.”
While the teacher, Barbara, is responding, that’s when the screen flashes again. Another image, this one a post from online—a photo of Barbara hugging the woman I’d guess is her mother, and underneath it the words: Can’t believe it’s been twenty-eight years, Mom! Miss you every day! You can even see Barbara’s friends’ comments on the post: their likes and frowny-face emojis and well wishes.
Aunt Nic is still talking on the floor below. “Your mom says, Memories are good, but real life is good, too.” Another grainy photo flashes on the screen. A little girl icing cookies with her mom. Then another. Young Barbara hugging a black-and-white puppy. “Don’t forget to look forward, ’stead of always looking back.” More people in the audience are noticing what’s happening now. On the screen, a tween Barbara does a handstand in a badly fitting leotard.
And all at once, the projection screen is bursting with words and images—the name of Barbara’s husband, photos of her kids, the school where she works, the date of her last dentist appointment, and a receipt for a salad she purchased. More and more and more until it’s coming too fast to take it all in, and the rustling in the audience is turning to shouts, and Aunt Nic is getting confused.
When she spots the screen, Aunt Nic’s words freeze up inside her mouth.
But before she has a chance to react, there is a loud screech of feedback that pulls everyone’s hands to their ears, and the images on the screen disappear. The theater—stage, audience, everything—goes black as oil sludge, and for just a moment, everyone is silent. When the lights snap back on, only the screen is lit up, and the image displayed on it is so startling that everyone in the room gasps together. Even me, although I probably should’ve expected it.
An octopus.
Of course it’s an octopus.
It’s only a shadow, really, a black silhouette, but it is huge and realistic and terrifying. And it’s moving, slowly creeping its way down from the top of the screen, its tentacles spread wide.
Suddenly there’s a voice in the air, as the creature moves.
“Seat 30N! Nicole Wythe!” It’s Roger’s voice, slicing through the black. “Forty-six years old! Waitress!” As soon as he calls the woman out, a spotlight finds her in the audience, illuminating her for everyone to see. This spotlight isn’t coming from the spot bay, where Oscar works, but farther up the catwalk. One of Roger’s buddies is up there, I’d bet.
“Deceased brother, Harry! Died of a heart attack!” Roger’s voice booms on. Nicole Wythe shades her eyes and darts her head around, looking terrified, while on the stage the octopus slithers toward the bottom of the screen. From every corner of the audience, I hear whispers and mutters and hoots, people wondering what’s part of the show and what it all means.
“Seat 83F!” Roger continues. “Kyle Ng!” And just like that, the spotlight blinks off of Nicole and lights up someone else. “Twenty-three years old! Air force! Friend Dom died in a hiking accident!”
At first I’m focused on the voice, the lights, the chaos—so it takes me a moment to realize that the creature on the screen isn’t just an image after all but a shadow of a real octopus. Because there is a tip of a tentacle—an honest-to-goodness real tentacle—poking out from under the screen like a toe from a bedsheet. That tentacle grows longer and longer, and then there’s another one. Two enormous, fat, slimy tentacles stretching themselves out toward the audience. But no one seems to truly take in what’s happening until the projection screen hoists itself up several feet and thwacks back down hard on the stage as the knobby-headed octopus slithers his way through, black eyes gleaming. That’s when the screams start, when the people in the audience jump out of their seats and clutch at their chests in panic. Some laugh and clap, thinking it’s part of the show. Some simply remain still, mouths open.
This is it, I think. It’s happening. Although I only half understand what “it” is—and I’m not quite sure if I’m terrified or excited.
The octopus thuds and flops his way toward the edge of the stage, bigger and faster than any sea creature I’ve ever seen or imagined. But just as the bulk of his body reaches the cliff of the stage—when it seems the only place for him to go is straight toward Aunt Nic and Jax in the fourth row—one of his tentacles curls up tight on itself, and then . . .
Puff!
It disappears in an inky-blue puff of smoke. Where once the creature had eight limbs, now he has only seven.
The crowd squawks as the smoke puff drifts upward, shifting into something. A shape. A letter.
The letter T.
As quickly as the first tentacle disappeared, the next three do, too—Puff! Puff! Puff!—replaced with inky smoke. The next three follow soon after—Puff! Puff! Puff!—and then the last, and the octopus’s body along with it.
Puff!
The eight inky-blue puffs of smoke all drift toward the ceiling, shifting into eight different letters. The hazy letters rise several feet off the stage, bold and illuminated in the gleam of the stage lights. For the moment that they hover there, it feels like what’s written in the air is the only message any of us will ever need to read for as long as we live.
T
H
E
T
R
U
T
H
We’re silent, reading. Until something else pulls our attention away.
As the lights spring bright back to life on the theater audience, there’s a tremendous burst like fireworks sparking, and from above hundreds of objects begin to tumble down toward us. Just like everyone else, I shriek and duck, covering my head—but the unfurling objects halt, midair, bobbing just above our hair.
Dangling over every member of the audience from the catwalk high above is a scroll of long brown paper. Three hundred scrolls bob over three hundred heads. Three hundred hands reach up to tug the scrolls down and examine them.
I scuttle to the nearest seat, where a whole family is investigating their scrolls. I read over the shoulder of the teenage daughter.
Photos.
Posts.
Personal data.
In the chaos, all I catch are snippets of words and phrases.
“ . . . wherever you are, Katie!”
“ . . . never forget . . .”
Anything this girl has ever thought or felt or posted online, Roger and his buddies have dug it up and made it public here. It seems they’ve found everything—where the girl lives and the car she drives and her SAT score and what she ate for dinner last night and her favorite movie and the current color of her toenail polish and how very, very much she misses her sister.
Well, I think, taking in the horrified sounds of the people all around me. Roger sure made good use of those email addresses.
And just as I think that, Roger’s voice booms in the air once more.
“Monica May Ames does NOT speak to the dead! She knows things about you, but not from any spirit. You gave her an invitation to collect these details about yourselves the minute you bought your tickets to come here. But tonight, you hold in your hands the truth. Believe it.”
I’m so mesmerized by what Roger’s done that when I notice Oscar darting across the stage where just moments ago we all saw an octopus, I can’t understand why he’s headed toward the audience. The crowd is so loud now, everyone up in their seats and shouting with confusion, that anyone with any sense would be running as far away as they . . .
Aunt Nic. And Jax.
Deep in row four, Aunt Nic and Jax are surrounded by confused, outraged people. And though I’m far away, I can see their frightened faces. They need to escape this crowd quickly, or it will be far worse than the swarm of teenage girls who surrounded Jax at the zoo.
I’m not filled with bubbles anymore. I am quivering jelly. I did this, I realize. I put them in danger.
But I don’t have time to feel bad about it.
The aisles are filling fast now, and I can’t get anywhere. Luckily Oscar is quicker than I am. He reaches Aunt Nic and Jax in row four and helps them climb over the blue-velvet seats, even as the people around them grab at them and demand answers. Oscar pulls them over one seat, then another—just one more row between them and a clear path backstage. I let myself breathe again as I watch Aunt Nic hoist herself up on the last chair. They are going to be safe. Whatever else happens, they are going to be safe.
And then Jax drops the camera.
When I see him jump down to retrieve the camera, I cry out, “Leave it!” But of course he can’t hear me. Oscar is helping Aunt Nic down from the final row of seats, and without realizing that Jax has put himself back in danger, they take off into the wings. “JAX!” I scream. By the time Jax pops his head back up with the camera, it’s too late. Oscar and Aunt Nic have gone. The crowd is all around him. And I don’t have to see the look on his face to know that he’s panicking, but I do see it, and I wish I’d seen anything else.
He is terrified.
I race for the tech booth, just a few feet away, and pull open the door. Maybe I started this, maybe it’s all my fault—but maybe I can fix it.
“Whoa, whoa, you can’t be in here!” shouts the tech operator, who’s on the phone with someone, obviously freaking out about the chaos in the theater. “Get out of here!”
I don’t listen. I storm to the center of the booth, where the wall of glass overlooks the entire theater. From here the tech operator can control most of the light and sound cues.
It would be a good place to cause a distraction.
I scan the control panel for the fader for the backup mic, ignoring the operator’s Stop! Stop! signals—although lucky for me he’s too distracted shouting at security on the phone to actually stop me. If there’s one thing Oscar and Cyrus have taught me about working in a theater, it’s how to avoid that deafening yowl of feedback. “One bad screech like that,” Cyrus told me once, “will stop a show cold for a full thirty seconds.”
Plenty of time for Jax to make his escape.
While I’m searching, I keep glancing up to check on Jax. A burly man is right in his face now, shouting and poking him in the chest, while a woman clings to Jax’s arm and sobs. Several other people look like they’re just waiting in line to shout at him or pummel him or worse. Jax has both arms wrapped around the camera. He keeps looking over his shoulder to where Aunt Nic and Oscar have sped off, but he doesn’t need them—he needs me. I wave my arms over my head, trying to signal him through the booth window, and just as I finally spot the fader, he sees me.
Jax locks eyes with me through the glass, and I flash my hands at him. Once. Twice. Don’t worry, I signal. I’m going to save you.
And Jax, well . . . Something changes in his face then.
He narrows his eyes at me, and slowly, he shakes his head.
No, he signals back.
I’m so surprised, I don’t slide up the fader, not in time.
I’m so surprised, I watch, mouth open, as Jax straightens up, pushes away the burly man who’s poking him, and hoists himself up on the seat back, camera and all.
“Hey!” the tech operator shouts at me. He’s at my side now, off the phone. “You’re the niece, aren’t you?” I don’t answer. I’m watching Jax. Climbing, dodging, escaping. All by himself. “We gotta get you outta here. I’ll sneak you out the back.”
And I do slide up the fader then, all the way to max—but by the time the feedback screeches the crowd into momentary stillness, Jax is already long gone.
There’s still no sign of my mom when I burst out of the theater, but based on the look of the angry crowd that’s gathering, there’s no time to wait for her. Anyway, I don’t need anyone to tell me where to go this time. Not even Spirit.
When the city bus pulls to a stop at the corner, I’m waiting, with money in my pocket. Clouds are covering the moon tonight, so it’s extra dark as I tug my backpack straps up on my shoulders, hoist my messenger bag to my hip, and climb on board. I let the chaos of the evening shrug off me like a sweater tossed in the wash.
There are only two other people on the bus. All I can hear, as I find a seat, is the hum of traffic and my own thoughts.
I like the hum of traffic better.
Aunt Nic will be okay, I tell myself, and who cares if she isn’t. Oscar will be okay, because nothing ever gets to him. Jax will be okay, obviously, because he doesn’t need me to rescue him anyway.
I only did what Spirit told me to.
As I’m sloughing off my backpack straps, I spot one corner of my tablet poking out of the half-zipped front pocket. I have no idea when Roger snuck it in there.
I pull the tablet out and flick it on, and sure enough, Roger’s left a message for me. There on the screen is that same inky octopus image, the one I’m growing so familiar with. And written in its tentacles are eight letters, just for me.
