You Already Know

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There were dead earwigs in my hair.  I’d wanted to shower, but the faucet was running blood again.

Instead, I took some aspirin to dull the clamped, crushing pain that shot from my sinuses straight through the back of my skull, lay down in bed, and tried to sleep.  But every time I closed my eyes, I’d feel the Droxies crawling on me, the wasplike buzzing of their wings echoing in my ears.

I sat, picked the little shovel up off the ground, and turned it over in my hands.  It was about two feet long; the metal head turned white and brown with rust and calcium and mold.  My weapon.  My Daemon-slaying scepter.  I really had no idea what Mathilde wanted me to do with it.

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The slam of the front door woke me up.  Maybe, woke me up.  Because I’m not sure whether I was lying in my bed with the lights off, the door closed, the shades drawn, and my eyes fastidiously shut, or actually sleeping.

The brash, violent knocks on my closet door came and went.  The first in the series would jostle me awake; I’d shoot upright to make sure the wooden dowel was still blocking the sliding door and the line of chocolate milk mix remained untouched, then lie back down, turn over, and cover my ears.

“Help me, Ansley!  Please!  Come save me!”

Micah’s screams came with the second or third round of knocks.  Desperate, life-pleading cries, becoming more and more animalistic the longer I ignored them.  Heavy breathing.  High-pitched stridor.  Then silence.   I smelled rotting vegetables, sweet mold, cut grass.

Mathilde was there.  Might have been there.  She sat in the corner of my room, playing with the shag carpet.  I remember staring into her eyes.  I was getting a little sick of her, honestly - if there were more rhyming, cryptic clues, I wished she’d just get on with it.

But it was Alicia, finally, who roused me.  The front door slammed as she entered; I heard her padding over the shag carpet, turning on the kitchen light.  My room was grey.  Little peals of sunlight cut through the blinds.  I pushed the shovel under my bed and found my phone.  5:45.  I must have slept.  Because I’d been in bed for nearly seven hours.

I had three missed calls, all from Luke.

He answered on the first ring.

“Ans?  Hey.  I’m glad you called.”  His voice was pleasant, inviting.

“What’s up?”

“Um, I just wanted to apologize for yesterday,” he said shyly.  “I shouldn’t have freaked out on you like that.  I have no right to tell you who you’re allowed to talk to.”

“It’s fine,” I said.  “I get it.  You don’t want me to obsess.”

“You hungry? I’ve been in the lab at UCLA all day, and I’m starving.”

I was hungry.  The headache I’d been nursing all morning had dulled, but I felt unglued.  Lightheaded.  I couldn’t look at anything for too long before it haloed.  I put my hands in my pockets, balled them, then crossed my arms.  I was suddenly very aware of my fingers.  I needed food.  And I didn’t trust myself behind the wheel.

Luke picked me up in his old Toyota.  We went to the In-n-Out in the next town over.  Luke was in a good mood; he told me stories about the research project he was working on for the summer - something about sleep disorders - and the crazy subjects who’d volunteered for the experiment.  I didn’t pick up much of it.  Somewhere between my driveway and the drive-thru, my hands started shaking and the temperature increased about twenty degrees.  I didn’t want Luke to know I was going into withdrawal.  I didn’t want him to ask about my pills.

I was concentrating so hard on stilling my trembling appendages I didn’t notice where we were until he pulled into the parking lot of Allister Park.

“I thought we could have a picnic,” he said.  “It’s such a nice day.  And I haven’t actually sat down here in years.”

I didn’t know how to argue without sounding like a freak, so I followed him to an empty picnic table.  It couldn’t get too bad.  It was still light out, and children chased each other up and down the play structure while their parents subversively shared cigarettes.

The food helped.  I mellowed out a little, became capable of paying attention to Luke's anecdotes, regained the ability to communicate like an adult.

“Listen, Ansley,” Luke said, “I get it.  You’re back here, you’re seeing all these places again, you want to talk about Micah.  You want closure.  So have at it.  Ask me whatever you want.”

I thought about Micah’s screams, his heavy breathing, just hours before.  About Mathilde, the shovel, the quest.  About the little red sweater shoved in a crawlspace and forgotten.

“What was it like around here,” I asked him, "after Micah died?  Like, how did people react.”

Luke closed his eyes, opened them, and ran a hand over his face.  “Right after?  This whole city became The Twilight Zone.  People were terrified. All of a sudden there were parents hanging around school, cops hanging around everywhere.  I once saw this woman throw a shit fit because she lost her kid for, like, two minutes at Walgreen’s.  The kid was, like, ten, and he was hanging around the next aisle over.”

“How about school?  How did all the kids take it?”

Luke chuckled humorlessly.  “Everyone was crying.  Even kids who didn’t know Micah got really emotional, because it was their first actual experience of death, you know?  And not, like, an old person dying of natural causes.  Another kid.  Who was murdered.”

I shuddered.  I recalled those days, lying on my bed in my new room in Miami, repeating the words over and over in my head.  Micah is dead.  Micah was murdered.  Micah is dead.  And I’d missed Luke.  I’d missed him so much it ached.

“What was it like for you?”

He frowned, scrunched up his face like my query was something he'd never considered.  For the first time his eyes left my face, focused on a point in the distance.

“Lonely,” he said finally.

Behind me, in the high grass separating us from the softball diamond, something moved.  I glanced over my shoulder, and caught a glimpse of a black paw.

Luke was still talking.  “Tommy’s parents took him to Taiwan for the summer.  Everyone else was really weird around me, probably because Micah and I were friends.  I'd stay locked in my room, reading all those books I had about murders.”

My attention was again commandeered by the creature moving through the foliage behind me.  I risked another look.

A blue-black, faceless head poked out of the yellowed thicket.  Two thick, claylike paws.  Twisted, wrinkled shoulders.  Black hole of a mouth round and vibrating.  It shifted its head slightly, like adjusting a compass.  Calibrating.  Hunting its prey with some stronger sense to supplant its missing eyes.

“Ans, you okay?”

I turned back to Luke.  He couldn’t see what I saw.  A short distance away, the children obliviously continued their tag game.

“Sorry,” I said.  My hands were shaking again.  I wondered if he noticed.

Something cold and wet brushed against my wrist.

The AntWalker crouched immediately behind me.  Its long, black tongue hung from its mouth.  Almost doglike, it nuzzled my hand.  It lifted a flat, toeless paw.  In daylight, awake, I could make out veins and liver spots.

I stood up, edged away.  Luke was taking a swig of his soda.  Calmly, cautiously, I walked to his side of the bench.

“The sun’s in my eyes,” I said.

Red-and-blue lights and the wail of a siren.  A police car flew down 5th Avenue.

The AntWalker froze.  Back arched, tongue dangling dumbly, its blue-black flesh trembled.  Another siren, louder, lower.  The twisted, humanoid legs splayed and wobbled, readjusted themselves awkwardly, then the thing raised one vibrating appendage and pawed at its own face.  As a yawling red ladder truck came into view, the disoriented AntWalker turned itself around and lumbered away, back into the tall, dry grass.

When I was sure it was gone, I noticed how close to me Luke was sitting.

“I told you how I went out looking for Micah with my magnifying glass, right?”  He smiled at me indulgently.  “I think I was the only person in town who honestly believed he was still alive.”

It might have been those words, or it might have been the warmth of his leg pressed against mine, but I suddenly wanted to be even closer to Luke.  Affection - arousal - washed over me like a steam bath.

“I have another question.”

“Shoot.”

“Did you… like me, back then?”  I started.  “Did you have a crush on me?”

Luke gave me a sidelong glance.  Then he burst out laughing.

“Ans, of course I had a thing for you.  Every boy in school had a thing for you.  Funny, likes video games, Latina - you were, like, *the* pubescent fantasy girl.”

This was bullshit.  I was one of the guys back then, too much of a messy tomboy to stir twelve-year-old loins.  If I really had been some sort of pedestrian, pre-teen Jennifer Lopez, I think I would have noticed.

But Luke held fast to his bullshit.  So I kissed him, tasting the flecks of salt at the corners of his mouth.

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Luke’s bedroom hadn’t changed much in fifteen years.  He had switched out the Power Rangers comforter, thankfully, because it would have been weird to be naked underneath it.

Luke dozed beside me, rolled over, facing the wall.  His grandmother was gone for the day, he’d insisted, his hands groping under my shirt.  She was out with his aunt, and they wouldn’t be back until later that night.  Quietly, slowly, so as not to wake him, I fished my panties off the floor and slid into them.

I spied my bra, slung over a science fair trophy on his dresser.  As I plodded, barefoot, across the floor to retrieve it, Luke’s leviathan bookshelf caught my eye.  The rows of paperback true crime novels were still there.  The elementary school textbooks had been replaced with well-worn medical literature.

There were also several framed photographs.  Baby Luke, swaddled in a duckie blanket, asleep in his beautiful young mother’s arms.  A prom photo - Luke, in a midnight-blue tux, posing with Madeleine Wong.  A blurry, candid shot with a backdrop of brown hills and dusky sky.  Luke, Tommy, and me.

A creak of springs.  I turned around.  Luke was awake, tugging on his boxers.  He looked up at me and smiled.

“I can’t believe I just had sex with Ansley Vasquez.”

I snorted.  “Was I on your bucket list?”

He swung his legs over the side of his bed, hopped down, and came up behind me.  I felt his arm around my neck; his fingers sliding over my nipples, ribcage, belly, then under the elastic waistband of my underwear.  I jerked away playfully.

“Seriously?  You want to go again?”

“Is that a rhetorical question?”

I wiggled out of his grasp and picked up the photo of us.

“Is this from that Linkin Park show we went to?”

Luke took the frame from me, smirking.  “Yeah.  That’s us at the Hollywood Bowl.  God.  Two thousand fucking two.”

“We were adorable.”  I retrieved my bra and snapped it into place.  “All the guys in school were so jealous of you and Tommy.”

Luke replaced the photo on his shelf.  “Dude, it was a big thing.  That was the first time any of us saw Asians onstage without a fucking cello.  You wouldn’t get it.”

“I don’t get it?”  I shook my head.  “We grew up in a Chinese enclave.  If anyone was the butt of casual racism, it was me.  Did I tell you about the time Bryan Yu kept on insisting Cuba was a city in Spain?  I had to show him a friggin map to make him shut up.”

“Bryan Yu was a moron.”

“Mrs. Wolpe asked me what my family did for Cinco de Mayo.  Um, same thing you do, because it’s a Mexican holiday and we’re not Mexican.”

“Okay, you have a point.”  Luke reached for me and wrapped a hand around my neck, nibbled at my ear, fiddled with the clasp of my bra.  “So it’s a no on Round Two.”

My mind was miles away, crouching on a wooden bench at the Hollywood Bowl in 2002.  Thousands of teen-agers shoved together like packing peanuts and, amid all the stray elbows and screams in my ears and asses in my face, I clung to Luke.  His skinny arm around my shoulders.  My hands in the pockets of his sweatshirt.

*Micah hadn’t been there.  Micah wasn’t allowed to go.*

My bra snapped open, and I let it slide down my shoulders.  I pivoted, turning away from blurry, twelve-year-old Luke to face his handsome adult incarnation.  Then his mouth was pressed against my mouth, and memories blurred to bliss.

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This time, she found me in my backyard, as it used to be.  Lush wild grass, jasmine hedges in all their glory.  Instead of rot and vegetable waste, I smelled their delicious, vanilla-sweet flowers.

We were playing on the swings, arching higher and higher, cool breeze against my cheeks, before dropping towards the earth.  Back and forth.  Back and forth.  Mathilde’s ice-blonde locks and pink dress billowed and fluttered.  She was always even with me, always right by my side.

“Are you going to show me where Micah’s body is?”  I asked her.

She smiled.

“Up down, up down, side to side.  Who would have known?  So many places to hide.  Can’t make it through the front so you’ll have to climb, nobody will find what you hid in the slime.”

Back and forth, back and forth.  I liked this dream.

“Your weapon is powdery, grainy, and white.  You'll find it where the dead children cry.”

She giggled.  We swung in silence.  Then, something in our rhythm changed.  The jerks downward became uncomfortably choppy, accompanied by the groan of metal on metal.  I was starting to feel nauseous.  I tried to slow myself, but found that in my subconscious, gravity didn’t work.

“Mathilde,” I said finally, “why can’t you just tell me where Micah is?”

Another violent jerk.  A sad, almost pitying frown settled on Mathilde’s face.

“You already know.”

There was a mighty CREAK!  Then a snap.

Then I was falling.  Down, down.

The next thing I registered was the grey tiles of my bathroom floor; the comforting plastic of the toilet seat as I retched, on my knees, expelling slimy globs of french fries and diet coke.

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**June 10, 2017**

The knocking started after my third round of regurgitation, when I was half-convinced my stomach was empty and shuffling unsteadily to what I prayed was undisturbed unconsciousness.

I’d spent the previous evening in a numb, listless fog, buoyed by good sex and the lingering effects of Luke’s palliative presence.  But, hours later, the crushing headache was back with a vengeance.  It felt like my brain was too big for my skull.  My face and hair were damp with sweat.  I must have been scratching as I slept; my nails were bloody and there were shallow cuts up my thighs.

BANG!  BANG!  BANG!

I could swear, in the early morning light, I saw the door shake.

I felt the sudden urge to scream at the monster, or Mathilde, or whatever it was exacerbating the pressure in my head.  I no longer feared it - I was convinced the thing couldn’t dislodge the dowel or cross the line of chocolate milk.  But I was done with the shock-value, B-movie stunts.  As though the cryptic poems weren’t enough…

The poem.  What was the poem?

I grabbed my journal and a pen, went to the kitchen, and put on a pot of coffee.  Maybe the caffeine would shrink my brain down to normal-size.  I still heard the knocks down the hall.  I really hoped Micah wouldn’t start screaming.

Pen in hand, I transcribed Mathilde’s poem word for word.  I read it out loud, divided it into stanzas, mouthed each syllable, exercised my nonexistent cryptography skills and tried to find meaning in individual letters.

“Up, down, up, down, side to side.”

I skipped that one.

“Who would have known?  So many places to hide.”

Somewhere I’d played hide-and-seek?  The Forest?  Where my last game had been against a pride of faceless AntWalkers?  My stomach did a flip.

“Can’t make it through the front so you’ll have to climb, nobody will find what you hid in the slime.”

Huh?

I abandoned my amateur codebreaking.  I really doubted there was a more-secret message hidden within the already-unreadable lines.  Apparently I needed something powdery, grainy, and white, and I was supposed to be looking for it where the dead children cry.

The hospital?  A morgue?  A graveyard?  We didn’t even have a graveyard in town.  And what was I looking for that was powdery, grainy, and white?  Powdered sugar?  Cocaine?

I dug through my journal.  Eleven-year-old me was no help in solving the riddle, and neither was my inability to focus.  My thoughts kept on fluttering to swing sets and blue-black heads with no faces and Luke’s sinewy body rocking against mine, and then I’d realize I’d read the same sentence three times.

“What are you reading?”

Alicia jolted me from my half-waking state.  She was still in sweats and a tank top, pouring herself a cup of coffee.  She sat across from me and looked, suspiciously, at the journal.  I pulled it away.

“Nothing!”  The last thing I needed was Alicia asking questions.

She leaned back, pouting.  “Fine.  When you’re done with whatever that is, can you *please* go through the mail?”

Something in her stare bothered me.  I remembered our unsatisfying conversation the day before.

“Hey, Leesh,” I said, “the day Micah disappeared, why did you let us go into Mr. Carlyle’s yard?”

Her eyes narrowed.  She batted at a loose strand of hair.

“Stop doing that hair-twisty thing,” I demanded.  “It’s your fucking totem.  When you do it you’re lying.  I know it, fucking opposing council is going to know it, get that shit under control.”

She stood up abruptly.  She dropped the tuft of hair.

“Ansley,” she started cautiously, “why do you keep asking me about Micah?”

“Because I’m fucking sick of everybody messing with me!”  I screamed.

It was true.  Until that moment, I hadn’t fully mentalized just how frustrated I was.  If it wasn’t my sister during my waking hours, it was Mathilde in my dreams.  No one could give me a straight answer.

Alicia took a step back.  I’m sure she noted my glistening forehead, my bagged eyelids, the twitch that my hands and nose had adopted, the paranoid dart of my eyes.

“Ans, you’re not taking your meds.”

I grabbed my journal, turned my back on her, and locked myself in my room.

The knocking had, thankfully, stopped.  The coffee dulled the pressure in my head but amplified my shaking hands.  I dressed and brushed my hair.  I’d wanted a shower, but didn’t feel like waiting out running blood.  I knew I needed to go back to my sister, play nice, convince her I was nice and sane and not a danger to myself or others, and that she didn’t need to call the cops.

But first, I needed to flush two more pills.

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Next Chapter

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