The bug starts drawing all over the closet walls. It draws in the air too. Floating designs that aren’t against any surface, but instead simply exist in the air around us. I swear one brushes against my ear, and I yip.
I work hard to not look at the bug’s legs. There are so many, and they’re thick and black and awful. Marla hates bugs usually. But right now she’s grinning.
“Calm down. It feels good,” Marla says. A squiggly line drawing wraps itself around her, like a snake. She giggles, as if the floating drawing feels more like a hug than a threat, but I don’t buy it.
The rain hits harder. It pinches my skin and leaves little marks. For a moment there is a red bruise everywhere a raindrop has hit. I watch my skin as it polka-dots itself with pain, fades, and polka-dots itself again.
“I’m going to be sick,” I say. I want to reach for Marla’s hand, but I don’t want to risk the squiggly black line wiggling itself around me. I don’t want to touch it. The drawings that have hit my ears and the top of my head were hotter than I’d have expected.
The bug is all kinds of creepy and crawly. I’m going to cry, but I can’t get a big enough breath to get a sob out.
“I hate it in here,” I say. Marla dances in the rain. I can tell she is in charge of this closet, even if it’s Astrid’s.
If Astrid’s right, that this closet takes on our feelings, then of course Marla has control. Her feelings are the darkest and scariest and biggest. Hers are the most on the surface. Her feelings are the kind that scare me.
“Make it stop,” I say. In my closet, I have control over the elements, and I look to Marla for reassurance that she has some kind of control in here. She shrugs. “Make it STOP,” I say. I’m screeching now. I’m not even scared of Eleanor and Astrid hearing us. I can’t see the closet door through all the chaos, and I wonder if Marla knows where it is. If she can get us out. If she ever will.
“Which part?” she says. Her voice is light, airy, Astrid-like. Not Marla-like at all. She’s smiling at the phantom scribbles, the still-growing bug, reaching her fingertips out to touch them.
Once when Mom let me stay home from school, we watched a hypnotist on TV. I wasn’t really sick, and she knew it. She said sometimes we all need days to stay in our pajamas and watch TV and not worry about anything other than what will make us happy in that moment. She stayed in her robe too. It was before she stayed in her robe all the time. We ate cheese and crackers. She drank a big glass of jewel-colored red wine, and she let me have four glasses of chocolate milk, even after it dribbled down my chin and onto the couch pillows.
The hypnotist talked in a low, monotonous voice and convinced audience members that they were roosters and made them dance every time someone sang “Happy Birthday.” The way Marla is acting reminds me of those hypnotized audience members. Same wide eyes. Same slow movements. Same ability to be one person one moment, and another person the next.
I snap my fingers. That’s what the hypnotist did to snap his subjects out of their trances.
It doesn’t work. Marla still has a funny smile on her face, and she hasn’t blinked in several long minutes.
The pen in the air writes words, finally, but not any I recognize. It writes the name LAUREL over and over and over. I don’t know anyone named Laurel. I don’t know that I even like the name Laurel.
“Who’s Laurel?” I say. “Why is it doing that? Does it mean something? Are we supposed to do something?” I know I am asking too many questions and not leaving any room for Marla to answer them.
“You should really breathe,” Marla says as an answer.
I see the door through a patch of not-written-on space, like a bit of fog has cleared, and I rush for it.
“Sometimes it sticks,” she says. I pull and she’s right. The door is sticking.
“You do it,” I say, stepping away. I still feel like Marla is in charge of everything in here, from the writing to the creepy dark-orange color to the black leaves with black veins floating around us and starting to pile below my feet. I am wishing I had worn shoes, or slippers at least, because even the crunch of the leaves under my toes hurts a little more than it should. Not as badly as glass might, but sharper than leaves usually are.
“No thanks,” Marla says. She sits in a pile of leaves, covering her feet with them, the way we sometimes cover our feet in sand at the beach. “I like the name Laurel, don’t you?” she says. I pull at the closet door again. It feels like it might give in to me, but pulling hard doesn’t seem to help.
“Marla. We have to get out! We can’t stay in here!”
“Mom liked the name Laurel,” Marla says. “She told me once.”