He brushes past me, his anger focused on me instead of Caleb.
He searches the shelves, the boxes. Kicks the garbage can, reaches his hand into the empty boxes of food. Moves the leftover hangers. It’s a vortex. A storm. I picture a structure being torn metal from metal, limb from limb.
“Stop,” I yell, looking at what he’s doing to the room.
But he doesn’t hear me. Or he doesn’t want to. He runs his fingers between the mattress and box spring. Pushes it completely off, with a great thud.
He stops and slowly turns around.
I must’ve yelled again.
My hands are over my ears, and I slam my eyes shut from the roaring in my head.
He pries my hands off, gently. His mouth is saying he’s sorry, and he is, and so am I. He pulls me to his chest and I wrap my arms around his rib cage. I pull him so close it hurts.
“I’m sorry, Jessa,” he says once more. I feel the shudder in his chest, and I know he’s crying.
He leaves me there, frozen in this room. He doesn’t look up as he walks across the lawn, right past Eve and Mia, who don’t even notice him. He doesn’t even bother opening the gate. He launches himself over the fence, and he runs. He doesn’t stop.
It takes me a moment to realize that the noise from outside has stopped. And that something’s off in the room. Something more than the chaos and the anger and the lingering adrenaline. It feels colder in here, despite the fact that my heart rate has picked up and I’m breathing heavily. And then I realize what it is—as if a ghost is watching and wants to make himself known: the lights are out, the fan is off, there’s no red glow of light under his desk from the power supply. The sounds of the house, the ticking of the clock, above and below, echo and reverberate in the silence.
I’m standing beside the window, and feel the cold air seeping through the cracks at the base. I hold my palm to the sill, in the place where the wood gaps against the wall, a fine spider web of cracks running through. It feels like tiny tendrils of smoke, making their way into the room, taking over the house.
I’ve been inside the room like this once before, when all the noises were elevated, more focused, closer. And this feeling comes right back, an unsettling, like everything has been displaced, even myself. Like the walls lean too far, and the carpet bubbles up, and there’s a scent—debris and dust and things once buried, brought to the surface.
I close my eyes and imagine Caleb standing beside me in this room, with no light, no heat, no electricity. I hear the echo of his sigh. Feel the chill of the cold, seeping under the window seal. Feel him brush up against me when I shut my eyes, and me reaching out a hand for the shape of him in the darkness, coming up empty.
—
It was the end of November, nearly a year ago. A Friday night. We had been out at the movies with Max and Sophie, Hailey and a short-term boyfriend named Charles who was so short-lived I had almost forgotten about him. He may have only lasted this single date. There was nothing remarkable about him; he was no match for Hailey. I imagined, briefly upon meeting him, that he would become devoured by her, merely by standing too close.
I was telling Caleb this as we walked up the front steps of his house. “Devoured?” he asked, sliding his key into the lock.
“Or, like, absorbed into her aura,” I said.
“Hailey has an aura now?” he asked, his hand flat on the door.
“Yes,” I said, rubbing my upper arms. To make him laugh, I added, “It’s orange. Now hurry up.” I was shivering and bundled under several layers, aching for the heat inside the house. My curfew wasn’t for another hour and a half, and we were in the habit of utilizing every spare minute. We were at that stage where we couldn’t see enough of each other. Meeting for the two minutes between classes; him pulling me onto his lap in the cafeteria, until a teacher gave a curt shake of the head and I’d slide to the chair beside him; hanging out the ten minutes before practice, leaning close and talking until the very last possible moment.
It was the phase that Hailey made a face about, sticking out her tongue, mock-gagging. Give me my friend back, she joked, waving her arm in front of me like she was wielding an imaginary wand. Undo this curse. She smiles too much; it’s embarrassing.
Caleb paused as he pushed through the front door, as if he could sense something slightly off, even then.
“Hello?” he called into the empty space. His mom and Sean were supposed to be out, and his sister was at a sleepover.
He flicked a light switch, but nothing happened. I tripped over something I couldn’t see—a leg of the entryway table, maybe. But in the dark, everything felt slightly out of place.
Caleb tried another switch, cursed to himself. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” he said.
I felt, in the pitch dark, the shock of his skin against mine, unexpected, from nowhere. His fingers lacing through my own. “Wait here,” he said. And then he left me.
I heard him exit a door in the back of the house, presumably into the garage. The seconds ticked down, a wisp of cold brushed over my exposed skin, like something was alive inside this house.
“Jessa?” Caleb called.
“I’m here,” I called back. He seemed infinitely far away, though he was maybe one room, one wall beyond my sight.
“I tried resetting. The wiring is crappy, so sometimes that happens when the system is overloaded. But it’s out.”
Then I saw a light heading my way, his phone shining in the dark.
He grabbed my hand, pulled me up the stairs, the beam of light illuminating the steps in front of us. When we reached his room, he held the phone to his ear, and I could hear the ringing in the silence. The cold, from the lack of heat, seemed to grow as time moved on, and a shiver worked its way up my spine and over my arms.
I heard his mother’s voicemail pick up, no response from her. He said, “Electricity was shut off. In case you didn’t know.” And then he hung up the phone, and all I heard was his breathing, thick with something else—anger, I guessed.
And yet, I moved closer.
“Should you try the electric company?” I said.
He was silent for a moment, and I pushed open the curtains so that the moonlight shone through, a light spot on the rug, on him.
He sat on the edge of his bed, and he told me, with his head in his hands, “It won’t make a difference. They cut the power, because my mom and Sean didn’t pay the bill.”
I was trying to find a place for this information in my mind. Caleb, at our private school. Caleb, with his new lacrosse gear. Planning for a ski trip this winter. Everyone I knew may not have had money, but they weren’t lacking it in any substantial way—not in a way that would lead to something like this.