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Him: How did you find it?
Me: Searched "the leaves are gone you sh
ould be too." Nothing anyone else would know to search.
Him: Sorry if I sound paranoid I just like posting there and don't want to have to delete it.
Him: It was nice to see you tonight.
Me: Yeah.
I saw the . . . that meant he was typing, but no words came, so after a while, I wrote him.
Me: Do you want to facetime?
Him: Sure.
My fingers were trembling a little when I tapped the button to start a video call. His face appeared, gray in the ghostlight of his phone, and I held a finger up to my mouth and whispered, "Shh," and we watched each other in silence, our barely discernible faces and bodies exposed through our screens' dim light, more intimate than I could ever be in real life.
As I looked at his face looking at mine, I realized the light that made him visible to me came mostly from a cycle: Our screens were lighting each of us with light from the other's bedroom. I could only see him because he could see me. In the fear and excitement of being in front of each other in that grainy silver light, it felt like I wasn't really in my bed and he wasn't really in his. Instead, we were together in the non-sensorial place, almost like we were inside the other's consciousness, a closeness that real life with its real bodies could never match.
After we hung up, he texted me. I like us. For real.
And somehow, I believed him.
SIXTEEN
AND FOR A WHILE, we found ways to be us--hanging out IRL occasionally, but texting and facetiming almost every night. We'd found a way to be on a Ferris wheel without talking about being on a Ferris wheel. Some days I fell deeper into spirals than others, but changing the Band-Aid sort of worked, and the breathing exercises and the pills and everything else sort of worked.
And my life continued--I read books and did homework, took tests and watched TV with my mom, saw Daisy when she wasn't busy with Mychal, read and reread that college guide and imagined the array of futures it promised.
And then one night, bored and missing the days when Daisy and I spent half our lives together at Applebee's, I read her Star Wars stories.
Daisy's most recent story, "A Rey of Hot," had been published the week before. I was astonished to see it had been read thousands of times. Daisy was kind of famous.
The story, narrated by Rey, takes place on Tatooine, where lovebirds Rey and Chewbacca have stopped off to pick up some cargo from an eight-foot-tall dude named Kalkino. Chewie and Rey are accompanied by a blue-haired girl named Ayala, whom Rey describes as "my best friend and greatest burden."
They meet up with Kalkino at a pod race, where Kalkino offers the team two million credits to take four boxes of cargo to Utapau.
"I've got a weird feeling about this," Ayala said.
I rolled my eyes. Ayala couldn't get anything right. And the more she worried, the worse she made everything. She had the moral integrity of a girl who'd never been hungry, always shitting on the way Chewie and I made a living without noticing that our work provided her with food and shelter. Chewie owed Ayala a life debt because her father had died saving Chewie years ago, and Chewie was a Wookiee of principle even when it wasn't convenient. Ayala's morals were all convenience because easy living was the only kind of living she'd ever known.
Ayala mumbled, "This isn't right." She reached into her mane of blue hair and plucked out a strand, then twirled it around her finger. A nervous habit, but then all her habits were nervous.
I kept reading, my gut clenching as I did. Ayala was horrible. She interrupted Chewie and Rey while they were making out on board the Millennium Falcon with an annoying question about the hyperdrive "that a reasonably competent five-year-old could've figured out." She screwed up the shipment by opening one of the cargo cases, revealing power cells that shot off so much energy they almost blew up the ship. At one point, Daisy wrote, "Ayala wasn't a bad person, just a useless one."
The story ended with the triumphant delivery of the power cells. But because one had lost some of its energy when Ayala opened the box, the recipients knew our intrepid heroes had seen the cargo, and a bounty was placed on their heads--or should I say our heads--all of which meant the stakes would be even higher in next week's story.
There were dozens of comments. The most recent one was, "I LOVE TO HATE AYALA. THANK YOU FOR BRINGING HER BACK." Daisy had replied to that comment with, "Thx! Thx for reading!"
I read through the stories in reverse chronological order and discovered all the previous ways Ayala had ruined things for Chewie and Rey. The only time I'd ever done anything worthwhile was when, overcome by anxiety, I threw up on a Hutt named Yantuh, creating a momentary distraction that allowed Chewie to grab a blaster and save us from certain death.
--
I stayed up too late reading, and then later still thinking about what I'd say to Daisy the next morning, my thoughts careening between furious and scared, circling around my bedroom like a vulture. I woke up the next morning feeling wretched--not just tired, but terrified. I now saw myself as Daisy saw me--clueless, helpless, useless. Less.
As I drove to school, my head pounding from sleeplessness, I kept thinking about how I'd been scared of monsters as a kid. When I was little, I knew monsters weren't, like, real. But I also knew I could be hurt by things that weren't real. I knew that made-up things mattered, and could kill you. I felt like that again after reading Daisy's stories, like something invisible was coming for me.
