convince me I was worth something. It reminds me of when I couldn’t see a second into the future, when college and Bunny weren’t prizes that I’d won. I feel tears behind my eyes. I’m worried again that I’m treating those prizes like junk.
I finish the knot. “There. Done. And it’s Angie now. Call me Angie.”
Wyatt stretches back against the wall.
His eyes glow a little yellow in the candlelight. He reminds me of a beautiful feral tabby that used to hang out at my aunt’s trailer. Sometimes, I’d sneak him into bed with me, not caring if he might wake up in the middle of the night and tear me to pieces.
“What’s the worst thing that happened to you, Angel?” he asks. “In the group home.”
It’s not what I expect him to ask down here. I expect him to ask, Do you think I killed Odette? Trumanell? Why did you really come back to this fucking town?
“It happened to Mary, a friend of mine,” I stutter out. “She ran away afterward. Which is what made it the worst thing that happened to me.”
The sound of wind is howling down the stairs. My aunt used to call it the wolf at the door. She always said the wolf wouldn’t go away without his dinner. Once, with half a bottle of whiskey in her, she shoved me out into the wind and rain and locked the trailer door.
It is my third most terrifying memory.
Wyatt leans over. He blows out the candles.
45
We are all the same in the dark.
My mother said that to me when she kissed me good night.
She meant that in the dark, all that’s left is our souls.
She wasn’t imagining me in a hole with a killer, living out my worst fear.
Totally blind.
Floating in space.
One eye just like the other.
Soot and candle smoke are stuck in my throat. I’ve read that real space smells like something burning. Like a crash at the Daytona 500, or a charred house. The moon, like spent gunpowder. Like death.
How long has Wyatt been silent? Ten minutes? Twenty? How long have I held back a scream?
I try to calm the inside of myself, to imagine the open sky and green fields that stretch on and on and on above me. The air that will whoosh down here as soon as it is given a chance. Our little eye in the ground open to the sky, the sun peering down like a firefighter with a flashlight. But all I can really picture is the red farmhouse, blown to pieces, and every one of those pieces smothering our little metal door.
“You have to talk,” I gasp. “I get panic attacks sometimes. In storms. Being in the dark.”
I reach out a shaky hand as far as I can, arm straight, without moving any other part of my body. I touch nothing, not sweaty skin, not chilly wall.
I can’t hear Wyatt’s breath, just mine. Is he holding it, teasing me? Did I go to sleep? Faint? Did he take off his boots and sneak up the stairs in his socks? Wouldn’t I have heard the sound of the world, seen a shaft of light?
Will Bunny ever find me?
The lazy edges of a yawn break the silence.
“My sister used to tell me stories about wildflowers when I was afraid,” Wyatt says. “I’ll tell you one.”
Wyatt is saying that you can blow into the end of a dandelion stem and it will make a noise.
I’m paying attention to him, and I’m not. My relief that he is here, that anyone is here, even if it’s a killer, is overwhelming everything else.
“It sounds like a little horn when you puff air into it,” he’s saying. “You snap off the head and the root and the stem is hollow inside.” I hear him adjust his body roughly. I hope it’s not so I’m easier to reach.
“It was a signal between Trumanell and me so we’d know where the other one was hiding out in the field when Daddy got drunk. So we could find each other in the field if the corn or wheat was high, or if it was night and we couldn’t see. We practiced blowing on those stems, three short toots, so the sound was not too loud, just loud enough, the chirp of a cicada or a cricket. I was good at it, even better than Trumanell. Except one day, I got a bad stem. It wouldn’t blow. So on the next one I picked, I blew too hard.