Unreal City (2 page)

We were all starting to get caught up in the haze of the night, nobody really wanting to stay but nobody strong enough yet to be alone in this new place. The smoke was getting heavier and I decided to share a few puffs. Even after Lea’s death I’d never fallen far into the world of
responsible
substance abuse, though I regarded it with curious neutrality. If it’s there, why not? When she was still around, it was a different story. But as my head grew foggier, I became quiet with the heaviness of memories, something that Dean noticed as I became more absent from the conversation.

“What’s-a-matter with you, Sarah? Miss your mom already?” There was a desperation in his humorous tone; he wanted me to admit it so that everyone else could have permission to break down too. However, my guard went up. I wouldn’t allow him the pleasure at my expense.

“Not really,” I snapped.

“What’s up, then? You seem kinda off all of a sudden.”

“Nothing. I’m tired. Move in day, and all.” My hand flitted to the pendant that always hung around my neck, an unconscious motion of protection. He shrugged and they went back to their revelry, but my sense of ease had been disrupted.

Jason grabbed Dean’s guitar from the corner of the room and started fiddling around on it and swaying to the music. Dean’s eyes glowed with proud ownership of the instrument and he launched into the details of the fine piece of workmanship. In his own world, Jason started hammering out a Nirvana song and singing loudly over him. The other kids joined in. Goaded by their enthusiasm, Jason swung around the guitar like he was onstage at a rock concert. The neck came close to the corner of the desk, and Dean stood up to seize it.

“Dude, watch out. If you break that thing, I’ll murder you and hide your body in the woods.”

I was on my feet before I realized what I was doing, my cheeks hot with rage. “That’s not fucking funny, asshole. Murder is not a joke,” I shouted, my finger extended in an accusatory gesture. I hated myself for being unable to stop this emotional reaction. “Someone back me up here!”

The atmosphere turned uncomfortable as all eyes fixed on me and then I was charging out of the room with my tail between my legs. Their faces had been confused, hurt, and even concerned, but I still felt as if I were under attack. Making a great reputation for myself from day one was my specialty.

Aching with shame and furious at myself, I rushed back to my room and sat down at my desk in a huff. I had become the person that my friends and I used to mock. The ones who we were polite to when they were around, but constructed cruel inside jokes about when they were not.

I tried to get my mind off it, but social media offered no distraction and I closed the browser almost as soon as I opened it. I stared blankly at the desktop—another photo of Lea and me, this time on the boardwalk at home, in Monterey. We used to walk there after school sometimes. It had been one of those hazy, late afternoons and the sun backed us, the shadow making it difficult to tell who was who. I gazed at the photo for a long time, then took my computer to bed with me, clicked into a folder containing different shots I had taken over the years, and fell into the slideshow. The good times illuminated the screen and faded away, each one bringing a bittersweet feeling in my chest.

Photography interests me for different reasons than why I think most people get into it. A lot of them do it for the art of the process and result. I do it for the nostalgia. There’s something supremely safe about a frozen moment. Something that ensures it never truly disappears. I like to collect such moments, keep them preserved, and enjoy them again and again. It’s almost proof that the love shared between the people in the photo was real, at least for an instant.

And that was the comfort I sought on my first night. I revisited Lea, her entire story already told in eighteen short years of life. Memories of trips to Disneyland came back. Nights of silliness when she, her boyfriend, and I had talked until three in the morning. Our sixteenth birthday party. Halloween when we were little girls—Lea dressed in the likeness of a fairy and me as a rabbit. Lea kissing Fenris, our old gnarled Husky dog, on the side of the head. Every time I got sleepy and closed my eyes for a bit, they would flutter open just to make sure the photos hadn’t gone away.

I fell asleep with little trouble, as I always do, though that night the rarity that was a dream came to me. I hardly ever remember my dreams, and when I do it’s usually vague, colorless images or general feelings. But that night I dreamt I was standing at the edge of a pier, high above the water. Dark, mammoth shapes were circling the pier and disturbing the already choppy waves. I had a feeling that they would jump up toward me soon, but just as I saw a rising body of slick, leathery flesh, I woke, disoriented and confused about where I was.

Then I remembered and my head returned to my pillow. I stared at the shapes of the trees through the cracks in the blinds as I drifted back to sleep, and thought I saw a shadow slink past the dim blueness of the hours before dawn. It stirred me for a moment, but I reminded myself that the campus was built in the middle of a redwood forest. The animals had been here first. They hadn’t up and left just because humans planted a school there. I had already seen two deer on my walk to the Merrill dorm. Since I was on the ground floor, I knew I’d probably have to get used to seeing a parade of fauna pass by my window every night.

Now that I look back on it, I probably should have had the good sense to be more afraid. If I had been even a bit more alert, I might have taken more notice of a weird, atonal tune whining through the wind. But I was a different person then, unassuming of dark things, blissfully unaware, even secure in the belief that the worst that could ever happen to me had already come and gone, leaving behind a hell of an aftermath to sort through.

But maybe that’s also why I like photos. You can
see
the innocence in people’s faces and look back on them in melancholy hindsight. They never have any idea of what’s coming for them, do they?

MOST OF THE
time before I went down into the Caves is a blur to me now. School started and we were force-fed a more-than-healthy portion of rules and regulations. I rushed around the massive campus desperately trying to catch buses, but mostly getting lost in the miles of forest.

I remember a sense of wonder at the campus itself. Mists curling in and out of the massive redwoods and sprawling ferns could be seen almost everywhere during early mornings and late evenings, and sometimes they rolled in during the day. Getting stuck in the middle of one of those walls of fog while on the way to class felt like being in a different world. Sometimes I’d pass another lonely student in the grayness, make eye contact for a mere moment, and glance back to see them disappear into the mist as if they were the last person I was ever going to see. Dew-beaded webs decorated every clearing and spiders, fat and bright green, hung heavy on their surfaces like bulbs on a Christmas tree.

I got a sense of everything
growing
around me, of plants moving in and consuming the buildings that invaders had dared to construct. I stumbled across many wonderful and enchanting places on my first weeks while hiking in the September heat that so easily transformed into rain. I don’t know how I found it, but there was a lovely little garden tucked away somewhere that I happened upon once and couldn’t relocate, no matter how long I searched.

The thing that interested me most, and that I actively sought, was something the other students called the Wishing Tree. They said that if you wrote your wish down on a paper and left it on the tree, it was sure to come true. Something about that stirred my numbed heart, and the first weekend I took the time to go on a little journey to see it for myself. Sure enough, it was already covered in rain-bleared wishes, but instead of exciting me the way I had hoped it would, my heart ached at the sight of it. My eyes fell on the dreams of my classmates: “
Please get Jordan to ask me out”
,
“Let me do well this quarter”
,
“I wish for people to stop hating one another”
. I felt like an intruder. I’d brought paper with me and tried to think of a wish on the way through the meadow, but after standing there for a minute I just folded it up, stowed it in my bag, and stared at the branches.

“I wish I could go back to being me,” I told the tree, then shoved my hands into my pockets and turned back for Merrill College.

The first warning that things were not right came one evening as I was on the way back from my Intro to Sociology class. It was after nightfall, and the day had gone from T-shirt weather to a wind so biting I wished I’d thought of bringing a coat. I was crossing one of the long, wooden bridges built at an uncomfortable height above chasms brimming with plant life, and my mind was fixed on how much I did not want to go through with the group project my class had been assigned.

Suddenly, I saw what looked like a face staring at me from the gulch. I stopped walking and leaned forward to get a closer look. The bushes shivered and the ghost-green flash of an animal’s eyes glinted as the black, shaggy shape of what looked like a bobcat leapt out and skittered away. Seeing so many animals on campus was still unusual for me.

When I arrived back at the dorm, my phone buzzed and I answered it to hear the voice of my mother. It made me want to cry; I was homesick despite my constant denials.

“Sarah! How are things? We hardly hear from you—I wanted to give you your space, but Dad and I are getting curious and—”

“Mom, it’s good to hear from you. Things are—well, they’re really good, actually.” I caught myself smiling as I tossed my bag aside and plopped into the desk chair, the feeling of eeriness I’d gotten from seeing the bobcat already washed away. “Though I have to admit it’s getting a bit lonely. I miss you guys. How’re things back at the homestead?”

“Oh, nothing’s changed.” I couldn’t help but notice Mom sounded really tired. “Things are busy, busy, busy. Book club, sewing circle, painting, keeping up with friends—oh, and I started taking a Wine Studies class! We’re both college kids now, isn’t that funny?”

I faked a laugh.

Ever since the day we’d gotten the call about Lea, my mother had refused to sit still for a minute. She arranged the funeral and dealt with all the finances alone while Dad and I tried to hold ourselves together. It disturbed me how frantic she was about filling her life with activity, because I knew how terrified she was of being alone. But she still wept. We all did, only she would do it when she thought no one could hear her, and it broke my heart again and again to see the way she’d hastily wipe tears away, stifle wails, and force the ugliest smile I’ve ever seen when I came to check on her.

It had affected us all differently. My father’s safe-haven became his routine, and if anything altered it I’d see an angrier side of him than I ever had before. It disgusted me to realize that Lea had taken so much of what I loved about my family and myself with her. It disgusted me that I thought she was selfish for doing so, but I did all the same.

We chatted for a while about safe subjects like my classes, new friends, and anecdotal incidents that had happened in class, but when there came a long, pregnant pause, I knew what was coming. The answer to a question that had been in the back of my mind since my phone had rung, but I had been too afraid to ask.

“Nothing’s changed with Stephen. The doctors say there’s almost no sign of brain activity and they have no clue when he might wake up. Actually, they’re not sure he’ll wake up at all at this point. But his parents are doing everything they can. No one’s given up hope just yet,” Mom said in a flat voice.

I made a low noise to show I’d heard her, but didn’t respond. Stephen had been Lea’s boyfriend, and they’d found him next to her body on the night she died, along with another boy from our high school. Lea and the other boy, Isaac, had been murdered. Stephen was still alive, but only just. He had remained almost untouched, except for a cut on his hand and innocuous scratches he’d likely gotten as he fell to the ground; yet ever since that day, he’d remained in a coma.

Isaac and Lea were found in the exact same condition: both had drowned to death. People drown all the time at the ocean. Accidents happen. But we knew it couldn’t have been an accident—all three of them were found in the center of the town, miles away from the beach. I hated to even imagine what had transpired. Had someone held her down and forced water down her throat until she died? Had she been awake while it happened? How badly had it hurt? Was the sick fuck who had done it just getting his kicks by watching her and the other kid gasp for air as they slipped away?