Where Darkness Blooms, page 2
But then everything changed. Cori’s desk chair remained, worn and empty. And Bo painted the whole room navy blue.
“Bo!”
Bo blinked, and Delilah appeared in front of her, her light brown curls pulled back into a bun. Behind her, the old tire swing in the side yard creaked on its chain, metal grating against metal, and petals floated around her like dust. Bishop’s warning sirens had already started to wail on her walk home, but now they were relentless.
Delilah clamped her hands on Bo’s shoulders and squeezed. “Come on!” she yelled. “The wind’s getting bad!”
Bo sighed. She tossed the now-dead sunflower back into the field it had come from and followed Delilah up the porch steps. A ribbon of blood ran down her knee and pooled at her shoelaces.
“Hey, what happened—”
But before Delilah could finish her sentence, Bo brushed past her, ignoring Whitney and Jude on the sofa, and stomped up the narrow staircase at the end of the hall.
She knew what they were doing. She knew what they were saying. It wasn’t like Bo was oblivious to what the three girls she lived with thought of her. Bo couldn’t remember how many times she’d overheard Delilah whispering words like so mad all the time and even vicious. And of course, there was Whitney’s favorite line.
Why are you such a bitch, Bo?
Well, let’s see, Bo thought as she limped into the tiny room at the top of the staircase. My dad’s gone, my mom’s missing, and I have to live with the rest of you until I get out of here.
And then there was the other thing. The thing that threatened to bubble over like a hot spring every time she walked back into town, or to school, or happened upon the wrong place at the wrong time. The constant hum of dread pulsing in her veins that she hadn’t been able to shake since that night.
Bo flung open the door to her mom’s old office and flopped on the bed. Well, sort of bed. When she’d realized that her mother was probably never coming back, Bo had moved out of the room down the hall she’d shared with Delilah and into this office. It was only a quarter of the size, but it had been her mother’s, and that mattered. Plus, then she didn’t have to share with Delilah and deal with her incessant poking and prodding.
What’s going on with you lately, Bo?
Why won’t you just talk to us?
Are you okay?
No, Bo answered in her head to no one. But it wasn’t like she could talk to Delilah about it.
So instead of her old double mattress, Bo had dragged the camping cot out of the garage and set it up where her mom’s desk had been. She’d layered it with old, musty afghans and pushed it up against the wall so she had enough space to close the door all the way.
She rolled onto her back and stared at the ceiling. Bo had painted that navy blue, too. When she had painted the wall where her mom’s desk used to sit, she’d discovered little specks of black coffee in the corner, sprawling all the way across the wall, almost touching the ceiling like a watery constellation. She’d imagined her mom sitting in her chair, her favorite mint-colored mug in her hand, headset on, as she tried to explain to someone’s grandma what a web browser was. Cori never complained about doing tech support, but the aggressive coffee splashes on the walls told Bo everything she needed to know about her mother’s job.
Bo lay in the dark, listening as the tire swing outside began to slow. That was what storms were like in Bishop. It was like the winds knew right when someone was thinking too hard about a different kind of life. They’d pick up at the worst moment, pummeling her skin until it was red and raw. The storms pushed them all back into their homes. Away from the edges. Away from one another. Then they’d start to ease. And for a little while, everyone in Bishop would forget that they had ever wanted to try something different—be someone different—in the first place.
“Hey,” Delilah said, tapping her knuckles on the door. She stepped into the room before Bo could tell her otherwise. “You should come downstairs.”
Bo sighed again. “It’s just another storm. I’m fine.”
“Really? Why are you bleeding all over your bed then?”
Right. Bo had forgotten about her scuffed-up knee for one blissful second. She shrugged. “I fell.”
“Where?”
“Up at school. I went to pick up my schedule.”
Delilah went still, and Bo stole a glance at her. She immediately regretted it.
Bo hadn’t hit Delilah—not once, not ever—but every time she lied to her, Delilah winced as if she’d been slapped.
“Juniors don’t pick up their schedules until next week,” Delilah said quietly. She glanced at the floor, the velvety blue walls, the pile of laundry festering in the corner. Anywhere but at Bo.
“Fine, fine, fine. I was in town. I was going over some stuff for the memorial tomorrow.” Bo sat up and swung her legs over the bed. She had to get out of here before more questions came hurtling toward her. “Are we done here? I have to clean out this scrape.”
“Bo,” Delilah huffed. That was it. No more nice Delilah. No more tender Delilah who talked to her like she was a preschool teacher trying to spoon-feed her the alphabet. Bo had reached her max allotment of patient, saintly Delilah. She pushed a limp pillow out of the way and sat on the edge of the cot.
“Why are you doing this to yourself? To us?” Delilah said.
Bo scoffed. “What you really mean is why am I doing this to you, right, Delilah?”
She opened her mouth to reply, but it was too late. The embers that had been licking at Bo’s insides all day erupted into wildfire. If Delilah wanted to have this conversation again, then Bo was going to have it, and she was going to burn everything to the ground.
“I don’t want to hear it,” Bo said through gritted teeth. Delilah pursed her lips. “You’re just going to tell me to let it go, that our moms are gone and we’re going to ‘move on.’” She curled her fingers into air quotes. “But I don’t know how you expect any of us to move on when we never even figured out what happened!”
“Bo.” This time when Delilah said her name, that single syllable, she said it so gently that it almost made her crack around the edges.
Almost.
“They never even found them!” Bo erupted. She jumped off the bed and started to pace in a tight circle like a cat trapped in a cage. “No one even knows what happened. So if some ridiculous event committee wants to build statues for them, and they want everyone to sit in the sun and tell stories about them for an hour, then why not? Who knows? Maybe we’ll find out something and—”
Delilah stood. She grabbed Bo’s shoulders and squeezed, just like she had beside the sunflower field. “It’s been two years, Bo,” she said, her face crumpling. “There’s nothing to find.”
If it wasn’t Delilah standing in front of her with her doe eyes and perfect skin, she might have broken. She might have softened enough for Delilah to see the fault line that split Bo right down the center, into the Before Bo and the After. The crack that had spread like a spiderweb, starting with the night their mothers had disappeared.
It was only supposed to be a party.
It was just supposed to be some meaningless night out, a bonfire on the very edge of town where the sunflowers crested a dead-end road. And it was that, at first.
When Bo had come home from a run that afternoon, no one was there. Not their mothers, not any of the other girls. It wasn’t uncommon for them to go their separate ways throughout the day, but as the sun began to wane, they would all find their way back to the house before dinner. Bo had hopped in the shower, letting the steam settle into her skin, and gotten dressed.
The house was still empty.
She didn’t like being alone in the house. The way it was tucked into the dusty corner of the street, how the sunflowers always stared ominously at her through the windows in spite of the weather. She texted Whitney, Where are you?
Bonfire at the clearing, she replied.
Meet us.
And even though Bo had thought she’d finished sweating for the day, she jogged across town in the late-summer heat. As she cut through the center of town, more and more people began to pop up like dandelions in front of the small-town shops and in spaces between buildings. A couple of them waved, but most quickly looked away and continued shuffling down the sidewalk. That happened a lot to Bo. People would catch her eye and then look away, pretending she was a ghost instead of a girl. She never knew if it was because of her, or if seeing her churned up some kind of uneasiness about her missing mother, or if it was something else entirely.
She had just started to catch her breath at the clearing when Whitney slipped a red plastic cup filled with something that looked like honey and smelled like fire into her hand.
Bo drank it down. It was as thick as syrup.
The boy appeared as she finished the last drop. He was summer in human form, with hair so sun bleached it was almost white and freckles all over. He towered over her, which wasn’t saying much considering Bo was one of the shortest girls in her class. The lip of his plastic cup brushed her shoulder.
Hey, he’d said. It was one trivial word, and it made Bo’s skin flush.
She hated that.
He reached for Bo’s wrist, his calloused fingers cupping it, his thumb pressing into the soft skin where her pulse thrummed.
It was the first crack.
The rest of the night unraveled like a spool of thread. Bo never caught the end again before the whole thing came undone. She’d been trying to smooth out the tangled remnants of her life ever since, and a second-chance memorial had felt like a way to wind everything back into place. But now that the memorial was only a day away, Bo had started to think that nothing—not even a permanent stone statue—could fix what had been broken inside of her.
“Sit,” Delilah said, her voice cutting through the memory.
Bo blinked, suddenly woozy. She sank back onto her bed.
“What happened?” Delilah asked, softer this time. She leaned forward, careful to avoid the angry wound on Bo’s knee.
“An accident.”
Delilah stiffened. She glanced up. “Try again.”
“I just … something happened when I was leaving the planning meeting. Just a little, um.” Bo winced as she swung her legs back onto the bed. “Fine, I kicked Evan Gordon’s ass on my way home.”
Delilah pressed her hands to her face. “Bo, why—”
“Trust me, he’s way worse off than I am.” She glanced over at Delilah, who had squeezed her eyes shut like she was trying to force herself to teleport out of this room—or out of this life. Bo sighed. “He was right outside of town hall and he started saying stuff. And I couldn’t ignore it. I didn’t ignore it.”
“You can’t go around kicking people’s asses every time they say something you don’t like,” Delilah said softly, but even as she said the words, she couldn’t hide her mouth from creeping up in the corners.
She touched Bo’s knee, which was already puffing up. In the last few minutes alone, a throbbing knot had taken over her entire kneecap, turning the skin the color of a ripe plum. “That has to hurt.”
Bo shrugged. She knew it should hurt, but honestly, it didn’t. Still, Delilah would think she was lying again if she told her she could barely feel this wound that cut to the bone.
It wasn’t that it didn’t hurt, exactly. It was that everything else hurt so much more. In some ways, the scrapes and cuts and bruises made Bo feel more alive than anything else. Like maybe she wasn’t just a walking ball of hellfire.
Bo had lost so many things she loved that night at the bonfire. Her love of late-night runs, the protection of the storm cellar. The way she felt around the other girls. The way she felt in her own skin.
Her mother.
“I’ll go get some things for it.” Delilah hopped off the bed. She didn’t look at Bo. “Be right back.”
She watched Delilah trudge toward the door, searching for a way to soothe this wound, despite the fact that she had spent most of the afternoon staring out into the storm, waiting for Bo to come home.
“Hey, Lilah?”
It was a nickname the girls had called Delilah when they were growing up, when they all still had fathers and their mothers were best friends instead of roommates, and they lived in separate houses on a different, dusty street in Bishop.
Delilah slowly turned. “Yeah?”
“Thanks,” Bo said softly.
Delilah’s eyes shone. She blinked quickly and swept out of the room as if the wind were pushing her out.
Bo leaned back onto her bed and stared up at the navy ceiling. If she imagined hard enough, it almost looked like Evan’s blue jeans as she’d kicked him into the dirt after he’d said those words.
Your mother never wanted you.
He never wanted you.
She squeezed her eyes shut, but nothing happened. She patted the skin beneath her eyes. Still dry.
Bo had forgotten how to cry, but she still knew how to bleed.
CHAPTER THREE
It wasn’t that Whitney had a death wish. It was just that there were more important things to do than wait for a storm to pass through.
Plus, she was tired of listening to Delilah and Bo argue.
Whitney listened to the hum of their voices between the wind’s lashes and the old house’s groans. There was a certain rhythm to their conversation, the crescendo of Bo’s anger and the lulls of Delilah’s disappointment. It was a symphony of unbearable tension and it never freaking stopped.
She’d heard the groan of Bo’s makeshift bed and that was her cue—time to get out before Bo inevitably pounded down the stairs, rattling Whitney’s mother’s knickknacks all clotted up together on the TV stand.
Whitney uncurled herself from Jude on the couch. Her sister sat up. “Where are you going?”
“Out,” Whitney answered, and before Jude could protest, she slipped through the front door and down the gravel driveway, letting the wind push her all the way to the end of the street.
Considering there was an evacuation order, no one was actually evacuating. Whitney took the long way into town, purposely avoiding the straight shot down Main Street to loop through the gravel side streets. There were still cars nestled in dusty driveways, each kissed by the buttery yellow petals of blooming sunflowers. The houses were still, windows boarded up with cardboard boxes, like Delilah had done to their house, or with crusty cooking sheets, rolls of wire meant for enclosing chicken coops, or behind precarious glass panes and old furniture that could bear the shatter that was sure to come.
Bishop never listened.
It didn’t matter if it was a massive storm or a Main Street parade, the people who lived here treated this town more like a holding cell than home. Even though there was an “event committee,” Whitney couldn’t remember the last time there had been an actual event to go to. The storms pushed people away from one another. The deaths and disappearances made them weary. It seemed like everyone had one eye on the weather radar and the other on one another.
Which was extra unfortunate because Bishop was its own world in the middle of nowhere that no one would ever find on a map. Surrounded on all sides by sunflowers that grew taller than Whitney herself, it always felt like they were all being watched while they lived their lives. And sometimes lost them.
And once something was lost in Bishop, it was never found.
The wind raged as Whitney made her way past faded brick shops and tiny cafes to the clearing on the other side of Main. It was the place where Bishop all of a sudden stopped. Like whoever had settled this place had decided they didn’t need a road out of here—just the one that cut through downtown. Like they just … gave up on the idea. Stopped pouring concrete and called it a day, tucking themselves back into their warm little houses like mice in a nest.
It was the same clearing she’d brought Delilah to on That Night.
At sixteen, Delilah had never been to a party; she had been too busy planning to be the youngest woman elected to the US Senate or an astronaut for NASA or whatever audacious ambition she’d carved out for herself that week. While Whitney, a year younger, had been to every party, even if it involved only herself, a half-empty bottle of whiskey, and an inky sky speckled with stars.
That Night, the clearing had been full of people. They all orbited around a bonfire while avoiding the rusty old weather vane that also occupied the space, their bottles full of jewel-colored liquor that glinted in the light. Whitney had drunk until her cup was empty, again and again, and all the while her mother was already missing and she didn’t even know it. She drank until her throat burned, and she had never even known that her mother hadn’t come home from teaching her last English class at the high school.
Now the space was empty. Except for the weather vane.
Whitney stepped into the clearing. The weather vane poked up from the center, squealing under the strain of the wind. It was an ugly thing, this bent-up rooster that had turned a pale, sickly green over the hundreds of years since Bishop had been founded. But no one ever dared to touch such a “historic relic.”
The story went like this: before Bishop’s founder ever laid a single brick, he had jammed the weather vane into this very spot, declaring that this would be a place for all. An opportunity for men and women alike to “grow and thrive.”
Right. Just like her mom had “grown and thrived” here. And now Bishop had the audacity to throw them a memorial like it was some sort of jolly send-off, two years too late? In Whitney’s opinion, this place could fuck right off.
Whitney went up to the weather vane and flicked it.
It jerked to a stop. The wind settled and the clearing went silent.
She held her breath. This was the part that always stung, like ripping off a bandage. Just for a second.
She reached into her back pocket and pulled out a bracelet.
It probably used to be gold, but all the shine had been rubbed away from years of wear, leaving behind a dull metal finish. Two charms tangled together in the center of Whitney’s palm—a horse and a flame—hooked so close together that their clasps clicked, and a third clasp hung off to the side. Whichever charm had been attached to it had long since broken off.
