I knelt by the window, fingers parting the blinds, peering out. The sun was still out and I examined the trees, waiting for every dark corner and every shadow to swell like the forest’s lungs. I waited for it to come for me. But back in Bryn’s tree house, when I’d reached for her hand, stroking empty air, she wasn’t the only thing that had disappeared.
When I’d turned back around the shadow was gone too and so was the cold. When the ice in my veins finally started to melt that’s when I ran back to the farmhouse.
I heard the door shudder, the knob turning, and I bolted upright. When I saw that it was Bryn, her smile impossibly wide as she stepped through the front door, my stomach clenched. She found me?
Bryn reached for me, lacing her arms around my neck, pulling me tight. “You’re alright,” she breathed into my shirt.
“And you?”
Her eyes darkened, remembering. “I’ve seen it but that’s it. I’m not sure what it is…”
I felt the chill of it hanging over us again, shook off the memory. “Or what it wants.”
She pulled away, quiet. I watched her make her way to the bookshelf, lifting things, pushing them aside, looking for something.
“What is it?” I asked.
She searched her mom’s old room, stripping the bed, emptying the pillowcases.
“My iPod.”
“Is it here?”
“Not sure.”
She moved to her grandparent’s bedroom, rifling through the closets, checking the pockets on every article of clothing, inside shoeboxes, and beneath the faulty floorboards. I looked too. Checking under the mattresses, on the top shelf of the closets where she couldn’t reach. But there was nothing. We went back to the living room and she searched the kitchen cabinets and in the utensil drawers before wandering back to the bookshelf, tipping the spines of books back one more time. She finally sunk down on the couch.
“I found something,” she said.
“What?” I stood in front of her, restless.
“Your shirt. That symbol, it’s a logo for a band called Mismatched Machine.”
My hands grazed the raised monogram on my shirt, cracked and fading. I tried to remember where I’d bought it—a concert, an old record store, some shoddy band website. I tried to remember slipping it on, the scent of cigarette smoke still clinging to the fabric.
“Wait.” Bryn slipped her hands between the couch cushions, digging under the pillows.
I helped her pull them free, exposing the springs underneath and there wedged between the frame of the pull out bed were those signature white ear buds, cord snaking down to something shiny. Bryn pulled out her iPod, thumb tracing over the screen, waking it. Then she slipped one tiny speaker in her ear and the other in mine.
I caught hold of the bass, tethering myself to it as the song sprang into chaos. The first verse kicked in and I tried to recognize the sound of his voice, then I felt Bryn’s gaze slip to my lips. I felt them mouthing the words.
“I…I remember this song.”
But that wasn’t all I remembered. I remembered bodies pressed against me, the smell of their sweat and beer and cigarette smoke. I remembered screaming until my lungs burned. I remembered the pulse of the drum writhing against my heartbeat. Every city. Every concert. I grabbed the iPod, scrolling through songs—choruses and drum solos ignited in my memory.
My finger bounced off another one of the tracks, a growl buzzing in my ears. “Holy shit!”
I grabbed Bryn by the shoulders, shaking her, and she laughed.
“Holy fucking shit is right,” she said.
In that moment of remembering I forgot about being embarrassed, or wrong, or afraid, or empty. I scooped her up with one arm, the two of us spinning and jumping and laughing. And singing. I was singing, my voice swelling and then cracking. I thought I might choke on the words. I thought I might cry. I almost did. But then I looked at Bryn, at her flushed cheeks, the birthmark on her chapped lips, her eyes—green irises fluttering like a pair of leaves—and I knew. That she was real and so was I. That I was real and I was somewhere and she would be the one to find me.
So I let it simmer, hope filling me to the brim. And it felt good. Touching her, that thrum of the music riding under my pulse, knowing it could last. It felt good.
Bryn grew still as she stared through the open front door. I turned, the trees bleeding into the sky. Dark trunks splaying into these pale blossoms, the petals swirling and spilling to the ground like snow. She led me into the dizzying scent of spring, flowers bedding in her hair. We stood under the branches, sunlight a shadow against the white leaves, me staring straight into it, her staring straight into me.
“You’re real,” she said.
I looked down at her. “I’m real. I’m real and you’re going to find me.” My fingers scaled her arms, her shoulders, the slope of her neck. They curled into her hair, warm, soft. “Please don’t disappear this time.”
She held her breath, waiting for me to kiss her, to wake up. But it wasn’t her this time. This time it was me. I kissed her, letting the heat trail from her lips to mine. Still. Soft. Unrelenting. And when I opened my eyes I was for the first time, finally and undeniably awake.
She saw the moment it happened but the second I met her eyes they fell. Straight down. Away from me.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
She wrestled with something, words and worries that weren’t supposed to exist now that I was real. All that was supposed to exist was us. Here. Now. The realness better than magic.
“Bryn?”
“What if you’re not sick?” She finally said, still not looking up at me.
I let out a tight breath, confused. “What do you mean?”
“I mean what if I find you and you’re not sick? What if you’re normal?”
“Then how would I be here?” I said, still trying to figure out where she was going with this.
“I don’t know,” Bryn said. “But hypothetically what if we’re different?”
“Then we’re different.”
“That doesn’t scare you?” she asked.
The only thing that scared me was Bryn disappearing for good.
“No,” I said. “Why should it?”
She shook her head, eyes pleading with me but for what I didn’t know. “You don’t know what it’s like. It’s hard. It’s not—”
“I don’t want normal,” I said, realizing that Bryn’s fears weren’t about us in the here and now. They were about us in the real world. I squeezed her tight. “I want you.”
She looked up at me, breathless.
“Follow me?” I asked.
The sun set slow for the first time since I’d washed up on shore. It hung above the trees, sinking as I led Bryn into the trees. At the top of a small hill was a checkered quilt, both of us kneeling just as something flickered, a crack of static ignited in the spontaneous night. The giant screen shuddered to life, a beam of light from an invisible projector spilling past us into the forest.
“How did you know this was here?” Bryn asked.
“I saw it on my way back to the farmhouse,” I said. “You haven’t seen it before?”
“Not like this. Not here.”
“What is this place?” I asked.
“When I was younger there used to be a drive-in movie theatre just outside of Austin.” Her cheeks warmed with the memory. “We’d buy dinner at the small snack bar at the back of the parking lot, stocking up on corn fritters and beer salt and these corn tortilla sandwiches filled with meat and cabbage and pimiento cheese. I’d stuff myself sick and then we’d lie in the bed of my uncle’s truck, soundtrack pouring from the speakers of every car and out of the open windows.”
Just as she spoke the words the audio swelled from the darkness. I sprawled out on my back, one arm tucked behind my head. Bryn just sat there, watching the light from the screen spill across the grass.
“E.T.,” she said.
“What?” I glanced up at the opening scene, tape fla
shing along the bottom of the screen.
“It used to be my favorite movie,” she said.
“Really?”
“Until I saw Jurassic Park.”
Her eyes fell on the quilt dimpling next to me and I reached for her hand, fingers climbing to her wrist, giving it a slight tug. “Want to come down here?”
She slid onto her side, still facing me. I closed the space between us, my arm slipping around her shoulder, her chin resting on my chest. I brushed her hair back with my hand, trying to get her to shed the hesitancy she’d been shrouded in earlier, my thumb resting there as we faced the screen.
She rose with my lungs, eyes fluttering closed, as if every inhale lulled her. And as I held her under the dull twinkle of those artificial lights, time almost felt tangible again. Like something real that you could tuck into your pocket. Like something worth saving.
“Don’t worry,” I said, words trapped under my breath.
Bryn looked up. “What?”
“Don’t worry about this. About me.”
“Why not?”
I stared straight into her. “Because this isn’t a coincidence.”
“No?”
“No.”
I kissed her and I felt the sting in the balls of my feet. My tongue roamed her mouth, my fingers clinging to the nape of her neck. She pressed her mouth over mine, making me feel raw and new and exposed. Like I was a fossil, her lips tearing me from the illusory confines of time and space and I was on fire. But then she pulled away, long breaths tearing from her lips. She was staring at my own and that’s when I realized they were glowing, sparks igniting where our fingertips touched, where my skin brushed hers.
“This is not a coincidence,” I said again and I knew this time she believed me.