Vassa in the Night (5 page)

She opens her mouth to snap back, then stops and stares at me. With our dad gone and as good as dead for all practical purposes, Stephanie is the only blood relative I have left. I get up from the bed and stand facing her, only two feet away, staring back into her brown eyes. Blue light stutters across her pupils. I'm still hoping, barely hoping, that she'll think about what she's doing and back down.

Her cheeks flush scarlet and the corners of her mouth hike up, but that's it. My own sister is trying to get me killed. Knowing that—knowing it for
certain,
now—is what makes up my mind.

“All right!” I say. I sound like a very cheerful boulder. Shiny and hard. “I'll be back in fifteen minutes!” And I slam my feet into my shoes, never letting my eyes leave hers. My hands are in my pockets and Erg wraps her arms around my right thumb and squeezes.

I walk through our dark apartment: past the sagging sofa and Iliana's needlepoint pillows with their depictions of galloping horses and wild rivers—I'm obviously not the only one who dreams of being anywhere else—past the chipped coffee table and the vase I made last year in art class. I can hear the faint jitter of roaches in the kitchen. Stephanie drags along behind me as if she was stuck to my shoe. Maybe she thinks I'm just bluffing. Shows how well she knows me.

When I get to the front door I take my army jacket off a hook and shrug it on. It was getting pretty cold earlier. I turn back to her and smile brightly; there's just enough whiskery shimmer from the streetlamps outside that I know she can see my face. I want her to remember this forever. I want her to wake up sweating, years from now, and watch me smiling while I float over her bed. “See you soon, sis! Want me to pick up anything else while I'm there?”

And that's when we hear footsteps creaking up the stairs, and a key turns in the lock. As soon as I see Chelsea's face framed by the hallway's harsh fluorescence, her happiness collapsing into confusion at the sight of us by the door, something compresses in my chest. I'm not the one who has a reason to be ashamed, though.

“Hey, Chels!” I say. It's strange, I know, but I don't actually want her to stop me from going. “I was just running out.” I try to move past her—let Stephanie do the explaining, if she can—but Chelsea's blocking the door. Did I mention that Chelsea lifts weights? She's what you'd call strapping, in an attractive way, but she could definitely pick me up and throw me if she felt like it.

“It's a little late for that,” Chelsea says. More puzzled than angry. “Isn't it?”

“Just for a few minutes,” I say. “Picking up some things for Steph. I'll come right home.”

Chelsea hasn't processed the implications of this yet and she comes in and tosses her bag on the sofa. Behind the theatrical blandness I'm putting on there's a lot for her to take in, really. I'm able to scoot behind her, out into the stairwell and then down the first three steps.

“Wait,” Chelsea says, looking back and forth between me and Stephanie. Stephanie's lower lip is jutting out defiantly and her chin is up; she's giving off way too much drama to convince Chelsea that this is just a casual errand. “What things?”

“All the lights have burned out,” Stephanie says. She sounds insolent and, for somebody engaged in a murder attempt, weirdly silly. It makes it all worse and my knees start shaking, though I swear it's not from fear. “Vassa's just going to out to buy bulbs.”

“I guess it's okay if she hurries,” Chelsea says, and I realize she still hasn't figured it out. I'd be in denial too in her place. She's standing sideways in our doorway, bisected by shadow and shine. “The corner store closes at midnight. Oh, V., can you get me some ice cream while you're there? Cherry vanilla?”

“It's
after
midnight,” I tell her, moving slowly down the stairs while I'm talking. I've decided I don't want Stephanie to be able to pretend later that she didn't know. “Steph said I should go to BY's.”

I can't see Stephanie from here, but I can see Chelsea's face waking with outrage as she swings around to glare at her. “Stephanie! You know she can't do that!”

“Why not?” Stephanie's voice falls out of the door and bangs around the stairwell, bouncing off linoleum and glossy green paint. “They only kill shoplifters at BY's. Scummy, sneaky thieves. Why would that be a problem for
Vassa
?”

I'm still heading down, turning at the landing now. A triangle of Chelsea's back shows overhead, sliced by banisters. Her attention is all on Stephanie. “There is absolutely no excuse for you, for your even
suggesting
this! Stephanie, you need to apologize to Vassa now!”

“Why? She'll be right back,” Stephanie says. Her voice is filthy with a sick kind of sass. I'm at the second landing now and I can't see even a scrap of the girls who used to be my family.

There's a loud crack and a wail, and I know that Chelsea just smacked her across the face. It's about the best goodbye she could give me. They're both screaming now and I've reached the foyer with its corpse-colored mailboxes. And then I open the building's metal-grate door, and I'm running. I'm in the night, and for a few moments all I feel is free. Darkness drums up through my body and the streetlamps sweep my head up and away inside levitating blobs of pure brilliance.

Somewhere behind me a window flies open. “Vassa!” Chelsea screams. “Get back here!” I keep going. Chelsea's stronger than me but I'm faster, and she knows it. “You don't have to prove anything to us! Come home!”

Us?
I'd like to say.
Who is this
us
, Chelsea? We're just people who got stuck in the same apartment, and there's no
us
anywhere around here.

As for
home,
well, I'll have to borrow a dictionary.

And then I've passed enough slabby brick buildings with crappy swan planters and ugly cement lions that I can swing onto another block which is exactly the same, except with a closed auto-body shop, and I don't have to hear Chelsea anymore. She can't fix this for me. She can't, and I don't even want her to try.

I'm just getting wise now to what must have happened: I bet Stephanie unscrewed all the lightbulbs just enough so they wouldn't work. I bet they're not burned out at all. My hands are balled in my pockets as I run and something starts kicking at my right palm. It's only now I realize that I've been crushing Erg in my fist this whole time. I pull her out, half-afraid I might have hurt her. There's a cold wind winging down the nothing-stuffed streets; I feel wet trails licking my cheeks and then spilling down my neck.

“Oh, Vassa,” Erg says. Her painted violet lids flutter over round azure eyes; for something made out of wood she's doing a great job of looking concerned. “Oh, you're so sad! That was so mean of Stephanie! Do you think I could bite through her jugular? If I opened my mouth extra wide?”

I'm not out of breath. I don't know why I stop running—stop moving at all—and just stand swaying in the middle of the sidewalk. There's no one around, thankfully, but the tears still feel degrading. Nothing Stephanie does should have the power to make me cry. “This is what you call
everything being fine,
Erg?”

Erg just stares at me for a moment, her little body still wrapped up like my hand is a straitjacket. She can't possibly have retinas—there's nothing behind her black lacquer pupils but a chunk of wood—but I've never doubted for a second that she really, truly sees me. “Why yes, Vassa,” she says after a second. “I do call it that. Indeed I do.”

My last night on Earth, with its stars fuzzed out by the rusty city sky and its rambling maze of emptiness covering every possible inch of ground. I guess Erg has a point. What could be finer? If this is all there is, well, then by definition it's the finest thing out there.

 

CHAPTER 3

There's plenty of nothing in Brooklyn, but BY's still hogs vacant space as if it was afraid of getting emptiness deprivation sickness. Not many stores in the city have parking lots but our local BY's franchise is surrounded by a field of dead cement that takes up a whole small block, though cars never seem to park there. As I get close the stench is like sick sweet fur in my nostrils, and I try not to look—but who can keep from looking at that? The parking lot is ringed in by poles maybe thirty feet high, and on top of every pole a severed head stares down, some with eyes and some with just gutted pits. A few heads are fresh and still have humanish colors, just a little too gray or too white. With my weird pallor I'll fit right in, I guess. Others have mossy patinas, verdigris mold, or purplish pockets of rot. I don't want to recognize Joel, but I do. He's spiked to my left and it looks like he's staring off at the sky, dreaming of bleeding into the moonlight. His smooth black skin has gone ashy and sort of prickly, as if it's covered in iron filings. I acknowledge that many intelligent people would say I'm exhibiting poor judgment, doing something so dangerous out of pride and rage, and, I mean, no doubt. But somehow looking at Joel gives me my first little shiver of hope that maybe I
will
go home tonight and fling the lightbulbs straight into Stephanie's face. With any luck they'll explode and engulf her in snow-white flames.

It's only logical: BY's can't kill
everyone
who shops there. If they did, they'd go out of business.

At the center of the ring of poles, BY's dances. Just like in the ads, the building hops and swivels on giant chicken feet, on yellow legs that manage to be at once wobbly and graceful. Its orange plastic sides glow with this relentless singeing shine that hurts to look at, and the beams lancing out of its plate-glass windows bow and scrape across the pavement. As if they were searchlights. Always looking for someone. The orange building bends with a dramatic forward swoop, a distorted trapezoid of light lunges toward my feet, and then I see that not every pole has its own personal head on top.

No: there's exactly one that is empty.

Nice touch,
I'd like to say.
Good one.

There's a growling sound that rises and falls; I've been hearing it for a while but not really paying attention. Now the source of it lashes by and I jump back so it won't crush my feet: a motorcycle, jet black, with a heavy-muscled, black-clad rider. His helmet is strangely huge, protruding like a spherical cancer from his skull, and his visor is down. He looks like a concentrated chunk of the darkness, a clot in the night's black blood. He's going fast enough that I don't have time to see much, but when he comes around again I try to make out his face. All I can see is a mouth with thin, gray-pink lips above a boulder of a chin. “Hey!” I call, but he's off.

I watch him for a few more minutes, his engine snarling up and down in pitch like somebody practicing scales on a dog. He's going around. And around. Twice more I try to talk to him, but it's like he can't hear me or doesn't care. His head never turns and his visor looks completely opaque, and much blacker than the sky with its haze of outcast light. The guy must be some kind of security guard, but it seems like he'd be more useful if he could see.

I start to realize I'm stalling. BY's prances on its horned legs, but, like every city kid on the East Coast, I know just what to do to make it stop.

The next time the motorcycle burns past I step through into the circle of those watching heads, and now the engine whines by behind me. So my muscles are tight and my legs are trembling and I feel sick and cold and stupid. Why should I care?

“Turn around,” I sing. My voice comes out thin and crackly. “Turn around and stand like Momma placed you! Face me, face me!”

The building stops spinning abruptly, with a little jerk. Then, quite deliberately, it rotates so the plate-glass windows and the door are pointing my way. I could swear it's looking at me. They're just windows, obviously nothing but mindless glass, but somehow I can't shake the sense of a cynical expression and even a tweaky little smirk like the one on Stephanie's face when she sent me out to die.

Then the chicken legs crease at the knee and the whole store drops, bending forward to invite me in. I will go right in, get the lightbulbs, and leave. I will …

But there's something I have to do first. Knowing what I know about Erg's proclivities, bringing her into a BY's seems like absolute suicide. I don't want to leave her lying on the pavement, though. I look around for somewhere to hide her until I'm done in there. For no good reason there's a tree stump right in the middle of a parking space, and when I walk closer and peer down I see a deep cleft in the wood, big enough for Erg if I stuff her. She might have to go in headfirst, but it can't be helped.

She's howling like a siren from the instant I reach into my pocket. “No! Vassa! No, you can't do that! Stop having such bad ideas! You can't leave me!”