Kissing Midnight

KISSING MIDNIGHT

By

Laura Bradley Rede

Copyright © 2013 Laura Bradley Rede

All Rights Reserved.

No part of this work may be reproduced in any fashion without the express, written consent of the copyright holder.

Kissing Midnight
is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed herein are fictitious and are not based on any real persons living or dead.

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Dev

Four fifty-two a.m.

I glare at the time on my phone as I fumble it off the bedside table. Who the hell is calling at this hour? My voice comes out rusty. “Hello?”

“Dev!” The girl’s voice is so thick with tears that I can barely understand her. “Thank God I got you. It’s Beth.”

Beth? Who the fuck is Beth? For a minute I’m not even sure what decade this is. My mind flashes through all the Beths I’ve ever known, and there must be a thousand. “Beth..?”

“Kayla’s friend.” Her voice breaks on Kayla’s name, and she stifles a sob.

Shit
. I sit up in bed, suddenly awake. “Deep breath,” I say, “Calm down. What is it?”

“Oh my God, Dev. I don’t know how to say it. I shouldn’t be telling you this on the phone. Is anyone with you? You shouldn’t be alone.”

A terrible coldness creeps through me. I swing my legs over the side of the bed and stand, my hand tightening on my phone. “Just say it.”

“Dev, it’s Kayla. Earlier tonight… There was so much ice on the road…”

“Beth,” I say carefully, “Just tell me. Is Kayla okay?”

Her voice comes out small. “Her parents called me. On her way home from dinner, her car slid off Stalton Bridge. The police pulled her out, but she…she didn’t make it.” She takes a deep, shuddering breath. “Dev, I’m so sorry. Kayla’s dead.”

Kayla’s dead.

She’s dead.

I sit down hard on the bed. Kayla, in whom I’ve invested six months of my time. Six months of movies and dinners and making Christmas plans with her family. Six months of late-night sexts and driving her to work and being kind to her fucking cat.

And we were so close. We were almost there.

“Dev?” the girl’s voice trembles. “Are you still there? Oh God, I knew I shouldn’t tell you over the phone.”

“I’m still here.” My voice comes out flat and vacant.
Good
, I think,
I sound appropriately upset
. And I am. I am very upset.

“Good!” The girl sounds relieved I haven’t gone and jumped off a bridge. (I could, but it’s not like it would do any good.) She starts talking nonstop, but I just catch bits and pieces: “special to her,” “so in love,” “didn’t suffer,” “horrible accident.”

Was it an accident, I wonder? The timing seems too perfect. I stare at the ornate antique box on my dresser. It looks as secure as ever, but is there a chance they’ve gotten strong enough? That enough of them have gotten free?

No
, I think,
only a few have leaked out.
It would take more than that to do any real damage, wouldn’t it?

But there still might be someone else who wants me dead. In four hundred years, a man collects a lot of enemies.

Or maybe this is just bad luck. In four hundred years, I was bound to have some of that, too, and, all things considered, I’ve been lucky.

Luckier than some, at least. For a second I picture Kayla’s little silver Subaru plunging through the guard rail. I see her beating on the windows with her palms as the river swallows the car, imagine the cold sting of water invading her lungs…

No. I press the image out of my mind. It’s never a good idea to think about how they die.

I’m vaguely aware the girl on the phone has stopped talking. I should say something. “I knew the roads were bad,” I say, “I shouldn’t have let her go.”

“Don’t think about it,” she says quickly, “You can’t blame yourself. It’s not your fault.”

Yes
, I think,
that’s the problem
. I can’t take the blame—or the credit, either. Kayla doesn’t count.

“Dev? Are you there?”

“I’m here.”

“I’m coming over. You shouldn’t be alone. I’m getting in the car right now.”

For a minute, a whole new scenario plays out in my head: Beth comes over. We talk. We cry. We listen to Kayla’s favorite songs. She makes me tea. In a few days, after the funeral, I tell her I don’t want to be alone. We hook up for a night of comforting each other with passionate, life-affirming, survivor-guilt sex. We start a secret affair…

Which one is Beth? The blond? Or the shorter one?

No. Too many variables. Too many complications. I can’t afford for anything else to go wrong.

“No,” I say, “I don’t want you to drive. I’m okay.”

“You’re not,” she says gently, “but you will be. Someday you will be. I promise.”

Oh yes
, I think,
I most certainly will be
. I always am. But my palms are sweating as I run them through my bedhead hair. I don’t even have to look at the calendar to know: Eleven days until New Year’s Eve.

Eleven days to make a new girl love me.

It takes ten minutes to persuade this girl Beth to get off the phone, and the second she hangs up, I punch in a new number. God knows I hate to involve anyone else—I prefer to work alone—but this time I may need backup.

“
Bonjour?”
The voice that answers is silky with sleep. Or maybe that’s a purr I hear, if she has recently been a cat. “Dev, is that you? Why are you calling so late?”

Eleven days.

“Anathema,” I say, “I have a situation.”

Saintly

The last thing my brother ever gave me was this little black heart. He drew it on the underside of my wrist, the day I went to confront him about the drugs. He was always drawing things—on paper, on his desk, on his own arms and the arms of all his friends. Sometimes just little doodles, sometimes big, elaborate sketches that twined in and out of his real tattoos like animals slinking through vines. He got in trouble for drawing on everything, of course, but Enrique didn’t mind. He was used to being in trouble and usually able to charm himself out of it by batting those long, dark eyelashes and flashing that crooked smile. Drawing calmed him down, he said, made him sit in his seat and focus, the way school work never could. “Besides,” he would say, “I have to practice to be a tattoo artist. I’ve got my future to think about.”

When did Enrique stop drawing on things? Whenever it was, I should have known right then.

But all I knew was the way he made our mother cry, the way the dark shadows under her eyes had become a permanent fixture from too many nights up, waiting for him to come home. I noticed the way she sniffed his clothes like a drug dog before she put them into the wash, the way she rifled through his pockets for proof. I saw how she watched the news when he was out late, scanning it for signs of accidents and shootings, rubbing her fingers together like she was ticking off invisible rosary beads. Our mother didn’t deserve this. She had already been through too much.

And so I confronted him. I cornered him in his room and yelled at him, furious, but he stayed calm. (Who knows, maybe he was high, then, too. Or maybe he knew even then what he was going to do and that it would all be over soon.) He took my hand in his and flipped it over to reveal the smooth belly of my wrist. “
No te preoccupies, hermanita
,” he said. “Don’t worry.” (He always called me
hermanita,
little sister, just because I was a few inches shorter than he was. Never mind the fact that we were twins, or that I was a full eight minutes older and endlessly more mature.) And he drew that tiny black heart, there where my angry pulse was pounding, because that was the way he kept calm, by putting ink on skin.

It did nothing to make me calm. I yanked my hand away before he was even done. His black pen left a long thin line from the tip of the heart, like yarn from a sleeve about to unravel. I stormed out of his room and slammed the door behind me.

It’s a wonder I didn’t scrub the heart off right then, on purpose.

It’s a wonder I didn’t scrub it off by mistake the next night, after I found him, when I was frantically trying to wash the blood from my hands.

But I didn’t. I forgot all about it, and only rediscovered it at the funeral when I looked down at my praying hands and noticed the line trailing from the heart like mascara streaked by tears. Like a tiny thread, still tying me to him.

From then on, I was committed to keeping it. Losing it would be losing the last of him, and that I couldn’t bear. I should have gotten it tattooed over right away. Enrique had a million friends at the Inkshack where he hung out—he had a million friends everywhere—and they would have been happy to do it for me, but I wanted to wait until I was eighteen. I wasn’t a rule-breaker like my brother, who snuck out to get his first ink when we were only freshmen. I knew I would have to ask my mother’s permission to legally get a tattoo under age, and there was no way I could ask her for that. I could barely ask her for anything in the state she was in, and certainly not for something that would remind her of him, that would make her think I was headed down the same path.

And so, instead, I started retracing the heart every day, to keep it from fading away. I thought I only had to retrace it for a year, until I turned eighteen. How hard could that be? I didn’t know I’d spend most of that year at Westgate, where the stinging hospital soap would reduce the heart to the color of ash, turn it into a ghost of itself. Sometimes it got so faint, I wasn’t sure it was there at all. Was I just redrawing it from memory? Was the heart I saw just an after-image, like the flashes behind your eyelids when you stare into the light too long?

Of course, by then I was seeing a lot of things that weren’t there. That’s why I was at Westgate in the first place. I had learned not to trust my eyes.

So I traced the non-existent lines with a ballpoint pen stolen from the nurse’s clipboard, my fingers shaking from the medication until the lines wobbled and I couldn’t tell how much of it was the heart he left and how much was a heart of my own creation, warped and already fading like my memory of him. At my best, the heart was a talisman that brought those memories back, and at my worst…

I remember the day at Westgate when I hit an all-time low, the day I saw the monster for the last time. I looked at the heart like it was the center dot in a line across my wrist showing me where to cut, as if Enrique had left me a little path to follow him.

It feels wrong to be in the world when your twin is gone, like you’re a person without a shadow, or a shadow without a person.

But I didn’t do it.

I hauled myself up by a tiny string and got out of Westgate and into college, and the first week we were here Delia and I went to a tattoo shop (the cleanest one I could find—I researched online) and she got a bright little daisy on her ankle and I got this black little heart. I even got the trailing line, like the string of a kite a little kid let go. Except now I can’t let go. Enrique and the heart are a part of me forever—or, for as long as I live, anyway—for better or for worse.

I rub the heart when I’m nervous, now that I can’t rub it off. It has become a little habit to scrub at it with the thumb of my right hand, or press on it like I’m checking my own pulse. In fact, I’m doing it right now as I gaze out the window of the student union. I’m watching my classmates—the ones who are already done with finals—haul their suitcases and duffel bags of dirty laundry across the frozen quad. They’re headed for the line of taxis idling by the dorms, waiting to take them to planes and trains and ultimately home. There’s a powdered-sugar snow sifting down, so gentle it looks fake, and everyone is laughing and waving goodbye and calling out holiday wishes. It’s December twenty-second, just three days until Christmas, and I’m not going home.

“Saintly, are you okay?”

I startle at the sound of Delia’s voice. I had almost forgotten she was there. She’s looking at me over the edge of her coffee cup with a sad, worried expression that seems wrong on her usually sunny face. It makes me feel guilty. Delia has worried enough about me, and I don’t want to drag her down.

I force a smile and try to shake off my mood. “Sure. Just tired.”

Her forehead is still creased with concern. “Honest? Because if you’re having second thoughts about not going home I’m sure your mom would—”