WHO: Lyra and the Moirae WHEN: Thursday, late afternoon WHERE: Bushwick and Bed-Stuy WHAT: The universe says 'not yet' WARNINGS: None
As Lyra hung on wires down the side of buildings; and as she scrubbed the burners at Taco Bell; and as she and Jocelyn hauled groceries home with Jemma riding on her shoulders; and as she scrolled through job listings where she might actually get to build a building stead of just washing one; the same question kept turning over and over in her head.
How on earth did a person go bout telling their best friend (in the entire world) that at the end of winter, they’d disappeared (from the entire world) for three months cuz they were partying hard with things underground that their best friend absolutely did not (would not? Could not?) believe in?
Well, you didn’t put it like that, for starters. And screw trying to talk to her on campus when she was stressing out about being lab-partnered with her bio-brother, or after a party when you were in an uber with a boy she thought was a basketcase. Of course that was never gunna work.
Lyra knew what her big mistake had been: she shoulda told Rosario on the roof. That was their place, with the solar powered fairy lights (a little more than half of them still alive) and the plastic furniture and the monstrous throne she’d made out of mannequin parts that – sure – had been pretty vandalised by now (Lyra was so pleased, pointing to it as an example of community art and/or urban horror and/or proof you didn't need to live in one of them hip collectives to be an artist in Bushwick) and the solid door between them and the rest of the world, and nothing at all between them and the sky. That’s where she shoulda tried to tell her, not on campus, during the middle of the afternoon. That was never going to work.
So Lyra started to plan it all out. So far, she had location and catering down. Still not so sure how she was going to phrase it, but she figured that after they’d split the bottle of wine between them, something would come to her.
Something did; only half way through the bottle, the fire alarm had gone off.
Lyra’s question to the sky (“are you shitting me?!”) went unanswered and she grabbed Rosario’s hand and joined the scores of other people evacuating out onto the street. Everyone was outside, speculating who it had damn well been setting the alarms off this time (Jocelyn had her eye firmly on the couple from 6E) or eyeing their neighbors in their pajamas (Jem had struck up a conversation with a young man in a tank top from the floor above them) while Lyra and Rosario took turns swinging Jemma between them because she was very upset by all the noise but cheered up immensely whenever swinging was involved.
By the time they were all allowed back in again, Rosario admitted she needed to do some study (with the grim look on her face that said she had her anatomy lab tomorrow) and Jemma was falling asleep in Lyra’s arms anyway, and the moment was well and truly gone.
Later that night she’d sliced up an old t-shirt dress, ostensibly to turn it into a better t-shirt dress but in reality she’d just felt the need to put some fabric scissors against something and shred it while listening to a horror podcast about the Bell Witch haunting. It was when she’d sat back amidst the dismembered dress that she realised that, for real, the universe was trying to tell her that now would’ve been a bad night to tell Rosario anyway. If she had her lab with Archer tomorrow and if she’d stayed up all night talking to Lyra about faeries and lost time and shit then she was gunna be overtired at school tomorrow and Lyra didn’t wanna be responsible for Rosario not being at her best when she had to face Archer.
So it had to happen on a Friday, maybe Saturday; one where neither Rosario nor Lyra were working nights.
And, Lyra realised later (half way through an episode on the Barney and Betty Hill abductions) that doing it after half a bottle of wine was a terrible idea too. Like, Rosario had literally told her that she only thought she saw Archer heal Ricky cuz she’d been drinking. Being drunk would make everything she said dismissable and she didn’t know how she’d cope if Rosario dismissed her entirely.
So hell no, when Lyra was doing this she was doing it sober.
She wasn’t doing it drunk and she wasn’t doing it distracted and she wasn’t doing it when they didn’t have the whole night to themselves and she wasn’t doing it anywhere but up on the roof and – cuz it was impossible to be soul sisters with Rosario for so long without picking up a few things, she’d even written this list down.
She wasn’t sure Rosario had ever felt the need to add the instruction don’t be drunk to one of her lists, though.
But man, Rosario was so much better at lists than she was. Sitting cross legged on her bed, twisting a curl rather aggressively round her finger and staring at her list, she wondered how this was supposed to be helpful, this half page list of don’ts. She bounced her fist on her knee a few times and worried her lip with her teeth like she could find the answers by busting them outta her lip or yanking them outta her hair.
No, no lists wouldn’t help. This was way more serious a thing that a list could cope with.
She had to approach this like Rosario, with a plan of attack, with all the proof and explanations she had, with something prepared and solid and unshakable that Lyra could rely on and Rosario could hold onto.
What Lyra needed was a binder. What Rosario needed, to believe her, was a binder. So before Lyra could start doing any real thinking about this, she needed to buy herself some stationery.
This wasn’t just procrastinating, Lyra told herself. No way. She wasn’t putting anything off cuz she was nervous about how the universe kept cutting her off like it was trying to tell her something. This was organising her crazy story into something less crazy. It was essential. And if her feet took her the long way to Walmart past brightly painted warehouses that housed artists rather than wares, and crowded cafes serving matcha lattes and the stupid new bougie shop that sold artisanal mayonnaise well… Well okay, that was her putting it off, a bit, but it made her feel better to flip off a couple of the hipper places that were cranking up rents in the neighbourhood. Had to exorcise a lil wired energy somewhere and why not there, right?
Cuz she was doing this. She was doing this. She was hella doing this and no nerves or shit gunna convince her otherwise.
Inside the Walmart, everything was orange and black and purple and spooky and Lyra, who normally threw herself into Halloween with a fervor, this year, was discovering that all the wired energy (that hadn’t been exorcised at all by flipping anything off, lets be real) started to curdle into something unsettling.
She ran her fingers down the arm of a skeleton hanging at the end of an aisle, thinking of the bone breaking and the power (magic) needed to put it back together. It wasn’t that she was afraid of, exactly; it was that she didn’t understand the rules of the world, anymore. That she’d been swallowed up by one of those rules she did not understand, and spat back out through a tree into May, and now her skin kept crawling about it, and literally anything could be real.
It was like… how every supernatural Halloween movie started by warning the protagonists that the boundary between this world and the next was thinner on Halloween and inevitably things would rip through that boundary and it had been such a naff idea last year but this year she was staring a plastic skeleton in its eyeholes and the goosebumps on her arms wouldn’t go down. Was something going to happen to her, on Halloween? Was something going to culminate with her and Rosario and Avery and Archer and god-knew who else at the end of the month?
The goosebumps remained as she lined up to buy the binder, and as she walked down the street toward the library to print out something to go in said binder. The goosebumps remained as she stood by the old library printer, rubbing her arms to make them go away. Alongside the uneasiness, she felt a little guilty about wasting paper when she could pull up the exact same info’ on her phone, but there was something about evidence that was printed on physical pieces of paper that felt more substantial, more believable, even if the content was identical.
Lyra knew she was never going to be able to fill a binder to the same extent as Rosario could. She knew printing out the google document Avery had sent her of all his interviews with other abductees would get her nowhere. That printing out the Wikipedia article for redcaps would get her nowhere. No, she had to stick with the concrete and believable. She had to root this story in something Rosario could hold onto. She had to think of everything Rosario might doubt and figure out a way to counteract it. She had to rehearse all this without becoming overwhelmed by the fear that Rosario would not listen.
That fear, and the goosebumps, both stuck with her, neither of them receding as she waited underneath the hanging flourescent library lights as the scant half dozen pages fell one by one into the printer’s collection tray.
And there it was in black and white. The top page: her bank statement proving that on Tuesday the second of February she paid for a single motel room in Charleston, West Virginia and that was the last time she touched her account until the middle of May when she bought two bottles of cheap wine that she’d shared that night with Rosario.
Not a single thing written on this piece of paper was new information yet it still forced Lyra to cover her hand with her mouth, her eyes prickling with tears as she sat down on the edge of the library couch. More than three months of nothing. Fifteen weeks of nothing. How was it possible? (How it was it fair?)
No – not nothing. Fifteen weeks of the sweetest wine pouring down her throat, burying her hands in the softest velvet and gasping and laughing as the softness turned to pain, of howling songs at the top of her lungs, singing the best she’d ever sung, playing till her fingers were shredded on her strings and still playing because the high of the perfect music was the greatest high of her life, because she was desired by all the grabbing hands and she was enjoyed by all the laughing faces and nothing she’d found since came close to what it felt like, feeling so clever and so talented and so magical, and being so wanted and so enjoyed like that, and all of it, all of it was the most terrifying and greatest high of her life.
...And now she was a crazy lady clutching a bank statement and crying on the couch of a public library. Lyra pulled herself together with a sniffle as she saw one of the librarians start to make his way over from the desk, shoved her stupid, painful, unsettling, unfair, skin-crawling proof in her brand new ring binder and got out of there before anyone could ask her what was wrong.
But the tears hung around, not as tears themselves but as a pressure in her temples that was just waiting to be released again, just as the goosebumps hung around, just as the fear of what Rosario was going to stay hung around, and Lyra seriously wished she had a drink on her. Something to take the edges off her a bit.
God, was it any wonder she’d avoided confronting this for so long? Lyra felt horrible. If Archer had messaged her right then to invite her to a party she would a gone in a heartbeat, would’ve cast herself upon the dance floor and let the volume of the music buzz up her blood and would’ve pulled anyone who was there close up against her and would’ve drunk oh so much, maybe would’ve got them to hold her upside down as she tried a kegstand, maybe would’ve even risked going home with someone so long as if felt like they wanted her. Not Archer himself, though. She wanted to drink and dance off this anxiety inside her while ignoring the unavoidable root of the problem, not make things worse, and sleeping with Archer would for sure make things worse.
Lyra looked down at her binder as she walked aimlessly away from the library. It was like an anchor, now. She couldn’t ignore the things it contained and she couldn’t keep pretending things were normal to Rosario. Avoiding things she didn’t want to do was fine, sometimes, but this was eating at her.
And the goosebumps on her arms just wouldn’t go down. Seriously! Lyra pinned the binder under her arm and rubbed at her skin, trying to shake the feeling off just for one moment before she started to wonder… was this feeling a warning? The universe or her gut sending her a message? Was there a danger here she wasn’t seeing? Something watching her? Something waiting for her?
Who knew what the fucking rules were, anymore? Suddenly Lyra felt utterly certain; she wasn’t just feeling uneasy, she was feeling uneasy because something was after her. She turned on the cracked pavement, scanning the faces of the people around her, watching for anything weird– a glimmer of a cat’s eye in a human face, the sharp point of a tongue or an ear, the opening of a door through the vivid and surreal street art painted on the side of a warehouse with dark windows watching over the street like eyes.
And beneath the chatter of people on the street and the traffic and the Caribbean music spilling out from a cafe and the clang of someone dragging out some bins and a deeper base beat pumping from a pimped out car she heard something else. A giggle, a familiar goblin giggle.
Lyra broke into a run like she’s been stung. She bolted across a side street in front of a car and winced when it honked but did-not-could-not stop to gesture an apology.
RUN he’d said, Johnny had said, as the surge of needle toothed monsters pushed in toward him.
Where?!
Doesn’t matter!
Lyra ran.
In the back of her mind there was a sensible, rational voice, pointing out that the giggle had just been a kid. Asking her where she was running to, since she couldn’t see any danger behind her. Telling her she looked a bit ridiculous and needed to take a few deep breaths and calm down. It was a little like watching herself run from a slight remove; she could think all these things, but she couldn’t stop. Her vision had absolutely tunneled down to directly in front of her, she could barely hear a thing and maybe that was the rush of blood in her ears or maybe she’d cut through some interdimentional barrier and she was in a silent movie, now, and that thought was ridiculous and impossible but was it?? and Lyra was suddenly laughing.
Maybe she was crazy. Maybe she was purely losing her goddamn mind, not sure if she was laughing cuz everything was ridiculous or cuz everything was terrifying, but it was the kind of laughter that ricocheted any last rational thought out of her mind, and the kind of laughter that scrunched up her eyes so when someone opened a shop door in front of her she didn’t see it at all, not till she was sprawled on her back on the ground, stunned out of laughter, panic and thought, trying to see what it was that had just crashed into her face and knocked the entire world onto a new angle.