Messenger 93 Read online

  But Boy didn’t come. His friends — the other ones I might try to ask if I could channel the nerve — were nowhere around. It was just me, by myself, inside a useless, mindless stream of kids.

  I pulled out my phone. Boy’s number was still in there. I could call him. My thumb hovered over the prompt. But it felt twisted and mixed-up and wrong. What right did I have to bother him? Especially now.

  A chill ran over my neck, like when you sense a presence. I looked up. There, at the other end of the hall, through the crowd, eyes trained hard, seeing me, was Remy.

  Perfectly symmetrical features, brown-black skin, rows of gold-ringed braids lacing her shoulders. A vegan activist, Remy was probably the coolest person in our school. I couldn’t remember the last time she’d spoken to or looked at me. We’d been friends in elementary school, but hadn’t hung out in the same circle for ages.

  We locked eyes as other people’s bodies picketed the space between us.

  I couldn’t translate what she wanted to communicate with her intense and piercing stare. Or what she wanted to hide.

  The bell screamed and I jumped and spun away.

  IN MY NEXT CLASS, Anusha was sitting a few rows ahead of me. I watched her in half-profile. She had her phone out, silver acrylic nails scrolling through Ittch, tapping into profiles, onto photos, zooming in, zooming out, scrolling on.

  I played with all the ways I could interrupt her. Question her.

  Hey, Anusha, it’s been ages. By the way, if you want, I know this imaginary crow and it might help us find Krista. Hey, Anusha, I love your outfit, it reminds me of Krista. Oh, which reminds me, maybe I can help you guys find her? Hey, Anusha, if a crow came to you and said you should find Krista but you secretly hated her, would you look for her anyway?

  “Nice work.” Mr. Roberts’ voice startled me. My English essay with a red-penned A on it landed on the desk in front of me.

  Anusha shot me a look at that exact instant. As if I’d spoken my thoughts out loud and she’d heard them. My face went hot. Almost burned my fingers when I hid it behind my hands.

  “Do I have to say it again, people?” Mr. Roberts raised his voice to address the rest of the class. He dropped essays onto more desks. “Please pay attention to the clear and simple instructions I set out for you. Before you write.”

  Anusha turned away and stared purposefully at a point of air in front of her. She would never agree to talk to me.

  “You were asked to explore the relationship between the writer’s intent and the level of language used to convey that intent. If you’re analyzing Tennyson’s The Eagle, I’m not looking for how much you know about eagles.”

  Anusha hated me because she thought I’d badmouthed her behind her back.

  “Let’s examine the sensory appeal of the words Tennyson uses. The sound value. Literary devices like —” Mr. Roberts was at the blackboard now, writing across it with chalk. “Symbol. Connotation. Allusion.”

  I knew I should be taking notes. But when I pulled out my binder, I worked on practice notes to Anusha instead.

  There’s something you need to know.

  There’s something I need to tell you.

  We have to talk. It’s important.

  Meet me at lunch break. Football field. Come alone.

  If you care about Krista, find me. It’s a matter of life and death.

  It all sounded so hostile.

  The bell rang. I started and checked the clock. I couldn’t believe class was over already. Everyone burst out of their seats. Anusha stacked her books and balanced her phone on top. She started texting someone.

  I opened my mouth to say her name. Nothing.

  Swallowed and tried again. Nothing — I mean, nothing — came out.

  “Remember,” Mr. Roberts announced over the shuffling, banging chairs, books, bodies. “Your Creative Writing assignments are due next week!”

  Anusha, eyes trained on her screen, stepped into the exodus. My window of opportunity was slamming shut. I fumbled with the loose-leaf in my binder and ripped into one.

  We have to talk. It’s important.

  It seemed the least ominous.

  “Go ahead and write your poems in any style you choose!” Mr. Roberts was shouting to be heard.

  I scrambled to fold up the scrap of paper, and pushed into line behind Anusha. Blood was whooshing in my ears like floodwater.

  “But marks will be based on your use of language and symbols!”

  Just as I reached the note into the space between me and Anusha, I realized I’d forgotten to sign it. I started to pull it back, but someone knocked my arm and the note fell out of my grip. It sailed over Anusha’s right shoulder and down onto her stack of books. As if the whole thing had been preordained.

  “And please, people, let’s explore outside the box! No more snakes and ravens, okay?”

  I gulped for sweet, nurturing air, and squeezed past the others to get through the door. Krista’s fate was in Anusha’s hands now. It was all on her.

  AT LUNCH BREAK I pretended to work on a storyboard for Infinity Girl while I waited for Anusha to arrive at the caf. We’d known each other for so long, I told myself, she would recognize my handwriting and realize the note was from me. I pictured her reading it, then catching my eye across the room and doing one of those subtle head-jerks to get me to follow her.

  Instead I saw this: Anusha walked in without looking for me, got a spot at the table where she and her friends usually sat, pulled out an apple, took a bite, saw my folded note poised on her pile of books, plucked it up like it was a piece of public-bathroom toilet paper, didn’t open it, didn’t read it, threw it on the ground as if that’s where it belonged, waved at L.J. and Hattie when they came into the caf together, then connected to the life-support that was their devastated-best-friend-huddle.

  I didn’t know what to do with my disappointment. Its claw plunged into my mouth and its long silver nail stretched down my throat towards the gag-trigger.

  I took it out on Infinity Girl.

  Establishing shot: school hallway. Three girls enter frame. Superstar, Goddess, Genius. They walk the superhero slow-mo formation walk. Hair blows in improbable wind. Outfits show off their marketable bodies. Best friends, impervious to the usual threats of lust or jealousy or degradation. Their power is each other.

  Infinity Girl watches from the sidelines as they tell each other stories of lust and love. In the reflections off Infinity Girl’s mirrors, the girls see only the indestructible power of their union.

  Cut to: archetypal party. Smoking, drinking, grinding, puking. Superstar, Goddess, and Genius arrive and rule. But Infinity Girl is there too. She intercepts. This time, the refracted lights off her mirror-plates work as lasers that divide the girls. They’re thrown apart and stumble about in dark corners. They weaken with every passing second. No one sees them. No one helps them. They can’t find each other.

  Genius understands it first, then Goddess, and then Superstar. They are alone, always have been, always will be. The indestructible union was an illusion.

  Superstar clutches at the shadows and gasps for breath, close to her lonely death. Speech-bubble: “Messenger 93!” Second speech-bubble: “Help me, Messenger 93!”

  No no no. I scratched out the bubbles. There was not, nor would there ever be, a crossover between Infinity Girl and Messenger 93. It was a super-error-brain-malfunction brought on by the trauma of the day.

  I smoothed my hands over the storyboards. Poor fragile page. No match for the exasperated fury of my pen. The recklessly inked lines — squares of scenes, multitudes of stick-people — had turned the loose-leaf into shreds. I yanked it out of the binder and crumpled it into a ball.

  A chill ran across the back of my neck and I looked up.

  It was Remy again. This time, watching me from slightly behind the hard edge of the open cafeteria door
. She couldn’t hide a tremor that crossed her face from one side of her lips to the opposite eyebrow.

  I stood up. Something about her expression made me want to demand an explanation. Instead, I grabbed my stuff and whirled in the opposite direction, leaving the caf through the side exit.

  4

  MESSENGER 93. MESSENGER 93.

  The name kept pinballing inside my brain.

  Why that name? What did it mean?

  Maybe I’d seen it somewhere and it had entered my subconscious. Maybe there was subliminal significance to it that could actually lead me to Krista.

  But what was it?

  By the time I got to Computer Science class, the noise in my head was so loud, I couldn’t hear anything else. I waited until Mrs. Fariah went back to her own computer where she did whatever she did while we worked on our independent assignments. Our masterpieces of grand design, she called them. I was developing a music program: Easy Soundtracks for Beginner Filmmakers.

  I clicked on the file, but then opened the browser over top. The empty search field gaped at me. I hesitated, then typed in: Messenger 93.

  Nothing interesting came up right away. A radio station, a year in the last century, an airplane crash. But digging deeper, I found hit after hit of weird and interesting stuff.

  Like, did you know there are 93 million miles between Earth and the sun?

  That the diameter of the universe is 93 billion light years across?

  In DNA there are molecules that carry genetic information. One of them — miRNA-93 — is a micro-molecule messenger that scientists believe can stop the growth of cancer cells in the human body. So you could actually say there’s a Messenger 93 that has the power to stop cancer.

  There was once this old religious philosophy that calculated the numeric value of words. Apparently the number-values for “will” and “love” add up to 93, so 93 became that religion’s power number. It became their message of love.

  Love. That manipulative, coercive word.

  Messenger brought up a billion hits.

  Get this — messenger also means prophet.

  “In religion, a prophet is an individual who claims to have been contacted by the supernatural or angelic. The prophet then serves as an intermediary, delivering a divine message to humanity.”

  Contacted by angels? Divine message to humanity?

  Messenger 93. Only you can save her. Save her, save us all.

  There were too many prophets to search every one, so I looked up the most famous. Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad, Moses, Joan of Arc.

  All of them died horrible deaths. Jesus: staked to a cross; Buddha: violently ill, possibly poisoned; Muhammad: violently ill, possibly poisoned; Moses: wandered the desert for forty years, died just short of the Promised Land; Joan of Arc: burned alive at the stake. She was nineteen. Nineteen.

  There was a tap on my shoulder and I practically punched the computer screen. Mrs. Fariah was beside me, giving me one of those scrunched-mouth-disappointed-head-tilts. She pointed pointedly at my screen and I fumbled to quit out of the search. She waited while I pretended to get back to work on my music program, and then she moved on down the aisle.

  But terrible words had been planted inside me. Galactic questions.

  AFTER MY LAST CLASS, I rounded through the side doors and out towards the track, and came up against the circle-wall of L.J., Hattie, and Anusha. All four of us stalled to instant and stiff attention. Them staring at me, me taking them in, the football field behind them stretching away like some empty airstrip at the edge of the apocalypse.

  It was ominously quiet. No teachers. No students running by. No breeze buffeting over the short-mown grass. No birds, no crows in the giant oak.

  “I’m looking for Krista.” It was a blurt. Not the words I’d wanted to speak if I saw them. Definitely not the words I meant. Because I was not looking for Krista. But now it was out and I couldn’t take it back.

  Hattie stepped towards me. “Why?”

  “I don’t know.” There was a slight breathlessness to my voice, which I worked to fix. “Because I have to?” Except I didn’t, did I? I still had a choice.

  “You have to?” Anusha stepped in beside Hattie and stared me down. “Is this another one of your backstabbing moves?”

  “No —” Tears twitched at the rims of my eyes. “No — I wouldn’t —” But that was all I could get out. I hunched my shoulders and pushed to move past them.

  L.J. stepped in front of me. She said, hard, certain, “Krista doesn’t want to be found.”

  Hattie smacked L.J.’s arm. “Stop saying that.”

  “Why should I when it’s true? Krista chose this. Why am I the only one who respects that?”

  “Because it’s dangerous.”

  “Yeah, and she’s doing it anyway. She’s doing what she needs to do, and she doesn’t care about anything else.” L.J. flicked her hand at Hattie and then at me. “Leave her alone. Let her work it out.”

  “But we don’t know for sure that she chose this.” It looked like Hattie was going to cry. “Someone could’ve taken her.”

  “C’mon. It’s Krista we’re talking about. She texted her mom before she ditched her phone. She literally said she was okay.”

  “But what if she’s running away from something bad and she can’t talk about it? Like, some sort of abusive situation?”

  This time L.J. smacked Hattie. “Clio is not a fucking abuser. Clio is an angel.”

  “Right, right.” Hattie was full-on pacing now. “And her dad’s dead. So it can’t be that.”

  “What I don’t get,” Anusha emphasized each word, “is how you guys don’t see this whole thing as a huge betrayal.”

  Hattie stopped and looked at Anusha like she had become the sun. “Betrayal?”

  “She never said anything to us.” Anusha was seething. It shocked me. Locked me to my spot. “What does that say about our friendship? That she doesn’t trust us. She’s leaving us hanging like everyone else. And Boyd? You ever think about him? What kind of person does that? Leave their boyfriend like that?”

  “It’s okay, Anusha.” Tears were streaming down Hattie’s face. “You just feel guilty because you can’t help her.”

  Anusha reeled on her. “I don’t feel guilty! This is not my fault. I’m saying — she betrayed us, and she betrayed him, and I hope she’s having fun on her sparkly adventure, but she’s dead to me.”

  Hattie gasped. She splayed her hands in front of her mouth like she’d caught the sound.

  Anusha spun around to face me. “And what are you doing here? We didn’t invite you to our wake. Or are you loving this? Karma for some traumatic shit you think Krista did to you.”

  The other two girls turned to stare at me too. Riveted, waiting.

  “I didn’t —” I shook my head. The inside of my mouth was sand. “I’m not —”

  “How are you better than her, huh?” Anusha leaned at me. “You are two sides of the same coin.”

  She stared at me for a really long time.

  I mean like when one second extends into eons and eras.

  What was I doing? Why was I here?

  I forced myself upright, forced myself to look at each of them. I said, veering from word to word to get them all out, “I know you guys think I started those rumors, that I set you up, or backstabbed you or whatever, but I swear — I didn’t do any of it. You were my best friends. I would never break that.”

  Anusha’s face distorted — sarcastic pity. “Well, too bad for you.” She spoke through gritted teeth. “Because everything breaks, doesn’t it?”

  That razed me. A hand at my throat.

  Somehow I managed to turn and hobble away. I pictured them watching me, rolling their eyes, condemning my uselessness. My legs were gelatin. I was drenched in a feverish sweat.

  Joan of Arc, nineteen, nobody
special before turning self-proclaimed prophet. Burned at the stake.

  My rubbery legs somehow got me to the track, then across it, then over the football field and down the path to the residential street that backed onto the school. It wasn’t until I was out of eyeshot that a semblance of composure returned to my limbs.

  I made it to the bus stop, got onto the next bus, and pushed down the aisle to a seat at the back. I just needed to get to my headphones-on-music-cranked-sketchpad-armored normal life.

  And maybe I would’ve made it too, maybe it would’ve all ended there — except I had to be looking out the window, didn’t I? Had to be replaying the epically weird day against the backdrop of the unraveling world. Because that’s how I saw Remy sitting on the sidewalk, cross-legged, leaning against a mailbox, scrolling her phone.

  I was out of my seat before I could even think about what I was doing. I rang the bell to get the driver to drop me at the next stop, and before I knew it, I was standing on the sidewalk not far from Remy, staring at her like a stalker. She didn’t notice me — she was too busy checking her screen. And that’s when I noticed where I’d landed: at the intersection to the street where Krista lived.

  I’d been to Krista’s house once, back when I was still a part of their friend group. She’d invited us over because her mom needed her to babysit her baby brother and Krista didn’t want to be alone. Her mom — Clio — had been nice. She’d paid attention when we were introduced. She noticed little things like Hattie’s exquisite handwriting, Anusha’s necklace from her grandmother, L.J.’s thrift shop menswear jacket, the fact that my eyes are very subtly two different colors, Boy’s firm handshake.

  She left us to look after the baby, who was maybe a year old, chubby and cute and constantly getting into stuff. Krista rolled her eyes after her mom was gone and huffed about how much she hated her. We all laughed and pretended it was another one of her witty jokes. Because everyone was shiny-in-love with Clio. She’d been kind to us. An angel. More exotically, she was a widow. A woman alone in the world by circumstances outside her control.

  I took another look at Remy, sitting on the sidewalk, curled over her phone, unexpectedly small. I could ask her why she’d stared at me at school, what she wanted. I looked again down the street towards Krista’s house. There was a police cruiser parked in front by the curb.