20 #2
“You’re the worst. Kinda like my hearing aids.
I couldn’t afford anything fancy, just the basic tech, covered by the government.
They’re ugly, and echoey, and obvious, and .
. . I dunno. I guess I didn’t want to be living in a strange city while I was figuring all that out.
I came back to live in town for a bit and .
. .” She exhaled, slow and shaky. “I guess I never left.”
You think you’ll ever go back? I asked. Give higher education another try?
“Maybe,” she said. “Or maybe not. Honestly, the older I get, the more I think what I want to do, who I want to be, isn’t the sort of thing that can be found in a classroom.”
But bachelor’s degrees are, like, helpful, right? In the job department?
She coughs out a tight little laugh. “You sound like my parents. And I guess you’re right.
But these last few years . . . I guess I haven’t really seen much future in them.
” She was climbing faster, still only moving one limb at a time, but doing it steadily, face aimed up at the thin metal balcony wrapped around the base of the billboard above.
Nic, I . . .
“What about you?” she asked suddenly. “What was your plan?”
My plan?
“Yeah, what were you going to do after you graduated?”
I studied business administration, I reminded her. It’s not very exciting.
“What does a business administrator do?” she asked.
Wear a shirt with buttons, I said. Fix jammed printers. Drink coffee. Answer emails. Put annoying people on hold.
“Sounds amazing.”
Just then, it did.
“What kind of business would you want to run?”
I’d never thought about it. While studying, my mind had been pretty set on getting a job a cent or two above minimum wage. I hadn’t speculated on anything more specific than that. But now . . .
Something weird, I said. Something freaky.
“Yeah,” Nicola said. “I figured.”
Antiques, oddities, and curiosities.
“Sounds like Trash N’ Treasure.”
It is. It’s exactly like that. Except, you know, spookier.
“I think that’s achievable, especially when the one answering emails and putting annoying people on hold is a haunted doll,” Nicola said. “People like a good gimmick.”
I wanted to tell her not to do that. I knew she was just trying to be kind, but pretending an impossible thing could be a future thing didn’t feel like a kindness to me; it felt cruel.
The sort of cruel that made my stitches tight and the plastic inside me twist and shake.
But before I could say anything, her hand bumped against the edge of the balcony and she pulled herself up with a fevered “Oh thank God.”
I didn’t think the half-meter-wide landing was much better than the ladder, but I didn’t say that as she leaned back against the billboard, pressing me up against it, breathing deep, slow, and shaky.
There were a dozen floodlights pointing up at the billboard, making the fragile beam coming from the phone useless. I dropped it into the backpack, wedging it down beside my car so there was no danger of it falling out, and flopped out of the zipper onto Nicola’s shoulder.
She winced but reached up to touch me. “Sorry. Kinda freaked out there.”
It’s OK. Then, thinking about what I should’ve said before, I added, I’m glad you’re not dead.
“Yeah,” she said. “Me too.”
For a while, that was it. Neither of us said anything.
We just sat on that rickety little balcony, bathed in bright fluorescent light, staring out over the construction site and the world beyond.
We were on the side of the sign facing away from the town, toward the highway.
The northbound lanes were awash with the angry red of taillights, southbound were spotted with high beams. Darkness blanketed everything else, but it wasn’t the close, erratic dark that had been dancing on the edge of the light below.
It was a wider, safer sort of dark. A dark that belonged.
Nicola wriggled out of the backpack and stood, keeping one hand against the billboard.
She held a hand down to me. “Pass me the paint.”
Oh . . . ah . . . right. I dropped down into the bag, now lit by Nicola’s phone. We had several aluminum paint cans: red, purple, black, neon green. They were the colors that had been on sale when Nicola bought them.
Which color?
“You choose.”
I twisted to look up at the billboard, still visible through the open zipper.
This close, I could see the pixelation of the text, printed in a bold font on a picture of a woman in a white dress, smiling dead-eyed toward the camera.
A luxury shopping experience. Designer brands at discount prices.
Exclusive international stores. Everything was oversaturated and clean. White on white on white.
I grabbed the black paint.
Nicola took it, straightened, and started painting. She wasn’t tall enough to reach even halfway up the billboard, but it didn’t matter. She made the letters as big as she could, balancing on her tiptoes and swinging her arm in wide arcs.
I expected another Kyle Lawson Killed Lucy McQuinn. For whatever reason, perhaps creative license, or perhaps just not wanting to spend a lot of time committing literal crimes in literal floodlights, Nicola went with something a little simpler.
Justice 4 Lucy.
Has Kyle responded to my message? I asked when she returned to the backpack.
Nicola pulled out her phone. “Nope. But I’ve got a read receipt.”
A strange tingle of fear wormed through me. So he’s seen it.
“Sure has.”
And he’ll see this. I looked up at the billboard.
“Unless he’s blind,” Nicola confirmed.
How do we know any of this is working?
“It’s going to take some time,” Nicola said, talking with the cadence of a prayer. “But that’s OK. If we just keep at him, he’ll break. I know it.”
Can I send him another message? I asked.
“Yeah,” she replied. “It’s your account. What do you want to say?”
This time, instead of sending something long, rambling, and epic, I kept it simple.
You scared yet, Kyle?