Chapter Eighteen Lee
James left the balcony door open.
That was the beginning, though Lee didn’t know it at the time. Everything that happened next could have been avoided if only
James had closed the door.
Lee had been sitting on the couch in their suite, trying to do his English homework even though he didn’t care about Shakespeare.
He’d thought getting his pre–eighteenth century literature requirement out of the way early was smart, but he regretted it
now. He’d read the same line over and over again, its meaning somewhere beneath the surface of a pond, too blurred and waterlogged
to read.
Your light grows dark by losing of your eyes.
That was his favorite line in the text he was trying to read. Lee imagined holding his own eyes in his hands. Wet, bloody
golf balls. He had color-changing eyes depending on the light. He would have liked to hold them up to the sun, examine them
from different angles, determine their true color.
But Shakespeare wasn’t talking about that.
Lee was fairly certain because his first guess was always wrong when it came to Shakespeare.
It was unfair that he’d learned another language so easily but couldn’t even understand English.
When he’d told his advisor that he liked puzzles, she’d excitedly told him that decoding Shakespeare was kind of a puzzle, that he might find it exciting to try.
But the problem was that Shakespeare’s sonnets didn’t have one correct answer.
They were unsolvable, or their answer changed depending on who you asked. Puzzles only had one solution.
Lee clenched his fists and relaxed them, looking at his palms and imagining his own eyes looking up at him.
A breeze blew through the door, turning the pages of his notebook.
He hadn’t even noticed James coming back and opening the balcony door, but he heard him now, shutting cabinets in the kitchen.
It was unseasonably warm for October, and the air breathed into the living room was hot, like someone had opened their mouth
and sighed across his face. It made the room stuffy, filled up with cotton.
Lee stared at the rectangle of open sky that he could see now through the doorway. It shouldn’t have bothered him as much
as it did. It wasn’t as if he feared going outside, and he had no problem with open windows. But Lee felt certain that even
though they were on the fourteenth floor, someone was going to walk through the door.
Isn’t that what you want? he thought. For her to come back?
He shook his head as if to break the thought apart, keep it from sticking. It was what he’d wanted once. But now, so many
years later, whatever came through the door of the fourteenth-floor balcony would not be his mother. And whatever it was,
he didn’t want it in here.
Lee stood up to shut the door, but James stuck his head out the doorway, like he’d been listening for the couch springs to tell him when Lee moved.
“Hey,” James said, “I’m making tacos. You want some?”
“No, thanks,” Lee said, standing awkwardly in front of the couch. He felt ashamed to close the door in front of James, but
he couldn’t say why. “Mind if I shut the door?” he said at last, because James was still staring at him.
“We need to air this place out,” James called back. “I know you’ve gone nose-blind because you never go outside, but it reeks
in here. Plus, I’m cooking.” He said it kindly, as a joke.
“Okay,” Lee said quickly, sitting back down like he’d been scolded.
James lingered in the hall for a moment longer, then disappeared back into the kitchen.
Lee tried to focus on Shakespeare, but his gaze kept flickering over to the open door. In his peripheral vision, he swore
he saw shapes in the doorway, but whenever he looked, there was nothing but blue sky. He took some Ativan, but it didn’t make
him forget about the door the way it usually would. He took another pill, then gathered up his books, stuffed them in his
bag, and headed into the hallway. There was a staircase at the west end of the building that no one ever used unless it was
a fire drill. It would be quiet there.
Lee shoved open the heavy stairwell door and let out a breath. There were no doors to the outside here, no windows, no air,
no sunlight. Lee didn’t want to “air out” anything. He wanted to be trapped inside. Like a coffin, safe and sealed.
He finished his homework quickly after that, soothed by the sterile lighting.
Then he pressed his face against the metal railing, cool against his forehead.
He peered between the painted slats and watched the darkness spiral down and down and down.
It was only fourteen floors, so he should have been able to see the bottom, but the lights were shut off on the lower floors unless motion-activated, so there was nothing but a chasm of black below.
How would it feel to fall?
Lee picked up one of his erasers and passed it between the bars, suspended it over the darkness for a moment, imagined it
begging for its life. Then he opened his hand and let it plummet down.
Lee gripped the bars and leaned closer, watching the eraser fall fast until it disappeared into the darkness, which opened
its jaws and swallowed it whole. It didn’t make a sound, which meant there was no end to the darkness. It had been so easy.
All he’d had to do was relax his hand, and the dark had done the rest for him.
Lee picked up a pencil and dropped it, watched it chase after the eraser, feeding the darkness.
Lee wondered what it would feel like if he threw himself over the ledge.
It wasn’t that he wanted to die, though he almost certainly would from that height. He’d read that 50 percent of people survived
a fall of fifty feet. The fourteenth floor was close to one hundred and forty feet. Lee did not crave the moment of impact,
only the fall. How would it feel to be weightless? Would the darkness fold around him and catch him in a pillow of nothingness?
How wet was the mouth of darkness before it devoured you?
Before he knew it, he was leaning over the railing. His center of gravity shifted and he teetered over the darkness for a
moment before jolting back, falling to the ground. He didn’t remember standing up.
His bottle of Ativan was spilled across the floor. He’d taken too much, and his brain was growing weeds, choked with vines that stole all the sunlight. He carefully gathered up the pills and tried to remember how many he’d taken with breakfast, but his memories were watercolors.
“Lee?”
He looked up.
James stood in the doorway, hallway light bleeding in behind him.
“You okay, man?” James said.
“Shut the door,” Lee said quickly, trying to hide the pill bottle. He knew his voice was too cold, too mean, but James was
ruining his sacred space.
James blinked his perfect green eyes. He was confused, but he knew what Lee was like at this point—at least, that was what
Lee told himself.
“I didn’t mean to chase you out, dude,” he said. “Your phone is ringing and you just disappeared like you’d been abducted
by aliens or something.”
He laughed like it was a joke, but it wasn’t funny—Lee knew people actually got abducted through open doors. He should have
laughed—maybe everything would have turned out differently if Lee had just laughed, had tried a little bit harder to pretend
one last time.
But instead, Lee’s gaze homed in on the stain on James’s shirt.
It was dark maroon on his yellow shirt, just slightly above his heart. The shape of a bean, or a lagoon, or a teardrop.
“What’s that from?” Lee said.
James didn’t understand at first. Lee had to point to the stain, and even then, James had to tug at his shirt and angle it
to the light before he noticed. It all felt like a charade to Lee, because how could he possibly not have noticed such a stark
stain? He must have been pretending just to make Lee feel unreasonable.
“Oh,” James said once he held the stained patch of shirt up to the light. “I was just cooking,” he said, shrugging as if it didn’t matter.
But it mattered to Lee. “What is it?” he pressed, clenching his fists.
James shrugged again, but his posture had changed. The way he angled himself was broader now. He was on the crew team, and
even though he’d never looked that large to Lee, he suddenly seemed to block out all the light from the doorway.
“I don’t know, man,” he said. “Salsa?”
Lee shook his head quickly. He was lying—people lied all the time and usually Lee could just accept that that was how most
people lived, but James wasn’t allowed to lie now. How could he not understand the gravity of the situation? This was not
a time to lie.
“It’s not the right color for salsa,” Lee said, glaring at the stain, talking to it rather than James.
The stain didn’t make sense. There were obvious explanations—James had been cooking and probably just got splashed with sauce—but
Lee knew that wasn’t the answer. And he needed an answer in that moment, felt that somehow he knew it, that if he only stared
hard enough and thought about it enough, the world would peel back its skin and tell him the truth. The need screamed inside
him, louder and louder.
“I... Okay,” James said, frowning. “Sorry, I’ll leave you alone. Answer your phone, though.”
Okay, thanks , Lee thought. The words he should have said. He could taste them behind his teeth, opened his mouth to make them real, was
so very close to a different life if he’d only said them out loud.
But instead, Lee remembered.
He felt as if he’d been falling and falling and falling through the stairwell and had finally crashed into the tile.
His bones burst like porcelain inside of him, and he was a bloody sack of formless shards, brain oozing from his ears, eyes rolling on the ground, green in this light.
Your light grows dark by losing of your eyes.
There was a reason that Lee Turner didn’t like stains.
The truth was a passing eclipse of darkness, and for only a moment, Lee could see.
He grabbed James by the arm.
James could have fought back, should have fought back. But he’d always seen Lee as scrawny and small, something unsightly
that had crawled out from under the bed. He let Lee turn him, frowning like it was a joke.
“You good?” James said.
It was a kind thing to say, to still worry about Lee at that point, but it was the worst thing he could have said. Because
even now, when Lee’s mind felt like a city crumbling to dust, James didn’t see the problem. He thought Lee was weird and eccentric
and maybe a bit creepy; he didn’t care that the world was falling apart, that the screams inside Lee’s ribs were only growing
louder.
No one listens to me , Lee thought, his hands trembling, his blood full of glass, his ears full of wind. No one sees me. James was still talking, but Lee couldn’t hear him anymore.
He grabbed James and wrenched him toward the railing.
He wanted James to fall into the darkness like his pencils, to meet its teeth and smash through. It was a privilege Lee had
wanted for himself at first, but now he needed the dark to swallow James whole.
But James was an athlete, and it wasn’t that easy. James braced his hands against the railing and pushed back.
“What the fuck, man?” James said. And now he was angry, and this was better to Lee because at least now James understood the
way he felt.
James probably thought Lee would try to shove him again, had braced himself to shove Lee back if he grabbed his arm again. But Lee did not fight like James’s crew buddies or an athlete or a man. He fought like an animal.
Lee grabbed James’s shirt, his fist closing around the stain, and with his other hand, he grabbed James’s hair, yanking him
forward. James tried to right himself, but he slid on one of Lee’s pencils and his weight fell onto Lee. For a moment, James’s
face was pressed close to Lee’s heart. Lee could feel his breath, was sure James could feel his heartbeat.
He yanked James back by the hair and smashed his face against the railing.
The sound rang all the way down the corridor, again and again, an echo of a note Lee could not name. A strange, wet song.
It was easy after that.
Lee played the note again and again, sparks of blood flying, teeth clattering onto the tile. Lee couldn’t stop, even when
some part of him knew it was enough, that the problem had been solved because the problem was gone.
The eclipse passed, the darkness closing its mouth because it was too full, and Lee began to realize what he’d done.
He stood in the silent hallway in a pool of blood. Lee Turner was an empty room and wondered if his heart was even still beating
because everything was so, so quiet. Worst of all, he had held the truth in his hands, and now it was gone, and Lee could
not remember why he had killed James Baldridge.
He inhaled a shuddering breath and tasted salt on his lips. James’s blood , he realized. He was tasting James, like some sort of strange kiss. They had shared death, which was so much more intimate
than love.
Lee fell to his knees in the blood and wanted to scream but knew the sound would draw people, so he screamed silently inside of himself.
He blinked hard, rubbed his eyes with bloodied fists as if he could wake himself up.
And when he realized this was his world now, he picked up one of James’s eyes in each hand.
Your light grows dark by losing of your eyes.
James was staring at him, even now. Both eyes were bright red, burst blood vessels, oozing through his fingers. Did he understand
the importance of the stain now? Because Lee didn’t, not anymore.
If he called the police and turned himself in, they would put him in a mental hospital because sane people killed for love,
money, revenge, or jealousy, but Lee had none of those things.
Or, Lee could keep this moment a secret.
He cleaned up the hallway meticulously, hid the body, ran away from school. James would become a missing person, but by the
time anyone started looking, all the evidence would be gone. They would never suspect Lee because he had no motive, and eventually
the case would go cold. Lee could carry the secret inside of him, lock it somewhere in the dark cellar of his thoughts.
Lee didn’t even realize he’d made his choice until he was on the airplane to Japan, his palms stinging from bleach. He’d hidden
the body somewhere dark and safe, where no one would ever find it. No one would ever look.