A Flicker in the Clarity Read online

  Dedication

  for Medbh

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Eleven-Story Tumble

  Frozen

  Because . . .

  Songbirds, Sweet Tears, Magic Apples, and Other Lies

  Between Storm and Monster

  Lonely Dot, Suspended

  A Dim Bulb in a Marquee Made of Sparklers

  The Dog of Me

  Missing

  Voorse Means Vhat?

  Exit from the Gift Shop

  Other People’s Families

  Like a Dream I Don’t Remember

  Flight After Flight

  Something Else

  Arctic Fox

  The First Hold

  No Map of Lack

  Souvenir

  Between Thrill and Disaster

  Wild Eyes Wide

  An Act of Love

  Sumo Sushi

  String Lights

  Brilliant, Contagious

  Whisper

  Something New

  House Arrest

  Anywhereelsebuthere

  Secret Foxes

  Fern Code for Soul Location

  Black Hole

  Docent at the Cloud Cemetery

  Places the Sun Hides

  Flying Free in the Blue-Dark

  Need You

  Lookout

  Special Affection

  Bouquet of Hues

  Muddy Well in the Center

  Hibiscus, Delicious

  Kiss

  Reckless Generosity

  Cake

  Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha

  Banned

  Where the World Falls Away

  Want or Yes Or

  Map the Black

  Prickle

  Stiff and Bitter

  Nowhere

  Hard Lemonade Times a Million

  ••• _ _ _ •••

  Broadcast from Another Plane

  Topo Map of Nebulous Force

  Criminal

  Kick-Ass Ninja

  Endless Possible Mistakes

  No One Else Can Do It for You

  Unbridgeable Distance

  Astral

  Love, Theo

  More in Common with Air

  Small Falling Parts

  No Rule Book

  Rebecca & Enid

  Floating like Faraway Moons

  Sprint

  Acknowledgments

  Note

  About the Author

  Books by Amy McNamara

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Eleven-Story Tumble

  SOMETIMES YOU HAVE TO DO SOMETHING CRAZY in order to stay sane. This is what I’m telling myself, because I’m on the fire escape, blindfolded, feeling my way up to the roof. Before tonight I would have said I could do this in my sleep. Em and I have climbed out my window and gone to the roof a thousand times. But the blindfold changes everything. I adjust my grip on the railing. Inch forward on the rough iron strips from one set of steps to the next.

  This is Emma saving me from myself. An hour ago I was lost in gloom after looking up colleges and costs. Then Em showed up like a stray sunbeam. The air changes when she’s around, feels more charged, ionic, which was just what I needed right when I needed it. We balance each other. I’m the calm to her crazy, and when she sees me sinking in the murk she grabs me by the hand and yanks me out.

  We started the blindfold trust game in seventh grade. Mandi came up with it at one of her giant sleepovers—standard middle school girl-on-girl torture. Monkey brains or spaghetti? But Em and I took it further and never let it go. We may as well call it Blind Evie, because she never lets me lead. We do it at my place, shove the battered furniture around, move my mom’s various piles and stacks, make as many obstacles as possible. Then we grab hands and spin, until we’re giddy, dizzy.

  I am easily lost.

  Today when she showed up, I was freaking about the future. My grades aren’t great, and my chances of a scholarship seem slim. I don’t say how unfair it feels that poor kids have to be on top of it all the time because Em can mess up. Her parents have it covered. But it’s like the higher the stakes, the less I care. Only that’s not right, because I care so much I can hardly breathe when I think about it. The future’s a formless blob and our fantasy of going to college together doesn’t seem likely. Art school, which is secretly the only place I want to go, is way more than my mom can afford, not to mention that it doesn’t promise the kind of career where I could pay off thousands of dollars in student loans.

  Emma drew on the inside of my wrist while I talked, her breath tickling my skin. Two stick girls in the center of a heart, holding hands. Supposed to be us. Only Em can’t draw—like, at all—so it’s a mess on my skin, a heart with an affliction. I love it anyway.

  Then she snapped the marker shut, stood up, and said, Time to shake things up, which is her response to everything.

  So here I am, clammy-handed, gripping a gritty metal railing, finding each step by whacking it lightly with my shin. My legs are going to look like old bananas. That is, if I manage not to end up on the pavement below.

  “A little farther . . . ,” Emma says, her bubblegum breath on my face. “Almost there!”

  She sounds closer than I thought. I reach out for her—it’s instinct—but she moves, and my hand swipes wildly at empty air.

  Emma’s somewhere above me now, cackling like a downed power line, tight, explosive. She’s thrumming with the insanity of what we’re doing.

  I have to relax. My body knows how to do this. I’m never scared up here when I can see. The trick is to stop trying to think it through. Memory doesn’t matter, it’s what I touch that counts.

  I creep forward, one hand on the flaking iron, the other waving like a feeler, until there’s no more metal going up. I crouch and find a vast flat spot, the gritty rubberized surface of the roof, my whole arm making contact with safety. All I need to do is crawl forward and I’m done. I tell myself not to think of the great empty nothing behind me. Except telling myself that makes a movie in my mind, gravity pulling me like a snowflake, arms and legs out, falling through the air.

  No.

  I’m so close. Behind the blindfold I squeeze my eyes shut tight, then tighter. This is me shaking things up.

  I launch myself out, but scramble frantically onto the blessed wide roof.

  “Oh my GOD!” I shout, yanking off the bandanna. Above me, the dusky sky looks like a dirty gray lake.

  Emma’s a few feet away. She does an excited little dance, cheers, and drops onto the sooty rooftop next to me. Her thick braid brushes my cheek and she looks as relieved and thrilled as I feel. She needed this too. She’s been acting weird with me, with Roman, agitated, like she’s ready to leave everything behind.

  “Wasn’t that the best?” she whispers, grinning wildly at the sky. “That rush! Right? Oh my God, Evie, you totally needed that!”

  I can’t tell if I’m about to laugh or cry.

  “My heart,” I gasp, my hand against my hammering chest. “Feel it! It’s like an animal’s trapped in there.”

  Emma presses her silvery fingertips to my sternum, her eyes bright with respect.

  We clutch each other and scream with laughter. I feel like a criminal who tunneled out of jail. My body’s electric and sparking. We’re near the edge, but we’re together, and Emma’s looking at me like I’m someone exciting. Maybe she’s right about doing what scares you. I don’t feel bad anymore; I’m a collection of limbs, animal, alive. My brain’s overloaded with adrenaline, all the other stuff knocked offline.

  “You are no mouse,” she says.


  Mouse. Part of the Bly School’s idea of community building. A year of wilderness and environmental skills training on field trips to Bear Mountain leads to earning your animal in eighth grade on a final scouting retreat. And I got mouse. By nearly unanimous vote. Em’s a fawn, which—okay—she has a long neck and big eyes, but come on, mouse? Thanks, social hierarchy. I was still pretty short and that was the year of my terrible haircut, but it hurt to have been so clearly seen and labeled.

  “Tell no one,” I pant, rolling my head to the side to look her in the eye so she can see I’m serious. “Jack thinks we’re crazy to come up here. If he hears about the blindfold, he’ll kill us both.” Jack’s not into crazy risks.

  “Poor Snack.” She smirks. “He was flirting with Alice this morning.” She widens her eyes at me and laughs. “Must mean his heart’s not too broken.”

  My stomach twists. Jack’s almost as important to me as Em. After a solid year of flirting, he tried to kiss me. It was clumsy, sudden, and I ducked it, which Emma finds hilarious. I haven’t admitted to her how much I wanted that kiss, how sick I am I screwed it up.

  “Alice?” I groan. “Seriously? He totally ignores her.”

  I press my back flat against the rooftop and take a deep breath. I’ll never forget the look on Jack’s face that night at his house. Hurt. Confused. Embarrassed. We were on a brownie break in the middle of watching The Shining. Em had just left to meet up with Roman. Right there, in his kitchen, while I was pouring milk in glasses, he put an arm up on the cupboard, leaned in, and tried to make it real.

  I panicked. Ducked away from him and laughed. Then we watched Jack Nicholson cackle like a madman and hunt down his family with three cold feet of space between us on the couch.

  There’s obviously something wrong with me. Emma flips through guys like photos on her phone and when Jack finally makes a move instead of going with it, all I can think is, What if it wrecks our friendship? Which happened anyway when I nervous-laughed right in his face. There’s no easy way out of that one.

  “Alice!” Emma laughs.

  I blink up at the night sky. Love’s dangerous. It flattened my mom. Em says I overthink it. Guys our age only want sex. But I don’t know. It seems like another way to lose yourself, and I’m already lost enough.

  “Whatever,” I say, convincing neither of us. I press my cold palms against my hot cheeks.

  She wedges her head closer to mine with a happy sigh. “Evie Ramsey, you are a secret fucking superhero.”

  Which makes it worth it. This is how it is with her. Wild, crazy, beautiful, like being caught in an unexpected storm.

  She lets out an ecstatic “Whoooo!” and grabs my hand.

  We’re small beneath the sky.

  Ask me about love and I’ll say there’s not much between your heart and an eleven-story tumble.

  Frozen

  EM’S AN HOUR LATE.

  I check my phone.

  Nothing, of course.

  I shift from one frozen foot to the other.

  The taco place has cycled through a first dinner rush and is filling up again. I’d go in and order so I could stay inside while I wait, but I barely have enough cash for food once she gets here.

  I can’t keep texting her. I’ve already burned through my phone plan this month and the overage fees are no joke. I should shut it off until I’m on Wi-Fi again. But I don’t.

  She’s with Ryan, again. She’s supposed to be with me.

  A cute couple walks up, his arm on her shoulders. He holds the door for her and they go in. For some reason this is the thing that makes me mad.

  “Come on,” I hiss, stomping my feet and blowing on my frozen fingers. I don’t usually get mad—Em’s always late; that’s what books are for—but this is getting ridiculous, and I’m beyond my ability to deal with stuff today. Everything she said she’d do changed. We were supposed to go to the park for lunch. We didn’t. We were supposed to start our Junior Investigation projects together after school. That didn’t happen, either. Somehow she convinced me to deliver her breakup news to Roman. Being on time to hear how it went kind of seems like the least she could do.

  I’m covering for her more than we actually hang out. Since she started cheating on Roman with Ryan there aren’t enough hours in the day left for me. And today was one where I could have used a few. Jack and Alice are a thing and somehow seem to be everywhere, and, after an excruciatingly endless prepping-for-college-applications assembly, Em skipped out, leaving me to go to the first Spain-trip meeting after school, even though she knows there’s no way I can go. We can’t swing those “extras.” I didn’t snorkel in the Caymans at the end of eighth grade, either. It can suck being a poor kid in a rich-kid school, but I’m used to it.

  Ryan better be worth it. She won’t let me meet him because she knows if she does, he’ll figure out how young she is. Emma looks more like twenty than seventeen. I mean, I guess it’s a good sign that she thinks he’d care. The last time she hooked up with a totally random guy like this was right after her brother, Patrick, died, and that guy got off on how young she was. Em has this delicacy thing going on that draws people to her—delicacy in all senses of the word: sensitive, rare, delicious, and a little fragile. I don’t know what I exude, but it’s not that. I’m useful. Or something.

  I lean against the wall near the window of the taco shop. Roman. I felt bad for him, and that’s saying something. Roman, Devon, Cassius, and Max are all part of this circle of senior guys who think they’re the hottest hookup material Bly’s got going. But when I told him Em was done, he staggered backward a little. A step or two. Looked ruffled. I was so surprised I reached out, but he brushed my arm away and said, She sent you? She couldn’t come herself?

  I knew it was messed up when she asked me. When I hesitated, she looked kind of exasperated and said, Hand him this. Then she wrote, “Hey Roman! We’re done!” on a sticky note. I don’t like conflict, but I couldn’t do that. It was too mean. I should have told her to do her own dirty work, but in truth some part of me liked the idea of having a little power. Guys like Roman Schaeffer don’t even see me. I will never go out with a guy like him, much less get to dump one. And he’s no saint. I’ve heard stories.

  He saw me when I told him she was done, though. He looked at me with hurt in his eyes, deeper than anything I ever expected to see on his smug face. I felt mean. That look hovered there, cloudy between us—a moment of realness—before he snatched it back, clearing his throat and flipping up his hood. No more questions. He glanced my way one more time, then swaggered off, as if whoever he’d been waiting for was a no-show, as if we never talked.

  I check my reflection in the window of the taco shop.

  I’m not repellent, I’m just not Emma. I’m more like an extra, the people they need to make a scene feel real but who don’t catch your eye while you’re watching the stars. My knees are bony and my waist is straight. I wear glasses. I should probably wear them more, because I squint a lot, and Em says it makes me look kind of annoyed or weirdly intense, but I forget to put them on.

  Wind tears down from Union Square and whips more of my blondish-brown hair from its braid. I tuck a few strands back, but my fingers are stiff with cold.

  My phone buzzes. Finally. I whip it out of my pocket so fast I drop it, then wince as it skitters on the frigid sidewalk. I’m lucky. My screen’s intact.

  But it’s not Em.

  I deflate.

  My mom’s texting to tell me the Hanovers need a last-minute sitter.

  I check the time again. I’ve been standing here an hour and eight minutes.

  Screw it. I’m going babysitting. The Hanover twins are out of control, but the family lives in one of the swanky renovated double apartments above ours, and whenever they go out, they come home blitzed and pay big.

  I look inside the taco shop one more time to see if she’s in there, if she slipped in without seeing me and is sitting in the tiny space, wondering where I am. Waiting for Emma leads to magical thinking
. The cute couple stares back at me instead. They’re on stools in the front window, his leg flung over hers. They make me feel guilty about dumping Roman for Em. She said they were using each other, there was nothing between them, but what if he really, really liked her? Kind of looked that way. The guy in the window wipes a dot of sour cream from the corner of the girl’s mouth with his thumb. The gesture’s so intimate something in me twists.

  My feet are frozen and Emma’s not in there. She doesn’t wait for me. That’s not how it works. I text the Hanovers and tell them I’m on my way.

  Halfway down the steps to the subway, my phone buzzes again.

  This time it’s Emma’s dad.

  Em with you?

  I hesitate a second. It’s kind of like I’m out-of-body or something.

  Then I sell out my best friend.

  Sorry! I write. At least she has a dad to worry when she’s not home. No idea where she is.

  I run down to my train, try not to think about what I just did.

  Because . . .

  HER TEXTS WAKE ME UP.

  Wtf??

  Why???

  I’m trying to figure out what to say when my phone vibrates again.

  One more word.

  Traitor.

  Songbirds, Sweet Tears, Magic Apples, and Other Lies

  “EVIE HAS MY KNEEPADS but I’m not gonna ask her for them because I don’t want to see her face.”

  Emma knows I can hear her. Her voice cuts through the morning din as people flood the hall, changing classes. One period in and the day’s already a series of small hells. Advisory was all about making college-visit plans and the best Spanish tutors to hire before the trip in May. I sat there taking notes, feeling stupid and left out.

  Jack’s intel by way of Alice is that Em came home high and with her shirt on inside out. Em’s parents are Catholic, Catholic, Catholic. All my attempts to apologize have been met with silence, and I’ve barely slept.

  Now this.

  I look up at her for a millisecond. I get it. I picked the wrong night to take a stand and got her in major trouble. But there’s a difference between mean and mad. Em and I get mad at each other sometimes, but we’re not mean. Yet here she is, planted in the middle of my path, her mouth like a megaphone, her eyes glassy like she might even be high now, that plastic smile creeping across her face, and one skinny arm flung around Alice’s shoulders.