My best friend’s desk was empty on Monday morning. While Miss Wrex called our names off the dog-eared register, I leaned over to Michelle. “Hey, where’s Jamie?”
“Who?”
“Shut up,” I said, smiling. “But seriously, where is she? Is she sick?”
Frowning, Michelle flicked her hair over her left shoulder, a move she’d picked up over the summer from her older brother’s college girlfriend. “Who the hell is Jamie?”
Miss Wrex glared towards us. Today she was wearing her yellow outfit—a lemon blazer with a mismatched buttercup-gold blouse underneath. It clashed horribly with her rosy cheeks. “Evelyn?”
“Here.” Obviously I was here; she was looking right at me.
“Frank?” Miss Wrex asked.
I leaned over again. “Come on. Is she sick?”
“Is this some kind of prank?” Michelle rolled her eyes. “Grow up, Evie.”
I swivelled back to face the front of the class, unease prickling down my spine. The feeling worsened when Miss Wrex passed right over Jamie’s name without the slightest hesitation. I glanced towards the empty chair again while Michelle turned her attention to her glittery notebook, the tip of her pink fluffy pen wobbling in mid-air while she scribbled something I couldn’t see. When the bell rang, I shouldered my bag and slipped alone into the river of students, letting it carry me along to the science wing.
In chemistry, Mr. Faraday wrote the word electron on the board. “Today we’re going to talk about why they don’t like to share space,” he said, his gentle Scottish accent cutting through the babble of raucous Americana. “Picture—okay, quiet down guys—picture an empty hotel. An electron prefers to have its own room, if there’s one available, right? Just like you lot might not want to share with your siblings. But if there isn’t an empty room available, then the electron looks for the next—”
The stool next to me was vacant. Mr. Faraday’s gaze lingered on it for a moment, but then two kids in the back row started beatboxing Britney’s new song and he had to break them up.
At lunchtime, nobody had a clue who I was talking about. “I used to have these dreams,” Frank interrupted my interrogation, “where I was like, in school, and nobody knew who I was. I would just walk around trying to find where I was supposed to be, but I never found out.”
“Nobody asked you,” Daniel said, his voice cracking in the middle. Sunshine blazed down, shimmering the tarmac. We were standing in the shade, but he still looked sweaty.
Frank stared up at the sky, watching a single cloud sail across, buffeted by unseen forces. “I’m just saying.”
“How can you not know who I’m talking about?” I asked, my voice shrill. Sweat had broken out between my shoulder blades and under my arms; in other circumstances, I’d be glad I’d worn a black Nirvana tee to cover the shame of having bodily functions, but right now I didn’t care who saw. “Jamie,” I insisted. “Jesus Christ. We all grew up together. My height, long brown hair. Top of our class in everything.” Angry tears filled my eyes, and I brushed them away with the back of my hand, not wanting them to get the satisfaction of seeing the impact of their terrible joke.
My friends shook their heads, looking genuinely baffled. I turned away, unable to bear the pity in their faces, and stared out at the younger kids who were running around playing tag as if it wasn’t ninety degrees out. Someone would have cracked before now, I figured, if it hadn’t been real. Someone would have laughed, breaking the spell. They really didn’t remember Jamie.
But I did.
I sat through all of ten minutes in English before I cracked and asked to go to the nurse. The teacher waved me away, too immersed in yet another monologue about the importance of subtext in Of Mice and Men to care. There was a kid in a sleeveless vest already outside the nurse’s office, holding a fistful of paper towels against his bicep. I walked home in a daze; I ditched my bag by the door and burst into my mother’s office without knocking. “Mom, you remember Jamie, right?”
“Hi, honey.” My mother frowned. Her fingers moving over the keyboard like newly hatched baby turtles, scuttling for the safety of the sea. “Is that the Wilsons’ neighbor?”
“No. Jamie. You know, Jamie?”
Her chair creaked as she shifted position, though she still didn’t look at me. “Is he a transfer student?”
“She,” I corrected. “We talked about this.”
“Is she a transfer student?” my mother repeated obediently. Clack clack. Maybe she’d already forgotten about the Misgendering: Why It Hurts pamphlet I’d printed out.
“She’s my best friend.”
“I thought Michelle was your best friend.”
“We’re all best friends,” I said, though that wasn’t true. My nose prickled—a sure sign of more pending tears—so I retreated into the hallway and stomped towards my bedroom. Everything looked the same as usual: navy bedspread, matching curtains, blue and navy patchwork rug. My desk, handmade by my dad, was neat, with books and papers piled in one corner. Something was missing from the picture though. I halted on the threshold, a shiver of uncertainty wriggling through my stomach.
I kept the glass unicorns on a shelf above my bed—a row of seven, one for each colour of the rainbow—but now there was a space where the orange one should have been. My mother made me dust frequently to prevent her allergies from acting up, so there wasn’t any trace of the little creature which had once stood between Green and Purple, no minuscule hoof prints to indicate where something once stood.
I knelt and peered under my bed. Nothing. Patted my neatly made bed in case a unicorn-shaped lump should magically appear. Nothing. First Jamie, now this. Nausea roiled in my stomach, savage and acidic. I wedged myself between the bed and the dresser, knees jammed against my chest and took slow breaths. The small space felt comforting, the pressure on all sides even better than a firm hug. Jamie used to say it was indicative of my desire to return to the womb. She used words like ‘indicative’ and ‘preternatural’ with ease and didn’t care that it made our classmates roll their eyes. She should have skipped at least one or two grades, and the teachers had encouraged her to do so, but she’d insisted on staying behind. At first, I’d thought she did it because she was scared of coming out to older kids, kids who didn’t know her, who were physically bigger, emotionally armoured, more at-ease with the kind of casual violence that permeated a high school social ecosystem. Later, I’d thought she might have stayed for me.
It was possible that I had imagined her. It was possible I had dreamed the way she smiled, eager as a baby bird, when I painted her nails for the first time. It was possible I had only invented someone so pretty and so smart, who loved grunge the way I did. A person who understood why “Lounge Act: was miles better than “In Bloom,” who could recite every single song on every single Sonic Youth album in order. Now we’d never run away together, would never sneak into a Soundgarden show and flail in the crowd with our plaid shirts tied around our waist, our leather jackets squeaking against each other like trapped mice. I rested my forehead on my bony knees and swallowed, trying not to throw up.
There was a rumor floating around—there was always a rumor—about a guy who’d been in a coma. He’d dreamed he had a wife, children, a whole life, and then one day something had seemed off; a vase or something, maybe in the wrong place or the wrong colour. The more he fixated on the vase, the more he woke up until he opened his eyes for real. He’d said he wished he never had, that he missed his coma-wife and coma-kids every day.
I stared across the room at the unicorn shelf. Maybe my sanity was unravelling. Maybe this was my vase. Maybe I wasn’t sure I wanted to wake up either.
At dinner, I couldn’t eat more than a couple of bites of pizza. Complaining of a headache, I told my mom I was going to bed early and waited until the sounds of her nightly routine—flush, brush, clatter of the plastic laundry hamper lid—faded, before I slid into the dark hallway and tiptoed out of the house. I thought about taking my bike, but if anyone saw me it would be harder to hide, so I decided to go on foot. It wasn’t far, anyway, though it was uphill most of the way.
I marched through square streets, ignoring the neat houses that looked like cloned sugar cubes, bookended by Lego-green lawns. Jamie and I had talked about moving to Seattle together after graduation. We’d get an apartment somewhere in the medium-bad part of town and fall asleep to siren lullabies. No paint on the walls but the blue flash of cop cars, circling the block for some shoplifter just trying to feed her kids. I’d pictured us sharing a joint, a bottle, a lip gloss. It only occurred to me now, as I hugged my jacket tight around my body to defend against the slight breeze that had sprung up, that I’d fixated a lot on her mouth. I had no real defense for that, other than it was pretty, and my face flushed in a weird, hot way that left me glad I was alone with nothing but the occasional streetlight to illuminate my embarrassment.
Jamie’s house was the sugar cube on the corner of Elm. Her parents’ car was parked in the driveway like a sleeping cat, long and sleek, and the scent of her mother’s prize roses filled the air. I sidled around it and crept up to the kitchen window at the back of the house. Light spilled out like wine, golden and bright, pooling on the dry grass below. For a moment, I felt a giant wave of relief. There was Jamie’s kitchen, same as ever. Her mom with the same curls, her dad with the same sparse red-grey beard, like a middle-aged fox. But Jamie wasn’t there, and the more I stared, the more my stomach sank. From my vantage point, I could see into the hallway, where there were only two sets of shoes lined up, both adult-sized. No glittery jelly sandals. No worn pink converse with grunge girl inked carefully on each toe box.
I retreated, stood with my back against the wall, breathing hard as if I’d been running. Again, I felt like throwing up. Inside, I heard her father laugh, her mother murmuring something I couldn’t make out. I climbed the low fence separating their property from the neighbor, before heaving myself onto the roof of the shed and staring through Jamie’s window. An empty box room, maybe a guest bedroom, and nothing more. Neatly made bed which looked as if it had never been slept in. Pale walls, pale carpet.
Jamie wasn’t just gone. It was like she’d never existed.
I woke up the next day, convinced it had all been some horrible dream. It had to be. But Jamie’s desk was empty again and when I whispered a question to Daniel, who sat right behind me, he scowled. “This again?”
Even so, I caught his gaze flickering from my face to Jamie’s vacant chair. Maybe it was a city-wide virus. Something like a bodysnatcher, only instead of bugs or aliens taking over everyone’s brains, it was wiping their memories one by one.
After the bell rang, I lingered at Miss Wrex’s desk and took advantage of her momentary distraction to flick through the register. Jamie’s name should have been between Daniel’s and Mike’s—Coulter, sandwiched between Carson and Cunningham, but it wasn’t. There wasn’t even a space where she should have been.
I left early again and didn’t go to school the rest of the week. I couldn’t bear to see Jamie’s desk empty, or to hear one more person pronounce her name with blank confusion. Fearing I was suddenly anaemic or dying—or worse, pregnant—my mother bundled me into the car and drove me to the doctor who pronounced me physically fine. “And how are the meds, Evelyn?” Dr. Bennington sat back in her chair and studied me over the top of her oddly square glasses.
“Fine.”
“We could increase your dose,” she suggested. “If you’re feeling extra anxious about something. Are you feeling extra anxious about anything?”
If I said yes, then it was like admitting to a secret she would then feel obligated to ferret out of me. If I said no, then there was nothing wrong and I could deal with whatever it was myself. Meds aren’t a cure, just a cast, she always said. They hold us up until we’re strong enough to help ourselves. “Whatever you think is best,” I said, relishing a stab of petty joy at her look of consternation. If Jamie hadn’t taught me that word, I would have said Dr. Bennington was pissed. Nuance had never really been my forte.
At home I searched once again for the orange unicorn and couldn’t find it anywhere. Shivering, I shucked off my jeans and crawled into bed, even though it was still early afternoon. Sunshine traced a golden finger across my ceiling, drawing a single curved line. If Jamie had been here, she would’ve told me a cool fact about the sun or started listing all its names in different mythologies. I pressed my face into the pillow, wishing I’d written down even some of the things she’d said.
Late on Thursday afternoon, Daniel showed up clutching a single Gatorade and thrust it at me as I lay in bed. “Thanks,” I said, taking a swig and picking listlessly at the label.
“Sorry for being a jerk.” He seated himself on my desk chair, his lanky frame folding like a rolled-up sleeve. He’d grown about a foot over the last year, and his thin face looked even more gaunt than usual.
“Look, I—” He swallowed, and lowered his voice. “I remember her.”
“What?” I fumbled the bottle, almost dropping it. “Why didn’t you say anything?”
“At first I thought they were just kidding.” He swallowed, tugging at the collar of his white polo. “Then it seemed too late to admit it. And it’s weird, anyway. They really don’t know. They talked about it after you left. I’d know if they were lying. How come we’re the only two who remember her? Does that mean there’s something wrong with us?”
“I don’t know. But we’re going to find out.”
“How?” he pressed.
I had no answer for that.
My mother made me go back to school the following Monday and insisted that I increase my anxiety meds by half a dose again. As a result, everything felt weirdly fluffy, as if the air was made of cotton wool, and my first couple of lessons blurred past without incident.
On my way to math, I found my chemistry teacher standing in the hallway, wild-eyed, his normally neat hair sticking up as if he’d run his hands through it several times. Apart from his expression he looked normal enough—green cardigan, white shirt, enough colour not to look bland but not so much that we made fun of him behind his back like we did with Miss Wrex. The current of students parted around him like a dividing rock in a river, changing the course of the water. There was probably a word for that kind of rock; Jamie would have known what it was.
I elbowed through the crowd towards him. “Mr. Faraday? Are you okay?”
“I’m—” he said, and stopped, biting his lip. His eyes were shiny. I’d never seen a teacher cry before. “Have you seen Mikey? I mean, Mr. Phillips? I can’t— And nobody seems to—” He stopped again. “Is this some kind of new prank you kids are playing?”
“Are you saying nobody remembers him?” I stared at the spot right between his eyes, since my own were starting to tear up in sympathy. Beyond us, just at the edge of the yellow lockers which lined the hallway of the second floor, a girl drowning in a too-big army jacket watched us curiously. A junior, I was pretty sure. All the eyeliner and bleached, messy hair in the world wouldn’t cover the shiner she was sporting on her right eye.
“None of our friends—” Mr. Faraday said and stopped again. His fists were tight whorls, like abandoned snail shells. Students giggled and shoved past us, moving in sunny clumps. “You do know him though, don’t you? I asked the principal if he’d seen Mikey today and he looked at me like I was crazy. Said he didn’t employ any Mr. Phillips.”
I jerked my chin towards an empty classroom. “Come with me.”
He followed, dazed, as I slipped inside and held the door for him. The junior in the army jacket sidled through the crowd. “Hey,” she said, before I could close the door. “I know Mr. Phillips.”
Mr. Faraday spun. “You’ve seen him?”
“No.” The girl leaned against the teacher’s desk. “I said I remember him. People are vanishing, right?”
Mr. Faraday was staring at her as if she’d started screaming and frothing at the mouth. “Huh?”
I shut the door behind her. “She’s right. Jamie’s gone, too.”
He blinked. “Jamie Coulter? What—I thought she was off sick.” His thick eyebrows kissed. “You’re saying she’s disappeared?”
Relief blossomed in my chest, like coming up for air after a really deep dive. Hearing someone say her name reassured me; I wasn’t crazy. Or maybe we were all crazy together. The important thing is that I wasn’t alone. “She vanished last Monday,” I said, and then realized I didn’t know that for sure. “Well, some time before Monday. I saw her on Saturday afternoon. But after that, I don’t know … and now nobody knows who she is. I went over to her house and her room was bare, like she never existed.” I willed myself not to cry again at the memory.
“Was she trans?” the girl asked.
Anger flared inside my chest. “What’s it to you? What does that have to do with anything?”
“Cool your jets,” she said, shoving her hands into her pockets. “It’s relevant info.” She turned to Mr. Faraday. “When was the last time you saw Mr. Phillips?”
“Sunday. He came to a—” His eyes flickered between the two of us. “A dinner party. At my house.”
“What about his wife? He was married, right? You could call her.”
“Separated,” Mr. Faraday said, his fingers retreating into the sleeves of his green cardigan. “The divorce was taking a wee while to sort out. He stayed with me for a couple of months, before he found a place. He wasn’t … I mean, sometimes things just …” I watched his throat bob. “And now you’re telling me he’s gone? That can’t be right. People don’t just vanish.”
“I guess they do now.” The girl shrugged. On the webbing between her thumb and pointer finger, she’d drawn a row of little hearts and coloured them in like a rainbow. They reminded me of my glass unicorns.
“I don’t understand what’s happening,” he repeated, running his hands through his hair again. “I should call the police.”
“And tell them what?” the girl asked. “They won’t be able to find any trace of him.” She stood up and folded her arms. “You know what I think? I think we’re vanishing because we’re part of the community. You know? Queer.” Mr. Faraday flinched at the sound of the word, his eyes shooting to the closed door. “Am I wrong?” she asked, raising an eyebrow.
Queer. I tasted the word. It was kind of nice—long and squeaky, like a strand of bubble gum stretched between tongue and teeth.
“Well, I—I—” he stammered. “That’s not an appropriate thing for me to—”
“So I’m right. What about you?” she said, turning to me.
I rolled my shoulders, uncomfortable with the attention. “If that’s the reason, then how is that fair?”
She cocked her head and studied me. “It’s not, obviously.”
“Look, girls,” Mr. Faraday said, the strain evident in his voice, “let’s be reasonable. People shouldn’t just disappear without a trace.”
“Believe what you want.” The girl rubbed her shiner, tracing the darkest parts with a finger, as if it was still tender, then glanced at her watch. “I should go. I’m already late for music.”
“Shit, my class!” Mr. Faraday yelped, and bolted for the door, leaving us alone.
“I’m Lisa,” the girl said with a sigh, offering the rainbow hand.
“Evie.” I shook it. Up close her eyes were an odd shade of brown—so light they looked almost amber.
“I’m sorry.” She hesitated. “You must miss her.” The words slid out like so much loose scree, tumbling down a mountain.
The tears I’d been repressing welled up again and before I could protest Lisa had pressed me into an awkward hug. “Christ,” she muttered. Under the large jacket she was bony but warm, and smelled like orange rinds and Sharpies. Bitter, but sweet, sharp but inviting. Caustic, Jamie would have said. Tart. “Is there anyone else who knows?” Her voice was a little raspy; I could picture her hunched over a bass in some dank bar, thrashing to something angry and loud. The image made my stomach clench.
“A guy in my year,” I said, my voice muffled by the fabric of the giant jacket and my now-clogged sinuses.
“Okay.” She released me, stepped back out of arm’s reach. “Tell him to meet us at the gates after school to see if we can figure anything out. I’m not sure Faraday’s going to be any help.”
Daniel was reluctant to come, complaining that we didn’t know if the idea was contagious, or whether thinking about it—or talking about it—might increase the chances of it happening to us.
“So you just want to ignore it?” I asked, baffled, while the hallway emptied around us.
“Well, maybe.” He stared into his locker, then reached into the back and rifled through piles of old papers and balled up candy wrappers, evidently not finding whatever he was looking for.
“Don’t be an ostrich, man.” I leaned against the lockers. “It’s better to face something head on than hide from it. Besides, Lisa has a theory. She thinks it might be because we’re all queer.”
At the mention of the word, Daniel’s shoulders jumped towards his ears. “I’m not queer!” he snapped, looking around. “I don’t like—I mean,” he took a deep breath, “I don’t think I’m like anything. So I can’t be queer.”
I wasn’t really sure that was how it worked. “But you’re part of this,” I pointed out. “If not, then how come you noticed Jamie was gone?”
A muscle jumped in his jaw. “Maybe I don’t want to be a part of this.” His foot tapped against the ground once, twice, as if looking for a beat and finding none.
“I don’t think you have a choice.”
“I’m not coming, Evie, okay?” He slammed his locker and stalked off down the hall.
Lisa was already waiting at the gates when I arrived, flicking a lighter on and off. “That your friend?” She jerked her thumb backwards; Daniel was marching across the parking lot, kicking rocks as he went. “He looks pissed.”
“He is.” I fell into step beside her as we walked towards the football field. “What made you think it was only queer people who were vanishing?”
“It’s what they all had in common,” she said. “At first, I wasn’t sure, but eventually it was hard to miss. Pattern recognition, you know?”
I stared at her. “What do you mean? How many people have vanished?”
“Five that I know of. Not counting your Jamie and Mr. Phillips.”
“Five?” I choked.
Lisa counted them off on her fingers. “A senior who played percussion in the orchestra. A freshman who’d landed some kind of art prize. My elderly next-door neighbor. And our gym teacher went sometime yesterday. Total chaos this morning. They couldn’t figure out why no one had been assigned to teach us how to throw projectile weapons at each other.”
We reached the bleachers and climbed to the top. My head was spinning as I stared out across the grass. A small knot of junior boys were huddled at the far side, a thin plume of smoke drifting from their loose circle as they passed around a joint. “That’s four. Who was the fifth?”
She settled herself on the topmost bleacher before she answered, popping the collar of the army jacket and turtling into the depths. “My girlfriend, if you could call her that.” The words came out casual, almost throwaway, as if we were discussing the cafeteria menu. “Two months ago.”
“It’s been happening that long?” I yelped, before the words really sank in. “Jesus. I’m sorry. You must feel …” I trailed off. I didn’t know how she must have felt. I barely knew how I felt, other than it was a tumult of anger and fear and grief, churning endlessly on a wash cycle inside my gut.
“It’s okay,” she said. “We’d barely started seeing each other.” She touched her shiner again, absent-mindedly. “It was just nice not to be alone for a while.”
The herd of boys—an obstinacy of buffalo, Jamie would have called them, or maybe a crash of rhinoceroses—prowled across the field, heading for the exit. One of them clocked us, said something to the others, and the rest turned to stare. “Dykes!” they hollered. The leader whooped, the others following suit, before descending into raucous laughter.
Lisa rolled her eyes. “Sometimes I think it would be nice to disappear.”
“You don’t mean that,” I said, shocked.
“Don’t I?” she bit back, the line of her shoulders tense. “You think being here is so great?”
I knew better than to answer a question posed in that kind of tone. Instead, I watched the clouds scud across the sky at speed; it wasn’t particularly windy down here, though up there it must be blowing a goddamn gale. I dug the toe of my sneaker into the wedge of a loose board, prying it up. “Why do you think they went and we’re still here?”
“I don’t know. Maybe we’re next.” The silence lengthened. She sagged, all the fight draining out of her. I waited, saying nothing; I wanted to hug her the way she’d hugged me in the classroom, but it was too awkward out here, exposed to the elements. “I think about that all the time,” she admitted. “But if there’s no fairness to why we vanish, why should there be any fairness to how we’re selected?”
“Mr. Phillips was a decent teacher,” I said, thinking out loud. “He wasn’t a dick about late homework or anything the way some of them are. And Jamie was a really good person. I don’t see why they were picked out. It’s not fair.”
“Well, my elderly neighbor worked for a charity all his life, and our gym teacher was a bitch who’d been warned for bullying kids so badly they threw up,” she said, snide again. She had a point—I’d hated our gym teacher, and my momentary glee at the realization that she was gone was followed quickly by a deep sense of shame. It wasn’t like she’d been suspended. She’d vanished; I wasn’t sure if that meant dead, but it did mean gone forever, which was pretty much the same thing however you sliced it.
“So I don’t think it has much to do with moral character,” she added. “And even if it did, how come the same thing isn’t happening to straight people? How come we’re being held to some higher standard?”
“Wait—were they all out?” I asked, a splinter of despair working its way through my heart. There had to be something. Some clue that would help us make sense of this, to find a way to undo it. “Maybe that has something to do with it.”
She shrugged. “Some of them, I think. Like, hushed at best. Nobody’s gonna come right out and announce who they are, not here and now. Maybe in a bigger city.”
The splinter dug deeper. “So the upshot is that we don’t know anything useful, and there’s nothing we can do to stop it?”
“Well,” and for the first time, she looked less sure of herself, “yeah. I guess.”
“Cool,” I said, standing up and brushing my jeans off. “Really glad we had this chat.” It wasn’t her fault, but the more I thought about it, the angrier I felt. We were helpless, like ants being picked off by the giant magnifying glass of fate. And worse, we were obviously being singled out for some inexplicable reason, something we had no control over. It made me sick.
“See you later,” she called as I picked my way down the stairs, “unless I don’t.”
The sound of her laughter followed me off the field and haunted me all the way home. I knew what I’d see even before I opened the door to my bedroom—another unicorn, gone from my shelf. This time, it was the blue one; the gym teacher, I supposed, since I’d known her. It wasn’t exactly a shock.
Not like the next morning, when I woke to find the yellow unicorn had vanished too.
I rushed to school, terrified to find out what had happened and yet unable to stay away, and was relieved to see Mr. Faraday sitting alone in his parked car, staring into space. I knocked on his window, making him flinch. His lips moved, but I couldn’t hear him. “Are you coming in?” I asked, gesturing towards the school, but he didn’t move. Just sat there, tears streaming down his stubbled cheeks, hands gripping the wheel at nine and three. He looked as if he’d been up all night. “Mr. Faraday? I’m sorry,” I added, though I didn’t know what I was apologizing for.
Mr. Faraday buried his face in his hands and sobbed, his whole body shaking. “Mr. Faraday?” I repeated, pressing my palm against the window, though I wasn’t really sure what I was doing or how it would help.
The noise which burst between his fingers sounded like a wounded elephant, deep and shuddering. He slammed his hands on the wheel, over and over, his screams bright and blue and hot as hell. I called his name again and again, banging on the window, but he either couldn’t or wouldn’t hear me. After a few moments, he turned the engine back on and screeched out of the parking lot much faster than the PTA would have approved of. A small throng of senior students, gathered outside to shoot the shit like they did every morning before registration, watched him go with curiosity and amusement. I wanted to scream at them, but there was no point—soon enough they wouldn’t remember him, or me either.
I was physically present in my classes, but that was all I could manage that day. Daniel still wasn’t talking to me—every time I tried, he found some excuse to slither away, laughing at Frank’s jokes with an enthusiasm he’d never shown before, flirting with Michelle in a way that had her hair-flipping every two seconds like a caffeinated Barbie. All day I scanned the faces of my classmates, my teachers, the janitorial staff, wondering who I was missing. The stress was getting to me—my fingernails were little more than bloody stubs—so it was a relief to find Lisa lingering at the school gates after the final bell had rung, flipping her lighter on and off. I realized I’d never seen her with an actual cigarette and she’d never smelled like smoke. “You ever use that thing?” I asked.
She flipped it shut and dropped it into her pocket. “It was my dad’s. It was his one bad habit. Otherwise, he was awesome.”
The tight curl of her upper lip told me the end of the story. I glanced again at her black eye, which had faded into a ferocious purple. “Your mom remarried?”
“Kenny’s never laid a hand on me, if that’s what you’re asking.” She watched the last of the stragglers stream through the gates. “He’s actually pretty nice.”
I wanted to ask who’d given her the shiner then, but I knew she wouldn’t answer. “Someone else vanished, but I can’t figure out who.”
“The nurse. The young one with the red hair.”
“How do you know?”
“A freshman broke his wrist during gym.”
“Yeah, but how did you know?” I persisted. “Weren’t you in class?”
“I was looking for Faraday. He didn’t come to school today.” She turned and began to walk along the street that led to the main thoroughfare.
I jogged a couple of paces to catch up. “Technically he did. He just never made it through the door.” I told her about what had happened, trying to keep my tone casual, but she shot me a side-long glance and ran a hand through her bleached hair, making it look even messier than usual. I had an urge to touch it, wondering whether it would be rough under my fingers, or smooth, like sanded wood.
“How are you holding up?” She stumbled over the question, as if she didn’t ask it a lot.
“I’m okay.”
“Uh huh.” She blew out a sigh. “I’ll walk you home if you want. I’m in no rush.”
Mom was working late again at the office all week, so when we got to my place I invited Lisa in. I stood in the doorway of my bedroom, watching her survey the place with a practiced eye. I hadn’t told anyone about the unicorns, but she didn’t even seem to notice them, much less wonder why there were only four left. “Nice collection,” she said, fingers walking over my CDs. “I’m more of a Pearl Jam fan myself.”
I moved forward and sifted through them until I found Ten. “You want to listen?”
“Yeah, okay.” She seated herself on my bed and flopped back, staring at the ceiling.
By the time the drum whispered into life on “Once,” I’d joined her, mirroring her position, deeply aware that this was the first time I’d had a girl other than Jamie lying on my bed. My palms were sweaty, and each time our elbows brushed, a jolt of something cold and electric swelled in my stomach. By the time the guitar uncurled into a hissing, angry thrash, Lisa had broken into a smile for the first time. I watched her lips press together once, twice, then mouth the first lines of the song.
“You’re staring at me,” she said, without opening her eyes.
“I’m not,” I protested, while Eddie Vedder confessed quite the opposite.
She moved towards me until we were mere inches apart, blinking amber eyes at me. “Did you love her?”
“What?” I was distracted by her breath on my lips, cool as autumn sunshine.
“Jamie. Did you love her?”
“Of course. She was my best friend.”
“Evie,” she said, her voice impatient. “I mean, were you in love with her?”
I thought about Jamie’s plump wrists and her dimpled elbows and the way her nose kind of scrunched up when she laughed and the way she always offered me a bite of everything she ate even when it was her very favourite dessert in the whole world and—
My breath hitched. “I don’t know. I didn’t really get a chance to find out.”
“So you never kissed or anything?”
“No.” The moment stretched out, while Eddie Vedder screamed a single word over and over. Once. Once. Once. “I’ve never kissed anybody.”
“Well, I’ve never loved anybody. It would be a shame for both of us to disappear without knowing what those things were like,” she said. Her eyes were twin flames, too bright to look at, and before I’d had a chance to wonder if it was a terrible idea, I dipped forward and kissed her.
By the end of “Release”—a circling, questioning bass accompanying the sound of Eddie’s quiet calls, as if singing from the next house over— I was near-sick with dizzying want. “I have to go,” she said, dropping a last kiss on my cheek, her breath coming in quick pants. The room was dark, only the orange streetlights splashing colour onto the wall.
I touched her black eye. Feather-light, tracing the shape of a fist meeting flesh. “Can I have your number?”
“Give me yours,” she said. “I’ll call you later. If you want.”
It was easier to talk over the phone, without those amber eyes studying my every move. Now that I’d accepted I would be vanishing sooner or later, there seemed no point in having any secrets. I told Lisa how scared I was, how much I’d planned to do, how guilty I felt about not being able to save Jamie or take her place. I told her that I was afraid to let her out of my sight now, even though it wasn’t as if I knew when it was going to happen, or if I could do anything about it. “If I was holding onto you when you vanished, do you think I’d vanish too? Or do you think you’d have to stay? Or would we both go at the same time?”
In short, I meant do you think it matters if we’re alone, but I was too scared to say that out loud in case it made it real.
In turn Lisa admitted her own fears, her frustrations about the rigid structure of high school cliques, her dreams of becoming a world-class cellist. “I never saw you carry a cello,” I said, surprised.
She snorted. “I don’t bring it home anymore. It’s not—” interrupted by a quick intake of breath, a door slamming in the distance, the sound of a woman’s voice snarling her name. “Shit. I have to go.”
Lisa waited for me outside school the next morning and we walked in together. Ordinarily I would have hated the way eyes landed on us, the way kids whispered loudly and cracked jokes, but I discovered I no longer cared. There was a curious freedom in knowing your time was limited, that you were already ostracized. What more could they do to me that the world wasn’t going to do already?
“Mr. Faraday’s car isn’t in the lot,” I said, when we stopped outside the stairs leading to the second floor, where my registration class was held. When I’d left home that morning, I’d still had four unicorns, but I couldn’t really use the fact as any kind of scientific basis. I kicked myself for not bringing them with me. “Do you think—” I faltered. The way he’d looked yesterday—savage, defeated—had unnerved me.
“Only one way to find out.” Lisa stepped into the corridor and flagged down Miss Wrex, who shot me the usual glare. I glared back. “Excuse me,” Lisa asked, “do you know Mr. Faraday?”
I’d expected her to look confused, but instead she looked uncomfortable. “You better wait for the assembly, girls. Right after registration.”
Lisa frowned. “What assembly?”
Miss Wrex waved her away like an errant chicken and herded me towards the stairs. Despite my questions, she refused to say anything more. I was forced to sit through registration, my stomach in knots, wondering what was coming next. While I was busy worrying, Michelle leaned over, a smug smile curving her lips. “Everybody’s talking, you know. You and that junior girl coming in together this morning.”
Behind her, Daniel looked pained. “Babe,” he said, reaching for her hand, “c’mon.”
Babe? I mouthed at him, the moment her back was turned. Shut up, he mouthed back, frowning. I caught him on the way out of the classroom. “What the hell are you doing?” I whispered. “You’re dating her? I thought you said—”
“Never mind what I said.” He swallowed hard. “I’m not going to disappear, Evie. I’m not going to let that happen, okay? You can fight it however you want, but just leave me alone. We’re not the same.”
He stepped into the crowd heading to assembly and melted away. I stomped after him and picked a seat where I could glare at the back of his head to my heart’s content. The principal, never a man to beat around the bush, waited until we were reasonably quiet and then informed us without fanfare that Mr. Faraday had been found injured at home the previous night and was in a coma, unlikely to recover. Gasps rippled through the hall. Tingles of shock quivered up my spine, while sudden vertigo made me feel as if I was falling from a great height. I didn’t need to ask myself what Mr. Faraday had tried to do—it was clear enough.
“A counsellor will be available for anyone who needs to, uh, talk through their emotions,” the principal added, looking deeply uncomfortable with the idea. “Dismissed.”
In front of me, a group of freshmen girls started to cry. A few seconds later, the hall was filled with pained voices and wide eyes, seeking answers to a question they could never hope to understand. Teachers gave up on lessons for the day and we were allowed to sit in class quietly reading or writing about our feelings. I stared at a blank page, unable to think of a single thing to say.
At home, I found a note from my mom, informing me that she had to do a quick trip to the city to supervise an audit, tucked around a fifty-dollar bill. Eat something more nutritious than pizza, she’d written. Try not to burn the house down. Back soon.
I padded through the house, roving restlessly from room to room. When I vanished, what would disappear along with me? Maybe the fridge magnets, several of which I’d picked, from various family trips. Probably the ugly olive vase I’d bought for Mother’s Day a few years ago, and which she’d insisted on keeping even though it clashed with the decor. Definitely the marks on the doorway depicting each stage of my growth spurt.
That night, Lisa called me at our pre-determined time; a relief, since I’d been watching the clock tick down for the last thirty minutes. “Do you think you’ll be able to sleep?” she asked. “Today was, like, a lot.”
“I don’t know.” I listened to her breathing, steady and sure. “Will you tell me about your dad?”
“Why?”
I’d been thinking about this a lot, but it was still nerve-wracking to say it out loud. “I think I need to know a person in order to love them.”
“I, uh—okay.” Her voice cracked in the middle, though she tried to cover it with a cough. “What do you wanna know?”
“Everything.”
“Okay,” she said. “Then I want to know about yours too. Can I come over?”
“Your mom won’t mind?”
“Screw her,” she said. “I’ll be there in fifteen.”
We spooned on my bed, our socked feet resting on my pillows, our heads inches from the edge of the bottom of the bed. Every now and then, I glanced up at the unicorns on the shelf, not liking to take my eye off them for too long. Lisa told me everything she could remember about her father—the smell of menthol cigarettes, the warmth and grip of his hugs, his broad swimmer’s chest, his penchant for vanilla ice cream and Motown records over all else. We compared her father’s heart condition to my father’s long trips and infrequent letters, contrasted the bullet her father had kept from Vietnam with my father’s work in a local liberal arts organization. Between every word she breathed love and longing, a stability and security that had evidently been missing for several years. A recognition of who she was, rather than who she was expected to be. I knew what that felt like. Jamie’s parents had taken her announcement in stride—I was sure mine wouldn’t have been so obliging—and while I’d been relieved for her, I’d also been a little jealous.
In between one blink and another, the green unicorn vanished from my shelf. I stiffened, twisting in her arms. “Mr. Faraday is gone.”
Lisa’s eyes were wide, though not disbelieving. “Wait, what? How do you know?”
I sighed. “You’ll think I’m crazy.”
“Evie,” she tugged me round to face her. “Are you kidding me? It can’t be more insane than what’s happening to us.”
I told her everything about the unicorns and let her examine each of the remaining three. “Hiding in plain sight,” she murmured, turning the red unicorn over and over in her hands. “Do you think it would still feel so bad if we knew why it was happening?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I think it would.”
“You’re probably right.” She sighed and placed the unicorn back on the shelf. I didn’t have the heart to tell her she’d put it out of rainbow order.
The next day, everyone at school was back to normal. No one was crying in the halls, and when I swung past the nurse’s office, I saw no special posters on the noticeboard for counselling services. In registration, Daniel was holding Michelle’s hand again and ignored my pointed stare. “Hey,” I said, and repeated it more loudly until he caved, cheeks reddening. “Can I talk to you for a sec?”
“Maybe later, Evie.” He pressed a kiss ostentatiously against Michelle’s cheek while she shot me a victorious glance.
“Seriously,” I persisted. “It’s about, uh, my dad.” I had to get him alone, somehow. I might not be able to make him see reason, but at least I could make amends, or peace, or whatever.
“Okay, fine,” Daniel snapped. Someone giggled behind us. “Lunchtime, yeah?”
I nodded, figuring I’d take what I could get, but when I turned up to lunch Michelle and Frank were sitting alone in the cafeteria. She was leaning against his chest while his arms hung loosely around her neck. “Moved on kind of quick, haven’t you?” I commented, barely repressing an eye roll.
“Huh?” She flipped her hair, only just avoiding poking him in the eye. “From who?”
Frank grinned amiably down at both of us. “Oh man, do I have a rival I don’t know about? Is he bigger than me?”
A cold sweat spread throughout my body. “What? Where’s Daniel?”
Michelle patted his arm lightly. “You’ve got nothing to worry about. Evie’s just being weird. It’s like, her new thing, apparently.” She glared at me. “I don’t even know a Daniel.”
Panicking, I turned and sped down the hallway, skidding to a halt outside Daniel’s locker. I spun the combination, getting it wrong twice as I fumbled with shaking fingers. It was empty—no litter, no books, nothing. I punched the locker door again and again, bloodying my knuckles, unable to stop the rage that had been building in me for days. I’d thought I had more time with him. I’d wanted to tell him that I was both sorry, and not sorry, that he was being smart but also so goddamn stupid, that he was my friend always and forever no matter how he identified or whatever he did. And now he was gone, and I’d never get to say any of those things.
I spent the next hour in the bathroom, sobbing behind a mercifully locked door. Daniel had tried to fight it in his own way and he’d vanished anyway. I wasn’t sure what I was more mad about—that he’d decided the best way to stay alive was to hide who he really was, or how easy and quick the decision had been for him.
After I splashed my face with cold water and pulled myself together, I scuttled through the empty hallway and outside. I found Lisa sitting on the top of the bleachers, pressing a hand against her ribs. “It’s what I get for being late home last night. Oh, don’t,” she said, seeing my expression. “It won’t change anything. Besides, it won’t be for much longer. And I got in a couple of licks of my own. She’s got a scratch on her face that’ll be hard to explain to her colleagues.”
I threw my arms around her and buried my face in her neck. “Easy, tiger,” she said, though she sounded pleased.
“Daniel’s gone.”
“The closet kid? Damn. I’m sorry.” She pulled me closer, the now familiar bittersweet scent of orange peel soothing my strained nerves. “I think it’s speeding up. People are disappearing faster than ever.” She sighed. “Whatever happens, I won’t forget you. You know that, right?”
“I won’t forget you either.” I wanted so badly to squeeze her like a tube of toothpaste.
“I think I’m next,” Lisa said.
I sat back, wiping my eyes. “Why would you say that?”
“I don’t know. I just have, like, a feeling.” She shrugged, then winced. “Pattern recognition, remember?”
“Come home with me,” I begged. “Don’t be alone.” Jamie had once told me that there was always going to be a barrier of atoms between us—that when we touched, it was like we were wearing gloves. We might feel like our hands had pressed against each other, but in truth they’d only ever come incredibly close. They’d never really touch, not properly. At the time, it had sounded cool. Now, I hated the idea.
“You know what? For the first time maybe I don’t feel like I am.” She got up and held out her hand. “Let’s go.”
We spent the evening in my room, listening to one album after another. Ten again, followed by Badmotorfinger. I put Bleach on, and we roared along to “Love Buzz,” pretending to drum like Grohl, to wail like Kurt, to pluck like Krist. After I put Nevermind on, Lisa pressed me down onto the bed.
“At least we lived to hear this,” I whispered into her ear, as she kissed her way down my neck. “At least we’ve been alive.”
“We’ll never not be alive,” she said, then paused. “You know what I mean.”
“I do,” I said. I knew exactly what she meant.
I woke up alone. There were no scuffed boots in the hallway, no lingering smell of oranges in my bedroom. Only one unicorn remained on the shelf above my bed. I grabbed the pink unicorn and examined it closely, horn to tail, through a blur of tears. The transparent body couldn’t hold any secrets, though maybe that was the point. Maybe there weren’t any clues because there wasn’t any reason to what was happening, the world had just picked us off one by one and then kept turning as if our disappearance didn’t matter, leaving no trace of what had once been queer and complicated and vain and bright and stupid and normal and utterly, utterly glorious and just as mundane as everything else.
Content warning: References to suicide and physical abuse, homophobia
