The Great Big One Read online

  “Hey,” she said.

  He took a breath.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “There you are,” she said. “Are we still on for tomorrow?”

  “On for what?”

  She frowned.

  “Room five.”

  “Oh,” he said. “I guess. Yeah.”

  She squinted at him. Shook her head.

  “What?”

  “You forgot,” she said.

  “No,” he said. “We just hadn’t talked about it in a while.”

  “I’ve got no phone,” she said. “And we said same time next week.”

  “Right,” he said.

  “I don’t feel like…” She sighed, raked a hand through her hair—this was new. “I don’t feel like people should have to keep confirming appointments, you know? Like—we make a date, set a time, and that’s set. You shouldn’t have to keep following up. If it’s important, you just do it. You remember.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Don’t be sorry,” she said.

  How could he tell her? It was entirely shocking every time she wanted to be with him. If he told her that, what else might rush out? How he thought about her face so frequently that sometimes it was terrifying to see her? Would he say there were not enough red circles on the calendar anymore—could he ever tell her about red circles?

  “I think we need to bring Leo in on this,” she said.

  “What?” Griff said. “Into our rehearsals?” His blood went still.

  “Not bring him,” Charity said. “Tell him. There’s nothing wrong with us rehearsing our own songs. And I had an idea this week. I talked to my mom about it.”

  “What?”

  “What if we played at the Urchin? You and me. If we’re going to play cover tunes, why not play a couple of our songs?”

  “There is a piano,” Griff said. His cheeks burned. He sat up straight.

  “We can open for ourselves,” Charity said. She was giddy, alive with the idea.

  “Yes,” Griff said. “Of course.”

  “I’ll tell Leo today,” Charity said. “Or at practice.”

  Griff tried not to think about the telling. He tried, for a moment, just to be happy.

  TWENTY

  “WE’RE STILL WAITING ON LEO AND CHARITY,” THOMAS SAID. “But come in. I want to show you something.”

  While the rest of them had gotten busy, Thomas’s obsession with the Band had only intensified. No longer a Missing Persons situation. Now, One Man’s Desperate Search for His Daughter’s Killer. Computers set in a loose ring. And maps. Big printed sheets of the coast. Northern California to southern Washington tacked to the pegboard, inscribed with notes, the arcing sweep of a compass pencil. Off on a tiny table, a separate computer, isolated from the others. Griff walked toward it.

  “Don’t touch!” Thomas said, as if Griff were about to grab a snake.

  “That one goes to the dark web,” Thomas said.

  “What are you doing in the dark web?”

  “Only 3 percent of the internet is searchable,” Thomas said. “They’ve got to be hiding somewhere.” He pulled off his hoodie, tossed it aside. Another custom T-shirt. Ghosts surrounded a condenser microphone, their mouths distended Os.

  “Do you have a theory?” Griff asked.

  “Yeah,” Thomas said. “If they aren’t ghosts, or a figment of our collective imagination—they actively don’t want to be found.”

  “So why broadcast the shows?”

  “That’s the mystery!” Thomas said. He looked crazed. “But if they broadcast once, they’ll do it again.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Patterns,” he said. “Psychology. Geology.”

  On the pegboard Thomas flipped back large butcher-paper sheets of coastal maps and triangulation. Peeling the onion back into past obsessions. He stopped. This one, Griff recognized. A timeline stretching deep into the geologic Holocene, Pliocene, the murk of the Jurassic, the Cambrian, each punctuated by tall red lines growing like uneven chutes to the present. Each line represented an eruption.

  “The Cascadia Quake,” Griff said.

  That last bright white space—from January 26, 1700, until now. Every 234 years and then—blank. Like the first pause after hours of hiccups.

  “I’m familiar,” Griff said.

  “Okay,” Thomas said. “How about this?”

  He let the sheets fall. Second from the top, a timeline made with the same compunction for straight lines, right angles, and historic accuracy, but over the last thirty days. The big red spike was the day they’d found the Band. Thomas, being a good prepper, had devised his own code. A series of symbols that consisted of a curly upside-down letter U and lightning bolts. They appeared on simultaneous and alternating dates, snaking up and down the calendar.

  “Given the number of people in the Band, and the quality of the broadcast,” Thomas said, “my original theory was that they must send the signal daily. Or weekly. Some predictable interval.”

  Griff smiled, seeing the pattern.

  “These are the days at the station,” Griff said, touching the lightning bolts. Thomas stared back at him. “So—what are these?”

  He touched the horseshoe shapes.

  “Another, um—source.”

  “Who?”

  Thomas stared back at him. He pursed his lips and raised his eyebrows like half-moons. The Preppers had not been able to eradicate an ounce of earnestness from Thomas Mortimer. He had all the guile of a tortoise.

  “Well,” Thomas said, as if to himself, “I didn’t tell Leo about your practices with Charity.”

  “You’ve been working with Leo on this?”

  “Ask Leo,” Thomas said.

  Thomas was easy to read but impossible to crack. You’d know he had a secret, but he’d bite down on a cyanide pill before he’d turn it over. Griff pored over the maps, tables. They were extraordinary.

  Footsteps overhead, soft thunder down the stairs. Leo and Charity entered together. The energy was strange—you could feel the edges of the conversation they’d just snapped off. Thomas and Griff stood at some kind of attention, like they were awaiting orders.

  “What?” Charity said.

  Leo looked at Griff, then Thomas’s maps.

  “Nothing,” Leo said. “We have a gig next week. Let’s practice.”

  She must’ve told him about their practices.

  The energy improved once they started playing. As it turned out, the potential for public humiliation was galvanizing. Leo and Charity had worked out their sound, Leo in the lead—Charity bolstering his sound like a human repeater. She should’ve been holding microphone one. Griff kept his eyes on the plastic keys of the plastic keyboard and played the plastic songs and when he looked up Charity was staring at him. Her brow creased, creased harder. She said:

  “Hey, all. Can we talk quick?”

  “Okay,” Leo said. He was chewing his lower lip.

  She hadn’t told him.

  Don’t do it, Griff thought. Not now. Wrong time.

  “Griff and I have been working on a few songs,” she continued. “Leo, I kind of mentioned this to you, the other day.”

  Leo’s face, expressionless.

  “Anyway,” she said, “Griff, you and I, right, were wondering about opening for Lionized. Fifteen minutes max. We don’t really have songs yet, but we’ve got a great sound.”

  “How often do you two practice?” Leo asked.

  “Just once,” Griff said.

  “But again tomorrow,” Charity said. “And a few times next week, if we need to. Like I said, it’s pretty informal. Kind of improv.”

  Leo looked at Griff.

  “So, you have a side project?”

  “Oh,” Thomas said. “Oooooh.”

  “It’s not a side project,” Griff said.

  Leo walked straight toward Griff and his muscles tensed. Griff flinched and Leo breezed through the curtains. They opened with a soft flutter, draped themselves shut.<
br />
  “Let him go,” Charity said. But Griff had to follow. It had been a brand-new look from his brother. He’d never seen it before. It scared him.

  Griff left Thomas’s house and climbed on his bike. The night was humid but cool. The kind of fog that clung to your clothing, made you shiver and sweat at the same time. Griff knew Leo’s bike wouldn’t be at home, but he checked there first. Then past the McLeans’, where Leo had tucked himself behind the hedge after a breakup, past the Marcinis’, with the abandoned tree house they’d often infiltrated together.

  All the hiding places were old. From the comic-book times. Cards in spokes had not rattled for years and Griff no longer knew where Leo went when he wanted to be hidden.

  When Griff came in, dripping, his father was at the kitchen table, surrounded by spreadsheets. No more transistor radio games in the basement, no more big bowls of popcorn. This man owned a condo in Florida. Griff hung up his raincoat.

  “Have you seen Leo?” he asked.

  “Weren’t you both at Thomas’s?” his father asked. “Working on EARS updates?”

  They hadn’t done an EARS update in weeks.

  “I thought he was out with Jonesy,” Griff said.

  “Jonesy!” His dad snorted. “Those two mix like potassium and water.”

  Potassium exploded in water. These sorts of analogies were part of the problem with making friends and meeting girls. Made you grow up strange. His father looked up.

  “Speaking of,” his father said. “You’re really short on hours for Gap Academy. You haven’t been to a rotational meeting in weeks.”

  “I’m doing radio shifts,” Griff said. “I’m not sure about the Gap anyway.”

  “Well.” His father sighed.

  Griff edged backward. This was a black-hole conversation. A vortex that would suck him into obligations and sad calendar boxes. Back in his bedroom, the padlock winked from the eyelet hook of the TOE Box, just beside the mirrored closet door. Griff stared at the lock. And the box.

  What were he and Thomas doing? Just listening in secret?

  Despite their endless contests, Griff had mostly felt lashed to Leo, hip to hip, like joint competitors in a three-legged race. Leo’s outside foot always landed first, but they crossed the finish line together. Griff touched the cool lock. Flipped it up so it banged down on painted metal.

  TUNG

  With Charity, it was different. The feeling hung like hooks in his lungs.

  TUNG

  Griff chipped off a fleck of black paint. Blue beneath.

  He could snap that lock with the torque of twin crescent wrenches. Griff looked up at the mirror and Leo’s face was watching him. He turned off the light and lay in bed with his phone.

  Finally, he sent a message to his brother:

  LEO, WHERE ARE YOU?

  After midnight, Leo came in like a cool gust of air. Whistling.

  Griff sat up.

  “Where have you been?”

  Griff was startled by his own voice. He’d been asleep, but sounded wide awake.

  Leo kept whistling. The bedroom was cold, like the damp sea air had clung to his clothes and changed the bedroom’s weather.

  “The lighthouse,” Leo said.

  “What?”

  “Jonesy and I blew it to pieces. Shot it up.”

  Griff flung off his bedsheets. No light in the window.

  Leo took the bag off his shoulder, dug inside. Cassette tapes. Something metal. Cardboard tubes.

  Still, no light in the window.

  Half tethered to sleep, dreamy images rushed through his mind. Leo, smashing their mother’s cream-colored pitcher and bowl set with a hardball after Griff won Best At Bat in fifth grade. His prized snow castle at Hoodoo Mountain, the painstaking stacking of igloo bricks to achieve the perfect slope, a miraculous window—smashed, battered, caved in with the steel runners of a toboggan because “that’s what happens to snow forts,” but not exactly. That’s what happens when you win.

  Leo had the capacity to destroy beautiful things.

  Griff raced to the window. Lifted the blinds.

  He watched the darkness.

  “See?” Leo said.

  Thick mist. A blot of white. The lighthouse blinked. Unmistakable. Griff’s shoulders dropped. He didn’t mind being lied to, because it was a lie.

  “You really believed that?” Leo said. He laughed.

  “I don’t know what you’re doing,” Griff said, getting back in his bed. “But I know you’ve been working with Thomas.”

  “Not anymore,” Leo said.

  “I’m sorry about the rehearsals,” Griff said. “I should’ve told you.”

  “Sure.”

  Leo shut the door to the box. Reattached the lock.

  “Can you tell please me what you’re doing?” Griff asked.

  “Ask Charity,” Leo said. “Tomorrow night, she’s coming with me.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  AFTER SCHOOL, CHARITY WAS NOT IN PRACTICE ROOM 5.

  When Griff went through the hallways to look for her, he heard his brother’s voice down the next hall. When he turned the corner, he saw Leo talking to Charity.

  Leo’s hands, flashing around. He looked angry.

  Griff went back to the practice room and waited five minutes. Ten. He paced the tiny zoo cage of a room. Pulled the skin on his bare wrist. Looked at his phone, looked out the window. His phone again.

  When Charity arrived, her face had the flat composure of a smooth stone. Cracks showed around her eyes and mouth. Trembling.

  “What?” Griff asked.

  “Leo’s mad at me.”

  Another snapped-off conversation, only this time the edges were rougher. For the first time after one of Leo’s tantrums, Charity looked rattled.

  “What’s he want?” Griff asked.

  “To go back to the Ruins. I thought it was all of us. But he just wants it to be me.”

  “Of course,” Griff said.

  Charity looked at the practice room’s small window. No one there. Her eyes looked clouded over. Griff wondered if she looked at him and saw Leo.

  “Are you going?” Griff said softly.

  “Going alone with Leo anywhere feels like a stupidly complicated choice and all this is already stupid and complicated,” she said.

  “It doesn’t have to be,” Griff said.

  “Really?” she asked. She looked at him, like she was waiting for an answer.

  “Let’s play,” he said.

  It took time to dig out from the mood, smooth the edges. The reservoir of words he was unable to share, he let flow through his fingers instead. A trickle, a torrent, a flood—no more him, no more Leo, barely a room. He let himself be tethered to a bright, humming energy. The sound of Charity’s voice.

  If he was water tonight, she was the wind.

  She chased notes up and down the scales. Her voice shook, wobbled, cracked—broke and put itself together. When Charity sang, it all meant something, and you were part of it, something profound, just past the edge of understanding.

  His hands shook. She looked at him.

  “You’re singing the mysteries of the whole universe,” Griff said.

  “It’s my favorite,” she said. “Like my body understands and my mind is trying to catch up. Do you think we have three songs?”

  Did they? The music was an exploration. Like a swimmy underwater cave with roundish spaces you might call songs and, in that respect, yes. There were three such spaces.

  “Yes. We can play three songs,” Griff said.

  “Yeah? Still? Thank you.”

  She came to him, threw her arms around him. Squeezed hard. No kiss.

  “Thanks for what?”

  “Taking me to a brand-new place,” Charity said.

  Griff looked at the piano.

  “What did Leo want to do at the Ruins?”

  Charity shrugged.

  “What did he say?”

  Charity hesitated, weighing something. She looked at the window, and when
she looked back she squinted a moment. Like—Which twin are you?

  “Leo told me he found the Band.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  CHARITY WASN’T IN STUDY HALL THE NEXT DAY AND SHE DID NOT come to lunch, nor respond to texts. In third period, Griff learned from Thomas that Charity had stayed home sick.

  “She seemed fine yesterday,” Griff said.

  He didn’t see his brother all day. And that was the night Leo changed.

  He came home later than usual, stinking of the low-tide flats. His energy was all different. Tension in the room, like the suck of breath just before a scream. Griff couldn’t stop thinking: Had Charity gone with him after all?

  Leo removed his boots. Unlocked the TOE Box.

  Movement of materials. The quiet rip of paper. Each cassette, treated like thin glass. Leo pushed the hasp of the lock into the body and jerked once, twice. He went to the shower.

  Strange underwater sounds.

  You can hear just about anything in running water and a bathroom fan. They provoke auditory hallucinations, the way all types of white noise will. Their father had told them, when they first began song fishing. Given every possible tone, the brain will weave its own thread of meaning—often a repetitive beat, a forgotten jingle, or sometimes your own name being whispered, chanted, screamed.

  “You could lose your mind,” their father said, “if you’re not careful.”

  Griff listened closely.

  He wasn’t making it up.

  Beneath the water, Leo was singing.

  TWENTY-THREE

  AFTER THAT NIGHT, THE WORLD REGAINED ITS PROPER EDGES AND corners.

  Mostly.

  Charity was back at the lunch table. Leo stopped going out late at night. He’d snapped like an overstretched rubber band back into Prepper Life. Running tutorials on his computer—mapmaking, orienteering, survival science. Finding Water. Surviving Thirty Days in the Sand. Maybe he was worried they’d end up in Florida. At night, in bed, Leo listened to music, giant new noise-canceling headphones gulping his ears, head bobbing, feet tapping.