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Basil sees it for the first time and wonders if he needs cataract surgery.
“Aubrey, there--there are vines underneath your fingernails.”
Aubrey drops the blade of grass she’s trying to turn into a harmonica and holds her fingers in front of her face. The grooves under her fingernails are green with shredded chlorophyll. “Uh, okay,” she says. She puts her fingers in her mouth and sucks the grass pulp out, and then turns to the side and spits it out. “Next time just tell me I got gunk under my nails. No need to get poetic. Or has your English assignment addled your brain?”
But that’s not what Basil means, and although the gunk is gone, leaving only a hint of red--evidence of a daily hot-chip habit--beneath the white parentheses of her nails, the fleshy bit underneath is latticed with filaments thin and smooth. They swirl, now branching out from her nail and winding around her knuckles.
Basil blinks. Once, twice. Brushes his bangs from his face and blinks again. Looks away, at the lakeside horizon and the ring of trees around them not half as electric green as the thing twisting under her nails, looks at the waterfowl preening by the reeds and the boards of the pier that creak and swing in the breeze. The afternoon is fine, and all is well.
“You can take a break if you want,” Aubrey says. “You’ve been reading for a long time.”
“Um, thanks,” Basil says. When he looks back at her, the green’s still there. It creeps up her hands, twining around her forearms with thick spirals, sprouting leaves, bleeding dew. A thin, wet membrane stretches over the vines, and with a startle he realizes it's skin. The growth bulges under her skin and stretches it to translucence, like bubblegum.
“What? Do I have something on my face?”
“No, nothing like that.”
“You know, there’s a bunch of ripe dandelion heads around here.” She snaps one off its stalk and holds it to the summer sun. “Do you believe in wishes?”
“Well… I, uh, used to. They never came true, though.”
Aubrey smiles. Her gums are verdant with moss. “Maybe you have bad luck, then. It’s not your fault. I’ve got pretty good luck! Remember when me and you and Kel played blackjack? I don’t really know how to play… but…”
“You won.” Basil breathes in and smells nothing, not even the tint of sugar that the skies have during this month. He surreptitiously holds his own fingers up to his nose and hopes to smell oils and paper and grass, but there’s no scent, only the blank rush of air into his sinuses and out.
“I do win,” Aubrey says, in a voice that isn’t hers. “I always win. I’ll make a wish for you, if you tell me what it is.”
The book he’s laid open on the picnic blanket is a jumble of text, too slippery for his mind to grasp. When he blinks, the book is blank.
“Aubrey? A-Aubrey, what’s going on?”
Leaves fall from her hair when she shakes her head in the wind, clawing a strand of pink from her mouth. “What do you mean? Make a wish, dork.”
“No. What’s going on?” Basil yells, panic setting into his chest.
“That’s a fine wish.” Aubrey smiles and sways. “You got it.”
“What? ...Did I say--”
She holds the dandelion to her face and blows out, letting the seeds fly towards him. The tufts of each particle brush against his face, and he turns and waves an arm in front of his head. “Agh.” When he turns back, the first thing he notices is not that the air pressure is much lower, or that the sky is the strongest, crispest blue that he’s ever seen.
It’s that Aubrey is no longer kneeling on the picnic blanket with a bald dandelion’s head drooping from her fist. It’s someone else, someone with matted tendrils of aerial roots for hair and eyes like loam. Large, fenestrated leaves blanket her back and shower wetly from her shoulders. She’s green, greener than any plant he’s ever tended, and she steps out of the stretched-thin pile of skin, clothes, and limp, pink hair that used to be Aubrey.
Basil rises to his feet, slowly. “You’re not real,” he says, and pinches himself on the inside of his forearm. Nothing happens. “You’re not real. Dr. Sullivan told me to watch out for things like you.”
The creature cocks her head. “Your psychiatrist? He doesn’t know the first thing about the world.” Her voice warbles and clicks with the language of carpenter ants but with the intonations of Aubrey’s speech. “He doesn’t know the first thing about you .”
“What do you know?”
“You told me this, remember? When we were trying that new flavor of ice-cream outside the Othermart. What was it, peaches and cream? You’ve already forgotten…” She pouts.
“What? That was with Aubrey. Look. You aren’t real. You aren’t--you aren’t real. You’re just… can you go away? Y-you don’t exist.”
“I am Aubrey. Or…” She laughs. “I’m what’s been pretending to be her. Really, I can explain.”
“No. Go away, please.” Basil shoves his hands onto his ears and squints his eyelids shut. “Go away, go away, go away. I want to wake up.”
“Hey, there.” A dense, wet hand on his shoulder. It’s warm. “I can explain. I know this is a little hard for you to accept. Take a deep breath, okay?”
He does. And then he smells it. Loam, and plant matter, and chlorophyll, and sugar. The summer in the air, his own fresh sweat festering from his back. All the scents that come with being alive, electrifying every breath. He opens his eyes a sliver and the text in the book’s the same paragraph of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that he thought he was reading. He’s awake already. So how long had he been asleep?
He opens his eyes and lets his hands drop. “I’m scared, Aubrey. I--tell me, um, please tell me what’s going on. I’m so scared. I don’t know if I’m dreaming.”
“Sit down, Basil. We aren’t going anywhere,” she says. Her eyes are spheres of guttation dew. “...Unless you want to, of course.”
“Okay.” He takes a tentative kneel. “Okay.”
“First, I’m not Aubrey. I’m someone else.” The girl sits, yanking the bundle of skin from underneath her and shaking it out. Basil doesn’t look at it. In his peripheral vision, it trails like a scarf in the next gentle wind.
He sees her and the toss of her head and the hollows under her eyes, deep enough to press his thumbs into. “But you look like her. And, I guess, you talk like her too?”
“C’mon. You really think Aubrey would have hung out with you? On this fine an afternoon?”
“Hey… that’s mean.”
“I'm just being honest here. You could stand to watch and learn.”
“...”
“What I mean is, did you really think there’s a universe where you and her could eat peach ice cream together on the benches in front of the parking lot? Think about her. Think about what you did to her, and what she does to people who wrong her. She hasn’t talked to her mom in five months. Hasn’t said a word. And she carries that bat in the house.”
“Yeah, but… her mom’s her mom. She told me she forgave me.”
“You hung her goddamned best friend, Basil. Let’s not be delusional.” She hugs her knees to herself. “...I haven’t always been honest with you, and I apologize. I’ve… known you for a long time, actually. I just wanted to see you happy.”
“If you’re not Aubrey, then who are you?”
She grins. “Have you heard of the legend of Galatea? You loved me, your first little plant, so much that I came to life to repay you. And I didn’t know how to reveal myself to you… and I didn’t want anyone else seeing my true form… so… “ She tucks a strand of root behind her ear and looks down. “Sorry. Not really sorry, though.”
“Oh… you’re the first Monstera deliciosa I’ve ever had.” Basil reaches over and turns the largest, oldest leaf by her wrist. The underside is peppered with thin, silvery holes: scars of past pests. “I had to order you from Ebay--what was it? Five years ago?--because the Othermart never sold your type. You gave all my other plants your mites infestation.”
“Um… look. I--”
“You’re still my favorite, though.” Basil smiles.
He had told this plant all his secrets, held her pot in his lap to pick dead matter off its stems, and, during the winter months where he couldn’t get out of bed or water or fertilize or dig or scrape or spray, watched, helpless, as the other plants turned to rot and dust. But this one stretched its woody limbs across the windowpane while his eyes were closed. And when he woke, the room was dark and cave-like with her foliage.
“Where’s the real Aubrey, though?” he asks.
She looks away. “Somewhere. Somewhere far away. Hanging out with her friends, or vandalizing the campus. I synthesized this skin myself--don’t worry about her.”
“And every time she’s been hanging out with me… or I thought she’d been hanging out with me…”
“It’s been me.”
“Oh… wow.”
The next breeze brings the seagulls that usually terrorize the children’s playground. They swoop and caw over their heads. “Could I ask you a favor?” she asks.
“Of course.”
“Could you keep calling me Aubrey?”
“Don’t you have another name?”
“No. I’m just someone else. But you know that now, so keep calling me Aubrey, m’kay? It’s grown on me. And don’t mention the plant thing after today. That makes things weird. Just pretend I’m her.”
Normally Basil wouldn’t take this lying down, but he wants to keep a net friend balance. The revelation that Aubrey has never been his friend is perfectly offset by the elation of a new buddy, one that knew him. And he knew her. And the world was beautiful for such miracles did happen--they happened in the books he read and the shows he watched. And that was that.
“That sounds fair,” he says. “Aubrey.”
She beams and twists her shoulders to loosen the pale strands of her hair from the woody crevices of her neck.
The seagulls circle and alight on the surface of the lake. When he looks back at her, the leaves are gone. Her skin’s back on her shoulders and her hair is pink and eyes are glassy teal and she has the ruddiness of a human girl in her flesh. But if he squints, or lets his eyes unfocus, he thinks he can see it: a slight, burnt tinge of green in her cheeks.
She lies on her stomach, propping herself up on her forearms, and rips a blade of grass along its midline. The sky is pale and smells of nothing.
“Hi,” she says.
The more he watches, the more he sees. There really are two different Aubreys. The Aubrey who walks him home or to the lake on Wednesday afternoons is not the same as the Aubrey who calls him names in front of her friends and breezes past him, eyes set forward, in the school hallways.
And he supposes she doesn’t owe him anything. If he’s been passing time and getting to know someone else all this time, it stands to reason the real Aubrey is nothing but a stranger to him, someone who promised reconciliation in the heat of his lie, who he had been naive to expect more from. And while he had been confused by Aubrey’s ambivalence to him--as well as unnerved, panicked, discomforted, nauseous--the knowledge that there’s two of them makes life easier to manage. Aubrey and someone else.
He’s warm as the counter under a cup of coffee to her when she’s got neon green in her eyes, and cold and avoidant when her eyelashes brush past nothing but dark glass. Simple rules.
Maybe there's a moment of doubt. Maybe he's looking out the second floor window with his chin on his hands while the teacher goes on about the derivative of e to the x or whatever, and from across a sunlit field she's slumped on the baseball bleachers with her friends wrenching plastic bottles and shooting caps at each other’s eyes. And he thinks to himself that maybe he owes her this--the knowledge that there's a kinder, prettier doppelganger of her running loose and hanging out with most anyone she pleases.
The baseball coach--he’s in navy blue and khaki, that’s how he knows--totters up to them and barks something, a demand for hall passes, or an admonishment. She cackles and flips him off with fingers stained with hot-chip powder. And the group scatters like swallows, to rejoin somewhere else; in the gym’s storage closets, or behind the school’s water heaters. She could use the positive publicity, he thinks. It would do her some good.
He and someone else are in the biology classroom building a house with her pack of cards, a month or two after the afternoon picnic where they met. Rare winter sunshine streams from the door, ajar, and the windows.
She eats hot chips, leaving her fingerprints over her cards. Not that they’re that clean, anyway--these cards are dog-eared and bent, each one of them coated with a unique pattern of grime. A card counter’s heaven. Which is why they don’t play poker anymore, because she keeps winning. Calls it luck when she swipes her stained thumbs on the bottom left corner of every ace.
Not that he minds. Whatever makes her happy.
“Hey, Aubrey?”
“Yeah?” She looks up.
“I know that, like, I don’t know. I’m not supposed to ask you about this, but it’s been a few months and… I figured since no one else is around…”
“What is it?”
“Um. It’s the plant thing.”
She blinks and smiles. “What plant thing? There’s a plant thing?”
“You know. The… “ He scans her eyes for malice, or warning, or even understanding, but finds nothing but a perfect display of confusion. “Nevermind.”
“What?” She holds her hand in front of her face and stifles a laugh. “You’re silly. You know that? You’re a little bit insane.”
Okay. So she doesn’t want to talk about it. “I just think… ‘cause I have some questions about the whole plant thing… and… “
“Look, Basil,” she says, pinching another card in between her fingers, “you’re the expert, not me. I don’t know anything about plants. I don’t even like eatin’ ‘em.”
Basil sits on his hands to keep them from fidgeting. “Do you want me to shut the door?”
“Actually, that’s a great idea,” she says. “It’s a little chilly, too.” Which makes sense, because she’s native to the jungle floors of Mexico, where there are no winters and the air chokes you with its warmth. Right?
His fingers are soft and smooth when he rubs them together, and when he stands, the floor is flat. The Punnett squares on the board have more than three boxes. The sunlight flows backwards. He’s having one of those moments again, what Dr. Sullivan calls derealization . He needs sensory grounding, whatever that means, and focusing on the tightness of his shoes on his feet or the itchy weight of his sweater isn’t enough.
He kicks away the doorstop and lets the closing door pinch him on the thumb, not enough to break but enough to bruise. The gasp of pain brings the first whiff of real air he’s had in months. The air is rich with odors--rotting magnolia, loam, whiteboard marker, old carpet, someone else’s hot chips, his bone-dry teeth. The sky outside the window is the divine gray-blue of those little Dutch paintings of ships being conquered by the sea. Sunlight flows upward through the cloud layer.
“Oh, shit. Are you alright?” the girl chitters.
Basil turns. Bile sits beneath his tongue and threatens to spill out. Tears brim at his eyes and he clutches his throbbing thumb with his other fist. “Y-Yeah. I’m… I’m okay.”
“You need to be more careful with yourself.” She’s green again, mouth agape, flashing rows and rows of milky spikes in her gullet. “Do you need to go to the nurse’s?”
“No, I think I’m fine. R-Really. Um,” he says.
“Hey, hey.” She rises, kicking her chair aside. “Let me take a look at it.” Her undercarriage of dried, yellow leaves rattles as it brushes against the floor.
“It’s not broken. It’ll just be sore for… I dunno, a week.” He lets her uncurl his hand with her talons. The scent of rotting greenery is overpowering. “Can I ask you--”
“We should get an ice-pack for this,” she says. “And your nails are really… uh, bitten. If you want to, I can tape them up for you.” She nods to a roll of scotch tape on the teacher’s desk.
“Okay, yeah, fine. I’ll go to the nurse’s. Look, I wanted to talk to you, Aubrey. Someone else. Whoever you are.”
The light changes. Her eyes pop and drool down her cheeks, new spheres of dew forming in her sockets as soon as the previous ones have broken against the rough bark of her eyelids. “Yeah?”
“I’ve tried to ignore it because… I--I didn’t want to make you uncomfortable, but we really need to talk about, um, you.”
“Well, what’s there to talk about?” She guides him back to the table and sits. “Fine, we can chat a bit, but I’m still very worried for your thumb.” He takes the seat opposite her and traces his fingers on the new, vivid texture of the desk.
Basil racks his shredded mind for the list of questions he’d made that morning. “What are you?”
“We literally already talked about this.”
“Okay, okay. Uh… how do you do it? How do you look exactly like her? I mean, I promise I’m not being creepy, but you even have that birthmark on the inside of her elbow and everything.”
“Well,” she says, and leans back, a lilt of pride in her voice. “I have her DNA. It’s not hard to collect someone’s DNA. All you need is a little saliva, or some flakes of skin. That’s all I need to synthesize her,” gesturing at the puddle of flesh near her ankles, “outwardness.”
“Right. And, uh…”
“Yes?”
“You act like her, too. How’s that possible?”
She shrugs and smiles and brushes her brittle hair behind her ear. “A girl watches and learns. But I’m not perfect. Look, Basil, I’m what you wanted. You wanted your beloved houseplant to be able to love you like you loved her. And your wish came true. Isn't that just that? So stop asking questions.”
Basil frowns and chews a nail. It still doesn’t seem right. “Uh, are you going to tell anyone else you’re not actually Aubrey?”
She shakes her head. “Nuh-uh. Nope.”
“Don’t they deserve honesty?”
“Since when do you care about honesty?” Her eyes glitter, nothing behind their translucency at all. “Don’t tell me you forgot what you did.”
Some reflex in his brain shoots the memories in the skull before he can recall them. “I--uh. Yeah. Okay. Fair point. M-moving on.”
“Basil,” she says, slouching over the table, batting a hand through the house of cards and scattering it asunder. “Basil, Basil. Don’t make this any more complicated than it needs to be. You and the Sunny kid have the same problem, you know? You won’t let a good thing last. You go on, and on, and on, about trying to destroy something you brought into being. You wanted a friend.”
“Yeah.”
“You wanted that friend to be Aubrey.”
“Uh, yes. Yes.”
“And you got me. You can’t make her like you, silly. So all your silly little pain gave me her form, and all your silly little anguish imbued me with my love for you. So I could be who she couldn’t.” She looks down, blinks, as if noticing the mess she’s made of the house of cards for the first time. “And now I make you happy, don’t I?”
Basil squeezes his thumb and feels his heartbeat ricocheting in his fist. “You do.”
“Good. That’s all I want. Don’t fuck it up--and you need some ice for that thumb. I’ll go.”
She scoops the limp skin into her arms and yawns again--Basil can’t stand looking at her bulbous teeth--but she doesn’t close her mouth until she’s stuffed the stretchy gossamer skin into her maw and choked it down. She slurps the rest, the wet flaps of her hair gliding without obstruction between the spirals of her milk teeth. Basil can’t look away. A sound like crunching and gurgling bubbles from her throat.
“Augh,” he says.
She wipes her mouth and smiles. “You can look away if you want.” And across her limbs, between the grooves of the vines forming her forearm and stretching across the bulges of her cheeks, a thin, webbed substance begins to form, like the ones spider mites use to catch the wind in their conquest for more green sap. The webbing thickens, hardens, until it fills the earthy divots in her body with soft, pliable flesh.
Basil thinks about vomiting.
The dewdrops that were her eyes wrap themselves in silken casing. They roll wildly, then focus on Basil, now teal, with human pink veins radiating from the iris. “Hi,” she says.
“Hi,” he says, breathless.
“You look really pale. Are you alright?” she asks, as if he hadn't seen her eat her own skin.
“Um,” he says, holding his injured thumb out for her to see. His shallow breaths register no more tones of overripe magnolia.
“Yeah, yeah. The ice. Of course. Be right back.” She squints at him. “You look like you just saw a ghost.”
“What?”
“Nothing. You just look really off.”
And just like that, someone else is Aubrey again, and she twirls out the door, and the light that streams from it is not divine but earthly and flat, and the sky is grey-blue with eggshell dullness. And he looks around him, at the world that has been collapsed from a dimension he cannot see to a lesser dimension that he also cannot see--but he can feel it. The unreality. His brain is lying to him.
She ate her own skin in front of him and asked why he seemed haunted. A trivial oddity, but the thought cycles through his brain, catching on nothing but never settling, either.
He tries to ignore it. He swings his arms while he waits for her to come back. The clock ticks coldly, uncaringly, and the sound grates against his teeth. He fiddles with the sleeve of his sweater and puts his uninjured thumb through the hole in the sleeve and then takes it out. And his eyes fall on the roll of tape.
He gets to wrapping the tape around his cuticles, which is difficult when one of his opposable thumbs is purplish and incapacitated. Many times, the tape sticks to itself on the sticky side, and he has to rip a new piece. And the tape he discards is cloudy with skin cells and dust and oil, none of which he can smell. He can smell the hot-chip dusted cards on the table, though, but only faintly.
An idea wraps around his thoughts, suffocating his mind.
He takes a playing card from the scattered pile that once was a house. It’s the ace of hearts. The markings are there--a smudge on the bottom left corner and it’s creased in the middle. He tears a long tongue of tape from the dispenser and binds the card with it, sealing the loops and whorls of chili powder underneath.
He watched this in a true crime documentary once, four years ago. Fingerprint tape goes one what’s known to forensic professionals as a lift card, so that the powder is forever pressed to a nonporous surface and can be easily scanned into a database.
He slides the card into his pocket and lets its edges cut into his hand so it wouldn’t spontaneously dematerialize.
When someone else returns, she fawns over his wrapped fingertips and presses a small ice pack to his thumb, which is beginning to resemble a tender slug. “Are you sure you don’t need to see a doctor? This looks really bad,” she says.
“I’ll be fine. It doesn’t hurt as much as it looks.”
She bobs and nods and starts shuffling her cards back into their ragged box. “You’re staring.”
Basil shakes and swallows. “I am?”
“You’ve been doing that a lot, lately.”
“Sorry. I don’t want to be weird.”
“It’s not weird or anything, don’t worry.” She grins and he can’t see any shadow of those plump milk teeth.
Even with the ice wrapped around his thumb, the ace of hearts burns a hole into his palm.
He doesn’t sleep that night, the ace of hearts still searing through his hand like an iron through silk. Not that he’s an insomniac. Some wild creature sharpens its claws on the metal sidings of his old apiary. (He’d had bees once, before their colony was overrun with varroa mites.) The creature does this all night, makes shrch shrch shrch sounds. He stares his monstera houseplant in the eyes--two blots of shadow that, in the moonlight, outline the hollow brow of a starved predator. He stares and chews his cheek and waits for the cloying effluvia of rotting flowers to seep into his room.
It’s not till dawn that he realizes the sharpening noises are from his own taped thumb brushing endlessly, incessantly, compulsively across the back of the card.
“I don’t believe in wishes,” he says to his houseplant, voice hoarse, when the sun’s rays throw themselves over her wide, thick leaves and he sees she has no eyes at all. “I never did.” He takes the card into the shower with him to stare at, in case he looks away and looks back and it’s not there.
When he goes to find her after school, she’s exactly where she is every Tuesday afternoon--in the baseball amphithere of steel and aluminum that scorches bare legs and palms any time before sunset, even in the winter. Her nail bat glints deadly in the sun and competes with her pink hair and vinyl lined eyes for attention. A pink bubble sometimes emerges from her mouth.
Behind her, in the precious shade under a dusty awning, her friends do homework. Kim and Angel and Mikhael.
As he scrambles up the bleachers, they stare, idle as a pack of lions.
“Uh… hey, Aubrey,” he says.
Aubrey tilts her head. “You want something, nerd?” Her eyes flick down to his thumb.
The glare of harsh sun on the bleacher seats pulses in time with his heartbeat--that is to say, flares rapidly. He feels around for his card and, not feeling it anywhere on his body, almost begins to cry--until he finds it in the back pocket of his shorts.
He holds it up to her, this ace of hearts that shimmers and blinds in the sunlight. “Um, I found this card. It--uh, it belongs to you, I think. You left it after we--after we hung out and built card houses yesterday.”
A shrill bark of laughter from behind her. Kim fans herself with a plastic folder. “So that’s where you were? You weren’t doin’ your goddamn laundry? I knew that was bullshit.”
“I was doing my laundry.” Aubrey snaps. “Literally why would I hang out with him? I’m not some masochist, or--or some social worker.” She chews pink gum with her mouth open and teeth bared.
“Thought not . Now get him out of my sight. Psycho fuck.” Kim pushes her glasses up, and her smile glints in the sun.
Right, right. Of course she doesn’t remember. Someone else was there. “Oh--uh. Uh, this is probably, um, someone else’s then. I don’t know--I don’t know. What I’m doing here, that is.”
Aubrey searches his face. “Me neither,” she answers, after slightly too long a pause. “Run along, loser.”
“Wait. Hold up.” The blonde one--Mik, was it?--leans forward. “Both of you are, like, actually blind. That card’s got your hot-chip dust on it. That’s the deck we don’t play poker with anymore.”
Angel gasps. “Whoa. Whoa . Wait, yeah, I can see it. I’d recognize that color anywhere.”
“What?” Basil whispers, his voice failing him.
“Pass it around.”
Angel swings down and snatches the card from Basil’s fingers, holds it up to the light, and turns it left and right. He holds it to his nose and inhales. “Yup, it’s the shit. Dunno why it’s all taped up, though.”
“Gimme.” Aubrey, in turn, plucks the card from Angel. “I don’t know what you want, flower-boy, but you got guts trying to forge one of my playing cards. Like, c’mon, how much stalking did you do trying to replicate this?”
Kim’s eyes are dark with fascination now. “That looks like your ace of hearts, Aub. It’s got, like, the horizontal fold in the middle. And the dust is, like, uh… “ She squints and pushes her glasses up again. “Uh, I don’t really care. It’s your hearts card.” A silence, and then, quietly: “How would he know how you mark your cards?”
Mik snorts. “She did it. She hung out with him. Never thought you’d be someone to do that, Aubrey. How's second base coming?”
“Shut up, you dick! And I don’t fucking know!” Aubrey says. She throws her hands up, but they’re stiff. She’s uncomfortable. “I don’t know. I didn’t hang out with him. Okay, maybe I played a round with him and Kel, like, once, but that was months ago. When Hero was still here.”
“Uh-huh,” Angel says.
Aubrey spits her gum out, presses it onto the card, and crumples the card in her fist. “This is literally a forgery job. He’s got it taped up like that because he is a fucking psychopath.”
Basil’s not really listening to them squabble. He’s too busy sweating and trying not to throw up. “Fine, if you weren’t there,” he says, his vision swimming before him. “If you weren’t--if you weren’t--” He clasps a hand over his mouth and bends over to stop the liquids from forcing their way out of him.
Aubrey lets out a strangled yelp. The card drops wetly to the seats.
Mik watches him. “If you weren’t there, Aubrey, then show us your ace of hearts. You have that card pack on you, don’tcha?”
“No. Never--”
“Yeah,” Kim says, unzipping Aubrey’s backpack, fishing around, and tossing the pack to Mikhael. “Got it.”
“Booyeah.” He opens the box and spreads the cards on the seats before him with a swipe of his hand. “Let’s see… That’s your ace of spades… your ace of clubs… your diamonds… “
Aubrey scans the cards, disbelief in her eyes. Basil’s in agony.
"Curious. Very curious. You seem to be missing a card." With a flourish, Mikhael swipes up the crumpled card, lets it dance gingerly around his fingers, and flutters it down to join the others in the deck. “Just kidding, it's right here. Voila.” He looks up at Aubrey, who trembles slightly. Both of them are silent, one with rage, one with an obscure emotion Basil’s too fucked up to identify. “Does the defendant have anything to say for herself?”
“I--”
A sob wrenches its way out of Basil. It’s followed by a louder, even wetter one. He bends over and presses his hands over his face to stuff the sobs into himself, but they break out of him one after the other. The bleachers are silent but for the throttled, hitched noises coming from his chest. Snot drips from between his fingers.
“Whoa,” Aubrey says. “Hey. Hey, what the hell. Hey.”
“I don’t know why,” Basil says, in between gasps. “I-I’m sorry. I don’t know--I don’t know why I’m… I don’t know--”
She sets the bat down with a clink and turns back to her friends, who don’t look at her. “Okay… okay, um, let’s go down and get you some shade, okay?” She puts a hand on his shoulder and leads him down the steps of the bleacher.
“Um,” he says, half-blind from the dizziness of hyperventilating and stumbling on the steps. He follows her voice down.
“Yeah. Yeah, you’re doing great.” She leads him into the shade under the bleachers and the ground regains its stillness, a little. “Here we are.”
Piles of baseball equipment tower over them. Cobwebs sling from the tiered ceiling. He wipes at his face with the sleeves of his sweater. “I--I can’t explain this. I don’t know h-how to--who are you?” Through the blur of his tears, she stands awkwardly, arms hanging helplessly to her sides. The sun bleaches the grass behind her.
“Basil,” she says, hushed. “I’m really sorry. I didn’t know you would… react like this.”
“I’m losing my mind,” he tries to say, but it comes out garbled with heat and moisture. “I’m losing my goddamn mind.”
She reaches over and pats him on the back as he falls to a kneel and cries so hard he throws up by the stockpile of baseball equipment. “It’s okay,” she breathes. “It’s okay,” like she’s repeating a mantra. “It’s gonna be okay.” And he keeps throwing up until there’s nothing left in him, and he’s just heaving dry, his fingers entangled in the dust and dead grass and Aubrey kneeling beside him.
His breath tightens with a thought: someone else and Aubrey might share the same deck of playing cards. He could say the deck of cards was with first one of them, and then the other, but it wouldn’t have proved anything. Someone else could be a thief--after all, the playing cards have never been used by both of them, simultaneously. Which leaves the simplest, most obvious method of proof.
“A-Aubrey?” he croaks, and drags his soaked sleeve across his face again.
“Yeah?”
“I need you to be… I need you to be honest with me. I just wanna ask one question.”
“...Okay. I promise.”
“Yesterday afternoon,” he says, and looks up, eyes burning from dust and acid. “Where were you?”
Aubrey picks at her nails and then looks behind her, toward the light.
“I was with you,” she says. “We were building a card house.”
“Oh, th-thank god…” His shoulders sag, the tension propping them up evaporating, but not completely. “And then?”
“And you asked me about a… a plant thing. I didn’t know what you were talking about, so…” She scratches nervously at her arm. “Look, I know what I did was hurtful--”
“Just tell me what happened.”
“Sorry. Okay. Um, you asked me about the plant thing several times… and then you asked me to, uh, close the door. And then you had your thumb caught in the door, and then I asked you to--to get some ice for it or something, I don’t know. And then,” she says, alert with sudden remembrance, “you stared at me.”
“...”
“You stared at me for a long, long time. I think you zoned out. And all the blood rushed from your face.”
“Oh,” is all Basil can say against the shudder running through him.
“And then I asked you if you were okay, and then we got you some ice for your thumb…” she trails off, watching him twist. “What is it? What’s so horrible?”
“I--I can’t--”
“Shh. Deep breaths. Take your time.”
“Who--um--I--who knocked the house down?”
Aubrey’s brow furrows. “I promise you, I’m trying to remember. Oh, right. When you opened the door, the wind came in a little, I guess. And it blew it over.”
“Oh, no.”
“Basil, what ?”
But he can’t speak. He’s hunched over, chest twitching with tiny sobs and convulsions. She sits next to him for a long time with her hands on her lap and stares at a nearby tuft of grass, sometimes reaching over to touch him on the shoulder.
“I don’t know what’s going on with you, Basil,” she says, after a while. “But if it’s about the way I pretended I didn’t know you, I’m sorry about it. Maybe I’ve forgiven you, but it’s hard to be public about it. I didn’t want people thinking that I thought what you did was right.” She puts her hand over his. “Um, I guess what I want to say is… I’ll stop doing that. So what if they know we’re friends? Fuck ‘em, right?”
Basil straightens. He catches his breath, lungfuls of it that fill his ribcage to the brim but still feel so little, like he’s breathing pockets. He looks at her, tries to discern any tinge of green in her cheeks, but there’s only pink. She’s flushed and sunburnt and embarrassed.
“It’s not that, is it,” she whispers.
What can he even say to her? That he's insane? That she fooled him into creating a monstrous hallucination of her? That he’s got psychiatric issues that make reality fragile and hollow to him? That he can’t handle when good people do bad things? Or when bad people do good things? That this thing , this someone else, this something else, was why he did what he did and will continue to do what he does no matter the drugs, the therapy, the self-awareness, the second chances?
“Don’t you hate me?” he asks instead.
“No, Basil,” voice wavering. “Never,” and she pulls him into a hug.
That night, he crosses his legs and sits in front of his monstera plant, who is now too big for him to pull into his lap. She is silent and sways softly in protest when he pushes her leaves aside to expose her stalk and roots. He douses her with the rainwater from his trough. He scoops compost into her pot and plucks the dried, dead leaves from her undercarriage.
All around her, she is crowned with the young spirals of furled pale leaves, who point towards the moon like unicorns’ horns. And her stem is elastic and woody, and she drinks and breathes and moves her fronds to a rhythm he can’t hear. She stretches upward towards the ceiling with an insensate, sturdy vitality he will never understand. “I don’t know who lied to me,” he tells her. “But I never made a wish, did I? I had it all.”
The plant hums. It doesn’t care.