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“Vince was a lunatic in all the best ways. He’s not done with life, despite being dead.
“We’re out of earshot even if the guard comes back,” said Tuesday. “So talk. What are you looking for?” “You mean, out of life?” Archie’s low voice wrapped around them in the darkness. “In a job? In a partner?” “You know what I mean.” “I don’t know.” “Does that answer apply universally?” asked Dex.
“Jesus, he is charming,” Dex said to Tuesday. “Charming like a psychopath. Are we sure he’s not going to murder us down here?” He paused. “That’s a legitimately horrifying thought. Please don’t do that to us, Mr. Arches. I haven’t drunk half of what I intend to before I die.”
Dex perked. Oh you sweet, stupid man, he thought. He had broken not one but two of the Tuesday commandments: Thou shalt not gaslight. And thou shalt not condescend.
It didn’t matter that, ten seconds ago, she’d wanted to rip Archie’s head from his shoulders (or his clothes from his body; it was getting progressively more difficult to tell where one desire ended and the other began).
Maybe this was how adult friendships happened: by accident, embroidered over time, visible only from the height of years. She smiled at him, bewildered and grateful. “Tuesday,” said Dex, wary, “why are you looking at me like that?”
He was giddy almost, buzzing like a neon tube, lit by something deeper than the excitement of finding a clue. His voice rose so high, so quickly, it cracked.
“Money has meaning when you put it to work.”
No good ever came from ghosts. From seeing or talking to them. Tuesday knew.
Tuesday hadn’t expected to have a best friend. “Best friends” occupied the same imaginary territory as fairies or leprechauns, mythical things kids (girls especially) were told they should be looking for.
Just because you wanted to talk to dead people didn’t mean you wanted to be dead yourself.
Only it was more than a board game. It was a telephone for talking to dead people. Tuesday hadn’t believed in it like that, as a literal link to the other side. Ouija boards were like Tarot cards: they didn’t tell you anything your subconscious didn’t already know.
Dorry was a girl after her own heart: a smart, strange, searching girl. If Tuesday could protect her from a Much Worse of her own, she would, even if it meant breaking the heart that they shared. A broken heart hurt like hell, but it kept beating. A lost mind was something else entirely.
Tuesday sat back in her chair, tucked one foot under the opposite knee, and the warm growl of Archie’s voice bubbled up from somewhere in the back of her brain. He wasn’t saying anything in particular. He didn’t have to. He was always there lately, like a daydream she couldn’t (and didn’t want to) stop having, or a riddle she couldn’t (but wanted to) solve.
Her first instinct was not to read the comments—the first rule of retaining whatever faith you had left in humanity was Never, ever read the comments—but she couldn’t help it. She read the comments.
Dex didn’t believe in coincidences. Wait. That wasn’t true at all. Dex believed in coincidences, and fate, and signs and wonders, and the great interlocking gears of the universe telling him to do things, and though he’d gotten pretty good at ignoring what the universe was telling him to do (most recently: quit your soul-sucking job and open a karaoke bar!), it didn’t mean he couldn’t still hear it screaming.
pockets. Yes, Bert made him feel calmer. Made him feel like he didn’t have to put on a show. Though that produced its own kind of uneasiness, because if Dex wasn’t putting on a show, he wasn’t quite sure who to be.
following the loop around the library’s open courtyard. Connecting the original old library with its modern addition, the courtyard was a gorgeous square arcade with a shady sheltered walkway, tables and chairs looking out over a garden, and a fountain with a statue of a pixie, perhaps, or some other breed of mythological creature, dancing whilst taunting a baby with some grapes. The fountain was turned off, whether for the night or the season, Dex couldn’t say. He didn’t remember the last time he’d been here, but he remembered the feeling: of being outside and inside at the same time, the air
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“Galahad couldn’t see the grail either. He had to figure out from these apparitions”—he pointed to the conga line—“what it all meant. But it was too soon. He was too young to solve it. He had to spend the rest of his life questing in order to understand the first, the only, the organizing mystery of his life.” Bert turned to the next panel. “He figured it out eventually, and came back to the castle, freed the king. Galahad got the grail in the end.”
“We spend our whole lives becoming worthy. Of ourselves. Our mysteries, our solutions, the fruits of our quests.”
Part of her wanted to be a baby and pretend that if she just stayed here in the library, hidden among the art books, she wouldn’t have to deal with any of it. Libraries had always made her feel like a kid, in a good way: secret and safe and taken care of, rocked to sleep in a cocoon of books.
Dorry smiled into her chocolate milk. She shifted on the metal bench. She didn’t know what to do next. Sitting next to Ned felt both normal and super-weird, because they didn’t know each other at all and yet it felt like they did. Like maybe they were already friends. She hadn’t been friends with a boy since preschool, and those friendships existed mainly in stories her mom had told her.
Archie had a deep appreciation for the act of writing something down instead of typing. A love of paper goods and pens. It was a predilection—some might call it an affectation,
Just because he could, occasionally, pretend not to care, the truth never went away; the truth never stopped being true.
She knew who she was, and who she was was herself. She took care of herself. She came home to herself. She was enough, herself. So to meet a person who was truly interesting, who presented both a mystery and a challenge, whose life was extraordinary to her yet familiar—she had not seen that coming.
It wasn’t that Archie suspected his mother was having an affair with Vince, though he wouldn’t have blamed her. He’d forgotten she could be this other person, this lighter person, who hummed to herself, who looked at the sky and the ocean, who noticed the world with something like hope, and he didn’t care who or what was making it possible. Vince had snuck up on them both. In the span of a month, the weirdo next door had become a person who made their house feel, improbably, like a kind of home.
wondering, after all of this, how he could have any appetite at all. But he did. He could’ve eaten the table. He could’ve eaten the chairs. Just so long as it meant he could use his mouth, his lips, and his tongue for some activity other than lying.
Tuesday was neither ice nor fire. She was numb.
Dex wasn’t much of a hugger, or an expresser of earnest personal emotion—he was expressive, sure, his whole life was one extended urge to Madonna-style express himself. But when he really felt something, he was much more likely to keep it to himself, to keep it down deep, to turn it over and over in his soul like the Precious. Which, he had always assumed, was probably why he and Tuesday clicked in the first place. They suspected how deeply the other felt things, and it was almost too deep to talk about. So they didn’t. But after he set down her box—it was so light!—he wanted to hug her, hug
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“Remember he’s a human. Not a database or a file or a whole filing cabinet to dig through.” Tuesday sat very quietly and stared at him. “All humans are filing cabinets,” she said finally. “Some are just better organized than others.” “Tuesday.”
He believed other people were valuable, and made them feel it.
She was happy he had found what he’d been looking for, but she was worried too—selfishly worried—that Dex would go away. That she’d just picked her head up and realized what knowing Dex, having Dex as a friend, meant to her, and now—poof! Gone.
it was just stuff. Things. Objects. They weren’t important. And yet, in their abandonment they suddenly felt like the most important, most symbolic artifacts of her life, as if that box held everything she was or had been or even liked about herself, and she had been careless enough to lose it. She had been careless.
The buildings in the city beyond got brighter. Who needed real stars? Those lights would be her constellations. She crossed and knelt on the opposite seats, propped her head in her hands, and looked out the window. Tuesday loved being alone. She always had. As a kid, it had never scared her,
That time alone in the dark, time alone with her self, traveling near and far through books, living in her mind, was what gave her the strength to go out and live in the real world. And there was no place on earth like a city for being alone. That was why she moved to Boston in the first place: no one there knew, when she first arrived, that she was Tuesday Mooney and that for a while she had talked to ghosts. The city had remade her into a glorious unknown, and she had enjoyed, for years, the perfect company of strangers.
What had seemed boring once had become infinitely interesting, essential even, now that it was gone.
Dorry had been braced for a duel of wits with a tiger and she’d gotten a drowsy housecat.
If she thought sex—and it hadn’t been great sex, but good enough sex, sex with potential (she had to imagine it would be much better when Archie’s body hadn’t been so recently pulped)—would take her mind off anything, she was wrong. It had sharpened something. Made her hungrier. Desire, in Tuesday’s experience, was a feedback loop.
In the afte math of y death, you, and every ne you know, will be invited to play a game. It is imperative tha you do so, and t at you not do so alone. Why? Because I am a horribly old man and must hav a dying wish. Humor me. In playing my game, know that you honor my last equests: that you make your way through this world with curios ty and courage, that you follow strange clues, make detours, and that you do not p ay it alone. Find a partner or two or three or f ur. Cross and crisscross your paths with the paths of others. I only had the pleasure of being your friend for a short time, but you
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Of all sorts of people, old and young, black and Asian and white and brown, skinny and fat and short and tall, and they were all in costume, and because they were all in costume, it was like looking straight into their hearts at what they loved or who they wanted to be.
A wish flickered across her mind: that her mother’s funeral had been like this. A party. A concert. A place she could imagine her mother grabbing her hands and asking her to dance, and even though her mom could be sad, and angry, and sometimes she had been so painfully uncool it made Dorry’s teeth hurt, her mother had known how to be happy. And when she was happy, it sort of radiated out, like a campfire, and could make you happy too. Yes: if her mother’s funeral had felt like remembering it was possible to be really happy—that, Dorry knew, she never would have forgotten.
It was a face for occasions—it was too much work, to put on and take off, to wear every day. But that was part of why he loved it. It was dramatic and haunted, his own face but better, the face he wore when he wanted to feel more alive.
Tuesday had shone a klieg light on his naked need for attention, and what was drag—what wasn’t drag, really? Drag was punk, drag was protest, drag was performance and art and fantasy, drag was as many things as there were people who practiced it—though for him, what was drag but a sequined scream? Look at me. Really look at me, please. I dare you to look at me and know me and love me.
than when he allowed himself to be most himself. When he was most himself, he ran the constant risk of being entirely Too Much. The kind of Too Much that could get the literal shit kicked out of you. “I know, I know,” Dex said. Pop the moment, he thought. Pop it like a balloon. “Just another needy queen, begging for attention.” Rabbit’s white-gloved hand slipped into his own and squeezed. “You’re astonishing,” he said. Dex wanted desperately to believe him. But that would have required believing it himself first.
“The point of a game is the experience of playing. The obstacles and the choices you make to get to the objective. The possibility of winning, the danger of loss, shapes the game. Risk and reward give the game suspense, a plot. But winning or losing is not the whole point.”
“How can you be so cool about all of this?” he snapped. And he was suddenly so present, jerked angrily out of his dreaminess, that Tuesday almost told him the truth. That she wasn’t cool at all. She was a walking exposed nerve. If she looked cool, it was because cool was the only costume she had in her closet. Archie still hadn’t learned how to see through the way things appear to the way they might actually be.
“That wasn’t the game. That wasn’t Pryce’s design. To keep the money for myself felt like stealing. I’m not rich, relatively speaking.” She turned her head from Archie to Lyle and back again. “But I have savings, I have options. I have time. A strange stranger gave me—gave us—thirteen thousand dollars and told us to use our imaginations. To seek well: to be curious, to find what we can in the world, to be alive while we’re alive. I thought of that line in his obituary—” Lyle’s eyes glittered. “—about regretting arriving at death’s doormat with full pockets. I felt he was saying—don’t hoard
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Lyle looked at Tuesday, and Tuesday looked back. She didn’t know Lyle, not really. Not from the details she’d found in her research, not from the brunch they’d shared, and not from this fifteen-minute interview. Lyle didn’t know her either. They were their own selves, separate humans living separate lives. But they were aligned nonetheless, linked inextricably, and not just by the death of Vincent Pryce but because all lives are linked, all the world is one tremendous story.
For weeks she’d been thinking of everything she might see through them, but now that her real life had caught up to her dreams, she was painfully awake. Her heart hurt. It was almost too much to be awake inside her own dream. What if it turned into a nightmare?
She could understand why someone would close up their house and push the whole world away. Sometimes the whole world hurt.
