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“I have something to show you.”
Owen blinks awake. He’s on the floor of Maddy’s basement, and oddly she’s standing over him. He usually sneaks out before Maddy even wakes up so he can walk the half-mile to Johnny Link’s house, and he’s both relieved and apprehensive at the departure from his routine.
“Um,” Owen says groggily. “Maddy? Is everything OK?”
“I’m fine,” Maddy replies. “Come on. Get up. I almost forgot.”
At first she sounds annoyed—or maybe he always thinks that—but Owen focuses on her voice and detects a stray thread of excitement.
“I wrote something,” she says. “A story. About The Pink Opaque.” She pauses and peers—meaningfully, it feels like, but confusingly—at Owen. “About Isabel.”
“Like, you wrote a script for the show?” Owen says at a lag. “That’s cool.”
“Well, no, it’s a third-person narrative,” Maddy says. “But it’s about the stuff that wouldn’t happen in the actual show. Probably.”
“Oh. Right.”
When Owen watches the Pink Opaque, the world of the show feels so real that he’s never really considered there being anything that lies outside of the TV set’s four walls. It’s all there.
“Or at least, stuff they wouldn’t show on the Young Adult Network.”
Maddy turns around. Owen watches, uneasily curious. She leans down and pulls out a notebook from underneath the couch, green with peeling-off stickers: Void High School, Isabel and Tara’s tattoos, If lost return to Maddy Wilson—or don’t. Maddy opens it halfway.
“It takes place after Season 3, Episode 7. Homecoming To Get You. You know, when Tara gets really hurt in her school gym at the end and Isabel can only hear her groans of pain on the psychic plane? Obviously Tara saves herself cause she’s a total badass, but…”
“But what?” Owen says, feeling weirdly defensive. “I liked that episode.”
“I wished Isabel was there to comfort her.”
“Oh.”
Maddy says, like a secret, “I think I always wish that.”
“That...that would be nice. But it’s impossible.”
“I think it depends,” Maddy says. “I don’t know. Do you really want to read it?”
“What? Of course!” Owen says, a little too enthusiastic. The words sound forced even when he actually feels them. It’s what gets him in so much trouble with his dad. “Of course I do.”
“Okay,” Maddy says and stands shoulder-to-shoulder with Owen, the notebook open to a page full of Maddy’s jagged black script. Owen swallows nervously.
When they watch the Pink Opaque it’s like a rollercoaster, stalled, waiting for the drop. Nobody is coming to help, to let Owen down to the ground the easy way. Owen would look away but he can’t. He’s a captive audience. Even when they watch episodes they’ve seen a million times he feels suspended and anxious, like something will change in the episode, something new that could change the Pink Opaque forever, turn it into something he doesn’t enjoy, or even worse, something he does. This time his arm is inches from Maddy’s, from the fingers she used to scrawl a new story, and he feels closer to the drop than ever as he scans the page.
Isabel was on her third day of tears. She couldn’t take it anymore. Every week, there was a new monster trying to hurt innocent people.
Trying to hurt Tara.
Her mom brought her chicken noodle soup and looked at her with big worried eyes. She hadn’t gone to school since Mr. Melancholy’s last trick. Her mom told the school that Isabel was under the weather. She hated lying to her parents, but it was necessary. Tara always told her that. If people knew about the Pink Opaque, Mr. Melancholy would target them right away. She couldn’t let that happen, even if it meant gagging on pills that didn’t do anything. But I am sick, she thought. I really am sick. Being apart from Tara is making me sick.
When her mom left Isabel sat on her bed anxiously listening to her footsteps disappear. She exhaled and brought her fingers to the nape of her neck. The comforting hum of The Pink Opaque’s connection warmed up her shaking fingers, but it wasn’t enough to calm the sickness in her stomach.
She wanted to talk to Tara on the Psychic Plane, to tell her about her day even if she had just stayed in bed with soup and ice cream and her sadness — her Melancholy, she thought with a shudder of fear — and look at her face. But she knew just looking across a barrier of miles and miles of driveways and community pools and Monsters of the Week wouldn’t be enough.
All of a sudden she got up and looked in the mirror. “Don’t worry, Tara,” she said to nobody, hoping she still might hear her even if she’d long left the Psychic Plane to get dressed. “I’m going to fix this.”
Owen looked at Maddy, and he wanted to say something about the story, something he didn’t know yet. But she was staring ahead of him with glassy eyes. He kept reading, anxious about what Isabel was going to do.
She opened her closet and looked around for Melancholic minions who liked hiding in the shadows. Thankfully it was all clear. But her closet was a mess and her clothes kept falling off the hangers. She sighed, looking at clothes which all seemed so drab all of a sudden, even the new stuff she got back to school shopping. Until she found it and smiled.
At their old Sleepaway Camp one of the camp counselors invited the campers to a party in the woods, with cheap speakers and fruit punch. She was scared of being out after dark, because the counselors kind of sucked at their jobs, but she went anyway, and Tara was there, and that became a pattern. If Tara was there she’d go anyway.
She had worn this dress. It was dark purple and had a lacy flower over her heart. Tara was in her fake leather jacket with her hair slicked back. She had stared at Isabel and for some reason Isabel had liked the way she was pretending not to stare while they both knew she was. Then Tara saw Isabel’s boots, heavy and buckled and heeled, and had said “Damn, those are sick,” and they both had laughed and danced to music Tara didn’t like and Isabel wouldn’t admit she did.
Back in her bedroom Isabel pulled out her eyeliner and started putting it on. She could almost hear Tara’s voice say, Hurry up! We’ve got a world to save! but she wanted to look pretty. Even though that — looking pretty when she saw Tara — wasn’t what this was about. It was about harnessing the full power of the Pink Opaque to stop Mr. Melancholy for good.
And getting to the other side of the county so she could see Tara face to face was the way to do it. With some difficulty Isabel opened her window and started to climb out.
Owen can see the impression of ink from underneath but Maddy doesn’t turn the page. For a few seconds Owen doesn’t say anything, until he finally goes, “Wow.”
It’s painfully inadequate. Everything he wants to say is tucked just out of reach in the pit of his stomach.
Maddy breaks out of her trance, eager. “Did you like it?”
“Oh, yeah,” Owen says quickly. “I—I loved it. It’s super cool. How long did it take you to write that?”
“I don’t know,” Maddy says. “I got bored in Calculus and started daydreaming. But it wasn’t like a normal daydream. I could see it all so clearly, just like I was watching the show with you. Then Mr. Franklin called on me and it snapped me out of it. I got home and started writing until I fell asleep. I woke up with it all done. My handwriting gets a little sloppy at the end, though. I guess I was pretty tired.”
“Oh. Cool,” Owen says, feeling inexplicably jealous. “Do you…do you think Isabel would actually do that, though?”
Maddy looks up from her notebook, frowning. “Do what?”
“Try to meet Tara in real life. It seems really dangerous and she’s so—nervous. I mean, I’m supposed to save the world? I don’t even have my learner’s permit,” Owen says, slipping into a haphazard impression of Isabel’s voice that he immediately regrets, his voice falling back to its usual register like a gag reflex.
“Um. Yeah, I guess,” Maddy looks back down, and Owen can’t read her. She seems frustrated, then indestructible. “But you expect Tara to be the brave one. You can see that stuff every weekend on the Young Adult Network. My story is about Isabel breaking out of her shell and admitting how she feels even though she probably wouldn’t in the show. Not this season, anyway. That’s what makes it… transformative.”
“Oh,” Owen says, feeling dumb. “I guess that makes sense. I’m still not sure, though. How will she even get to the other side, anyway?”
Maddy doesn’t answer. She closes the notebook and shoves it in Owen’s arms. “You should take it home and keep reading it,” she says. “If you want.”
“No, no, that’s okay.” He almost says, I don’t want my dad to find it. But even the idea of saying it gives him a headache. It feels like he’d be casting a bad spell. So he says, “you wouldn’t want me to lose it. It’s yours. It’s your… your art, Maddy.”
“It’s just for fun,” Maddy says dismissively. “Next Saturday maybe you can come over early and tell me what you think.” But Owen feels uneasy about the whole thing. Maddy would never really think the Pink Opaque is just for fun. It’s more than that.
Maddy goes upstairs. Owen sneaks out, notebook tucked into his sleeping bag, feeling like he picked the wrong option in a video game and lost access to the next level, like Maddy was expecting something from him that he was too stupid to give. Maddy always seems like she knows everything, and Owen never knows anything. He thinks of the party in Maddy’s story, of Tara and Isabel dancing together. Owen never gets ideas like that.
It’s still early, even though the time it took to read Maddy’s story had felt much longer. The sun is blinding and Owen’s head hurts. He reaches hesitantly into his sleeping bag as if to confirm Maddy’s notebook really exists. When he trips it’s a few seconds until he feels the bend of his ankle.
Owen wakes up with his forehead scraping against the harsh bark of a massive, sky-scraping tree. He’s crouched in grass and leaves and dirt. He tries to speak, if even to say just “what the hell” like a horror-movie moron, but he’s so out of breath it comes out as rough exhales. Like he’s been running.
He gets up on unsteady legs. There’s a soreness behind his knees he doesn’t understand, far beyond the natural discomfort of Maddy’s floor, a pain he’s gotten so used to he might prefer it to the implied surveillance of his own bed.
He glances around. The woods are dark and green and he has to focus his eyes to get a good look at anything—otherwise, it’s a shifting mass of leaves and color, the gray sky breaking through at impossible heights. These aren’t the woods he used to hide in for hours on end, playing at pirates and bandits all by himself because nobody was interested, before his mom told him it wasn’t funny, that he’s worrying her, that other boys came back to reality long before he even considered it.
Where is he?
He starts to walk. There’s nothing else he can do. He briefly looks back, behind the tree he’d come to at the base of. But it all looks the same. Gradually he becomes certain which direction he has to go, like he’s being pulled forward from the center of his torso.
Suddenly, a flash of something close to burning—a little zap of static electricity, building on his skin—at the back of his neck and Owen is straining to hear something from so, so far away, like morning bird calls or whispers in the hallway.
Isabel? a voice says. Is that you?
“Isabel,” Owen repeats so low he can hardly hear himself. “Oh, no.” It’s the same shameful, insecure feeling as when a new girl at school had spotted Maddy’s episode guide hidden underneath Owen’s desk and grinned, “The Pink Opaque? I love that show! Ugh, it’s my guilty pleasure. It’s so cheesy, but like, in a good way.” And Owen had thought maybe he was desperate to meet other fans besides the two of them, but it was all wrong, like there was something bleeding out between Maddy’s house and Owen’s and the Void dark room, something that could never be contained and left messy stains in every corner, and Owen was embarrassed at how far it had travelled, that nobody could get it back to where it was meant to be. What could any of this have to do with Isabel?
Isabel, it’s me. What’s going on? You ran halfway across the county in an hour!
Owen swallows. It’s just a coincidence. Some kid named Isabel got lost in the woods. He isn’t qualified to help, anyways, so he keeps on moving towards the place he, somehow, knows he has to go. He hadn’t even noticed the saliva building in his throat, could hardly remember to blink, the way his body was moving forward as if on an airport conveyor belt and he was along for the ride, strapped in.
After eternities in the endless, blurred forest, Owen is dizzy, sweat at his wrists.
I’m almost there, Isabel. Don’t worry. I’m coming to help.
Owen stutters like a scratched DVD, puts a hand to his face and feels tears—of frustration, of fear, of something else—against his palm. He can hardly see with the way his eyes are welling up. He cannot see the forest and he cannot see the sky and he cannot see the water and he cannot see the branch, and he almost falls face-first into the murkiness but he grabs his own arm to steady himself and opens his eyes wide and scared and—
Sees Isabel in the water. Her hair falling in her face.
Her reflection in the pond.
Owen is breathing hard, again. Owen’s hands go to his lips, where salty tears have left drugstore lipstick running, dabs of purple on his fingertips. Where his hair frames his face. Where he holds his arms straight at his sides and feels the flowy fabric of a dress, the way it falls on his body perfectly, like it’s meant to be there. He doesn’t look down again. He doesn’t—
ISABEL
TURN AROUND
Flinching back, he does. And she’s right there. Standing between two impossibly tall, weeping trees and staring at him and even though she’s just a blurred figure of black and blonde he can feel her gaze. Can recognize her silhouette from hours of the Pink Opaque. Hours of feeling Tara right next to him like she really exists.
“Tara,” he says in a voice that is not his own and it works like a stage direction for the log his heavy boots rest on to collapse, to leave him going down yelping, cold and wet and—
“Isabel!” Tara screamed. She sprinted, knowing all too well how deep the ponds can get here, deeper than any pond should be, especially when Mr. Melancholy was awake in the sky watching. He would carve out the world just to hurt them. “Wait!”
Isabel floated in the water, supine, her dress flowing all around her. Tara had to pause to hold her breath, but she knew she had to act quick, too. She leaned down, her jeans against the muddy shore, and slid her arms under Isabel’s back.
“Come on,” Tara whispered, soothing. It’s softer than she’s ever heard her own voice, and she wasn’t sure if she liked it. But Isabel did, from the way she melted into Tara’s embrace. “It’s OK. Don’t worry. Let’s get you out of here.”
She looked down hoping for a nod but she just saw Isabel’s blurred eyes stutter shut. “Oh no,” Tara said. “Stay awake, just stay awake so we can get out of here. I know how to get back to Main Street. Come on!”
When Isabel fell asleep, she almost sank. Tara squeezed tighter.
Owen arrives on Maddy’s doorstep, still half-dreaming. Dislodged. Clothes tattered and dirty, concealing the seams of this body as they struggle to hold together. Head cloudy, thinking distantly of fingers pushing back long wet hair. Of Maddy, or someone who looked a lot like her.
“Holy shit,” Maddy says when she opens the door, electric eyes widening. “Thank fuck my parents aren’t home. Let’s go downstairs. Come on.”
And just like that, Owen is himself again. He looks at his arms, at the way they stick out of his gray t-shirt. It’s all so haphazard, everything he sees of himself. Isabel, pretty and mostly graceful, would never stand for it.
Owen feels sick.
“Where were you?” Maddy says. “You’re covered in dirt. Were you rolling around in the woods?”
It’s a cue for canned laughter but Owen can’t rise to the occasion, trembling. Maddy goes, “oh,” like it’s a revelation. And it kind of is.
“Come on,” Maddy says again, and takes a hand in hers, leading Owen down the stairs. Owen doesn’t breathe until the TV is in sight.
Isabel woke up with wet teeth and hair stuck to her forehead and Tara’s arms around her shoulders. When their eyes met she almost couldn’t believe it.
She looked so real. The weight of her arms on Isabel’s body was so real. Her face was so real, so—
“Isabel,” Tara said. “Stop shaking. You’re safe. Nothing bad happened.”
“How did you find me?”
“I could sense you getting closer and closer,” Tara said. “I started sending out signals.” Tara’s face was red, from exertion or something else, maybe. “You came a long way to find me, didn’t you?”
“I needed it all to stop,” Isabel said. “I couldn't handle it anymore. Mr. Melancholy, the weekly nightmares, the—”
“I know,” Tara replied. “I can’t stand us being apart either. We belong together, Isabel.”
Oh.
Tara exhaled in one heaving go like she’d been holding her breath for a very long time.
Isabel’s heart hammered, and she looked down shyly. “You really see right through me, don’t you?”
“Of course I do,” Tara smirked, with warmth in her eyes. “We’re the Pink Opaque.”
“You need to change,” Maddy says bluntly, but the worry in her eyes is impossible to miss. A rare feat, at least for Owen’s interpretative skills. “I have… I…”
Owen watches as Maddy pulls out a drawer in a far corner of the basement.
“I have this,” Maddy says, and turns around with a dress in her hands. It’s dark purple. A lace flower over the heart.
Owen’s eyes widen. “Maddy. How—”
“It’s okay,” Maddy says. “I promise.”
Owen’s damp, dirty clothes go in a cobweb-infested hamper, and Owen steps into the dress.
It doesn’t fit like in the dream, but it fits.
Owen pauses. The dream?
It’s not important. It can’t be.
It’s not, not until Maddy’s hand rests between Owen’s shoulder blades to adjust the dress’ thin ribbon straps and it burns just like the static shock of Tara’s signals guiding Isabel all the way back home, back to a home that Isabel had never considered one but which had always existed.
“Did you like the story,” Maddy says. “The rest of it.”
“The story,” Owen repeats, not having read it, knowing it by heart anyway. “Yes. I wondered what it would take Isabel to break through. What she would have to—to realize.”
“I want to kiss you right now.”
Owen stares forward. Catches a reflection of purple on the TV screen. “Oh.”
Maddy says, “Do you want to?”
Owen wants so, so many things. He thinks of her reflection in the water, of the swish of Isabel’s skirt when she fell, of Tara’s arms wrestling her from the water.
With some difficulty, Owen’s gaze turns from the screen, from its staticky surface halfway to cracking at the edges, towards Maddy's pressing gaze, and—
Owen is still so cold, from the pond that was not a pond and the dream that was not a dream, and Maddy is so, so warm. Her glow surrounds them like a protective casing from all Melancholy that might burst this bubble.
They kiss in seconds, slow down, melt together. “Isabel,” Maddy whispers hurriedly against Owen’s mouth. “Isabel—,” she pauses like she’s been shocked, “Oh no. I, I’m sorry.”
Isabel. Isabel. Isabel.
Maddy is unnaturally still, waiting for Owen’s forgiveness or something else entirely. Her caged voice from the bleachers echoes in Owen’s head. I like girls. Girls, girls, girls, girlgirlgirlgirlgirl. What about you, Isabel? Do you like. Girls?
“Can you say it again?”
It feels wrong, humiliating, to ask Maddy for anything, especially something like this—but she has never wanted anything as much as this. Not really.
“Please.”
This body wasn’t made for asking for what it wants, but it could. In this dress? She could.
“Isabel,” Maddy breathes in response, then keeps kissing her. Isabel kisses back.
“I missed you,” Isabel says, slow and then fast. “I know that we just—I still missed you. I miss you every time I’m not in your basement, under your blankets, watching the Pink Opaque.” She can’t believe what’s spilling out of her, staining her purple dress, but she doesn’t mind. “I missed you, Tara.”
She gapes at Isabel, then shakily smiles. Leans in for one more kiss then another.
Isabel didn’t know she was made to withstand this much attention.
“I missed you too,” lip against lip. “You were so far away.”