Tuesday Mooney Wore Black. Kate Racculia
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concrete of the light station. And Abby’s fringed scarf – Tuesday could still picture her haggling with a cart seller on Essex Street – caught around the station’s high metal railing, a black banner flying twenty feet in the air.
If Tuesday hadn’t left Abby’s house – if Tuesday had gone to the wharf, or even just asked what was so special about that night, and why Abby wanted to go – she would have seen. She would have known what had happened to her best friend.
She might have stopped it from happening.
But she didn’t.
Seven-odd weeks later, she finally did something. The day of the memorial, in Abby’s closet, on the tall shelf next to her sweaters, was a short stack of board games, shelved in order of how often they were played: Life, Clue, and on top, Ouija.
It was the same Ouija box that Tuesday, wrists and pride still smarting from the police’s handcuffs, balanced on her lap a lifetime later. The box was old, foxed and squashed, dark blue with a lighter blue sketch of a hooded figure, one hand raised. Good old William Fuld’s mysterious oracle, a quality product made by Parker Brothers, right at home in Salem, Mass. She hadn’t taken the board out in years, hadn’t wanted the reminder (as though she needed a reminder), but maybe she should have. It was like seeing an old friend. Abby had personalized the edges of the board with pictures cut from magazines, a Sgt. Pepper collection of heads and shoulders: Lydia Deetz. A winged Claire Danes. Three different Keanus, a John Lennon, a Morrissey, an Edward Scissorhands, a Wednesday Addams. Anjelica Huston as the Grand High Witch. The 27 Club: Hendrix, Cass, Joplin, Cobain. Mulder was glued upside down, next to the sun in the upper left corner, a word-bubble connecting his mouth with the word YES; Scully was opposite, glued beside the moon, saying NO. Abby had sealed everything flat and smooth with a coating of clear nail polish. It still smelled, chemical and teenage.
She rubbed her eyes. God, she was tired. And confused.
She set the Ouija board on her knees and placed the plastic planchette, yellowed with age, a short nail spiked through the clear viewing hole, on the board. Gunnar, purring like a fiend, rubbed up against her leg.
She coughed.
“Abby,” she said, and she was worn so thin that just saying Abby’s name out loud made her throat tighten and her eyes sting and she cried a little. She coughed again. “Abigail Hobbes. Calling Abby. Abby Cadaver. It’s me. It’s Tuesday Mooney.” She twitched her lips. “Your living best friend.”
Gunnar bonked his forehead into her shin.
She rested the tips of her index fingers on the planchette and closed her eyes.
“Abby,” she said, “I thought I saw you.”
She breathed in and out.
“And then I – heard you.”
She lifted one lid to peek. Nothing. Gunnar was lying on his back now, furry limbs splayed like a little murder victim. He blinked at her.
“Abby, are you there?” she asked.
Silence.
“That’s settled, then,” said Tuesday. She laughed, but it wasn’t from amusement. She was relieved. And disappointed. And worried. She had no idea if she was losing her mind.
Again.
Friday.
Tuesday’s alarm went off at the usual time. Her arm shot out from a mound of duvet and smacked Snooze with a great deal of violence.
Before any discernible time had passed, it went off again.
And this time she remembered the night before.
Her brain sprang to life, dinging like a pinball machine. She had chased Pryce’s clue into the bowels of Park Street – ding! – and found a secret code – ding! – with a wealthy, obscenely attractive stranger – ding-ding! – who also – ran away and left her to the cops?
Had that really – had that—
She pulled her duvet up and over her face. Her lips cracked into a demented grin. Tuesday, alone in her apartment, cocooned in her bed, began to laugh. It came out first like a strangled hiss, air pushing between her clenched teeth, but the more she thought about it, the more absurd – she was exhausted, but it was – she was – her head was full of helium. The laugh pushed itself up and out into a full-throated cackle.
Tuesday Mooney was awake.
And now that she was awake, she had some decisions to make. Like: Should she call in sick? Or was calling in sick delaying the unavoidable; was it better to suck it up and get the worst of the “yes, that was me you saw on the internet in handcuffs” conversations out of the way before next week?
She stopped laughing and sat up straight.
Her parents.
It was too early to call her parents. Any call from her before eight a.m. would scare the daylights out of them, but she should probably try to talk to them before they saw it somewhere. Complicating matters was the fact that her parents had recently discovered Facebook. At her brother’s insistence, they’d created a page for Mooney’s Miscellany, which was really a way for Ollie to post pictures of the rare action figures he traded and sold out of the store on weekends. Her father thought Facebook was hilarious – “Six people liked what I had for breakfast. What a world!” – and her mother mostly used it to take personality quizzes. “Guess what?” she’d say, as though passing along hot intel. “If I were a Muppet, I’d be Gonzo.”
Did they look at Facebook at home before opening the store at ten? She didn’t know. She turned off her alarm and glared at her phone. She could check her own Facebook app and see how bad it was. She loved the internet, but she loathed feeling so fucking available. So exposed. And so goddamn distracted.
Gunnar howled from the kitchen.
She didn’t want to call them.
She didn’t want to have to explain any of this. She already knew what they’d think, even if they didn’t say it. Especially if they didn’t say it. It would ooze into all the cracks and crevices between their words.
And they would be right, this time, to be worried.
Her phone rang. The screen filled with a picture of her parents’ dog, Giles Corey III, pressed to sleep under a mound of couch cushions.
She slid her fingertip across the phone.
“Is this my daughter the terrorist?” her mother said. Sally Mooney had a voice like dark maple syrup, sweet and deep. And she was Gonzo; she invented strange, mostly useless things (an automated toast butterer, a case for golf pencils) and held firm beliefs about the healing powers of various Stevie Nicks songs. Tuesday didn’t need an online quiz to tell her that her mother was a weirdo.
“I was really hoping I could break it to you guys,” she said.
“There’s this thing, dear terrorist daughter, called the internet. It’s faster than the speed of a daughter’s admission of guilt.”
Tuesday tucked herself farther under the covers. “I don’t feel that guilty. Lucky, yes. And ashamed, maybe? That I got caught.”
“It’s true, we raised you to be slipperier than that. Are you okay? Ted – Ted, pick up the phone. It’s your daughter the terrorist.”
The line crackled and her father’s higher voice – nerdier, brighter, the voice of an overly enthusiastic cartoon squirrel – broke in. “You say terrorist, I say anarchist. Moonie! What the hell happened?”
“I—” And here it was: the wall. When asked for an explanation, Tuesday