Afraid of the Dark

Banner by cosmic love.. One of my favorites so far, hands down. It just suits the mood of the story so well, don't you think? I love it.

The Christmas after my father left, my mother splurged and bought my sister, Emma, a pair of skates and me a Polaroid camera. My mother fussed about it later, worrying aloud that I would've rather had a pair of skates, too, explaining sheepishly that she only bought it for me because my father had always wanted to get me one (too late, she acted on his every wish with an almost manic devotion once he was gone). But I never felt left out when Emma used to walk down to the Baptist church parking lot to rollerskate without me; the camera quickly became my most prized possession--besides all of Daddy's old records, of course.

He had always understood me so much better than Mama did. Even if he hadn't wanted me, he understood me.

I carried that camera around with me everywhere, taking pictures of everything. Mama used to make fun of me for my more ordinary photograph subjects, but everything looked so much more glamorous in a Polaroid. It was enchanting, like looking through a magic lens into a fairytale world. I couldn't get enough of it.

I liked to take pictures of lights, especially: lamps, lightbulbs, flashlights, fireplaces, the ends of matches, even fireflies--anything that lit up. I was in love with the way light looked in those photographs: fuzzy and ethereal, separate from the opaque mediocrity of the rest of the human world.

One night, back when we lived in the narrow, tilted house on the mountainside, I was upstairs in my room. I was lying on the bed and taking pictures of the streetlight outside through the window, when my sister walked in. She sat down on her bed, which was pushed up against the wall facing mine, and watched me in silence as I focused on the glowing orange bulb and snapped picture after picture.

I raised the camera to one eye, fixing the orb of light in the center of my line of vision and holding the camera as steady as possible as I took the picture. With a bright flash of light and a few mechanical whirring noises, the camera seemed to mull over the image for a moment, and then spat out the thick Polaroid photograph. The photo was still developing; the big block of space where the image should have been was pure, empty darkness. Gently, taking care to handle the photograph around the edges only (and not in the center, where fingerprints would run the image before it had a chance to develop), I placed the Polaroid photo on my bed.

Warm and black, this newest one sat alongside countless similar photos, arranged into neat rows and columns across my quilted bedspread. They were all pictures of the same thing--that orange streetlight glowing in the darkness. The only differences between them were their stages of development. The first few photos had long developed and cooled, while some of the newer ones looked darker, less focused as they developed. To an outsider, the photographs might have looked like some sort of evolutionary chart, like the ones found in kids' museums and high school classrooms everywhere: the Evolution of a Streetlight. Or the Life Cycle of a Streetlight--maybe that was more appropriate.

After all, the newest photo was completely dark. The transformation from rich, deep, smoldering orange to utter darkness was not a matter of evolution. It was life and death.

But, of course, I was only eight years old at the time, and I wasn't thinking any of these things. I wasn't even impatient for the photos to cool and develop, like most other kids my age would have been. To be honest, I wasn't really thinking about much of anything, other than how pretty that single orange light looked, at the time. My Polaroid camera tended to have that effect on me.

In fact, I was so absorbed in my camera that I completely forgot about Emma until she startled me with a question: "Why do you need so many?"

When I looked up at her, her head was cocked to the side and she was wriggling just a little in her spot on her bed. The look on her face was one of earnest curiosity.

"So many what?"

"So many pictures," she said. "Of the same thing."

Her voice sounded so ready, so sure. I don't know why this, of all things stuck with me, but it did--the sureness of her voice. Maybe because that was before I was ever sure of anything myself; sureness was still foreign and beautiful to me back then.

In fact, it was every bit as foreign and beautiful as all the other fairytales had always seemed to me. And sureness, I learned, was a fairytale through and through.

But at the time, I wasn't so concerned with being sure--at least not consciously. Consciously, I was focusing on answering her question. And the answer came easily, naturally. I just said, "Because I like them," and it was probably the most simple truth that has ever escaped from my lips.

Yes, that was why I took those photos. That was why I spent my whole allowance on new film packs every month, and then used all my film taking the same picture over and over again. That was why I arranged them in a careful grid and watched the skeletal beginnings of images emerge in the darkness of the undeveloped photos. That was why, once they had all developed, I spread them all around me in a fan--all my tiny, precious, two-dimensional streetlights, keeping me and each other company in my dark bedroom.

Those photographs made me feel safe, warm...loved. How do you explain that? You say, "I like them."

And sometimes that's the best you can do. Some things are just impossible to explain. Sometimes the truth is hard to tell--even when you want to tell it.

That was the dilemma I faced as I sat down to begin writing the article that night. Normally, I started writing it even sooner than this--I worked on the piece daily, even as I was tagging along behind the musicians, quizzing them on their favorite American Idol judge and whatnot--but I hadn't known where to begin this time. I still didn't know.

Fall Out Boy was not like all the other bands I had ever written about because Pete was unlike anyone else I had ever met. My particular brand of journalism dictated that I get inside rockstars' skin and figure them out, then break them down in terms the average reader can understand, relate to, and respect all at once. But, even when I thought I did, I didn't understand Pete; I couldn't relate to him; and I couldn't figure him out enough to decide if I should respect him or not.

But I had gotten inside his skin, whether I'd meant to or not. I didn't get Pete, but at the same time, there was a common tie between us now that would be there forever--the tangled knot that began with his drunken regrets about his marriage, and ended with my breakdown in the windowless room.

The truth was, whether I understood, related to, or respected him was irrelevant. We knew parts of each other that no one else knew, and that was that. Our bond was inevitable and indivisible, and that was really all that mattered.

So I didn't know how to write an article about this man--the only one who had ever managed to get inside my head. I didn't know how to break him down and explain him to other people, because I couldn't even explain him to myself, really. I didn't know how I knew him, or even what I knew, exactly...I just knew.

I couldn't put Pete into words. I couldn't just mention that he was a control freak, or arrogant, or full of deep-seated insecurities, or spoiled, or frighteningly clever. He was more than all of those things, in ways that I couldn't describe. There was no explaining Pete; he was one of those things you just have to experience for yourself.

-----

It was four o'clock in the morning when I woke up gasping into the darkness, reaching instinctively for the lightswitch that wasn't there--my hand met smooth wallpaper and then fumbled around desperately for the lamp. Soft light washed over the hotel room and I was surprised to find the other side of the bed empty. He was supposed to be there...

Warm fingertips brushing my hair out of my face, an arm draped around my waist, the rustling of sheets, the pounding of dual hearbeats... "Nothing's going to hurt you, Sarah, I promise. I won't let anything hurt you."

I sank down into the mattress, my anxiety melting away to be replaced by a combination of relief and disappointment. I turned over on my side and stared at the smooth, untouched comforter on the other side of the bed, still tucked in neatly. There was no rustling of sheets, and only one heartbeat. I was alone.

It was just a dream.

I closed my eyes and fell asleep with the light on. I didn't have the dream again.

-----

"I don't think any of us have changed, really. Not even Pete. Everyone's always talking about how the fame changed him, but he's always been that way--"

I paused the tape recorder as I finished copying down the quote--a snippet from my interview with Trohman earlier that morning. It was late afternoon now, and I was sitting alone in the living room area of my sprawling hotel suite, collecting my notes from this morning's interview so I could work on the article some more. I had made little progress the night before, but I was determined to get more done today.

I hit play and then fast-forwarded past my own voice to Trohman's elaboration: "I mean, he's always been...you know, the center of attention, and... It's not like he likes the attention, really, he's just the kind of guy that's hard to ignore, you know? And he's always been in with the right people. Even when we were just playing shows around Chicago, he was always rubbing elbows with the big guys in the scene, you know? It just comes naturally to him."

I didn't pause it this time, and I was so absorbed in what I was writing down that I didn't notice that the recording was going on without me until I heard the words that stopped me mid-sentence.

"Of course it bothers me when people call him a sell-out," said Trohman indignantly on the recording. "He's one of my best friends, and he's better than that. He's not a sell-out. He's a good dude. And I know it bothers him a lot more than it seems. He shrugs it off, but deep down it really gets to him--the things people say about him. He tries to act all tough, but--"

A few vigorous knocks on the front door startled me so much that I actually jumped a little, automatically clutching my heart like an overdramatic actress in an old black-and-white film. Before I even had time to laugh at myself, there was another round of persistant knocking. And the tape recorder was still going.

"--when you get down to it, he's probably the most insecure--"

Pressing stop on the tape recorder, I hurried over to the door, where whoever stood on the other side just kept knocking and knocking. I squinted to look through the peephole, and then my heart was racing again.

I opened the door, and there stood Pete, his fist raised as if poised to knock again. His jaw dropped open in surprise and his fist unraveled, his open palm paralyzed in mid-air like some strange, motionless wave.

"Why do you look so surprised?" I asked, laughing. "Who were you expecting?"

The change happened so quickly that I actually wondered if I had just imagined his earlier surprise: he dropped his arm to his side and closed his mouth, his face adopting a much more charming look of mischievous amusement (his usual expression of choice). He slid his hands into his pockets and smirked at me, shrugging. "I don't know," he said, and for all his casual behavior, his tone was almost sheepish. "You just took me off guard, I guess."

Confused by the way he was acting, I frowned and raised my eyebrows at him, but he just smiled at my sunnily, like he had no idea what I was getting at. I sighed and gave up. "Okay, well...is there something I can help you with?"

"No, not really," he said off-handedly, hands still shoved into his pockets as he strolled past me and right into my hotel room. He flopped down on the couch in the exact same spot I had been sitting in just moments ago and propped his feet up on the coffee table--right on top of my notepad. "So what have you been up to?"

I shut the door and sat down beside him, not-so-subtly yanking my notepad out from under his feet.

"Oh, sorry," he muttered. "Didn't see that there."

"Not much," I replied in answer to his previous question as I brushed the dirt off my notepad. "Just, you know, working on the article--"

"Oh really? How's that coming?"

I shrugged, avoiding his gaze. "It's... It's coming along."

He either compeletely ignored what I had just said, or I was so transparent that he found some contradiction to the words, because he said, "You're stuck?"

I looked over at him and he was giving me this horrible sympathetic look.

"No," I lied.

"Oh, come on, Sarah," said Pete heartily, and, just like always, my heart gave a little jump at the sound of my voice on his lips. "I'm a writer, too. Don't think I don't see that frustrated look on your face." He punctuated this by wrapping his hand into a fist and brushing his knuckles against my jaw, mimicking a right hook--an oddly tender gesture that should have been thoroughly masculine. "I see that look. I know that look."

The look on his face and the feeling of his skin brushing against mine brought back the memory of the dream I had had last night in a rush of frenzied images. Try as I might, I couldn't block them out--they just kept playing over and over in my head, a slideshow of all the morally wrong subconscious thoughts I had been supressing for the past few days, persistant now in their exposure.

My cheeks were heating up as I turned away from him, and I wanted to clap my hands over my face, to throw a blanket over myself, to shove my head down between the couch cushions--anything to hide the way he made me feel. It was so embarrassing, the way I blushed like a preteen with her first crush whenever he was around--when he said my name or brushed against me by accident, when he so much as smiled...

The dream was further proof of just how out-of-hand the situation was getting.

"Why did you come here?" I asked, staring at the floor instead of at him.

I wouldn't allow myself even a peripheral glance at him, but I could feel him moving closer as he stretched one arm over the back of the couch and leaned towards me. His very presence radiated a sort of humming I could sense. The space between us was electric.

He didn't say anything for the longest time, and the suspense built and built and built as I waited for his answer until the humming was so loud that I could hardly hear myself think, and if I didn't look at him soon, I would surely explode, and then--

"You know, Hemingway has this great quote about writer's block. He said, 'Write the truest sentence you know,' and then go from there."

The humming stopped.

At my silence, he started to ramble. "That's it. You just think of the truest thing you know and write it down, and then--"

"Pete."

"What?"

"Why did you come here?"

I turned to look at him this time, and that was what made the difference--I know this because I saw his expression shift from impish to very serious when he saw the look on my face.

Pete pursed his lips, and I knew he was debating whether to lie or not. And when he finally answered me, I also knew he had decided to tell the truth.

"I just wanted to see you," he said.

There was a certain ring to the words that made us both jumpy, that made him retract his arm and fold it modestly in his lap, that made me cross my legs and scoot away from him a little. I folded my arms across my chest tightly and he did the same--as if we might be in danger of smearing into each other if we didn't keep our bodies pressed closely to ourselves.

But it was too late. I don't think either of us recognized the slippery slope for what it was until he said that out loud, and by that time, we were already sliding. We couldn't go back.

"I mean, I just wanted to...I don't know, hang out." He swallowed hard and fidgeted, looked away as he struggled to dress up the ugly truth we both saw quite plainly. "I just--I don't know anyone here, and you know... I love the guys, but it gets old, since we're always together, so..."

"Right." I nodded fervently, my voice jumping up higher an octave or two and giving my nervousness away as I said, "Of course. We could do that. We could hang out...if you want to."

He nodded, too. "Okay, well...there's this party tonight, and uh... I'm going, but the other guys aren't, and...er... Well, I was just wondering if you wanted to--if you wanted to--you know, come with me or whatever..."

He had been staring at the floor, but he looked up at me with a question in his eyes, and then my cheeks were burning again.

"Well..." I said slowly. "What kind of party?"

"I don't know." He shrugged, but the way his eyes darted around, avoiding my eyes, let me know he wasn't telling the truth this time. "Just a party. There'll be drinks and stuff like that. I just thought--you know--I just thought it would be a good idea to invite you, since you're, you know, writing about my life and stuff..."

Really? He was really trying to use my job to guilt me into going to this party with him? I knew I would have been annoyed under any other circumstances, but now I just felt amused--maybe even a little flattered, as much as I hated to admit it.

And, sitting there in my hotel room with him, feeling the brush of his fingertips against my cheek, that slippery slope didn't seem so steep. So I took a deep breath and launched myself down it headfirst.

Was it a stupid thing to do? Probably. But do I regret doing it?

No. Never.

"Okay, okay, fine," I finally agreed. "I'll go to this stupid party with you."

Beaming, Pete reached over to push a stray piece of hair out of my eyes. His eyes were gleaming with something more than triumph as he looked at me and said, "Perfect."

My hands were shaking and my head was screaming at me that I was veering off course. Turn back, turn back!

But I couldn't. It was too late.

Out loud--to Pete--I said, "Sure. Perfect."

And when he smiled at me again, I smiled back.