Laundry day was both the best and the worst day of the week. Worst because my family produced an inhuman amount of laundry which was solely my responsibility to deal with, and best because I got to spend a couple of hours with my two best friends in the whole world, Shay and Lyn.
I’d push and pummel my family’s laundry into two of those big, flimsy-looking canvas bags, then huff and puff my way up the hill to the laundromat on Main Street. I was usually joined halfway by Shay – small and frail looking as a child half her age – wearing two huge and ratty backpacks on her front and back. Lyn was always there first, being the organised one. By the time we got there, she’d be sorting clothes into piles, with one headphone wedged in her ear blasting study notes loud enough to drown out the omnipresent hum, bang and clatter of the machines.
Unlike my family and Shay’s, Lyn’s family wasn’t actually poor – they were just super tight with money and knew the laundromat owners, so got a discount. It made more sense for their youngest daughter to lug all their clothes three blocks and wash them than to buy a machine and use their own water to do them at home. I guessed there was also some kind of disciplinarian aspect to it – like making sure Lyn knew her place as the dutiful daughter – but Lyn herself never talked about that. Of course, she’d never tell her folks that she actually enjoyed it, because then they’d probably take the chore away from her.
Lyn also made a point of never talking about, or scrutinising, our clothes. My brothers’ clothes usually stank of accumulated sweat from their obsessive sporting exploits, and could generously be described as borderline threadbare. There were also the knitted monstrosities mom had made all of us since we were born. They came in an eye-watering array of cheap colours – socks, sweaters, beanies, anything you can picture in itchy wool, and all of them carried mom’s dire warning to wash and dry on the much lengthier cool settings, or they would shrink. I’d never been bold enough to test this; I’d already endured enough bullying at school because of her clothing choices for me. I really didn’t need ‘shrunken’ added to the sad list of adjectives used to describe my skint chic.
As for Shay? Her family’s income was inversely proportionate to the number of kids they had. ‘Threadbare’ in this instance would have been an overly generous description of their earthly garments; which her mother insisted just highlighted how lavishly clothed their souls were, or something like that. I often reflected on how it was a shame that this apparent spiritual richness didn’t translate into a full belly, because if Shay hadn’t been notorious for hanging around the trash cans at school to nab any decent uneaten food, you would have accused her of being anorexic. I was constantly amazed she had the energy to carry all her family’s clothes, let alone go through the rigamarole of washing them too.
Anyway, despite our ‘diverse’ backgrounds, labouring at our weekly chore had meant we’d quickly become friends. We made sure our washing days always synced up. It was a couple of hours free from any other people or responsibilities, so there we sat together in the weirdly liminal space of the Main Street Laundromat, talking shit and watching clothes circle in the massive industrial washers and dryers. Like I said, it really was the best day of the week.
Or at least it had been. Until we found the note.
Lyn spotted it as she opened one of the still-warm dryers; the paper creased, frayed around the edges from its ordeal inside the machine, but the ink bone-dry, unsmeared. She carefully unfolded the note to read it, and I peered over her shoulder while I set yet another additional 10 minutes on my cool cycle.
“Probably someone’s lost homework” she joked, “Should probably check and return it to them.”
Shay’s untidy mop of blonde appeared over Lyn’s other shoulder,
“Yikes, if it is homework it’d be kinder to throw it away. That handwriting alone is gonna get the kid a fail.”
I was the fastest reader of the three of us (the library being the least expensive hangout in our town) and I scanned it at a glance.
“Um, that’s not homework,” I told them.
Spreading the note flat on one of the folding counters, Lyn adjusted her glasses with one businesslike finger, and began to read aloud, her voice only just audible over the heavy hum of endlessly revolving machinery:
“To who ever finding this note. I discover now a wonderful something! Riches beyond wild dreaming are mine and I have wish to share fortune”
“Jeez, are we being telemarketed by a fucking washing machine note?” I quipped under my breath.
“Shhhhh!” Shay admonished.
Lyn pursed her mouth, then continued louder:
“…wish to share fortune. I not believing at first, but there is world on other side of these machine! Don’t ask how I discover, is not happy story. But discover yes I did! If you go inside machine at after midnight, it take you another place. Strange place, many losted cloth and losted thing, but also losted money! Pile and pile of coin, old coin new coin, in big heap like snow, all clean and shining polish from machine trip. I have tape one coin to here note for you examine, it show my story real. Friend I big hope you find fortune also!”
“There’s no coin,” Lyn said, disappointed, touching the rough patch where scotch tape had clearly ripped off the bottom of the note.
“Ooh one sec,” Shay replied, and hoisted her skinny legs easily into the mouth of the dryer.
After a few moments her pink, pimpled face peered out, then broke into a slow smile as she held out a gleaming silver coin, easily overlooked against the shiny steel of the drum’s interior.
“That looks old,” I said.
“Old, definitely. And maybe valuable,” Lyn posited, taking a photo, then immediately opening a browser on her phone.
It didn’t take long to verify that the coin was from around 1920, somewhat rare, and that a specimen could fetch somewhere between forty and two hundred dollars at auction, depending on the condition.
Shay’s pale blue eyes seemed all shiny coin themselves, glowing at this information.
“Can we put it up on eBay?” she said, breathlessly, “Like, split it three ways?”
I glanced askance at Lyn. She half-nodded, half-shrugged, re-folding the note. “Sure, I don’t see why not. I mean, technically *you* found the coin Shay, so it’s up to you.”
Shay gave a little whoop of joy, and punched the air with the coin in her fist.
In the excitement of it all, we virtually forgot about the incredible claim on the note.
The silver coin (real silver, it turned out) sold two weeks later. The week after that, we met up at the laundromat, to divvy up the spoils. The auction capped out at eighty-eight dollars, and Lyn, the only one with access to her own bank account, reverently passed Shay and I a crisp new twenty dollar bill, plus a five dollar bill each.
“Now, if you two can keep an eye on my load, I’ll go buy us ice-creams,” she declared – and we readily agreed.
Twenty minutes later we were sat in our regular spot, watching our family’s dirty clothes slap and bang inside the big machines, blissfully eating our treats.
Shay picked at the corner of the faux-leather cushioning on her seat, where the ancient yellow foam had started to come through.
“You know. I could really get used to this,” she said, eyeing the nibbled-down stub of her cone.
“I mean, yeah,” I agreed, “But what are the chances we ever find another coin like that?”
That peculiar light entered Shay’s eyes again, and she stared at me with unnerving intensity.
“Come on. You both know what I’m thinking.”
Lyn shook her head definitely, matter-of-fact.
“No. It was either a prank, or it was some schizophrenic asshole who randomly found a vintage coin somewhere. There is no fucking way you are climbing into a clothes dryer after midnight to look for a mystical laundry dimension full of collectable coins.”
I could still feel the sharp-edged crispness of the newly minted twenty-dollar bill as Lyn had pressed it into my palm. That feeling, for me, had been borderline magical. For Shay? It must have been mind-blowing.
Shay nodded morosely, then stuffed the end of the cone in her mouth, closing her eyes and grunting contentedly as she crunched.
But I had to wonder if those eyes, beneath their thin lids, still shone with that same, pale and feverish light.
We didn’t notice anything hugely different about Shay at school, except that she seemed happier and hung out with us a bit more, and spent less time hanging around the trash for free sandwiches. I don’t know why I assumed that was because she’d been eking out her twenty-five dollars. The girl had all the poor impulse control that I had – and I’d blown all my share in two days. Lyn was the smart one who was good with money and suchlike; Shay and I joked she’d probably invested it, and had already doubled her windfall.
Maybe I fooled myself that I didn’t see the weird, long bruises across Shay’s shins, like nothing that had never been there before, or that one day she arrived at school with a swelling bump on the side of her head and was vague all day; unable to focus or pay attention.
I mean, she was happy, even that day. Happier than I’d ever seen her.
The first red flag was when she didn’t turn up for laundry day.
This happened sometimes with one of us; someone would be sick, or have other plans, sometimes family stuff going on. But we’d always let the others know via IM. I did know wi-fi access was a bit spotty for Shay, but she’d always make an effort to let us know if she wasn’t coming – even if it meant sending one of her multitude of siblings to tell us.
Now, Lyn and I weren’t dumb. We suspected exactly what you did; that Shay had been sneaking out at midnight to climb into the industrial dyers and look for coinage. The existence of the note, that first rare coin, Shay’s subsequently full stomach, her general demeanour of happiness – it all pointed to the idea that maybe she had found a way into some liminal space inside the laundromat where ‘losted things’ accumulated.
“What about her injuries?” Lyn asked, “What if she’s, like, being abused by someone for money?”
“As in, like, sex work or something?” I responded, incredulous.
“I dunno, sure. Maybe kinky stuff? It’s a more plausible explanation. Occam’s razor and all that.”
I knew Lyn didn’t want to discuss the note. She didn’t believe, she couldn’t, and I’m not certain I actually did either. I tried to be as logical at Lyn always was.
“What if… what if the note and the coin just gave us enough doubt for her to do something else? To let her do whatever else it is that she’s doing, but to let us *think* she’s going to some stupid laundry pocket dimension?”
Lyn nodded, “Maybe, yeah. But it still doesn’t explain where she is.”
“I’ll check on my way home – stop in at her house.”
“OK, cool. Let me know what you find out.”
Shay’s mother, a harassed-looking woman in her late 40s with a newborn on one breast, told me she hadn’t seen her for “probably about a day”. Questioning the three brothers she shared a room with proved more fruitful; they claimed they hadn’t seen her for two nights.
Her mother was loath to call the cops and report her missing, even after I told her I knew it had been long enough to worry. After I had a brief txt exchange with Lyn, Lyn convinced her parents to call the police and report our friend as a missing person.
We waited for two more anxious days before both Lyn and I were contacted to come into the local station to answer some questions.
The police officer was a woman, and she was really nice, offering us tea or coffee. She broke the news gently but plainly: Shay’s body had been found. Her mother had been informed, and they were in the process of releasing the information, whatever that meant. She asked us a few questions about Shay’s state of mind, her home life, then said she would try to answer any questions we had.
I was shellshocked, but Lyn stayed composed.
“Where? Where did you find her?” she asked.
The officer’s expression was genuinely sympathetic.
“In the Main Street laundromat. A woman doing her laundry late last night found the body - uh, Shay – inside one of the dryers.”
“The one two from the right on the back wall” I said, barely audible.
“Yes, that exact one,” the cop said, incredulous, and slightly suspicious, “How did you know that?”
Lyn’s eyes were huge now.
“Do you have… pictures?”
The woman shook her head, “Look, the images are quite disturbing. It certainly isn’t suitable for you to view them, they…”
He voice became a flat buzzing sound in the background, as I imagined what had happened. A kid at school once told me, with gruesome boyish relish in the details, about how his toddler brother had put their kitten inside the dryer at their house. Their mother heard an ungodly banging inside the machine and opened it to check, but too late. The cat was inside, wedged and tangled in white sheets, the stink of cooked blood. The poor animal was still just barely alive when they pulled it out, pink froth bubbling from its nose and mouth, the huge, swollen purple slug of its tongue blocking the airway. Its body convulsed for minutes in the miserable throes of death until it finally expired, stiff-legged, on the spattered linoleum.
“…yes, in fact… there was something odd,” I emerged from the memory to hear the policewoman answering Lyn.
“What?” I managed, “What did you say?”
The woman gave me a sharper look. “There was something odd about the situation. Very odd.”
“Well?” Lyn prompted.
The officer sighed, then passed us a photo as if it was against her better judgement.
“Her pockets, and her backpack, were full of these. We think that likely contributed to her death – the weight of them inside the machine may well have knocked her unconscious. The coroner will judge whether the heat, the battering, or both, were the ultimate cause of death.”
I already knew what the photo would show, and so did Lyn. But we looked anyway.
Piles and piles of coins. Many identifiably old, even with the perspective of the photo, where they might have been little drifts of silvery snow.
Laundry day isn’t the same anymore.
Lyn and I have a new place; neither of our parents let us go back to the Main Street Laundromat after the incident. Now we meet at a smaller, dingier place, six inconvenient blocks away.
We don’t really talk about Shay. We both know what actually happened, and we both stayed tight-lipped, knowing the cops wouldn’t believe us – or believe the note.
I believe it now, though.
So every night, Lyn and I take a picture of ourselves in our bedrooms, after midnight, and send it to each other. We’re sort of each other’s conscience now, because otherwise Shay died for nothing. I don’t know about Lyn, but whenever I start to think about the note, it feels impossible that I won’t go back to the Main Street Laundromat. Wouldn’t you want to see for yourself?