Can I really do this?
I could. I had to.
I blasted my sister with my flaming dragon breath.
Dead on.
Not daring to flinch.
For one awful, awful moment I could see her silhouetted, the way you can sometimes make out a candle's wick through the surrounding flame. But then the fire got too big, too intense. By the time it dissipated and stopped licking at the metal railing, at the stone parapet, there was nothing left of Emily, not even ash. Still, I was breathing through my open mouth, not daring to inhale for fear of smelling charred meat. My sister. My sister, whom I had just burned alive.
The railing was drooping, the stones themselves were warped by the scorching, and if my dragon hide hadn't been so tough, the residual heat would have blistered my feet as I settled down on the balcony where she had been standing.
I had just killed Emily.
There would have been no pain, I told myself.
It’s not for real, I told myself.
It’s just a game, I told myself.
Like capturing the last piece in a game of checkers.
Myself was not convinced.
This didn't feel one bit like checkers.
Even if I had done it specifically to save her real life. To end the game and send her out of this fake world and back to Rasmussem.
I had been distraught when she'd had one of her game characters kill off another game character, and here I'd gone and killed her. Never mind that she'd done the same to me in exactly the same way, this simply felt wrong, wrong, wrong.
Had she felt this wretched when she'd killed me?
My body seemed to have developed a mind of its own. I was shaking, and something was boiling inside me, and for a moment I thought I was going to throw up. But it was a sob that bubbled out of me, a deep, racking sob. And then another, and another. I couldn't stop, couldn't catch my breath. My chest hurt. My heart hurt. The Rasmussem people would be ending the game any moment now—now that Emily had been forced back into reality—and I absolutely needed to regain control before I came to on the Rasmussem total immersion couch with everyone gawking at me. I was unwilling to make a show of myself in front of Ms. Bennett and Adam—plus, my mother would take one look at me and freak out.
I became aware that I was rocking back and forth on my knees, and that my knees hurt. They had sizzled a bit, from the intense heat, and they had little pieces of grit embedded in them. Knees. Human knees. Somewhere along the way, I had lost control of the wish to be a dragon and had reverted to being a girl. A girl who had just killed her sister.
And it was only then that I realized someone was standing over me.
“How sweet,” Emily said in her snarkiest tone, the one she normally used for mocking people on TV, not family. “You killed me, but you're sad about it. Oh, well! I guess that makes everything all right.”
Emily?
Okay, I’m back at Rasmussem after all, I thought. I hadn't even felt the transition. I braced myself for embarrassment.
Except I wasn't back on the total immersion couch. I was still on the castle parapet.
So how could Emily be there?
But there she indeed was, as big as life: glaring at me, tapping her gemstone-sandaled foot, even.
I rubbed my snot and tears off on my already-filthy sleeve. My throat hurt, my head hurt. But my heart felt just a little bit better.
“Emily,” I managed to gasp between the sobs that still wouldn't stop, “I'm sorry I tried to kill you. I'm glad you got away.” That was true despite my realization that this was a major setback.
How had she gotten away?
My mind refused to focus on the thought that she couldn't have—because she obviously had.
That wasn't important now. What was important was explaining to her why I had done what I'd done.
She spoke before I could get my mouth to work. “That getting-away part?” she said. “Not so much. You did kill me. But I came back.”
I was glad to see her. I guess. Not quite as glad as I'd have been if we were both back at Rasmussem, but it was a relief, no matter how I looked at it, that I hadn't done a thorough job of killing my sister.
I gulped in enough air to ask, “What do you mean you came back?” I tried to make sense out of her not being dead, of my having gone through all that—the decision, the doing, the watching—of having killed her, all for nothing. “You'returned to Rasmussem and they...?” Except they wouldn't have. They wouldn't send her here to fetch me. I wanted out of this inane game; she was the one who was resisting...
But she was shaking her head. “Not to Rasmussem,” she explained. “I adjusted the code so that if I got killed, I would just restart from the same place.”
Wonderful. Everything I'd been through was meaningless.
And I knew I could never do it again.
I swatted away one of a pair of sparkly monarch butterflies that were trying to alight on our arms.
“I can't believe,” Emily snarled at me, “that you actually killed me.”
All right, this was just getting to be too much. “Oh,” I said. “So you're going to insist on taking that personally?”
She put her hands on her hips. “Well, yeah.”
“Excuse me, but you killed me first.”
“Oh, sure,” Emily countered. “Put the blame on me.” “Nice,” I snarled right back at her. “Who's the one who's been trying all along to get rid of me, trying to lose yourself in this, the world's most...” I couldn't think of a word to encapsulate all that I felt about this game. “...pink ... and ... and ... pointless ... and...”
“Then go home if you don't like it,” Emily snapped. “I never invited you to join me. I don't want you here.”
Much as I knew that already, it hurt to be told. “Yeah, and you've made that plenty clear.”
“So what are you waiting for? Go.”
“Oh, yeah?” I shot back at her, realizing even as I said it that we had degenerated to the level of feuding first-graders.
Emily lowered to the occasion. “Yeah.”
She's trying to make me mad, I realized. She wanted to goad me into leaving. And that realization quenched my anger. I took a calming breath and told her, “Not without you.”
Which defused her. Either that or she realized how ridiculous we sounded. Emily sighed. She said what she'd been saying all along, but this time she sounded more tired than annoyed. “Go back, Grace. I'm not coming home. Just leave me. This is all for the best. Really.”
“No,” I said. “Whatever's happened back home, it can be fixed.”
Emily swerved back into annoyed. “You don't know anything about it.”
“We talked to Danielle,” I told her. “And Frank.”
Emily narrowed her eyes. “And what did they say?”
I weighed my options. I didn't know enough to be able to bluff, so I went in the opposite direction. “They have no idea what's wrong.”
“The liars!” Emily shouted. Now she sat down next to me, and the next thing I knew she began to cry. “The liars,” she repeated. “That is just so damn frustrating.”
Well, that was unexpected. “Tell me,” I said.
And she finally did.
“Danielle and I planned ... We've been planning just about all our lives ... to go to school together. And RIT was perfect for both of us: me to study total immersion technology, her to learn to be a commercial textile artist. Then we took our college entrance exams.”
SATs. I was only in ninth grade, two more years to go before I'd take them, but our teachers were already warning us that those could mean more than whatever marks we've gotten in our classes. But only, it seemed, in a negative way. Good scores couldn't counteract mediocre grades, but bad scores could sink our hopes of getting into a specific college.
Emily was saying, “And Danielle ... Danielle's scores were middle-of-the-road. Not high enough for RIT. And it isn't because Danielle is a dummy. Well, she is ... because she didn't take the PSATs or
the sample tests to practice, and she was out partying the night before, and she came dragging in that morning energized by Diet Coke and Hershey's Kisses. I told her she could take the exam again, but she kept saying she just doesn't test well because she gets all nervous. That she knew she could do the work, but the SAT was the end for her.”
“Okay,” I said, remembering the whole plan where she could go to community college for one semester. “I know this.”
“No, you don't. Because what happened was she said, 'You're so good with computers, and the SATs are all computerized.' ”
It took a moment for that to sink in, the words spoken to Emily. My sister, the computer genius. “She asked you to change her SAT scores?” What kind of friend would ask someone to cheat like that for her? Well, okay, a desperate friend. “So she's mad because you wouldn't do it?”
Emily chewed on her lip.
“You did do it?” I squeaked. “You could do that?” Of course. I'd forgotten for a moment who I was talking to: the only person in the history of Western civilization—or at least at Neil Armstrong High—who thrived on trigonometry. “But then,” I asked, “why ... I mean ... what happened?”
“First,” Emily said, “I did it. I bumped her scores up. And then... then she told Frank. And Frank wanted his scores bumped, too, so that he could get a scholarship. 'Boston's accepted me, Emily,' he said, 'but my parents can't afford the tuition. If my scores were just a little bit higher, I'd be eligible for financial aid.' ”
I could just picture the weasel putting her on the spot. “Did you do it?” I asked.
“At first I said no, and he said, 'You'll do it for your girl- friend, but not for your boyfriend?’ So finally, I gave in. And the next thing I knew, Frank was telling his friends—”
“Ungrateful jerk,” I interrupted.
She continued, “And other people were coming to me, telling me they couldn't get into the college of their dreams. Crying. Begging for help.”
I was glad I wasn't smart enough that I'd ever have to face a moral dilemma like whether to help a friend cheat. The only kind of cheating my friends and I were likely to get caught up in involved dieting.
Emily said, “And I couldn't help all of them. I couldn't fiddle with all their scores. I mean, some of them had never gotten above a C+ their entire academic life. How would anyone believe they'd ever ace their SATs? So I had to say no.”
Surely her friends had to understand.
But apparently not.
Emily was saying, “And Frank said he was embarrassed in front of our friends, even though he got his stupid scholarship—but Danielle ended up not making the cut anyway. And she said it was all my fault for not making her marks high enough. She asked why I hadn't given her the same exact marks I'd gotten, so that we'd have been sure to be accepted or turned down together. She said I was just jealous, that I wanted to make sure everyone knew I was the smart one. But that wasn't it. I was only trying not to be obvious about it. My marks in high school had always been higher than hers, so the guidance counselors would have been suspicious if I'd given her exactly the same marks.”
Now it was Emily's turn to wipe her nose on her sleeve.
“In the end, my classmates weren't talking to me anymore, and if any of them ever rats me out, the people at RIT will suspect that I fudged my own marks, too, and I'll get tossed out. If not tossed into jail. I thought they were my friends, Grace.”
She hunched over and closed her eyes.
She had been betrayed by her friends, and I could only imagine how that felt. “I didn't know,” I said, only to say something to fill in the silence that sat so heavily around us. “I always felt...” I didn't finish the thought. I always felt you were the blessed one. You had everything. The looks. The smarts. ALL the friends. The boys. The social life I wished for...
As though she could read my mind, Emily looked up at me and said, “So now you know the truth, how stupid and empty my life really is.”
Our parents would be disappointed, and she was right: the school would probably bounce her out on her ear, even if they believed her scores, for helping other people cheat.
“But it's not worth dying over,” I told her.
“It's not like dying,” she said. “It's like fading away.”
“It's dying,” I insisted. “And, sure, your so-called friends might feel guilty and be sorry...” Obviously, this was part of it: Everyone who has ever been wronged thinks, If I were dead, THEN they'd be sorry... “But, Emily,” I continued, “think what it will do to Mom and Dad. Think what it'll do to me. They sent me in to rescue you, Emily. I've never been as smart as you, but if I fail at this...” My throat closed up again.
“Oh, Grace,” Emily said, “it's not you. You're the best little sister anyone ever had. You're making this harder than it needs to be. You've always been brave and resourceful and you're good at figuring out common-sense things. You'd never have gotten yourself into this situation.”
I didn't believe those words described me, but they were nice to hear. They were the first kind words Emily had spoken to me since I'd arrived. Here, here was the big sister I knew and loved, who had always looked out for me.
I said, “Tell Mom and Dad everything. They'll get over a bit of cheating to try to help friends much more easily than they'll get over my not being able to save you.”
Emily said, slowly and emphatically, as though speaking to a stubborn preschooler, “It's not about you, Grace.” She shook her head. “Back at Neil Armstrong, I thought I had all these great friends, but they only wanted to use me. Now I'm in college, and they don't even bother to pretend, because I'm not worth the effort.”
“Now you're just feeling sorry for yourself,” I told her. She shrugged.
I countered with the only thing I had left. “You're my sister,” I said. “And I love you.”
Emily rested her hand on my cheek, another first in this miserable game, a warm and gentle gesture that was just like what I would have expected from her in the past. “I love you, too,” she told me, “but I've messed things up bigtime. Here, too. I don't even like it here anymore.”
“No kidding,” I said. “This game should come with a warning label: might induce diabetes, hyperactivity, and tooth decay.”
She gave a sad smile.
“Emily,” I said, “come home. Please. Don't make me become the one who let you die.” And once more, tears started running down my cheeks.
She closed her eyes again, maybe so she wouldn't have to look at me crying. It wasn't acting on my part; I didn't think it out, as in Ooo, I'll get louder so she can’t ignore me—but I started sobbing again, huge, wheezing sobs.
“Grace,” Emily murmured.
I smacked her hand away from my face, not willing to take any comfort from her except for the comfort of her coming with me. “You can say it's not about me, but it's not only about you. Danielle and Frank and the rest of them will get over feeling bad. Mom and Dad and I won't.”
“You will,” Emily reassured me.
“I should never have let them talk me into coming,” I said. “I should have known I'd fail.” Okay, that was acting. A bit. At the moment I said it.
But as soon as the words were out of my mouth, I realized they were true. This was just too big a job for me.
Emily's shoulders slumped, and she looked close to crying again, too. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. The last thing I wanted to do was hurt you. I wanted to protect you. But if I go back, what then? What will happen to me?”
I had to admit it. “I don't know. It can't be any worse than this.”
Emily finally agreed with something I said. “And I couldn't feel any worse. Please don't cry like that. I'm sorry I've been so mean to you. I just wanted you to go back home.”
Mean? Mean was eating all the chocolate Easter eggs and leaving the stale Peeps. Mean was making fun of a bad hairstyle. Mean was letting someone else take the blame after you tracked mud onto the clean floor. Mean didn
't begin to cover what Emily had put me through.
But she was rocking me, making gentle comforting noises as though I were once again the six-year-old who'd fallen off our backyard swing trying to fly too high. “Everything will be okay.”
And then, finally— finally—she said the magic words that would end my ordeal: “End game. Bring me back to Rasmussem.”
My voice came out as a whisper. “Thank you, Emily.” I had to try twice before I, too, could manage to speak the Rasmussem formula out loud: “End game. Bring me back to Rasmussem.” Precise wording, so it can't be spoken accidentally. Was it ever spoken so much from the heart?
Of course, with time moving differently in the game, we didn't bounce back like yo-yos at the end of a string, but it would be soon now.
Exhausted from all our tears, we leaned against each other and counted stars in the now-dark sky until we fell asleep in each other's arms.
We woke up, stiff and sore and sooty, when the sun peeked up over the horizon.
And we were still in the game.
Chapter 14
I Guess That Would Be Another Oops!
AFTER ALL THAT.
Still in the Land of the Golden Butterflies, still on the tower balcony of Emily's mountain castle overlooking the sparkly lake.
There were even a couple of those damn butterflies fluttering around our heads, as though everything were lovely and normal, as though—after all we'd been through—we'd still be in the mood to transform them into coins for just another day of good, clean, wholesome fun.
“What happened?” I asked, suspecting—I admit it—Emily had somehow tricked me. But even as the words were coming out of my mouth, I knew that couldn't be it: if Emily had only been pretending to agree to return home in order to get rid of me, wouldn't I have found myself back there without her?
“That...” Emily said, “...that shouldn't have happened.” Her worried expression did even more than my reasoning had to convince me that she was just as surprised and confused and concerned as I was. “We should be back home.” I don't know if something of my initial mistrust showed in my face or voice, but Emily added, “Truly, Grace.”