“Her mother died, correct?” The technician pulled up a file, opening it to display various pictures of diaphanous ghosts. Many of them were modeled after deep sea jellyfish, strange and alien and organic. “Do we want to haunt her?”
“Esther has surprisingly few issues connected to her mother,” said Dr. Webb. “Eliza Hoffman’s death was not unexpected, and while it was, of course, a tragedy for their family, they had time to prepare. She didn’t die suddenly. She made her peace with her daughter before she went. Nothing in Esther Hoffman’s psych profile indicates a need for closure with her mother.”
“She immediately actualized her father into the scenario. Perhaps—”
“She misses him. Not uncommon.” Entirely understandable, in fact. Not even Dr. Webb could read something in need of fixing into the scene playing out on their view screen.
(She wondered, sometimes, whether anyone really understood that the true technical advance here—the thing that would put her institute in the history books, regardless of whether her admittedly time-intensive and potentially dangerous form of rehabilitation caught on—was the view screen. When her technicians watched a therapy session, guiding it from their keyboards, interjecting the beats and elements she instructed them to, they were watching dreams. They were guiding dreams. The interpretation and examination of dreams had gripped the human imagination for millennia and now, thanks to her, they could actually be touched, filmed, reviewed at leisure in the waking world. It was a game changer, and it was entirely hers. No one, ever, was going to take that away.)
The technician turned fully in his seat, frowning. She couldn’t remember his name—she almost never remembered their names; they were interchangeable, true believers all, who came to her looking to change the world, never understanding that when the world actually changed, when she actually did it, hers would be the only name on the magazine cover. Or maybe they did understand, and they simply didn’t care. Some people wanted change for the sake of change, and not for the potential fame it brought along for the ride.
“What are we going to do, then?” he asked. “We have to show her something. A little home movie of her father isn’t going to cut it.”
Dr. Webb tilted her head to the side, looking thoughtfully at the screen. “There’s something we could try,” she said, in a slow, deliberate tone. “How do you feel about managing a double session?”
The technician smiled.
STARTING A new school is always terrifying. Esther can’t imagine a situation where it wouldn’t be. She’s done it before, twice, but both times, she still had a living mother; she wasn’t the new girl with the dead mom, the girl everyone was primed to feel sorry for and judge. What if she doesn’t seem sad enough? What if she seems too sad, and it tips her over into weird? She doesn’t want to be the weird girl. There’s too much responsibility in the role. The weird girl carries the weight of the world, and it isn’t anything she’s ever wanted.
She stands outside the middle school that will be her home for the next year, teaching her lessons she can’t even conceive yet, and wonders whether she’s going to throw up in the bushes before she can get up the nerve to walk toward the door. She’ll definitely be the weird girl then. She’s pretty sure throwing up on the school grounds gets you an automatic pass to Weirdoville, do not pass “go,” do not get an invitation to the popular table.
Not that she wants an invitation to the popular table. There’s too much responsibility there, too. She wants to be left alone. She wants time to mourn, and time to figure out who she is, in a world that doesn’t have her mother in it. She’s never been half an orphan before. It still fits her oddly, like a pair of jeans she’ll have to grow into.
There should be a word. A word that means “daughter without a mother.” Her father is still alive. She can’t call herself an orphan. But moments like this, she feels like one, and she doesn’t know how to make it stop. She doesn’t know if it can stop.
“They hold the classes inside the building, you know. I mean, that’s what I’ve heard, anyway.”
Esther flinches before she turns. “Huh?” she says, words gone, chased away by anxiety.
The girl behind her smiles a little, looking oddly understanding. “Hi,” she says. “You must be the new girl. I’m Jennifer.”
“You already knew there was going to be a new girl?”
Jennifer shrugs. “You moved into the house next to mine. I sort of followed you down the street. You never looked behind yourself.”
It’s a believable story—Esther knows she never looked back. Her nerve would have broken, and she would have run all the way home to lock herself in her bedroom and cry until the shaking stopped. Cathartic, maybe. Not a good way to avoid a visit from the truant officer.
Jennifer is still looking at Esther, and so Esther looks at Jennifer. The other girl is an inch or so shorter, round in the middle, with a tangle of blonde curls that frizz at the ends, seemingly less styled than vaguely tended, like weeds growing in an uncut yard. Her eyes are bright, and she’s smiling. That’s the nicest thing about her. It’s been a while since anyone looked at Esther like she was something worth smiling at.
“I’m Esther,” says Esther.
“Cool,” says Jennifer. Then: “You want someone to show you to class?”
Esther very much does.
They have nearly identical schedules: Esther is in band while Jennifer is in her computer elective, learning about the language of bits and bytes and how to control some sort of virtual turtle. (It doesn’t make any sense to Esther, but Jennifer just laughs when she says that, and says it doesn’t matter; even though computers are the future, the future’s going to need a soundtrack). The rest of the day they spend together, packed into the same small, boxy rooms, surrounded by their curious, faceless peers. Not literally faceless—that would be terrifying—but oddly uniform, blending into the background, until it seems like the world has been reduced to Esther and Jennifer, moving in their own private beams of light, standing out in stark relief against the rest of the colorless world.
Esther might be worried about how quickly she’s latched onto this virtual stranger, if she weren’t so wrapped up in her relief. She hadn’t been sure she remembered how to make friends; had been afraid, really, that she’d lost the knack. It was always so easy back home, when the only weird thing about her had been “Esther Hoffman doesn’t celebrate Christmas.” Now she’s Esther with the dead mom, Esther with the sad dad, Esther from out of town who doesn’t know anything or anybody. She may not be a weirdo, but she walks in a cloud of weirdness, and Jennifer is saving her just by standing close without running away.
Everyone else can come later. She can make more friends, forge more bonds, once she’s proven that she’s good enough for this one.
All her classes are basically the same. She introduces herself to the teacher, who knew that she’d be joining them before she got there; she finds a seat; she is introduced as a new student, sometimes casually, sometimes with a mandatory “tell us something about yourself” that draws giggles from her new classmates. Esther doesn’t begrudge them their amusement. She’s been on the other side of the laughter, when someone new came to her old school. She knows there’s nothing mean behind it, even as her cheeks burn red and her knees go wobbly.
(And isn’t that knowing, that understanding of relief and self-consciousness and better-you-than-me, isn’t it all too adult for her? Shouldn’t she be crying in a bathroom somewhere, scared witless by this echoing new building with its rules she doesn’t know, its casual traditions she may not have time to learn before graduation sends her to a high school all these kids have grown up anticipating, and which she has never seen? Middle school feeds into high school, yes, always has, but she should have had three years to navigate it, not a slightly slimmer slice of one. She should be so much more upset than she is.)
(In the real world, the technician frowned and adjusted her emotional response triggers, trying to nudge Esther closer to the child sh
e appeared to be. It was impossible to take an adult fully back to the careless short-term thoughts of a pre-teen—impossible for now, anyway; they were getting closer all the time—but he could change her dosages, could adjust her perceptions, until she was thinking almost like her thirteen-year-old self. He had done it before, and he would do it again, over and over, until everything was understood.)
At the end of the school day, facts and faces chasing each other around her head like ponies on a racetrack, Esther follows Jennifer to the school doors and looks at her shyly, waiting to learn what the other girl is planning to do. To her delight and relief, Jennifer grins.
“Want me to walk you home?” she asks.
“Yes,” says Esther, and Jennifer laughs, and the world is a little better.
THE ROUTE from the school to their neighborhood is a game of choose your own adventure, streets branching and twisting in all directions. Esther took the easiest route this morning, walking fast and not looking back. According to Jennifer, that isn’t just the boring route, it’s one of the slower ones—too many streetlights and crosswalks slowing the average speed of transit. Esther isn’t sure why running into traffic is so appealing, but it is. It really, truly is.
The route Jennifer selects is winding, overcast with skeletal branches and coated in a thick layer of fallen leaves. She kicks them as they walk, her attention half on their surroundings, half on Esther.
“Where did you live before?” she asks.
Esther squirms inside her skin, feeling like she has come disconnected from everything around her. “California,” she said. “We lived in California.” The other side of the country; the other side of the world. Massachusetts has trees, but they’re wrong, more like bushes with delusions of grandeur than the comfortable, towering eucalyptus of her homeland. These are trees that show their bones. She doesn’t trust them. She would be a fool to trust them.
The leaves crunch underfoot, filling the air with a dry, unfamiliar scent. It’s organic and sour but not unpleasant, and watching Jennifer kick flurries of leaves into the air, sending them falling like confetti, Esther can understand how people who were born here could love it. She’s not sure she ever will. She’s not sure she wants to. It would feel like a betrayal of her home, and of the mother who waits there for her to return, sleeping silent beneath the loam.
(The adult Esther never did return: went to college on the East Coast, learned to love the idea of seasons, of trees that lost their leaves, of new beginnings. She learned to live in an unhaunted world, one where the ghosts of her parents were only shadows seen out of the corner of her eye, and not memories trapped on every street corner, indestructible and unforgettable. In her pod, she twitched a little in her sleep, and was still.)
“Hey.” Jennifer tugs her sleeve, pointing with her other hand. Esther follows the angle of her arm, the direction of her finger, and finds herself looking at a graveyard.
It is an old-fashioned thing, older and wilder and somehow more terrible than the graveyards of California, which are mossy and overgrown, but lack the weight of centuries. There are more dead people in that ground than there are living people on this street, thinks Esther, and shudders, unable to shake the feeling that something has gone utterly, catastrophically wrong.
“See?” says Jennifer, oblivious to Esther’s discomfort. She’s still smiling. She’s standing on the edge of a sea of dead people, and she’s still smiling. “That green one is mine.”
It takes Esther a moment to realize that Jennifer is talking about a house on the other side of the cemetery, and not an especially mossy tombstone. “Oh,” she says.
“Come on!” Jennifer steps off the sidewalk, sliding on the sides of her feet down the short incline to the cemetery fence.
Esther freezes, girl made of stone, as she watches her new friend squirm through a gap in the wall meant to separate the living from the dead. She has a choice here. She knows that. She can turn around, walk back to the school, and start the trip home anew, following a path she’s already walked, safe and secure and free from any adventure. Also free from the risk of making a friend. Jennifer will see her as a chicken if she runs, and Jennifer won’t be wrong.
Or she can slide down the side of the hill—can already almost feel the dirt moving under her feet, the familiar shift in the soil, carrying her onward, toward the consequences of her choices—and let Jennifer lead the way. She has the feeling that if she does that, Jennifer will be leading the way for a long, long time. Maybe for their entire lives.
She doesn’t think she’d really mind. She’s so tired of walking alone.
Esther slides down the side of the hill and follows Jennifer through the fence, into the graveyard where she waits. Jennifer smiles as she approaches.
“What took you so long?” she asks, and that’s that: the compact is sealed. The story is begun.
___3. Chasing.
BACK IN the real world, the man at the controls to the scenario smiled to himself, watching the vital signs of the two women rise and fall in quiet harmony. They’ve been under for less than two hours—in Dr. Webb’s case, less than one hour—and already, they’re starting to synchronize. By the time they finish facing the challenges he has to set for them, they’ll be old friends, thick as thieves and utterly loyal to each other.
The lights flickered. He barely noticed.
(Dr. Webb designed the system. She understood better than anyone that it was impossible to use without experiencing at least a portion of its power. No matter how hard he attempted to steer the psychological conditioning away from her, she would wake with a newly-formed lifelong friendship to the Hoffman woman boiling along her neural pathways. It would fade to a more subdued level if they didn’t elect to go back under, which seemed likely, all things considered: Esther Hoffman was opposed enough to everything they did that she was unlikely to consent to multiple treatments. But nothing, no amount of time or distance, would erase it. They would always care about each other. That could be used.)
A muffled footstep from behind him caught his attention. Not quite enough to take his eyes away from the screen, where the two girls (so odd, to see them reimagined so young) were walking hand-in-hand through the virtual graveyard. It was a small scare, binding them together before the larger frights that were to come. They had been regressed to one of the safer ages, subject to neither the terrible elasticity of early childhood, nor the hormonal rages of their true teenage years. Changes made in the here and now would only revise, not rewrite completely.
“Did you get the burritos?” he asked. “I’m starving.”
There was a rustle. He started to turn. The knife through his throat stopped him cold, pinning him back against the expensive leather of the chair. Eyes rolling, he scanned the darkness for his assailant, but found nothing. His hands rose, clawing at the hilt protruding from his flesh. They found no purchase against hardwood liberally smeared with blood, more of which was escaping all the time.
Eventually, his hands dropped away from the knife. The twitching continued for several seconds, until that, too, passed. His assailant waited until the stillness became absolute before stepping calmly forward and jerking the knife out of his throat, freeing one last hot gush of blood before it all faded to a trickle. From there, it was a simple matter to roll the chair into the corner and replace it with a fresh one, unburdened by inconvenient corpses.
Calmly, humming quietly, the new conductor of the bloody symphony reached for the keyboard and began to type.
WHEN ESTHER looks back on the last few years, it’s like seeing her life reflected in a funhouse mirror. She knows everything happened, can still see herself there when she closes her eyes and concentrates, but sometimes it seems impossible that her world has been reshaped so completely and conclusively in just three short years.
The smell of the Massachusetts sky is familiar now, as familiar as the California coast’s blend of eucalyptus, evergreen, and sea brine used to be. She walks in a world of fallen leaves and apple trees
, of petrichor and old brick, and she is happy here, so happy that she can’t imagine ever wanting to go back to where she came from. She no longer sleeps in the hall outside her father’s door, driven by a fear she could never quite put a name to, one that whispered of his life cradled in her hands, preserved only by her stubborn refusal to ever let it go.
And there is Jennifer.
Rude Jennifer, loud Jennifer, brilliant Jennifer, fighting against a sea of people who say little girls shouldn’t do math, or program computers, or dream of lab coats and white walls and the magical, infinite unknown. Weeping Jennifer, shattered Jennifer, unsure Jennifer, slipping her hand into Esther’s after one body-blow too many to her ego, which is reassuringly human, despite the fact that Jennifer herself sometimes seems like a force of nature, a hurricane destined to destroy the Eastern seaboard, mistakenly pressed into the body of a human child. Jennifer who matches aggression with aggression, refusing to be bullied, refusing to back down, and there, always in her shadow and happy to remain there is Esther, best friend and confidant, who will one day be the power behind the throne she knows in her heart Jennifer will inevitably claim.
Esther, who excels in creative writing and journalism, but had to drop drama midway through her first semester when the stage fright paralyzed her in front of her classmates. Esther, who is no longer the new girl—who left that new girl behind long ago, the moment she chose to follow her friend into the aisles of the dead rather than walking on alone. Esther, sixteen years old and confused about almost everything in the world, from who she’s attracted to all the way down to what she wants to be when the last bell rings at the end of senior year, but who knows two things for certain: she loves her father, and she and Jennifer are going to be friends for the rest of their lives. Let the world throw whatever it likes at them. She’ll be holding onto Jennifer’s hand, anchoring her to the ground while she builds her beautiful castles in the air.