She pulled it out.
She sobbed again and spoke a small whimper, a sound so terrible, so hopeless, and then, she placed the barrel against the side of her head, which now no longer showed the wound, the wound that was coming if she didn’t—
BANG!
The noise was so much louder than in movies. I felt as if I’d been struck physically. I felt that sound in my bones and my teeth, in my heart.
Samantha’s head jerked.
Her hand fell away, limp and blood-spattered.
Blood sprayed from the hole for a moment, then slowed to an insidious, vile pulsation.
She remained seated for a terribly long time as the gun fell and the blood poured and then, at last, she fell onto her side, smeared red over the pastel floral print of her comforter, and rolled to the floor, a heap on the carpet.
The gunshot rang in my ears. On and on.
“I don’t like this dream,” I said, gritting my teeth, shaking my head, fighting the panic that rose in me.
The boy in black said nothing. He just looked and when I turned to him for explanation, I saw a grim mien, anger, disgust. Simmering rage. His pale lips trembled. A muscle in his jaw twitched.
He crossed abruptly, his first sudden movement, to the desk in the corner of the room. There was a laptop computer open to Facebook. There were school books, a notebook, a Disney World cup holding pencils, a dozen colorful erasers in various shapes, a tube of acne medicine, a Valentine’s card curled with age, a photograph of Samantha and two other girls at a beach, laughing.
There was a piece of paper, held down at the four corners by tiny glass figures of fancifully colored ponies. The paper had been torn from the notebook.
The boy in black looked down at the paper and said nothing. He looked at it for far longer than it could have taken to read the few words written there in blue ink. I knew, for I, too, read the words.
I love you all. I am so sorry.
But I can’t anymore.
—Sam
I found that I could not look up from the words. I felt that if I looked away, I must look at the dead girl, and I didn’t want to see her. She had still lived when she had written these words.
Then I realized that he was looking at me.
“Why is this happening?” I asked him.
He touched the note reverently with one finger.
“Why am I here?” I asked with sudden vehemence.
“The same reason we are all here,” the boy said. “To learn.”
But I had lost patience with cryptic answers. “Hey. Enough. If this is a dream, then I don’t have to put up with you!”
“Mara,” he said, though I had never told him my name. “This is not a dream.”
“Then what is it, huh?” My voice was ragged. I was sick through and through, sick with what I had just witnessed, sick with what I feared about myself. “What is it and what are you?”
“I am . . . ,” he began, then hesitated, considered, and again showed that slight lessening in the grim lines of his face. “I am the messenger.”
“Messenger? What’s your message, showing me this poor dead girl? I never wanted to see that. I don’t want it in my head. Is that your message? Showing me this?”
“My message?” He seemed almost surprised by the question. “My message? My message is that a price must be paid. A price paid with terror.”
I reached to grab him angrily, but he moved easily out of range. I had wanted to grab him by the throat, though I had instead reached for his arm. It was not that I blamed him for what I was now enduring, it was rather that I simply needed to hurt someone, something, because of what I had seen, and what I had felt since waking to find myself in the mist. It was like an acid inside of me, churning and burning me from the inside.
I wanted to kick something, to shout, to throw things, to scream and then to cry.
To save that poor girl.
To wipe the memory from my mind.
“You’re the messenger?” I asked in a shrill, nasty, mocking voice. “And your message is to be afraid?”
He was unmoved by my emotion. . . . No, that’s not quite right. It was more accurate to say that he was not taken aback. He was not unmoved, he was . . . pleased. Reassured?
“Yes, Mara,” he said with a sense of finality, as though now we could begin to understand each other, though I yet understood nothing. “I am the messenger. The Messenger of Fear.”
It would be a long time before I came to know him by any other name.
Calmer now, having released some of my boiling anger and worry, I turned my unwilling eyes back to Samantha Early. Her life’s blood was running out, soaking into the carpet.
“Why did she do it?” I asked.
“We will see,” Messenger said.
3
SAMANTHA EARLY LOOKS AT THE CLOTHES hanging in her closet. She clenches her fists. The veins on her forearms stand out. Her body seems to vibrate with tension.
I see this. It is happening. I can neither look away nor remain indifferent. Messenger has shown me the outcome, so I cannot tell myself that all I am witnessing is teen angst.
By means I can neither explain nor ignore, I know her thoughts. I know what she feels as she gazes, frightened, frightened by nothing but a closetful of clothing.
What would not draw ridicule? That is the question she asks herself. She dresses defensively: What will avoid giving anyone an excuse to ridicule? It should have been easy, getting dressed. It should have been as simple as what top goes with which jeans or shorts or skirt, no, no, not skirt.
No, not skirt. She remembers that day when she tripped in a skirt, when she’d sprawled out across the hallway, finger still stuck in the loop of her locker’s combo lock, books strewn out into the path of oncoming students, who stepped aside indifferently or made a show of it, made a thing of it and laughed.
Spazmantha.
Not even original, that. She’d first heard Spazmantha when she was eleven.
It shouldn’t bother her. She knows that. Her mother has told her that. Her shrink has told her that. Actually, the shrink said, “You have bigger issues than that to concern yourself with.”
How do I know this? How am I seeing this? This dream is a very strange movie in which I watch Samantha and watch her thoughts at the same time.
The shrink’s bigger issue was obsessive-compulsive disorder. OCD for short. Everyone threw that term around like it was nothing, like it was cute, OCD. “Yeah, I’m a little OCD? Hah hah.” It wasn’t cute, and Samantha did not have a little of it.
Samantha goes to the bathroom and washes her hands. She uses Cetaphil soap because it’s mild, but she uses a brush as well, a wooden-handled bristle brush. First, the hot water. Then the Cetaphil, taking care that every single square inch of her hands—and for purposes of her compulsion, her hands end at the first crease in her wrist—is covered. Then the brush. She brushes hard. Then she rinses.
And that’s one.
I watch as Samantha begins the process all over again. The Messenger stands behind her. Samantha sees neither of us. This isn’t happening, this has already happened. The Samantha movie is in a flashback.
“Can she hear us?” I ask, but the answer is obvious: Samantha can neither see nor hear us. She is washing her hands, has already washed her hands, done all this already. I’m seeing it, here, in my present, but it’s in the past.
I can smell the soap. I feel the steam rising from the too-hot water. When I step to one side, I can see myself and Messenger in the mirror.
He’s taller than I am. He’s white, I’m Asian. He’s . . . beautiful? I’m . . . pretty? Maybe that, maybe pretty, but not beautiful. I’m not sure many girls could call themselves beautiful while sharing a mirror with Messenger.
There’s something about him that seems unnatural. He’s a marble statue brought to life, unreal. Isn’t he? He can’t be real, not really real, if for no other reason than no one dresses that way. And yet there is a weight to him, like a distortion of g
ravity, a bending of light, as if he was made of the stuff of collapsed stars.
I force my gaze from him and back to a more distressing vision: Samantha Early begins a third round of washing. Her hands are obviously spotless—she could perform open heart surgery without wearing gloves—yet, caught in the compulsion, she washes her hands a fourth time. The backs of her hands are bright pink now, like sliced ham, with fingertips so raw that the cuticles are tearing away in tiny shreds. She wields the brush with a ferocity that is necessary to her, energy that she must expend, pain that she must endure.
On the fifth washing little drops of blood ooze from the cuticle of her ring finger.
“Can’t she stop?” I ask.
“If she fails to wash her hands seven times, her family will die,” Messenger says.
“What?” I snap. “That’s crazy.”
“Compulsion is very like insanity,” Messenger says.
He is not indifferent, that’s the thing. His too-near voice that seems always to be whispering in my ear is held to a standard of cool detachment, but his eyes and his mouth and his forehead and the way he swallows all speak of reflected pain.
He understands. He feels. I’m convinced of that at least. There’s a humanity to him. He’s not entirely cold and beautiful and strange—there’s something flesh and blood there as well. That reassures me. He may be only a figment of a dream I’ll forget upon waking, but still I am relieved.
It is still a dream. What else could it be? I wake in a field with a mist covering me, and then, all of this?
Wait, had I fallen asleep? I try to recall, I strain to dredge some memory out of my foggy brain. But again it is as if all I can see of my waking life is a sort of clip art version, a stock photo version with generic people acting generically, none of it possessing the detail and grain of reality.
Samantha begins her sixth round.
“Is this why—”
“Many things are why,” Messenger says. “But this is for our deeper understanding.”
Why do we need to understand? I want to ask him that, I want to demand an answer to that, because there has to be some very good reason why my subconscious mind would lay these sad images before me like a fortune-teller laying out her tarot cards. But all of Messenger’s answers were vague, and after all, was there a point in asking why within a dream? Eventually I would wake up, and then I could consider the meaning of it all. Calmly, coolly, with the sick sadness of it all pushed aside and relabeled as nothing more than random imagery conjured from an overtired mind.
We were no longer in Samantha’s bathroom. We were at a school. But not my high school; of that I was sure. Almost.
A banner on the wall of the corridor read CARLSBAD HIGH SCHOOL—GO SPARTANS. The colors were maroon and gold. The colors at my school were . . .
What were they? I was sure I was in high school, and sure that this was not it. Why couldn’t I remember my school colors?
Dreamland was a strange world where cause and effect could be reversed, where one could move effortlessly from place to place. Where gaunt, beautiful boys with intimate voices and eerily blue eyes could wear skulls for buttons. Yes to all of that, but if this was a dream, shouldn’t I be able to recall my school colors? Or my name?
Mara? Mara what? I felt the knife’s edge of panic again. If I stopped believing this was a very lucid dream, if I started for even a moment to believe this was real, I would have to be afraid, and I feared that moment when I might be forced to cross the line into a more personal terror.
Samantha’s hands were pink and torn, but they were very clean as she walked down the hallway, thinking to herself that there was more to life than this place, that she would be out of this place soon.
“I know what she’s thinking,” I said, walking behind Samantha with Messenger just a pace behind me.
“Yes,” Messenger said, and that voice carried notes of warning coiled within the single syllable.
Samantha had spotted someone in the crowd ahead of her. I knew the name: Kayla. Kayla McKenna. K-Mack, some people called her, and it was like a brand name. It meant more than this one tall, willowy blond girl alone; K-Mack meant a group. K-Mack meant a power within the school. A force.
Kayla was more than pretty. Kayla had large brown eyes framed by absurdly long lashes. She had perfect cheekbones. Her every movement was graceful and assured. She was dressed impeccably. Her hair tumbled, liquid, like honey, like something out of a shampoo commercial. Her skin was flawless, untouched by blemish.
Samantha instinctively put a hand to her face, traced her finger over the bump that had begun to emerge just beside her nose, a zit in the making.
Having touched it once, Samantha had to touch it twice more. Three times touch. Or something awful would happen, something unspeakable.
Kayla was surrounded by people. Three girls and two boys. Certainty and smugness oozed from them all, but they were planets circling Kayla’s sun.
“Stop touching it, Samantha,” Kayla said. She had an interesting way of inflecting, Kayla did. The “touch” part of “touching” was punched with a humorous uplift. Like the word itself was funny.
Samantha’s hand froze in place. Kayla had disrupted the count, and now she would have to do it again. Three times.
“It’s just a zit,” Samantha said, and touched it.
“Yeah, I didn’t think it was a unicorn,” Kayla said. The emphasis on “didn’t,” with the same comical uplift. “Oh, my God, you’re touching it again. Stop touching it! You’re making me sick, honestly. No offense.”
The way she spoke was an invitation to a conspiracy—it invited all to see the humor, all to see that she was just joking, just having fun. Her eyes mocked, but was there anything to point to as proof that she was aware of the effect on Samantha?
“No offense,” Samantha echoed, and smiled a sickly smile and strained with all her will to keep her hands at her sides, not to touch.
All of them were looking at her now, the K-Mack crowd, staring at her, expectant, waiting on the signal to laugh at her.
“How’s your . . . um . . . book coming?” Kayla asked. The word book got the uplift this time, in a way that clearly cast doubt on the possibility that there was such a book.
“Okay, I guess. I have to get to class.”
“Aren’t you done writing it? You said in Mr. Briede’s class you were done.”
Samantha fought down a wave of anxiety. Mark Briede was the teacher who had most encouraged her to write. But she didn’t want to talk about the book, or think about the book, or think of how she wanted to touch her face. She had to begin the count again, had to make it three times. The book was just stupid. She would probably just be a huge failure—what were the odds of some sixteen-year-old girl publishing anything?
And if she did? She had revealed bits of herself in the story. One of the characters would be blindingly obvious as herself, as a prettier, cooler Samantha, an aspirational Samantha. She would make herself even more of a target, she would have painted a bull’s-eye. . . . No, a targeting map, like the military used—strike here and here and here to inflict maximum damage.
“I’ll see you guys later,” Samantha said, and fled, touching her bump. Touching it. Touching it again. Relief.
I looked at Kayla rather than Samantha now.
“Is she doing it on purpose? Does she know she’s being cruel?”
“Is that important?” Messenger asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“Listen to her thoughts,” Messenger said.
And I heard them. Kayla’s thoughts. As clearly as if she was speaking. In fact, when I looked, I saw her lips moving. She was speaking but not to the others around her. It was more as if I’d given her a truth serum that caused her to explain herself honestly.
“I don’t like Samantha. She’s very smart, but so am I. And I’m prettier by a mile and also much more popular. I pick on her because she’s weak. It’s that simple. She’s obviously got problems, so anything I say can make
her freak out.”
It was bizarre the way Kayla spoke, unsettling even by dream standards. She wasn’t looking at me—she wasn’t looking at anyone—she was just voicing her thoughts, like I’d thrown a switch simply by wondering about her. She was Richard the Third in Shakespeare’s play, pausing for a moment to enlighten the audience as to motive and malice.
“Why shouldn’t I pick on Samantha? It’s fun for me and entertaining for my friends. It reminds my friends to be a little afraid of me, and that’s useful. It reminds them that they could be next if they disappoint me. Besides, I can’t stand that she—”
She stopped just like that, in midthought.
I laughed. Not because it was funny but because it had the ring of truth and I had not often heard truth spoken so bluntly and so utterly without self-justification.
I turned my laughing face to Messenger, who was watching me, waiting for my reaction. Judging me, I thought.
“If this is a dream, why aren’t we at my school?” I asked him. “I should dream about places I know. This place probably isn’t real.”
He must have heard the uncertainty in my voice. I did.
“Okay, that’s enough,” I said sharply. “I want answers. I want to know what this is.” The panic came quick and strong, all at once, catching me by surprise. “This is real, isn’t it? This is real. Oh, God, this is real. This is real!”
“Bravo! Well done. She’s not nearly as thick as you were, Messenger.” A female voice. Not Kayla. Not Samantha, who was all the way down the hall now and entering a classroom.
Kayla’s little group broke up as the bell rang with startling urgency, and just as it did at my school when the bell rang, the hallway emptied out fast, the last stragglers rushing away with backpacks swinging.
The girl who had spoken, well, maybe she was a girl physically and chronologically but surely not psychologically. No girl could have carried herself this way. A woman, then. A young woman to look at but with no hint of youthful innocence.
She was as pale as Messenger and, like him, dressed in black. But this girl/woman had a great deal less clothing in total. She wore a thing that was a cross between a bustier and a leather jacket. Cutouts revealed her shoulders, the neckline plunged to her breastbone, and the whole garment was cut to a severe point in front, forming a V that hid her navel but left the sides of her waist and her lower back bare. She wore black tights that seemed more liquid than fabric, and swirled with black-on-black patterns that shifted and changed. Her boots went to her knees and were notably strange for suggesting that her feet were unnaturally small.