Authors: Amy Reed
I can't be certain, but I think I just won that round.
* * *
I am watching TV. I am trying to stay awake. I start getting drowsy as soon as I get bored, which is always. I click through channel after channel, not staying on anything too long. The longer I sit here, the more like a zombie I feel. I can sense myself getting stupider with every reality show I linger on too long. It seems like every other channel has a version of the same show about ridiculous, irresponsible rich people. Why are there so many of these shows? Why do we allow these horrible people to be famous? Is it because of people like me, bored idiots sitting on their couches for hours on end, needing desperately to be entertained? People who, despite their better judgments and taste, can't help but be fascinated by how this different species lives, these people who are so far removed from the real world the rest of us live in.
What would it be like to never have to worry about money? To be so rich you don't even have to care about how you treat people because you know there will be more lined up to follow you around and be your “friend”? What if you felt entitled to anything you wanted, entitled to having your own TV show, entitled to hundreds of thousands of people fascinated by watching you shop and talk on the phone. What if you could get away with anything? Would that power automatically corrupt the best of us? If you gave a saint a billion-dollar trust fund, would he turn into an asshole overnight?
No matter how fast I change the channels, my eyelids start to feel heavy. I make a pot of very strong coffee. Agave syrup will never taste as good to me as good old-fashioned white sugar, but it's better than nothing. I sip the sweet concoction as I watch a series of commercials: dating hotlines for lonely people, two-year technical colleges, drug rehab, something about Jesus, weight-loss systems, at-home electrolysis kits. They assume I am one of the lost and ugly who watches late-night TV on a Friday, and they are right. The marketing companies are speaking to me. They are saying, “Get a life.”
I return to a show about rich people. An orange-skinned, leathery-faced woman gets Botox. Someone's toy poodle catches a lizard by the pool, and they all have to talk about it for ten minutes while drinking margaritas.
This tiny blender will change my life, and it comes with a free knife that's sharp enough to cut tin cans! This man found the Lord, Hallelujah! This woman lost 133 pounds and now she's perfect!
Mom's still not home.
This pillow is soft.
My eyes are heavy.
Heavy.
So heavy.
Motionless. The air is like paper. Thin and sterile. Blank. We sit on a log on the side of the road, watching the show.
“Why can't I feel the fire?” I say.
“This is what it's like to be a ghost.”
“I'm not a ghost,” I say. “I'm dreaming.”
“Same thing.”
A fireball lights up the trees. Shadows dance across everyÂthing solid. Red and black and red and black. There is your car, becoming a skeleton. The world is melting in front of us.
A semi truck is tipped over, cradled by a wall of trees. The driver is out, eyes wide with flames, a phone to his ear, petrified, his only movement his wet mouth: “Oh god oh god oh god oh god,” he says, such useless words against fire.
I close my eyes. So many lives are over.
“Kinsey, look!” you say.
“No,” I say.
“You have no choice.”
Hunter is no longer a mannequin. He is a live, breathing thing. He is all movement. His skin is charred. He is made of fire. He is pulling me out of the burning car. “Are you watching?” you say. He sets me down on the side of the road, in a grassy spot away from danger.
“Do you see how he cushions your head with his hand?” you narrate. “How gentle?”
“I didn't know he did that.” My voice is small. “Why'd he get me first? Why didn't he get you?”
“Oh, you'll see.”
Sirens in the distance. The night getting bigger.
Hunter carries your body in his arms. You are covered with blood. You are roasted. Your face is completely gone, like someone shoved it inside your head. Your arm hangs limply at an unnatural angle. You are nothing but a bag of meat and bones.
“Oh god oh god oh god.” I don't know who is speaking.
The approaching fire truck lights the trees a strobing red. On off, on off. Like a pulse. Like the forest's heartbeat. The car on fire, consuming itself.
I try to run. But Hunter's burning arms are around me now, holding me too tight. I thrash and buck, but he is too strong. I try to close my eyes, but he's holding them too, pulling them open, forcing me to see. “Let me go!” I say. But he cannot hear the cries of a ghost.
“Oh god oh god,” I say; “Oh god,” says the truck driver; “Oh god,” says Hunter, all of us singing in harmony with the light. Our prayers, pulsing in the dark.
FOUR
I wake up screaming.
My legs run but I am going nowhere.
The world is hard and dark and close around me.
A stranger's chipper voice calls from somewhere.
Is this hell?
Strange canned music.
Is this the waiting room for hell?
No. I am on the floor. My foot kicks the couch. My forearm is sore where it must have hit the table. My cup is smashed on the floor in a puddle of cold coffee.
“No!” I scream. I punch the couch until my hand throbs with the memory of the dream. “No!” I scream until my hand is bruised, like some small amount of violence can pound out this feeling. An infomercial for an exercise machine is on TV. The announcer chirps his empty promises. How dare he try to sell me something so useless at a time like this? How dare he, when Camille is dead?
The room wobbles around me. Something is off. Something is tilted. All the angles of the walls seem askew. Things are not in the right places. It's like someone came in and moved everything an inch to the right. I am dizzy. I close my eyes. I go back to black, back to zero. But the world is slanted even there.
The only solution is moving. You can't sleep when you are moving. Nightmares can't chase someone who's running.
So I run. I was asleep for barely an hour, but I run. My stomach feels sick and empty, I am dizzy with exhaustion and adrenaline, but I run. The trees are black like they should be. No red. No light pulsing. The trees are not breathing. The only breath is mine, harder than normal. My body is weak. My legs feel like noodles. But I keep going. I will push through this. I will run through this weakness. It is all I can do.
This is the forest but it is a different forest. This is not where she left me. This is not where she was taken. That was somewhere else. Miles away. Still charred by the explosion. The stupid white cross someone stuck in the ground. The wreath of fake flowers. The teddy bears and candles and notes from people who barely knew her. But that is not here. The trees here are still standing, still fresh, still green behind the darkness. This road has not been cursed.
Run. Run. Breathe. Breathe. Run.
Light. In the distance.
Two eyes blinking.
The trees shift, become feathered tentacles, grasping for me.
I run faster. I run from everything chasing me.
The night stirs. The light grows. The ground shakes.
She is coming to replace me.
It was not Camille who was supposed to die.
Pure white. Blindness.
Some force pulls me off the road, like arms made out of wind.
I am lying in a coffin, the roots and vines tying me in, taking me under.
A sharp pain shoots up my leg.
Death starts at the feet and moves upward.
The brain is the last to go, to make sure you remember every last detail.
The light fades.
White then red then nothing at all.
Like a flashlight losing batteries.
But I am not gone.
It is dark again and I am in a ditch. Dirt sticks to the sweat on my skin. I am not dead. This is not heaven or hell. That was just a car driving in the night. I breathe. My heart pounds in my chest, testing itself. I sit up. My head aches. All I've had to drink in the last eight hours is coffee.
I shift my weight to my legs and stand up. Fire burns a trail through my leg. I steady myself on my right foot and tap the ground with my left. Pain throbs with the pressure. The pain sobers me, makes the night stop moving.
It is the middle of the night.
I am standing in the road in running shoes and ripped pajamas, and I just twisted my ankle.
My best friend is dead instead of me.
As I limp home, I can't stop replaying the dream in my head. I can't stop seeing Camille with no face. I squeeze my eyes tight, but she's still there, an empty hole, gone forever. I try to remember what she looked like beforeâher eyes, her nose, her lipsâbut it's like that's all been erased, like my whole life's worth of memories is gone, and now she's nothing but her absence, nothing but a big gaping wound.
I force myself not to think about her. I count my steps. I count the trees. Whenever I feel the sting of emotion coming on, I find something else to count. Numbers have no feelings. Numbers don't miss people. I count everything I can find until I get home. I count ice cubes into a plastic bag. I count five Advil into my mouth. I count how many times the Ace bandage wraps around my ankle. I sit back down on the couch and count the channels until it's time to get ready for work. Whenever I get sleepy, I press my left foot against something hard so the pain will wake me up.
Mom still isn't home when I leave to open the restaurant for lunch, which is more than fine with me. I don't have to hear her making fun of me as I attempt to ride my bike the eight miles to work with a twisted ankle. I don't have to listen to her calling me stupid for going running in the middle of the night. I don't need reminding. Every time my left foot pushes on the pedal the pain reminds me how dumb I am.
When I get to work, I feel dizzy. I nearly run into a family crossing the street for their morning shift at the beach. As soon as I walk in, Bill notices something wrong. “Had a little too much fun last night?” he kids.
“Totally,” I say, wishing it were true, wishing I could blame how I feel on something normal like a hangover.
The new girl, Jessie, peeks out from behind a freezer and smiles timidly. I don't bother saying hi.
People are already lined up outside the door by the time we open at eleven. Bill's excited and talking too loud, cracking stupid jokes that make my headache worse. All I want to do is prepare food so I don't have to talk to anyone, but Bill says Jessie needs practice on the soft-serve machine. What kind of idiot needs practice on the soft-serve machine? This is who I have to share my tips with?
Not that I'm making any tips today. I can't stop myself from being rude to pretty much every person I serve. I keep getting orders wrong. I ring up someone's hot dog and sundae and it somehow comes out to $127.83. At one point, I totally zone out while taking an order. I just blank for I don't know how long, looking out into space, like my brain shut off for a minute. I come back to the customer saying, “Hello? Hello? Anybody there?”
As she walks away, I hear the lady say to her husband, “I heard about there being a lot of problems out here with kids and prescription drugs. They call it hillbilly heroin. It's just so sad to see it in person.”
I want to scream at her, “I'm not a hillbilly, you redneck!” but before I have a chance Bill comes over with a concerned look on his face that almost makes me start crying. He puts his hand on my shoulder and says in a soft voice, “Kinsey, are you okay?” and for a second I want to tell him everything. I want to tell him how Camille won't leave me alone, how I'm afraid to sleep, how I think I'm going crazy, how it should be me who's dead and not her. But then I see Jessie not even trying to hide the fact that she's eavesdropping, and the lady who thinks I'm a hillbilly drug addict staring at me while she chews her disgusting meal, and I will not give them the satisfaction of seeing me fall apart.
“I'm okay,” I say, and try to smile as convincingly as possible.
“Are you limping?” Bill says.
“It's no big deal. Just twisted my ankle a little, running. Happens all the time. It'll be fine in a couple days.”
“Maybe you shouldn't be on your feet.”
“I'm fine,” I say, my smile shaking no matter how hard I try to maintain it. “I promise.”
“Okay,” he says. “But maybe you should switch jobs with Jessie for a while.”
I pretend I am an assembly line. I pretend I am a machine. I put hot dogs in buns. I put ice cream in cones. I put yellow goop on stale corn chips. I tune out all the chatter around me. I start to feel all right. The Advil's doing a good job with my ankle. I have a lot of things to count.
But then I turn around, and all of a sudden the sun is shining on the freezer in a way that makes it look like fire. The chrome reflects the light and turns everything orange.
I try to breathe but nothing comes.
I am only my muddy reflection in orange chrome.
I am the absence of a face.
I am just a hole.
I look away, toward the door and the sea of people. I try to settle my eyes on something. The door opens and someone walks in, someone so familiar I can sense it all the way over here.
My eyes find her face. It's Camille.
She looks at me and smirks. Her eyes crinkle the way they do when she thinks something's funny. But different. With an edge.
I hear her voice in my head:
You can't outrun me, Kinsey.
I hide behind the hot dog machine. I am crouched on the floor between it and the wall. Greasy dust bunnies collect at my feet, threatening to bury me. The world is wobbling and I feel cold, so cold.
Jessie's face pops around the corner and I shudder backward. But there is nowhere left to go.
“Are you okay?” she says, but the look on her face says she already knows the answer.
“Yes,” I snap.
She walks away and I hear her talking. “Um, Bill,” she squeaks. “Um, I think Kinsey is . . . I think she's having some problems.”
Screw you, Jessie. What do you know? I am fine. Look, I'm standing up. I'm brushing myself off. I'm walking like a normal person over to resume my position at the soft-serve machine. “Kinsey?” Bill says behind me, and as I turn around my right arm somehow comes with me, outstretched, and I don't even feel it as it knocks over the cone dispenser. But I watch the fall in slow motion, the cones flying through the air and smashing to the floor. I hear Camille's laugh echoing out of the air vents. As I fall to the ground, I can sense everyone in the restaurant come to see what the commotion's about, crowding around the counter, looking at me on the floor. I can hear the hillbilly heroin lady saying, “See what I mean? So sad.” My arms move but they seem to be making a worse mess. I don't know if I am breathing.
Bill comes over and kneels down. I am shoving smashed cones back into the dispenser. He puts a hand on my shoulder and says my name. I don't respond. I can't. I have to keep cleaning. I have to keep moving. I'm afraid of what will happen if I let myself be still.
“Honey, stop,” Bill says. He grabs my hands, both of them, and I am immobilized. A sound comes out of my mouth like something deflating. Not words. I am incapable of words.
“I think you should go home for the day,” Bill says.
“I'm fine,” I say, but my voice sounds thin, like paper.
“You need a rest.” He smiles, and I know he's trying to pretend it's not a big deal. But I know he knows it is. “You need to rest your ankle so it gets better. Jessie and I can handle the rest of the day.”
I nod because I'm too tired to speak. I am too tired to fight anymore.
He helps me up. I scan the room and all the customers look away. They scuttle back to their seats, embarrassed for me.
“You don't have to come in tomorrow if it still hurts, okay? Just give me a call later and let me know how you're feeling.”
I can't tell if this is pity or kindness. I don't know how to tell the difference. All I know is it hurts and I want Bill to stop looking at me like this, stop talking in this tone of voice. I just want out of here.
I take off my apron and grab my backpack from under the counter. The restaurant is silent. Jessie's sweeping up the smashed cones. Customers pretend to eat their meals, but their eyes keep darting over to the show behind the counter.
“Do you want me to call Annie?” Bill says. “I bet she'd come by with the truck and give you a ride home.”
I shake my head no and walk outside before he can protest. A wall of heat greets me as soon as I leave the air-conditioned building. I am vaguely aware that I should be feeling something. Humiliation, maybe. Shame. Fear. But I feel nothing. I am too tired and too empty to care.
Camille, is this what it's like to be a ghost?
I get on my bike and start pedaling. I am not going home. I am not ready to be inside that house again, not ready to possibly face my mother. I just go and go until the forest opens to fields and the fields turn into neighborhoods and the sidewalks lead into town. I park my bike at the library. I am covered in sweat and my ponytail is only half-intact. I enter the library looking like a crazy person. I sit at a free computer and don't even care who sees what I look up:
how to do exorcisms
Unfortunately, most sites say the first step is to be full of the Holy Spirit. Since the only time I set foot inside a church was at Camille's funeral, I think that's going to be pretty unlikely. I'm not sure Camille's going to take me seriously when I tell her to be quiet in the name of Jesus. Most sites recommend hiring a professional exorcist. One says I should definitely wear purple. One says that demonic possessions are often mistaken for mental illnesses, but prescription medications will only make the demons sleepy. The further I look, the more I'm convinced I'm hopeless.
“What are you trying to exorcise?” says a voice behind me. I scream, and the sound reverberates around the quiet library. I turn around and see Hunter. The handful of people scattered around the library stare at us. The librarian glares at me sternly.
“Sorry,” I mumble to the librarian. I turn to Hunter. “You
are
following me,” I growl.
“That's kind of conceited, don't you think?” He smiles his lazy smile. How can it be so easy for him to smile?
“What are you doing in my town?”
“
Your
town?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Wellspring has a fine library. My town does not.”
“What do you want with the library?”
“If you haven't noticed, along with computers with which people can look up how to do exorcisms, libraries also have these things called books, which I coincidentally like to read.”