Unreal City (10 page)

I had a strong inkling that Joy, too, had a similar addiction of nurturing the downtrodden, and though I intimately understood the inner-workings of her
modus operandi,
I couldn’t turn her away. Though I didn’t say a word, I managed to look her directly in the eye for the first time that night. From the look she returned, I knew she’d understood that I was going to let her in.

TUESDAY AND WEDNESDAY
passed in a blur of nervous anticipation. The highlights of my days were my capers in the dining hall. I was on my way to becoming the campus’s most infamous milk smuggler, and every evening Felix lapped up the spoils of my thievery with greed.

I went to classes just to keep my head busy, and though I always attempted to do the homework assigned to me, I couldn’t seem to focus on anything. After a day or two of ordering Felix to stay locked up in my room, I decided to let him move around campus with me, once he assured me that no one else could see him. He was manic, constantly moving around, chasing things, shaking his head or observing nothing. I’d watch him during the lectures I attended as he floated near the ceiling, ice-skating on air. His apparent madness amused me, but it was also sort of frightening to glean from this behavior just how unhinged and inhuman his mind was.

Nonetheless, he was always captivating to behold. There wasn’t a moment that passed when he seemed to be
truly
there, and this fascinated me. I could never concoct a theory about him that didn’t seem ludicrous, or settle on just what he was made out of. Ectoplasm seemed like a possibility.

I was pretty sure my classmates and those in my dorm noticed my eyes always tracking what they saw as thin air. No doubt their concerns regarding my sanity increased.

On Thursday morning in the middle of the Core lecture, the first in a series of very peculiar occurrences began. As I was trying to focus on what a fellow student was saying—something ridiculous about hip-hop music being like Walmart—a sharp ringing hummed in both of my ears. The sound grew so loud it blocked out everything else in the room. I tried to make it stop by swallowing and shaking my head to clear my ears.

Felix looked over at me, stopping his midair dance, as still as if he were a painted image rather than a sentient being. The ringing increased, along with my heartbeat. It continued for the rest of my lecture, then faded as suddenly as it had come. When I asked Felix about the incident and his stare, he responded, “I just heard it too. That was all.”

That evening, Joy texted asking if we should get together again, this time just to hang out instead of do work. She and her boyfriend, Kyle, were going to take a walk in the woods to the Wishing Tree, and she asked if I wanted to come. I didn’t feel like staring at a blank page while telling myself to start my homework, so I agreed to tag along.

It was drizzling, but Joy and I had a decent talk when Kyle wasn’t butting in. He seemed to be the sort of person who was desperate to prove his intellectual superiority to anyone in the vicinity. I learned right away he loved correcting trivial mistakes and slips of the tongue in a condescending tone. Scoffs and eye-rolls were his go-to response for anything that a person said, even something as harmless as “Wow, it’s cold outside” was met with “Oh, how original”, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what Joy saw in him. I guessed that their relationship was the sort that begins out of a need for comfort and affection when forced into a new environment devoid of close friends or family.

I anticipated the Wishing Tree to leave me feeling as empty as before. Instead, as Joy and Kyle scribbled wishes on scraps of paper, I heard a sound that was like hundreds of soft, slurred voices. My heart picked up tempo as I was assailed by a bundle of emotions, none of which belonged to me. It was like all the feelings, all the longing, aching, hoping, wondering, and hungering that people left by that tree, their wishes surging toward me. Powerful emotions wrapped around me, and my breathing grew laborious.

Joy noticed my hand clawing at my throat and stopped writing. “You okay, Sarah?” she asked with a worried tone, and I tried to offer a convincing smile.

“I’m good, but something just went down the wrong pipe.
”

Kyle scoffed, a cynical smile spreading across his face. “Hah. I think you mean that you’re experiencing
pulmonary aspiration
,” he said, raising his eyebrows as if this were common sense.

I stared at him, deadpan, until his sneer faded and he resumed writing his wish.

That night, for the first time since the day the police had come to the door with the news about Lea, I couldn’t sleep. Usually for me, sleep was a sanctuary of rest from my hyperactive twin demons of anger and depression. I ran to it willingly and fell into it effortlessly, but that night was different. I tossed and turned for hours, peeking up every so often to see Felix watching me.

“Don’t you ever sleep?” I asked him around three in the morning.

He prowled closer, looking thoughtful. “I can. Do you want me to?”

“Well, yeah. It creeps me out how you just sit there and watch me. Quit that, will you?” I requested.

Felix blinked his lantern eyes. “If you say so, Sarah.” He curled up and went to sleep without further ado.

Feeling a bit more at ease, I lay my head back on the pillow and sighed. I was beginning to slip away when the sense that Felix was watching me returned. As I glanced over to check, a dark silhouette on the other side of my window startled me. I screamed as the blurred figure that looked like a man with antlers growing out of his head fled from my vision.

Felix sprang awake, his gaze locked on where my shaking finger pointed.

“Wh-what was that thing!?” I hollered, pulling the blankets closer to my chest. “Felix, go see!”

The feline spirit obeyed at once, pushing his head under the curtain and peering out into the night. “There’s nothing out there,” he said after several tense seconds.

“But you felt it too, didn’t you? There was something standing there. You
had
to have felt it.” My voice sounded like the shrieking breath of the wind whistling through a crack in the window.

“I’m sorry, Sarah. I was sleeping.”

I SLEPT THROUGH
my class Friday morning, awaking without a hint of guilt but a great deal of anxiety. One day left. One day until I went back to Unreal City. One day until I was going to enact my plan to see my sister again, even if it was just a projection of my memories of her.

I’d decided I would go through with it, though I’d say nothing to Felix about it beforehand. There were many things I found myself wanting to ask him, but every time I was on the brink of voicing them, a disquiet like the one I’d felt when I’d researched familiar spirits shut my lips for me. I was aware that the answers were there. I just didn’t want to know them yet. I didn’t think I could handle digesting all this new information at once, so I chose the peace that came along with ignorance, meager as it was.

My afternoon class was almost unbearable. I spent the three-hour period doodling in my notebook, trying to render the scenes I had created in my garden on paper so I wouldn’t forget them. My artwork was less than amazing, and I gave up after I noticed that the bear looked more like a walrus. Maybe I’d commission Joy to draw them for me.

The pent up anxiety in me decided to come out in the form of tapping my pencil relentlessly on my notebook until I got a dirty look from the girl sitting beside me, at which point I settled for tracing spirals over and over on the blank paper meant for taking notes. That was something I could draw. Spirals were easy.

Class ended and I bolted from the building. In there, it had been stifling and I’d felt trapped. In there, we’d all been packed together like sausages sealed in plastic. Now I could break away, let the frustration and anger leak out.

One. More. Day. One. More. Day.
I repeated these three words in my mind every time my sneakers hit the ground. It became a mantra, until another thought rocked me.

Why not tonight? What’s stopping me? The weekend’s here, and it’s not like I was getting a lot of work done anyway. I’ll give Felix my hair tonight.

I stopped on the dirt path that was the long road through the woods back to Merrill, trying to think of a reason not to. As I was considering, a flashing of red and blue lights near the dorms of College Ten caught my eye. Suspicions aroused, I changed direction and slid down the fern-carpeted hillside to get closer. Even from hundreds of feet away, I could tell from the growing commotion that something terrible had happened. Muffled screams came from a crowd gathering around a parked police car and ambulance. I craned my neck to see what manner of calamity had occurred, and caught a glimpse of a stretcher being unloaded from the back of the ambulance.

“What’s going on?” I demanded of a tall, lanky student obstructing my view.

He didn’t look down as he answered. “A body was found. I heard them say he must’ve been there since last night. I can’t believe it took this long.”

“What?” I breathed, pushing past him. I had to know exactly what had happened, who had died, and how. I didn’t understand why it mattered so much then, but I’ve come to realize that it was my built up regret that I hadn’t been there the night they found Lea, Stephen, and Isaac. I’d played out that scene in my head so many times, finding it suitable punishment for my absence. The concerned onlookers, the police sirens. I’d imagined in that scene that I would push through the crowd to find her there, and I suppose that rehearsed frustration had been enough to make me struggle forward when this uncannily similar incarnation presented itself.

As I peered around a girl’s shoulder, I steeled myself, bracing to see any number of awful things—blood, burn wounds, or broken bones. Nothing could have prepared me for what it actually was.

My stomach tightened as I caught sight of the dead boy’s face, sallow yellow in color, the skin tight but bloated underneath. His lips and eyelids were tinged blackish-blue and a stillness that could only be death had settled over his body.

Something akin to a very intense form of carsickness gripped me, and I felt a scream bubble up from inside and escape. I grabbed at the girl nearest to me, unable to control myself.

“Get off me!” she grunted, trying to break free from my grasp as I clung tighter.

The paramedics were trying to block the scene from view and disperse the crowd, but I could see it all. He had been laid behind a building in the center of campus. They lifted the dead boy’s body, and the sight of his stiffened and lifeless limbs turned my grip vice-like. The girl was screaming, and her friend pried me off with tremendous effort as tears slid down my face.

“How did he die?” I gasped, the reeling in my head causing me to stumble. I could feel the gaze of the crowd shifting to watch me now. “How did he die?” I repeated louder, my tears flowing with abandon.

No one answered, but I didn’t care. All I could do was stare. The meat of his throat was bulging as if it were saturated with water. And dear God, that skin. Yellow. Black. Blue. The form of a human being desecrated by the onset of rot already creeping in. But it wouldn’t have acted this quickly. His lips must have turned black
as
he died.

“
HOW DID HE DIE?
” I shrieked, looking from face to frightened face, pleading with them, begging them. I reached out for another arm to hold onto and everyone backed away. A policeman was coming toward me, unsmiling. “
God, someone tell me! PLEASE!
”