Authors: Nova Ren Suma
Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Social Issues, #Runaways, #Horror & Ghost Stories, #Visionary & Metaphysical
wedged in, I found the scissors, the good
ones not made for cutting paper, and I
just started chopping around the comb,
snipping shorter than I meant to, and then
needing to cut shorter still to make up for
a crooked spot. The haircut was DIY, it
was daring, and it brought out my eyes.
Someone else’s eyes.
I flinched. Something had happened to
my face. The mirror was showing a
second face projected over my own. Her
face hovered, lit up like a round and
glowing moon.
I noticed a nose shorter than my nose,
thicker eyebrows than mine, and arching
far higher than mine could arch, the
straight line of the mouth, just like in the
picture, and the eyes, mostly the eyes,
pale and unsettling and absolutely
recognizable from that photo I’d found of
her, the one used in some of the
newspaper articles. Eyes so cold, they
could cut your throat.
My hand lost its grip on the scissors
and then we were watching them fall
into the sink, the girl and I, blades
spread open, and then a mouth also
opened—my mouth, hidden behind the
girl’s—and a sound emerged, startling
us both.
I guess I’d yelled something, because
my mom came running and was soon in
the doorway, one leg of her black-
patterned tights on and the other dangling
from her hip like a shriveled extra limb.
She wore her usual button-down work
shirt to cover most of her tattoos, but the
buttons were gaping open to show the
bare, perfectly clear skin of her chest.
She had no tattoos there, so she seemed
even more naked.
She buttoned her shirt quickly and
said, “Way to give me a heart attack,
Lauren! I thought you slipped in the tub.”
I shook my head and waited, waited
for her to see the face in the mirror.
Natalie’s face.
All she noticed was the haircut.
“Wow,” she said. “I mean that:
wow
.
Wanted something different for your first
day back at school, huh?”
I was still waiting.
She touched my hair and fluffed it out
at one side. She clucked her tongue,
cocked her head, then smiled. “I love it,”
she said. “It’s killer. I hope you don’t
hate it, because it’ll take years to grow
the length back. Is that why you
screamed?”
She didn’t see the face.
“I saw . . .” My arm, threatening to
give me up, was already pointing at the
mirror. I
saw
, past tense, and
was still
seeing
someone else’s face. I was
wearing a mask made out of her skin and
features and I couldn’t get it to come off.
“. . . nothing,” I finished. “I thought I
saw something, but it was nothing.”
“You okay?” my mom asked.
I turned back to the mirror and
realized she was gone. The new girl,
Natalie Montesano, gone as she was in
real life. The face staring back from the
glass was my own face—and, because
my reflection was clean, I saw the deep
and shocking truth of what I looked like:
I’d
given
myself
a
stupendously
unattractive haircut.
My mom had asked if I was okay and,
for the first time, I answered her
honestly. “I don’t know.”
Her gaze held mine in the mirror.
“What is it?” she asked my reflection, as
if it would be easier to talk to than to
flesh-and-blood me. And, you know,
maybe it would have been. Maybe my
mirror-self could have told her about the
dreams, still smoking in the backmost
rooms of my mind, or about the voice
that sometimes sounded so much like a
girl I knew a long time ago, if that could
even be possible, the voice that called
me names and needled at me to not tell
my mom a thing. The voice that stayed
hushed now, listening.
Maybe my reflection could have told
her that a wriggling thought was
dislodging itself in my mind as we stood
in the morning-lit bathroom, and this
new thought was telling me that if I
opened the shower curtain and looked in
the tub I’d find one of them: Fiona. Or
Abby. Or Natalie. Or, worse, all three of
them together, a tangle of shadowy legs
and vapory arms, a huddle of heat and
smoke and the dream’s deafening
darkness. I’d pull open that shower
curtain and show my mom and she’d be
the one to scream.
Of course I wouldn’t tell my mom.
Once you tuck one secret inside yourself,
digging out a little pocket to hold it,
you’ll find the pocket can be stretched to
fit another. And another, and another . . .
until you’ve got yourself a whole
collection.
So, instead, I searched for an excuse
and found a good one: “Jamie and me,” I
said. “I think we’re over.”
She made a noncommittal noise in the
back of her throat; I knew she liked
Jamie, but all her loyalties had to be
with me, since I was her daughter. “I
figured,” she said. “I haven’t seen him
around in a while. I knew you’d tell me
when you were ready to tell me. So
you’re nervous about seeing him in
school today, right?”
I shrugged.
“All right,” she said. “We don’t have
to talk about it. Just tell me one thing.
Should I be mad at him? Did he do
something I should know about?”
“No,” I admitted. “It’s all me.”
She kept the judgment off her face, a
skill she wouldn’t even need to practice
for when she finished her psychology
degree and became a therapist or a
school counselor or whatever she
decided to do after graduation. She
stepped closer to me and reached out an
arm to touch the nape of my neck,
playing with the chopped pieces of hair
back there. “Want me to even out the
back a little for you?”
I nodded and let her keep touching me,
even though every finger on my scalp
and every brush against my neck felt
wrong all of a sudden, weird. It wasn’t
so much her. Again, it was me. All me.
My
skin
was
tightening
against
intrusions. My body was pulling in on
itself like a knot tied over a knot tied
over a knot that would never come
undone.
It took my mom another ten minutes to
fix my haircut, since she insisted on
straightening out the sides and finessing
the front. By the time she left the
bathroom, my hair looked far more
stylish than I felt, like I’d gone and
gotten it cut on purpose for the first day
back from winter break. But beneath the
hair, the skin of my face had hardened to
ice. I was alone again. At last.
I leaped across the bathroom and did
the expected. It’s what you see in the
movies when the heroine fears someone
is hiding behind the closed shower
curtain and pulls it aside in a panicked
flurry . . . only to reveal an empty tub
and no serial killer lurking with a
glinting knife from the kitchen. The
heroine will sigh in relief. She’ll laugh
at her silly, overactive imagination,
leave the room unharmed, and the scene
will end.
But the difference was this: When I
pulled aside the shower curtain, the tub
wasn’t empty. Fiona Burke leaned
against the far wall, her legs straddling
the faucet, her glossy mouth in a small
smirk.
Abby
Sinclair’s
feet—one
muddied and bare, one in a mangled
flip-flop—were dirtying up the white
bottom of the tub. And the newest girl,
Natalie Montesano, was hiding behind a
second curtain, but this one was made of
her long hair.
I saw them for an extended moment,
unable to react, as if my mind had been
shoved full of socks. Then I blinked and
the tub was empty and clean and the lost
girls were gone and my mom was calling
from the kitchen that I’d have to eat
breakfast, now, or I’d be late for school.
—
23
—
I
saw Jamie when he got to school, but
he didn’t see me. I had AP Lit first
period, but when I caught a glimpse of
Jamie’s
jacket—that
sludge-green
peacoat I gave him—and his dark mop
of hair coming around the corner of the
social-studies hallway, I took off up the
stairs.
Seeing him, something caught in my
throat. Regret maybe. Or confusion. I’d
told my mom it was over, but we’d
never officially broken up—at least,
Jamie didn’t know I’d made it official.
Needing to get away from him, I made
my way up the north stairwell—past
another junior, who said, “Lauren, what
happened to your hair?” and another
who said, “It looks awesome!”—and
into the safety of the north bathroom, in
the hallway near the art classrooms,
where I could close myself into a stall
and breathe.
When I finally emerged and went to
wash my hands, I realized I’d been
followed. I was alone in the girls’ room,
or thought I was alone, when I heard
this:
I didn’t mean to do it.
That’s what I thought she said. Really
what I heard were those whispered
words slurred into one long word:
Ididntmeantodoit.
I doubled back. I checked all the stalls
until I came to the third one from the
right, the only one that had its door fully
closed. I pushed on this door and it
didn’t swing open; it was locked from
the inside. Most stalls in our school
bathrooms didn’t lock anymore. The
stall doors had to be held in place while
someone was inside with an outstretched
leg or a wildly reaching hand.
Here I was now, outside an
impossibly locked stall door, reaching to
open it.
The stall was as green as a lime left to
grow mold in a fridge drawer. It was
cold, not warm.
“Hello?” I said against it.
What I heard was . . . a hiss. The
hissing wasn’t her breathing. I knew it
was only the old radiators against the far
wall, the spit of the steam heat.
I tried to push the stall door again, but
it held in place. I bent down, but no feet
poked out below.
I climbed the toilet in the neighboring
stall and balanced up on the point of one
toe, bracing myself against the shared
wall, to dangle over. No one was hiding
inside, though the toilet looked stopped
up with paper. I assumed the stall was
only locked because the toilet was out of
order.
The last bell rang, meaning class had
started already, and I should have been
in my chair getting ready to discourse on
Shakespeare. I hopped off the toilet and
grabbed the backpack I’d left on the
sink. I was almost at the exit when I
heard the voice again. Heard it
distinctly. Heard it in my ears and heard
its echo through my bones.
Lauren, wait.
I did. The bell stopped ringing. Again
I found myself edging closer to the third
stall from the right.
“Natalie?” I said softly. “Is that you?”
It was then that she knocked in
response. Her knuckles rapped from the
inside of the stall in quick succession.
Even though I’d willed it to happen, it
startled me. I jumped backward and
almost took out a sink.
She was in that stall—or something
was. An entity without visible feet was
trying to communicate with me. To let
me know she didn’t mean to do . . .
whatever it was she did.
I could sense her inside, willing me
closer. I didn’t speak, and she didn’t
speak, and when I took two steps in her
direction, a foot could be seen dropping
down, finding floor. A scuffed snow
boot, once pale blue but dirtied and
streaked with soot. A second boot
followed, more blackened than the first.
Time distended into one long,
unbreakable moment that broke anyway