by Mira Grant
“Esther, earth to Esther, can you hear me? Do you read?”
Esther shakes off the cobwebs that have gathered over her thoughts, turning to smile at her best friend. For a moment, it seems like Jennifer is doubled, the thirteen-year-old she met when she first moved to town sketched over the sixteen-year-old that Jennifer has become. The moment passes.
Jennifer: still short, still round, but now with the added benefit of breasts and hips, both of which grew in with staggering aggression during the summer of their fourteenth year. Esther would envy them, if not for the fact that they’d seem entirely out of proportion on her own longer, slimmer frame. They are both built exactly as biology wants them to be, complete, perfect organisms, designed to ensure their own best shots at survival. Jennifer’s hair is still curly, still frizzy, but the blonde is shot through with panels of green and purple, painstakingly dyed in the upstairs bathroom of Esther’s home. She wears jeans and a Buckaroo Banzai T-shirt, and everything about her is perfect.
Esther is sometimes less sure about her own perfection, despite Jennifer’s insistent reminders that for one of them to be perfect, they would both have to be. She is taller, towering over Jennifer by almost a foot—towering even over many of the boys, who look through her like she isn’t anything worth seeing. Her hair is dark and dense and the red panels Jennifer so carefully bleached and dyed for her are lost among the shadows of it all. She rather likes that, if she’s being honest. She likes knowing that she’s enough to overwhelm cosmetic changes. Unlike Jennifer, she is not, has never been, dressed to be seen; is as close to bland as she can get without a uniform to save her from choosing between types of denim, between shades of gray.
Jennifer should have abandoned her years ago. There are always eager young scientists in training ready to play Igor to the right upperclassman Dr. Frankenstein. But Jennifer has stayed, and Esther has stayed, and as long as they can both keep doing precisely that, there is nothing they cannot do.
“Sorry,” says Esther, and shakes her head again. “I don’t know what came over me.”
“If we’re going to stand here and talk about what’s wrong with you, we’re going to miss homeroom,” says Jennifer, with the casual, artificial cruelty of the best friend, and Esther laughs, and on they walk, toward the future, toward the school.
All around them, the world is sketched in the colors of Halloween, just as it was on the day they first met—but if everything was strange and gray and unfamiliar on that long-gone, half-forgotten day, everything is color and light and comfort now. Esther knows every scrap of it, even as she knows that volunteers are already hard at work decking out the town square in orange silk streamers and bat-shaped lanterns.
(No crepe paper here, no. That was good enough for California, where it almost never rained hard before the end of October, but here, the decorations, and the people, must be made of sturdier stuff if they’re going to survive the weather. She likes that about Massachusetts. The things here seem real in a way that things at home never did. It’s odd, how a change of location can change the world so dramatically, but who is she to deny the evidence of her eyes?)
They step through the front doors and into hallways filled with cheerful monsters. Teens seem to hold to Halloween longer here than they did on the West Coast—or maybe that’s a trick of the light, her memories of her old home growing fainter and more suspect with every passing day. Maybe the high schools were always a costume shop given social structure and permission to walk in the world for the entire month of October, and she had simply been too far away from them to ever know for sure. Now…
Now a ghost with pom-poms and pigtails flirts with a werewolf in a letter jacket, her lips painted cyanotic blue, his hands adorned with patches of fake fur that look more teddy bear than terror. Now a zombie runs down the hall, arms filled with books, the shambling speed of the undead forgotten in his rush to get to class. Now there are creatures of the night everywhere she looks, and the clarity of their monstrosity is comforting. Humans can be monsters too. Esther knows that better than most. At least for the moment, they wear their fangs on the outside, and she can see them before they bite her.
Case in point: a tall, elegant vampire pushes herself away from her locker, every movement a poem, every gesture a psalm. She is beauty given flesh, and were it not for the sharp, bitter warning in her eyes, Esther suspects she might be halfway in love with this creature of the night before the moment had the chance to pass.
“What are you supposed to be, Webb?” sneers the vampire, and the illusion is broken, as the illusion always must be. This is no siren, no seductress from the other side of shadow. This is Daphne from down the block, always the prettiest, always the most poised, always posed to throw the first stone. “A laundry basket with legs?”
“I’m a mad scientist,” says Jennifer, no trace of rancor in her tone. Esther envies her more than anything for that, for the ability to stare down her enemies and never bat an eye. “We don’t need lip gloss. We have jumper cables.”
“Oh, and I guess she,” Daphne gestures toward Esther, a lifetime of scorn in the motion, “is your creation?”
“If I were that good, I’d already have enough money to buy and sell this town ten times over,” says Jennifer, still unruffled. “She’s my assistant. Right, Esther?”
“Yesssssssssss, mathter,” lisps Esther, like something out of one of the old Vincent Price movies, and Jennifer laughs, and she laughs, and some of the other kids around them laugh, and Daphne is neither vampire nor mean girl queen: Daphne is just another thwarted monster, crawling back to her crypt and swearing her revenge.
The bell rings. The hall begins to empty. Jennifer looks to Esther, concern flickering through her bravado.
“You okay?” she asks.
“I am,” says Esther, and for once, she isn’t lying: for once, she is just fine.
Just fine.
THE BLOOD on the floor had dried to a sticky mess, but the smell lingered in the air, too thick to be cloying, too strong to be overlooked. The figure at the keyboard paused, fingers going still, to watch the two girls walk into a classroom and close the door. There was no class programmed into the scenario: if they were asked later, they would both swear they had been attending a session on a different subject, something drawn from their own memories, stripped clean of identifying details and turned into a sort of “rest period” for the program, allowing it to compile the next segment of the scenario. They were safe, for the next few minutes, trapped in academic worlds of their own making.
It was time.
The figure reached into a pocket and produced a sleek black rectangle that looked like a cross between a thumb drive and a wireless booster. It slotted seamlessly into a USB port at the side of the main console, and just like that, it was done: the final step of the plan had been completed. All it had taken was the death of three employees and one of Dr. Webb’s clients, a woman named Angelica Mathers, who had been scheduled to come in for a consultation on her debilitating arachnophobia.
Angelica Mathers was no longer afraid of spiders. Her body, which might never be found, was covered in them.
The woman who’d stolen Angelica’s place, slicing her way into the facility like the finely-honed scalpel that she was—first taking the security systems offline, then bypassing the cameras, and finally killing two of the guards, all in the interest of unfettered access—dipped her hand into her pocket again. This time she produced a phone, sleek and slim and breakable. She raised it to her ear and pressed a button on the side, opening a connection to the sole number stored in its circuits.
There was a click. There was a stretch of silence, tenuous and thin. Finally, there was a voice on the other end, rendered electronic and strange by a dozen layers of encryption: “Report.”
“The infiltration is a success,” she replied, her voice like hemlock and honey. “With an added bonus: your Dr. Webb is in the system.”
There was another stretch of silence, this time the silence of s
hock rather than the silence of connection. Finally, the voice on the other end demanded, “What do you mean?”
“I mean she has a reporter here, doing a write-up on the system, and she went in to the scenario they created to impress the media.” The woman sniffed. “Probably shouldn’t have done that. She’s right in front of me. The scenario modifications you’ve uploaded will wash hers out real soon now.”
“Did you—”
“I set all active scenarios to teen parameters, exactly as I was told. I’m a professional.” Now she sounded disgusted, like the very thought of going off-script was inexcusable. “I assume that, should I be successful, I will receive full payment for both jobs.”
“You’ve done less labor than anticipated.”
“I’ve adapted quickly and accurately to a changing situation. Penalizing me for that would, of course, be within your rights, but I am afraid I would need to inform my colleagues of the chance that this could happen again at any time.”
Another pause. “You don’t need to threaten me.”
“No one has threatened anyone. You have implied, and accurately, that I could be paid less than the agreed-upon fee for acquiring this technology and eliminating its creator, and there was no threat there: you are well within your rights to pay me according to the letter, and not the spirit, of our contract. I am well within my rights, should you choose this alternative, to inform my colleagues of your business decisions.” Suddenly, her voice had teeth in it. “I agreed to work for you. I agreed to preserve your privacy as regards the materials you have asked me to acquire and the tasks you have asked me to perform. I am still allowed to discuss what kind of man you are. I think you’ll find that an NDA which stops my tongue completely is far more expensive than simply paying me for services rendered.”
“Be reasonable.”
“I could say the same to you, could I not, and with far more cause?” The woman brushed at a spot of blood which had somehow found its way onto the sleeve of her coat. “You’re paying for my time. If I am interrupted because of your indecision, and unable to complete my primary mission, you will still pay me in full. Now. How shall I proceed?”
The pause this time was shorter, and when the voice spoke again, it was with conviction. “Destroy her.”
The woman smiled. “Excellent,” she said, and hung up the phone without another word. Her profession required a certain amount of negotiation, and a certain amount of civility. What it didn’t require was actual politeness. Very few people hired their corporate spies or sometime assassins on the basis of how well they said “please” and “thank you.” Hiring was a matter of how well someone could get the job done, and she could get the job done very, very well.
Very well indeed. Leaning forward, she began to type.
THE LAST bell rings and the school day is over, unleashing a plague of high schoolers on the unsuspecting October afternoon. Esther and Jennifer step out of their last class, squinting in the sudden brightness of the sun, filling their lungs with the crisp taste of autumn growing ripe and ready on its insubstantial vine.
This is where we should stop, thinks Esther, with a sudden, nonsensical fierceness, like the whole world exists only to support this thought. This is where we should wake up. It doesn’t get better than this. A prelude and a friendship and we’re done.
“You okay?”
Jennifer is looking at her oddly again, a mixture of amusement and concern in her eyes. Only Jennifer ever seems to notice the way Esther zones out, like she’s getting instructions from another place. Then again, only Jennifer ever seems to notice half the things Esther does. Esther has matured from new girl into nobody in this place, not weird enough for the nerd herd, not smart enough for the geniuses, comfortably existing in the liminal space where all the social circles collide. She likes it where she is. Jennifer always knows where to find her, and that’s enough.
“I’m fine,” says Esther, smiling quick and sharp and utterly sincere. “You ready?”
“I was born ready,” says Jennifer. She mimes putting on a pair of sunglasses, and Esther laughs, safe within the embrace of a joke that has grown as well-worn and comfortable as an old pair of shoes. They begin to walk through the legion of monsters toward the door, letting the crowd carry them along without really trying. High school is a monster in its own right, alive and breathing and eternally hungry, and they, the students, are the parasites crawling on its skin. As long as they never attract its attention—as long as they can keep their heads down and their hands in clear view, never posing a threat—they can ride out the rest of their time here and escape clean and free.
Esther can’t wait. Whatever comes next, she knows it will include Jennifer, and she knows that they will never look back. Some of the other kids call them lesbians, or less flattering things, and she supposes she minds, because any word can be an insult if it’s thrown hard enough from the window of a moving sneer. Her love for Jennifer isn’t about sexual attraction. She isn’t sure yet where her sexuality lies, exactly, but she knows that it isn’t with Jennifer. Jennifer is her sister, and nothing will change that. Ever.
Next to her, Jennifer is enthusiastically describing some clever new bit of computer wizardry, some trick of invented language and rapid code that makes the electrons sit up and dance. This, too, is normal for them: all Esther has to do is nod occasionally and make the noises that let her friend know she’s still listening. Jennifer organizes her thoughts by talking them through, and doesn’t care whether Esther understands what she’s saying. Esther has found that if she allows Jennifer her data-dumps, the rest of their time together is less lecture, more conversation. It’s a price she’s more than happy to pay for her best friend’s peace of mind.
(Far away and very close, in a pod designed to keep its occupants safe and dreaming, Dr. Jennifer Webb stirred, eyes moving fast behind closed lids, subconsciously aware that something had changed: that she was not supposed to be dreaming herself as a teenager, impressionable and wild and so wrapped in the embrace of her own changing brain chemistry that she was, at times, more horror than human. She was supposed to be dreaming a safe and stable pre-adolescence, making little tweaks, not sweeping changes. Then the drugs surged back, and the awareness of her own plight was gone, replaced by the dream.)
They walk out of the school and down the street, heading for the now-familiar shortcut that will take them across the cemetery and into their own backyards. Jennifer is winding down. Esther is preparing to rejoin the conversation as an active participant when a shadow passes across their path, followed by a vampire queen.
Esther stops. Jennifer doesn’t, at first, too wrapped up in her retelling to understand the danger that Daphne and her gang represent. Esther grabs her wrist, pulling her to a puzzled halt.
“Wha—” Jennifer blinks, finally seeing the situation. Her eyes narrow. “Oh. Hi, Daphne. Sorry, didn’t see you there.”
“Freak,” sneers Daphne.
Jennifer shrugs. “I have a higher than average intelligence, so you’re technically within the meaning of the word. Can we help you with something?”
Daphne is flanked by five other monsters, all as carefully designed as she is, intended to be admired by their victims before they deliver the killing blow. There are no other vampires—that would be an insult to their leader, and anyone who’s managed to survive in Daphne’s grasp for this long is smart enough not to insult her—but there are two ghosts, and a werewolf, and a creature from the Black Lagoon. The last of them is a witch, all candy-colored spangles and cartoony makeup. None of them should be particularly frightening. All in a group like this, they’re terrifying.
Daphne’s upper lip curls back as her sneer grows more pronounced. “We thought it was time we reminded you of where you stand at school.”
No one ever says the name of the school, thinks Esther wildly, getting a little dizzy on the terror of the moment. They’re outnumbered, and one of the ghosts is on the track team, while Jennifer is infamous for treating even t
he hundred yard dash as an excuse for a stroll. They’ll never get away. I don’t even think I know the name of the school. Why does no one ever say the name of the school?
“We’re not at school right now,” says Jennifer calmly. “I guess that means we’re not standing anywhere.”
Jennifer has never been able to resist the opportunity to talk back, has been in trouble for her attitude so many times that Esther has long since given up on trying to keep count and simply settles for keeping an eye on Jennifer, a vain attempt to keep her friend out of trouble. It doesn’t work, but at least Esther feels like she’s doing something.
Right now, Esther feels like she’s watching a train wreck in slow motion. Daphne steps forward, and there isn’t any chance for them to run. Not today. Not yesterday. Maybe not ever.
“You mouth off too much,” says Daphne. “That mouth’s going to get you hurt one of these days.”
“Like today,” jeers the witch. Her words seem to put some steel in Daphne’s spine, and warn Jennifer that something bad is about to happen.
Jennifer steps back, away from the advancing Daphne. She reaches behind herself, and Esther grabs her arm, holding her tight. Both of them are terrified. Esther wonders if Jennifer’s fear is the same as her own, hot and cold at the same time, laced with thick bands of shame. How is that they always wind up here? Why do they never run before there’s no more time?