Still of Night

by Jonathan Maberry

  Then there was the little one, Jasmine. She kept trying to get people to call her Jazz, but no one did. Jasmine was a red-haired bowling ball with crazy teeth. It would be cute except that Jasmine wasn’t nice. She wasn’t charming. She was a little monster and she liked being a little monster. People didn’t let her be around their pets.

  That left Dahlia.

  Her.

  Pretty name. She liked her name. She liked being herself. She liked who she was. She had a good mind. She had good thoughts. She understood the books she read and had insight into the music she downloaded. She didn’t have many friends, but the ones she had knew they could trust her. And she wasn’t mean-spirited, though there were people who could make a compelling counterargument. A lot of her problems, Dahlia knew, were the end results of the universe being a total bitch.

  Dahlia always thought that she deserved the whole package. A great name. A nice face. At least a decent body. A name like Dahlia should be carried around on good legs or have some good boobs as conversation pieces. That would be fair. That would be nice.

  Failing that, good skin would be cool.

  Or great hair. You can get a lot of mileage out of great hair.

  Anything would have been acceptable. Dahlia figured she didn’t actually need much. The weight was bad enough; the complexion was insult to injury. But an eating disorder? Seriously? Why go there? Why make it that much harder to get through life? Just a little freaking courtesy from the powers that be. Let the gods of social interaction cut her some kind of break.

  But . . . no.

  Dahlia Allgood was, as so many kids had gone to great lengths to point out to her over the years, all bad. At least from the outside.

  No amount of time in the gym—at school or the one her parents set up in the garage—seemed able to shake the extra weight from her body. She was fat. She wasn’t big boned. She wasn’t a “solidly built girl,” as her aunt Flora often said. It wasn’t baby fat, and she knew she probably wouldn’t grow out of it. She’d have to be fifteen feet tall to smooth it all out. She wasn’t. Though at five-eight, she was a good height for punching loud-mouth jerks of both sexes. She’d always been fat and kids have always been kids. Faces had been punched. Faces would be punched. That’s how it was.

  But, yeah, she was fat and she knew it.

  She hated it. She cried oceans about it. She yelled at God about it.

  But she accepted it.

  Dahlia also knew that there was precedent in her family for this being a lifelong thing. She had three aunts who collectively looked like the defensive line of the Green Bay Packers. Aunt Ivy was the biggest. Six feet tall, three hundred pounds. Dahlia suspected Ivy had thrown some punches of her own in her day. Ivy wasn’t one to take anything from anyone.

  Mom was no Sally Stick Figure either. She was always on one of those celebrity diets. Last year it was the Celery and Carrot Diet, and all she did was fart and turn orange. Before that it was a Cottage Cheese Diet that packed on twenty extra pounds. Apparently the “eat all you want” part of the pitch wasn’t exactly true. This year it was the Salmon Diet. Dahlia figured that it was only a matter of time before Mom grew gills and began swimming upstream to spawn.

  Well, maybe that would have happened if the world hadn’t ended.

  — 2 —

  It did. The world ended.

  On a Friday.

  Somehow it didn’t surprise Dahlia Allgood that the world would end on a Friday. What better way to screw up the weekend?

  — 3 —

  Like most important things in the world, Dahlia wasn’t paying that much attention to it. To the world. To current events.

  She was planning revenge.

  Again.

  It wasn’t an obsession with her, but she had some frequent flyer miles. If people didn’t push her, she wouldn’t even think about pushing back.

  She was fat and unattractive. That wasn’t up for debate, and she couldn’t change a few thousand years of developing standards for beauty. On the other hand, neither of those facts made it okay for anyone to mess with her.

  That’s what people didn’t seem to get.

  Maybe someone sent a mass text that it was okay to say things about her weight. Or stick pictures of pork products on her locker. Or make oink-oink noises when she was puffing her way around the track in gym. If so, she didn’t get that text and she did not approve of the message.

  Screw that.

  It’s not that she was one of the mean girls. Dahlia suspected the mean girls were the ones who hated themselves the most. And Dahlia didn’t even hate herself. She liked herself. She liked her mind. She liked her taste in music and books and boys and things that mattered. She didn’t laugh when people tripped. She didn’t take it as a personal win when someone else—someone thinner or prettier—hit an emotional wall. Dahlia knew she had her faults, but being a heartless or vindictive jerk wasn’t part of that.

  Revenge was a different thing. That wasn’t being vindictive. It was—as she once read in an old novel—a thirst for justice. Dahlia wanted to be either a lawyer or a cop, so that whole justice thing was cool with her.

  Justice—or, let’s call it by the right name, revenge—had to be managed, though. You had to understand your own limits and be real with your own level of cool. Dahlia spent enough time in her head to know who she was. And wasn’t.

  So, when someone did something to her, she didn’t try to swap cool insults, or posture with attitude, or any of that. Instead she got even.

  When Marcy Van Der Meer—and, side note, Dahlia didn’t think anyone in an urban high school should have a last name with three separate words—sent her those pictures last month? Yeah, she took action. The pictures had apparently been taken in the hall that time Dahlia dropped her books. The worst of them was taken from directly behind her as she bent over to pick them up. Can we say butt crack?

  The picture went out to a whole lot of kids. To pretty much everyone who thought they mattered. Or everyone Marcy thought mattered. Everyone who would laugh.

  Dahlia had spent half an hour crying in the bathroom. Big, noisy, blubbering sobs. Nose-runny sobs, the kind that blow snot bubbles. The kind that hurt your chest. The kind that she knew, with absolute clarity, were going to leave a mark on her forever. Even if she never saw Marcy again after school, even if Dahlia somehow became thin and gorgeous, she was never going to lose the memory of how it felt to cry like that. Knowing that while she cried made it all a lot worse.

  Then she washed her face and brushed her mouse-colored hair and plotted her revenge.

  Dahlia swiped Marcy’s car keys during second period. She slipped them back into her bag before last bell. Marcy could never prove that it was Dahlia who smeared dog poop all over her leather seats and packed it like cement into the air-conditioning vents. Who could prove that the bundle of it she left duct-taped to the engine had been her doing? No one could be put under oath to say they saw Dahlia anywhere near the car. And besides, the keys were in Marcy’s purse when she went to look for them, right?

  Okay, sure, it was petty. And childish. And maybe criminal. All of that.

  Did it feel good afterward?

  Dahlia wasn’t sure how she felt about it. She thought it was just, but she didn’t spend a lot of time actually gloating. Except maybe a couple of days later when somebody wrote “Marcy Van Der Poop” on her locker with a Sharpie. That hadn’t been Dahlia, and she had no idea who’d done it. That? Yeah, she spent a lot of happy hours chuckling over that. It didn’t take away the memory of that time crying in the bathroom, but it made it easier to carry it around.

  It was that kind of war.

  Like when Chuck Bellamy talked his brain-deprived minion, Dault, into running up behind her and pulling down the top of her sundress. Or, tried to, anyway. Dahlia was a big girl, but she had small boobs. She could risk wearing a sundress on a hot day with no bra. Chuck and Dault saw that as a challenge. They thought she was an easy target.

  They underestimated Dahlia.<
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  Dahlia heard Dault’s big feet slapping on the ground and turned just as he reached for the top hem of her dress.

  Funny thing about those jujutsu lessons. She’d only taken them for one summer, but there was some useful stuff. And fingers are like breadsticks if you twist them the right way.

  Dault had to go to the nurse and then the hospital for splints, and he dimed Chuck pretty thoroughly. Both of them got suspended. There was some talk about filing sexual harassment charges, but Dahlia said she’d pass if it was only this one time. She was making eye contact with Chuck when she said that. Although Chuck was a mouth-breathing Neanderthal, he understood the implications of being on a sexual predator watch list.

  Dahlia never wore a sundress to school again. It was a defeat even though she’d won the round. The thought of how it would feel to be exposed like that . . . Everyone had a cell phone, every cell phone had a camera. One photo would kill her, and she knew it. So she took her small victory and let them win that war.

  So, it was like that.

  But over time, had anyone actually been paying attention and keeping score, they’d have realized that there were very few repeat offenders.

  Sadly, a lot of kids seem to have “insult the fat girl” on their bucket list. It’s right there, just above “insult the ugly girl.” So they kept at it.

  And she kept getting her revenge.

  Today it was going to be Tucker Anderson’s car. Dahlia had filched one of her dad’s knives. Dad had a lot of knives. It probably wasn’t because he was surrounded by so many large, fierce women, but Dahlia couldn’t rule it out. Dad liked to hunt. Every once in a while he’d take off so he could kill something. Over the last five years he’d killed five deer, all of them females. Dahlia tried not to read anything into that.

  She did wish her dad would have tried to be a little cooler about it. When they watched The Walking Dead together, Dahlia asked him if he ever considered using a crossbow, like that cute redneck, Daryl. Dad said no. He’d never even touched a crossbow. He said guns were easier. Ah well.

  The knife she took was a Buck hunting knife with a bone handle and a four-inch blade. The kind of knife that would get her expelled and maybe arrested if anyone found it. She kept it hidden, and in a few minutes she planned to slip out to the parking lot and slash all four of Tucker’s tires. Why? He’d Photoshopped her face onto a bunch of downloaded porn of really fat women having ugly kinds of sex. Bizarre stuff that Dahlia, who considered herself open-minded and worldly, couldn’t quite grasp. And then he glued them to the outside of the first-floor girl’s bathroom.

  Tucker didn’t get caught because guys like Tucker don’t get caught. Word got around, though. Tucker was tight with Chuck, Dault, and Marcy. This was the latest battle in the war. Her enemies were persistent and effortlessly cruel. Dahlia was clever and careful.

  Then, as we know, the world ended.

  — 4 —

  Here’s how it happened as far as Dahlia was concerned.

  She didn’t watch the news that morning, hadn’t read the papers—because who reads newspapers?—and hadn’t cruised the top stories on Twitter. The first she knew about anything going wrong was when good old Marcy Van Der Poop came screaming into the girls’ room.

  Dahlia was in a stall and she tensed. Not because Marcy was screaming—girls scream all the time; they have the lungs for it, so why not?—but because it was an inconvenient time. Dahlia hated using the bathroom for anything more elaborate than taking a pee. Last night’s Taco Thursday at the Allgood house was messing with that agenda in some pretty horrific ways. Dahlia had waited until the middle of a class period to slip out and visit the most remote girls’ room in the entire school for just this purpose.

  But in came Marcy, screaming her head off.

  Dahlia jammed her hand against the stall door to make sure it would stay shut.

  She waited for the scream to turn into a laugh. Or to break off and be part of some phone call. Or for it to be anything except what it was.

  Marcy kept screaming, though.

  Until she stopped.

  Suddenly.

  With a big in-gulp of air.

  Dahlia leaned forward to listen. There was only a crack between the door and frame and she could see a sliver of Marcy as she leaned over the sink.

  Was she throwing up?

  Washing her face?

  What the hell was she doing?

  Then she saw Marcy’s shoulders rise and fall. Very fast. The way someone will when . . .

  That’s when she heard the sobs.

  Long. Deep. Badly broken sobs.

  The kind of sobs Dahlia was way too familiar with.

  Out there, on the other side of that sliver, Marcy Van Der Meer’s knees buckled and she slid down to the floor. To the floor of the girls’ bathroom. A public bathroom.

  Marcy curled herself into a hitching, twitching, spasming ball.

  She pulled herself all the way under the bank of dirty sinks.

  Sobbing.

  Crying like some broken thing.

  Dahlia, despite everything, felt something in her own eyes. On her cheeks.

  She tried to be shocked at the presence of tears.

  Marcy was the hateful witch. If she wasn’t messing with Dahlia directly, then she was getting her friends and minions to do it. She was the subject of a thousand of Dahlia’s fantasies about vehicular manslaughter, about STDs that transformed her into a mottled crone, about being eaten by rats.

  Marcy the hag.

  Huddled on the filthy floor, her head buried down, arms wrapped around her body, knees drawn up. Her pretty red blouse streaked with dirt. Crying so deeply that it made almost no sound. Crying the way people do when the sobs hurt like punches.

  Dahlia sat there. Frozen. Kind of stunned, really. Marcy?

  Marcy was way too self-conscious to be like that.

  Ever.

  Unless . . . What could have happened to her to put Marcy here, on that floor, in that condition? Until now Dahlia wouldn’t have bet Marcy had enough of a genuine human soul to be this hurt.

  The bathroom was filled with the girl’s pain.

  Dahlia knew that what she had to do was nothing. She needed to sit there and finish her business and pretend that she wasn’t here at all. She needed to keep that stall door locked. She needed to not even breathe very loud. That’s what she needed to do.

  Absolutely.

  — 5 —

  It’s not what she did, though. Because, when it was all said and done, she was Dahlia Allgood.

  And Dahlia Allgood wasn’t a monster.

  — 6 —

  She finished in the toilet. Got dressed. Stood up. Leaned her forehead against the cold metal of the stall door for a long ten seconds. Reached back and flushed. Then she opened the door.

  Turning that lock took more courage than anything she’d ever done. She wasn’t at all sure why she did it. She pulled the door in, stepped out. Stood there. The sound of the flushing toilet was loud and she waited through the cycle until there was silence.

  Marcy Van Der Meer lay in the same position. Her body trembled with those deep sobs. If she heard the flush, or cared about it, she gave no sign at all.

  Dahlia went over to the left-hand bank of sinks, the ones farther from Marcy. The ones closer to the door. She washed her hands, cutting looks in the mirror at the girl. Waiting for her to look up. To say something. To go back to being Marcy. It was so much easier to despise someone if they stayed shallow and hateful.

  But . . .

  “Hey,” said Dahlia. Her throat was phlegmy and her voice broke on the word. She coughed to clear it, then tried again. “Hey. Um . . . hey, are you . . . y’ know . . . okay?”

  Marcy did not move, did not react. She didn’t even seem to have heard.

  “Marcy—?”

  Nothing. Dahlia stood there, feeling the weight of indecision. The exit door was right there. Marcy hadn’t looked up, she had no idea who was in the bathroom. She’d never kn
ow if Dahlia left. That was the easy decision. Just go. Step out of whatever drama Marcy was wrapped up in. Let the little snot sort it out for herself. Dahlia didn’t have to do anything or say anything. This wasn’t hers to handle. Marcy hadn’t even asked for help.

  Just go.

  On the other hand . . .

  Dahlia chewed her lip. Marcy looked bad. Soaked and dirty now, small and helpless.

  She wanted to walk away. She wanted to sneer at her. Maybe give her a nice solid kick in her skinny little ass. She wanted to use this moment of alone time to lay into her and tell her what a total piece of crap she was.

  That’s what Dahlia truly wanted to do.

  She stood there. The overhead lights threw her shadow across the floor. A big pear shape. Too small up top, too big everywhere else. Weird hair. Thick arms, thicker legs. A shadow of a girl who would never—ever—get looked at the way this weeping girl would. And it occurred to Dahlia that if the circumstances were reversed, Marcy would see it as an open door and a formal invite to unload her cruelty guns. No . . . she’d have reacted to this opportunity as if it was a moral imperative. There wouldn’t be any internal debate over what to do. That path would be swept clear and lighted with torches.

  Sure. That was true.

  But part of what made Dahlia not one of them—the overgrown single-cell organisms pretending to be the cute kids at school—was the fact that she wasn’t wired the same way. Not outside, God knows, but not inside either. Dahlia was Dahlia. Different species altogether.

  She took a step. Away from the door.

  “Marcy . . . ” she said, softening her voice. “Are you okay? What happened?”

  The girl stopped trembling.

  Just like that. She froze.

  Yeah, thought Dahlia, you heard me that time.

  She wanted to roll her eyes at the coming drama, but there was no one around who mattered to see it.

  Dahlia tried to imagine what the agenda would be. First Marcy would be vulnerable because of whatever brought her in here. Break-up with Mason, her studly boyfriend du jour. Something like that. There would be some pseudo in-the-moment girl talk about how rotten boys are, blah-blah-blah. As if they both knew, as if they both had the same kinds of problems. Dahlia would help her up and there would be shared tissues, or handfuls of toilet paper. Anything to wipe Marcy’s nose and blot her eyes. That would transition onto her clothes, which were wet and stained. Somehow Dahlia—the rescuer—would have to make useful suggestions for how to clean the clothes, or maybe volunteer to go to Marcy’s car or locker for a clean sweater. Then, as soon as Marcy felt solid ground under her feet again, she would clamp her popular girl cool in place and, by doing that, distance herself from Dahlia. After it was all over, Marcy would either play the role of the queen who occasionally gave a secret nod of marginal acceptance to the peasant who helped her. Or the whole thing would spin around and Marcy would be ten times more vicious just to prove to Dahlia that she had never—ever—been vulnerable. It was some version of that kind of script.