This time, I was sure of it.
It was the sound of a vending machine.
And it was coming from the floor below.
I hurried to the nearest stairwell, gripped the handrail, and descended with quiet, anxious steps.
It was either Imogen or Wynonna—one or the other. I doubted it was both because it was impossible for Wynonna not to talk when Imogen was around.
Slink. Clatter. Thunk.
Whoever it was, they were sure stocking up on some serious sustenance.
I slowed my pace near the bottom of the stairs. Lurked cautiously to the corner—knowing full well that the vending machine in question was mere feet away on the other side.
Palms to the wall, I peered around the corner.
It was Imogen Klutz.
You know that scene in high school movies where our protagonist, Awkward Social Outcast, lays eyes on our lead female character, Girl of His Dreams—the first time we, as an audience, meet her—and we see her in slow motion, and her skin glows with ethereal radiance, and her hair flows like a waterfall or something similarly flow-y, and all sound cuts out to an annoying pop song, like the Smash Mouth cover of “I’m a Believer”?
Yeah. That.
Okay, so I kind of had a thing for Imogen. And that thing may have been called “obsession.” She was beautifully lanky with a long, gawky neck; a heart-shaped face with kind eyes; and sheets of sandy-blond hair that kind of frizzed around the ears. She had an affinity for sweaters and often coupled them with colorful, awkwardly fitting jeans and beautifully ugly no-name-brand sneakers.
And the eyebrows. Oh my god. Don’t even get me started on the eyebrows.
Okay, I’ll tell you.
On the surface, Imogen’s eyebrows were big, bad, and beautiful. Unplucked and unashamed. Some might go so far as to call them “colossal” or “gargantuan.” That wasn’t an exaggeration. Deep down, however, Imogen’s eyebrows were an enigma. Beneath the planes of their vast, follicular arcs, they contained the secrets of the universe. And the darkness! They were sooooo dark—practically black against the sandy blond of her hair—drawing you in like gravitational singularities. Resistance was futile. Think Labyrinth-era Jennifer Connelly and you’re on the right track. Add a dash of black magic and a pinch of metaphysical transcendence, and SHAZAM.
Those were Imogen’s eyebrows.
Of course, when I told Holden this, he told me I had a troubling eyebrow fetish, and I should probably seek psychiatric help.
Anyway, as I witnessed all of this in slow motion, with Smash Mouth singing in the background, and—slink, clatter, thunk—the last bag of pork rinds fell into the dispenser hatch of the vending machine, there was a hazy moment when I apparently wandered out from behind the corner of the stairwell. But I didn’t say anything. Lest anyone forget, my role in this movie was Awkward Social Outcast, and it was a comedy at my expense.
Imogen turned her head slowly—suddenly noticing the human-shaped figure…
…standing six feet away from her…
…in a dark, empty hallway…
…watching her.
She screamed and threw her arms in the air—along with all the snacks she was carrying—chips, candy bars, pork rinds, and a pair of Dr Peppers. One of the Dr Peppers landed in such a way that it cracked and spewed pressurized soda like a punctured vein in a splatter film. The other Dr Pepper landed uncracked, although it caught a backspin and rolled beneath her foot—right as she took a frantic step backward. The sole of her shoe landed on the center of the can, wobbled unsteadily, and the rest was poetry in motion. That is to say, Imogen’s leg shot up in an elegant high kick, the can of Dr Pepper launched like a ballistic missile, her entire body swung like a catapult, and she landed flat on her back.
“Shit,” I said.
I immediately swooped to Imogen’s aid—only to hover over her body, mirroring her paralysis.
“Oh my god,” I said. My hands floundered aimlessly. “I am so sorry. Imogen, are you okay?”
There was a long moment when Imogen’s eyes were like marbles—glassy orbs disconnected from sentient thought. She was dead. I killed her. I ogled Imogen to death. Death by ogling in the first degree.
Then she blinked, and there was life. Her eyes focused on me, and she smiled.
“Oh, hey, Ezra,” she said. Then she winced. “Ouch.”
“Where does it hurt?” I asked.
Imogen made a vague, wibbly-wobbly gesture with her hands that seemed to encompass her entire body.
“I’m gonna call nine-one-one,” I said.
“No!” said Imogen. She immediately attempted to sit up. “No, no, no. I’m good. I’m fine.”
“Are you sure?”
“In a breaking-and-entering situation?” said Imogen. “Ten minutes before the eclipse? I am so sure. Wynonna would kill—”
“Slevin, you little shit!” said the last voice in the world I wanted to hear. “What the hell sort of perverted things are you doing to my best friend?”
I whipped around, and there she was—Wynonna fucking Jones—strolling onto the scene like some sort of deus ex machina. But, like, the opposite. A sort of anti–deus ex machina who fucked things up right when you thought everything would be okay.
Wynonna’s style could best be described as “military hippie-core” or maybe “’80s vomit-punk.” All I could tell you was that she had electric-blue hair and was currently wearing combat boots, a pair of very distressed jeans—shredded, bleached, and pegged to a fault—a bomber jacket covered in patches, tied snugly around her waist, some sort of boho-crochet top, and bracelets. Lots of bracelets. Like, way too many bracelets for any one human being. And yet, there they were—bold, overbearing, and predominantly neon. She had a pair of tattoos on her inner forearms. On her left arm was the word “dharma.” On the right, mirroring the other, was “karma.”
Ironically, it was the karma hand (rocking electric-blue nails to match her hair) that shoved me square in the chest. I staggered backward—almost tripped and fell—but landed against the wall of lockers behind me.
“Did he hurt you?” said Wynonna.
“No, no, I’m fine,” said Imogen, crawling to her feet—although this was followed by an invalidating wince.
“Was he trying to put his creepy moves on you?”
I felt myself flush red.
“What? No!” said Imogen, appalled.
“Did he try to bank-rob your virginity?” said Wynonna.
Okay, now I was fuchsia, swiftly encroaching on magenta.
“Wynonna!” said Imogen, wide-eyed. “Can we not talk about my virginity?”
But Wynonna was already bored with Imogen and set her predatory sights on me. I still had my back to the lockers, but Wynonna’s presence was reverse-magnetic, pressing me flat against the cold blue metal.
“I’ll tell you how this works, Slevin,” said Wynonna. “I’m like Imogen’s daddy. If you want to ask Imogen on a date, you gotta go through me. At which point I’ll decide whether or not I’ll kill you. Are we clear?”
We were so clear. Cellophane, even.
However, at that exact moment, I heard Holden calling my name. Then he rounded the corner and saw his best friend being bullied—yet again—by Wynonna fucking Jones.
“GET YOUR HANDS OFF MY BEST FRIEND, YOU BLUE-HAIRED SNAKE.”
Wynonna turned her head, and then her lips twisted into an amused smirk. “Blue-haired snake?”
“You lay one more finger on him,” said Holden, “and I’ll…”
But Wynonna was already raising a single finger—slowly, tauntingly. She made an incredible display of it. She then reached it slowly toward my face. But her eyes were on Holden. Testing him. Sneering with her pupils.
“Don’t. You. Dare,” said Holden.
She pressed my nose like a button.
“Boop,” she said.
If my nose were a button, then Holden was the doomsday device to which it was wirelessly connected. He extended his arms and screamed like a total mania
c—which Wynonna thought was hilarious. But then he marched over to Imogen.
Wynonna’s smile vanished.
Holden snatched a bag of pork rinds off the floor.
Wynonna’s eyes widened with alarm. “Put the pork rinds down, you son of a—”
Holden ripped the bag of rinds wide open, shoving his face in them like a wild animal.
“—BITCH!” Wynonna screamed.
Holden was chomping, scarfing, devouring with voracious force. Wynonna all but assaulted him, ripping the tattered bag from his hands. By that point, there was nothing but deep-fried pork dust and Holden’s smirking chipmunk cheeks, bulging like balloons. He didn’t dare swallow, though. Like any sane human, he knew that pork rinds tasted like salty, deep-fried ass.
Both Holden’s and Wynonna’s heads rotated slowly, homing in on the second—and final—bag of pork rinds.
Wynonna bolted. Holden, however, dove like a baseball player for home plate. And because the vinyl tile floor was as buffed and shiny as the immortal bald head of Bruce Willis, he slid like it was a Slip ’n Slide. Holden snatched the bag and barrel-rolled, and Wynonna tripped over him. He tried to get up, but Wynonna grabbed him by the shirt and muscled him down. They proceeded to roll around on the floor.
The moment Holden was on top, Wynonna went for his throat. Bad idea. Holden’s ballooning cheeks deflated, and he spewed chewed-up pork rinds all over her boho-crochet top.
Wynonna screamed with understandable horror. Holden coughed and gagged.
Imogen, meanwhile, crab-crawled away from the action on long, spindly limbs until she was right next to me. Climbed to her feet. Leaned toward my ear, although she was unable to tear her eyes away from the carnage.
“Why do they always do this?” she said in a hushed tone.
It was a very large question containing layers upon layers to unpack. Here were the facts as I knew them:
Wynonna hated me, but…
She loved to torment me.
Holden always came to my rescue, but…
He always did it in an unstable, psychotic, rage-y sort of way.
I think Wynonna loved that, too. I think she got a rush out of it.
It was a vicious, never-ending cycle. In fact, one might assume that it was a part of the normal balance of their lives. That if you took this away from them, their states of being might very well spiral into chaos.
Then a thought occurred: I was experiencing a rare, one-on-one conversation with Imogen. If you disregarded our best friends grappling MMA-style on the floor, that is. Which I did. In fact, Wynonna and Holden were inadvertently acting as a kind of strange and horrifying—but nevertheless effective—icebreaker. It was about as perfect an opportunity to ask You Know Who to the You Know What that I could hope for.
However, now that Imogen was standing next to me—clearly not having a 911 emergency—I devolved into my usual state of crippling social ineptitude.
Somewhere in the pandemonium, Holden managed to break free of Wynonna. He lunged to the nearest window—one of the few at Piles Fork that you could actually slide open. This is what Holden did. Slid it wide open with one hand. With the other, he thrust the hostage bag of pork rinds over the three-story drop. The bag dangled in his fierce grip.
“Take one more step and the pork rinds get it,” said Holden.
Wynonna froze in her oversized combat-boot tracks. Raised her hands in a slow and steady cease-fire. She was apparently taking the hostage situation very seriously.
“Eeeeeasy, Durden,” said Wynonna. “Don’t do anything we’ll all regret.”
“Apologize to Ezra,” said Holden.
“Excuse me?”
“Or the pork rinds get it.”
Wynonna glanced at me with a sort of residual disgust. Or dismissive resentment. It was hard to pin down exactly what it was, however, because my mind was slipping. Like the moon was currently slipping over the disk of the sun, causing the sky to darken with a strange, dusky hue. Although I was only vaguely aware of it in some distant compartment of my brain.
“No way,” said Wynonna. “I am not apologizing to—”
Holden let his grip slide but only slightly. The pork rinds slipped half an inch.
“Okay, okay, okay!” said Wynonna. She turned to look at me. Took several steps forward until we were standing at a safe, apologetic distance. I could sense the words coagulating at the back of her throat, like a scab.
“Ezra Slevin,” she said, pronouncing each syllable of my name overdramatically. “I am sorry…that you’re a PATHETIC LITTLE CHICKENSHIT.”
She lunged at Holden. Smashed him into the wall, tweaking his “pork rind” arm against the window frame. Holden yelped. The brunt of the impact, however, went into her right combat boot, which she planted flat against the wall. A compressed spring. She fastened her arms around Holden’s head, Randy Orton–style, and kicked off, launching the two of them like a WWE finishing move. I thought for sure she was gonna RKO Holden’s ass “outta nowhere!”
Instead, Wynonna kicked off a little too hard, and she and Holden collided into Imogen and me.
I felt it—a cerebral FLASH! I felt the impact like my astral form was being knocked out of my human shell.
We were a tangle of limbs, a human blob, rolling across the vinyl tile floor—crash!—right into the lockers. The kshhhhhhh! of ringing aluminum buzzed in my ears.
“Owwww,” said Holden.
“Am I dead?” said Imogen faintly. “Is this what being dead is?”
“Fuck me,” I mumbled to myself, in a moment of existential quandary.
Those were the words I said.
Except it was Wynonna’s voice that said them.
Somewhere in the human blob, I felt a body stiffen. As if they, too, recognized that something was cosmically wrong.
I opened my eyes. Glanced down at my hands, palms flat against the cold tile.
Except they weren’t my hands. They were smaller. Thinner. Smoother.
Each fingernail was painted electric blue.
That’s when I noticed the tufts of electric-blue hair framing my periphery.
It was then—and only then—that I realized someone in the human blob was looking directly at me. I rotated my head slowly.
The face staring back at me…
…was me.
It was Ezra Slevin. A mirror image of my face. A doppelgänger. His protruding head was sandwiched between Imogen’s long sweatered torso and, rather unfortunately, Holden’s ass.
He looked as terrified as I felt.
And then it happened again—flash!
Suddenly, I was in a different place, looking a different direction. Also, Holden’s ass was in my face—which should have been an alarming situation in its own regard. However, I was too preoccupied looking at Wynonna, and she was looking at me. We both seemed to be sharing the same look, and the look said, “What the actual fuck?”
“Oh shit!” said Holden. “The eclipse!”
Wynonna and I snapped out of our Twilight Zone situation—if only for a moment. Even Imogen made an Eeep! sound. We all twisted, and squirmed, and pulled, and slowly unraveled from one another. Staggered upright and rushed to the open window. Everyone fumbled to remove their respective cardboard eclipse glasses from various pockets, struggling to assemble them to our faces.
By the time we succeeded, the black circle occupying the sky was already in the process of receding. A blast of white light punctured its side.
We had missed it.
Finally—whether from the disappointment, or the stress, or the Twilight Zone–level shit in between—my body decided this was as good a time as any to shut things down.
I blacked out.
—so close, and yet, so far away—like they were standing over me in some parallel dimension.
Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, said Imogen.
Don’t worry, said Holden. It’s okay, it’s okay. This happens all the time.
What, is he narcoleptic or something? said Wynonna
.
Not exactly. He’s more of a hard-core insomniac who occasionally breaks from sleep deprivation.
And that’s OKAY? said Imogen, incredulous.
I mean, there’s no long-term damage from it. It’s just a part of his disorder or whatever.
How long has it been since he last slept?
Um. Holden had to stop and think about that one. Two or three days?
Two or three DAYS?
Again, Holden seemed to pause and mull this over. Three days, he said definitively.
Oh my god.
But it’s okay, Holden assured her.
How exactly is that OKAY?
I mean, it’s normal.
That is not normal!
Are you saying we SHOULDN’T call nine-one-one? said Wynonna.
Oh, no, we definitely should. His body hit the floor like that Drowning Pool song.
The voices faded into dreamless sleep. A swollen pool of blackness, like an abscess in time.
• •
“You haven’t slept in how long?” said the paramedic.
“Seventy-two hours,” I said. And then, as an afterthought, added, “…ish.”
I was rounding to the nearest day, of course. I had neither the time nor the patience to provide exact measurements for my insanity.
Even though I felt fine—all things considered—the paramedics had me lie down on a stretcher so they could determine how “fine” I was for themselves. Judging from the looks they exchanged, I was failing with prowess.
Imogen, meanwhile, was standing over me—as close as the paramedics would allow, at least—shaking her head like I was the saddest thing she had ever seen. Like a blind orphan with cancer, petting my puppy and dearest friend, Scruffles, who I didn’t realize was dead.
Normally, I would’ve appreciated the attention—even if it was just pity attention. However, I was a little preoccupied with the event that I was currently referring to in my head as What the Fuck Just Happened?
“Are you seeing a doctor?” said the paramedic.
“I have a psychiatrist,” I said.
“Are you on any medication?”
“Belsomra.”
“How’s that working?”
I glanced from him, to the other paramedic checking my vitals, to the police officer interrogating Holden and Wynonna, and back to him.
Where I End and You Begin Page 2