by Estevan Vega
The way she put it almost made me feel guilty. Like it was my fault or something. I never asked for her to come along. It’s not my fault she’s a mirror person. Or was it? I couldn’t think. Everything was happening so fast.
“Just think, Elizabeth. If you were in here, you could travel to any mirror you wanted and find out all kinds of secrets. Haven’t you ever wished you could spy on someone or see something secret?”
Well, who wouldn’t? This mirror stuff might not be so bad after all. I decided to try and keep an open mind.
“Yeah. Maybe sometimes I do wonder what it would be like.”
“Like Jimmy?”
She could read my mind all right.
“Maybe.”
“If you wanted, I could go over to his house right now and see if I can catch him in front of a mirror. I’ve done it before. I could come back and tell you what he’s doing.”
It was tempting but I couldn’t let her.
“Or better yet, we could trade places and you could go look for yourself. Or anywhere else you wanted to go. I can show you how to hide in a mirror so they’ll never notice you.”
Wow, that was tempting! I almost gave in but some small, quiet voice inside me kept saying, no, no, no. Actually, it was more like a scream. I was scared to death to even consider climbing into that mirror or whatever you did to get into it.
She was as persistent as a vacuum cleaner salesman. I think she sensed the curiosity that was burning inside me.
“I know you’re frightened, Elizabeth, but there’s no need to be. You can’t get hurt in here and we can trade places back and forth easier than boys find dirt. You know, I think we’re going to be great friends. I’ve never had a girlfriend. C’mon, let’s trade! You’ll love it in here.”
Something told me to be cautious but something else told me I’d be nuts to pass up this opportunity. Besides, she didn’t seem that bad. Kind of nice, actually.
“How do we do it?”
CHAPTER SEVEN
I NEVER SHOULD HAVE asked her that. The foot she had in the door just got wider. About wide enough to drive a fleet of semis through.
“It’s easy, Elizabeth. You just look into my eyes and say, ‘I want to trade places.’ That’s all there is to it. It’s the easiest thing in the world.”
Easy, indeed. There had to be more to it. It seemed too simple. And how did I get back out? I didn’t have to ask; she was in her mind-reading mode.
“Simple. You just have to look into my eyes again and say the same thing, ‘I want to trade places,’ and we automatically change places. There’s nothing to it. C’mon. What do you say, girlfriend? We’ll both have some fun.”
It was tempting. All of a sudden, I could think of about a million things I could do from the other side of a mirror. I could spy on all sorts of people. Like Jimmy. My mind was quickly being made up but I still had reservations.
“You sure that’s all I have to do?”
“That’s it. I give you my word.”
“Wait a tish. How do I get around in there once we’ve traded places?”
“That’s a good question, Elizabeth, and it shows you’ve got your thinking cap on. It’s easy. I can’t explain it to you, but once you’re in here you’ll just know how. There’s nothing to it. Trust me.”
As soon as she said “trust me,” I had this queer thought about my little brother, Mike. I bet he’s said “trust me” at least a kazillion times and each time I did I ended up walking around half the day with shoe polish rings around my eyes or something. But I was committed now. Curiosity is my biggest flaw and is always getting me into a jam.
“Okay,” I said, deciding. “Can we just do it for a minute and then trade right back? Just so I can see what it feels like?”
She got this big dreamy smile on her face and all of a sudden I knew I could trust her. Poor thing, trapped in there all her life. I could certainly give up a minute or two to let her experience what I took for granted. It was the least I could do. “Sure. Just look into my eyes and say, ‘I want to trade places.’ And be sincere.”
I’ll do it, I thought. Why not? If the first man hadn’t stepped out of the space ship onto the moon, little kids all over would still think it was made out of green cheese. What I was about to do was heroic. Scientific, too. I was taking a step for all mankind. I would be some kind of super explorer. Why, someday I could end up in history books and Mr. Bormuth would have to teach kids about me.
I was telling myself all this stuff, when inside I was shaking like Mrs. King during one of her cockroach attacks. I was doing what I always do: talking myself into trouble. Oh well, in for a penny, in for a dollar, as my dad says.
“Let’s do it,” I said, finally. “But only for a minute.”
I closed my eyes tight, took a deep breath and held it. I opened them and focused back on the mirror, staring into our eyes and said, “I want to trade places.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
NOTHING HAPPENED. I WAS still staring at her eyes and everything was exactly the same. It hadn’t worked. I was still in the bathroom and looking into the mirror. There was the wall with the flowered wallpaper and the towel rack with mom’s pink towels. I felt all sorts of emotions, elation at not being in the mirror and sadness that it hadn’t worked. Then, I noticed that something was wrong. Miss Blue Eyes wasn’t. Blue-eyed, that is. Her eyes had changed color and were like mine. Brown.
Something else was wrong. I couldn’t put my finger on it right away, but as I kept staring at her, it came to me. It was dark behind me. I could just barely see that out of the corner of my eye. Slowly, I began turning my head, still keeping my gaze locked with hers, until I had to break contact, and I turned my head completely around, quick, and then back. I was sure my hair was standing straight out.
There was nothing behind me. Nothing but the blackest darkness I had ever seen.
I have never been more totally scared in my life than I was at that exact moment. The terror welled up so swiftly my ears rang with the silent scream that jangled from every nerve ending and pore in my body.
I was in the mirror.
CHAPTER NINE
I FORCED MYSELF TO calm down. So I was in the mirror. So what? It didn’t feel bad or anything. It felt just the same as before. Before I was an official mirror person. Could I talk, I wondered? I tried out my voice. This teeny quavering mousesqueak came out.
“Am I in the mirror?” I sounded like one of the munchkins in The Wizard of Oz.
“Yes, Elizabeth, and your eyes are blue now. Didn’t you always want blue eyes?”
I could think of things I wanted more. Like getting out of this mirror now that I was in it.
“Yeah, that’s nice, I guess—who knows? I can’t see them. They look brown to me when I look at you. Anyway, this has been some fun, but I’m ready to come out now. I...want...to...trade—”
I said it slowly and deliberately and so loud I was sure I was shouting. It didn’t work. I was still in the mirror. Then I knew why. She wasn’t looking at me. Her eyes were downcast, gazing down at the sink.
“Look at me, Blue Eyes!” I screamed. I didn’t know what else to call her. She didn’t look up, but kept looking down at the sink. I heard my mother come in the front door and call my name.
“Elizabeth! Where are you, hon?”
“Here I am, Mom. In the mirror. Come and get me. Please!”
Miss Blue Eyes didn’t look up, but I saw her smile and it was a different kind of smile now. It was positively evil. She turned her head in the direction of mom’s voice and said, “I’m coming, Mom. Be there in a minute.” She glanced in the mirror. “She can’t hear you, you know. Or see you. Only I can.”
Then she was gone. Disappeared. I heard the door to the bathroom slam and I was left staring at my mom’s pink towels.
CHAPTER TEN
IT’S BEEN TWO FOREVER weeks now and I’m still inside the mirror. I know how to get out. All I have to do is get eye contact with Miss Blue Eyes long enough to say th
e words. And it’s not like she doesn’t use mirrors. She’s in front of them constantly. She’s got this trick she does that keeps me imprisoned here. She looks obliquely into the glass, almost never straight on. Oh, sometimes she’ll look directly at me but never long enough for me to say the magic words. I can say it pretty fast, just not fast enough. I guess she’s had years to practice what she’s doing. She’s a real pro.
What a chump I was!
She was right about one thing. It’s easy to go from mirror to mirror in here. It wasn’t totally black in here like I first thought. There are thousands of tiny little pinpricks of lights, kind of like stars. Trillions of them. They’re all mirrors. You just kind of “think” where you want to go and you’re there. I’ve been all over the map. Once I stopped crying, that is.
I went and saw the actor Christian Slater once. Was I surprised! You’d think a big movie star like that would be out partying with a bunch of other movie mavens or at least doing something movie star-ish. I couldn’t believe what he was doing when I saw him! He was just sitting there in this easy chair reading a book. Not only that, but the book was one of those thick ones they make you read in English class. The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky. He was reading it for fun. I guess so, anyway; I mean, the movie studio wouldn’t make you read stuff like that, would they? I could have died! Everybody knows he looks so deep all the time, but you know how it is—in the back of your mind you just figure that’s the way his manager or whatever wants him to come across for his public, but it’s really true. He is deep. I wish I could tell my friends, especially Amy Wempel about this. She thinks he’s the ultimate actor already and if she knew he was sitting around reading great classics when nobody was making him, well, she’d probably want to hitchhike over to his house and propose on the spot.
You should see what Liz is doing to my life.
Yesterday, I was in the big mirror in the front room and she waltzed in from school. I won’t even tell you what she’s doing to my hair these days only that the world isn’t ready for it yet. My mom was sitting on the sofa, sorting through her recipe box and she looked up and said, “Hi, Sweetie. How was school?”
“School’s for schmucks. I’m thinking about quitting.”
My mom’s hand flew to her mouth. “Elizabeth! I can’t believe my ears. I—”
She interrupted. “And I told you, I don’t want to be called Elizabeth anymore. My name is Liz. Say it, Mother. Liz, Liz, Liz!” She stormed off up to my room, which incidentally is totally trashed. A thousand times worse than I ever kept it. I’ll never find anything in there again.
As it stands right now, I’m grounded until the age of eighty-two, provided, that is, that I can ever get out of here. I’ve dropped Jimmy as my boyfriend and now I date about six zillion other guys, most of them about the age of my dad and none I’d be caught dead with if it was really me out there. I’ve sassed my parents, hit my brother and stolen from my married sister, Sienna’s, purse. I sneak into my parents’ bedroom at night and hear them saying things like, “What do you think about boarding school for Elizabeth?”
My life is ruined. It’s been thermonucleared. I can’t even pick up the pieces; it’s all in subatomic particles.
Part of my new life has been interesting, I will admit. I’ve gone lots of places and seen tons of stuff. Christian Slater and stuff like that. It’s like Miss Blue Eyes—Liz—said, I can go almost anywhere. I can’t explain how you do it—if you were in here you’d see how instantly, but what good does it do me? On this side of the mirror you’re not real. I don’t even feel real. I can’t feel my body and I’m never hungry or ever have any bodily functions, which saves on toilet paper but not on my sensitive psyche. I do seem to have all my emotions intact and I remember Liz saying something about how she was lacking in that. It must have something to do with on what side of the mirror you come from originally.
There are other people in here too. Oh, boy. I can’t tell you how excited I am about that. The first time I realized that I nearly jumped out of my skin. If I actually had skin, I would have. I was staring out at an empty living room, silently mourning the loss of my freedom, when this voice right at my elbow, said, “Hey, what’s going on, chickie?” in this conversational tone of voice, which made it scarier. As soon as I got my heart rate down to a thousand beats per kilosecond, I said, “What’s going on is that I just peed my pants, lamebrain, or I would have if I could still pee. Who are you? And who calls people chickie? You just land from the nineteen fifties?” It was some Australian guy, a total zero. If he looks like most of the boys in Australia, I think I’ll stay Up Over. I haven’t seen that many zits on a face since they messed up our last order from the Hut and overdosed on the pepperoni. You’d think a kid with that many pus factories wouldn’t go near a mirror, let alone stare into one long enough to create a twin.
“I’m just being friendly,” he said, with this big pout on his kisser, and then he vanished, gone away somewhere in mirrorland. Probably to hang out with some other Clearasil junkies. Good riddance.
Since then, I see people all over the place in here. There have been times, like at Nancy Gold’s birthday party when I felt I was suffocating with all of the people around me. A bunch of zombies. We don’t talk much or anything. Like I would want to! Talk isn’t the right word anyway—there’s a kind of communication between us, sort of like mind-reading that sounds like a voice, but they’re weird folks, even worse than Liz, and I have nothing in common with them, I’m sure! That time, at Nancy’s party, with all those ghouls around me, I kept thinking of that old TV ad for “Mr. Microphone.” You know, where these losers are all standing around, looking at their shoes, until Mr. Party Animal gets out his Mr. Microphone and then, boy, hey! do they ever start rocking! They all break out into a rousing chorus of “Michael, Row The Boat Ashore” or something stupendously cool like that. These people were even creepier than the TV people—I don’t think they’d come alive at anything, much less a banana-yellow battery-operated plastic mike from FAO Schwartz’s Under Six Department.
There’s this one girl, isn’t too bad. Her name is Betty and she’s about my age. The sad thing is, she’s been my age for about a hundred and sixty years. The Betty who created her died of the plague or something when she was seventeen, back in the eighteen hundreds, and guess what? Whatever age your creating human dies at is the age you get to stay forever. Nobody dies in here, but jeezum, what fun it must be to look forward to crawling around the world’s mirrors for the next millennium or so! Poor Betty. She was from Indiana, too, which is why she said she stays in the area, but if I’d been here as long as she has, I think I’d relocate. Check out some new scenery or something.
“Betty,” I said to her one day. “Did you know Liz?”
At first, she didn’t want to answer me, but I kept after her and she admitted she did. “I didn’t like her much,” she said. She was always saying my eyes were ugly. She was mean.”
Betty’s eyes were the same color as mine.
She liked to go watch people do things in the mirror. Things they did when they thought they were alone. You know, things with their noses, for example. Yuck! Include me out, I told her, on that one.
I did kind of like her, even if all she wanted to talk about was the good old days when they had what she called “really fun, quilting parties,” but she’d disappear for days at a time and when she came back and I asked her where she’d been, she said she liked to go back to where she’d lived as a girl, some farm just outside of Fairmont, Indiana. The only problem was, the old homestead had been torn down and was now a Dairy Freeze, but she said it wasn’t too bad there. It was the hot spot in the town and she knew practically everybody. Fairmont is the town where James Dean, the old-time actor my mom gets goofy-eyed over, is from. Our family was even trucked down there once a couple of years ago by Mom to walk around his grave. Some fun! Most of the other people there weren’t much older than me. I don’t know why he was such a big deal to someone who wasn’t even aliv
e when he was. The kind of person that’s maxed out on the shopping scene, I guess, has to manufacture some excitement. Personally, I’d rather spend my time researching how Cheez-Whiz is made. I guess the Dean guy got struck down in his prime, according to Mom, and would have been bigger than Tom Cruise if he’d lived, but people say things like that all the time about movie stars when they die young. Like Elvis. My dad is a stitch about Elvis. At Christmastime, we ride around all over town to see the different ways people decorate their yards and stuff and whenever Dad sees an especially gaudy one, like all twenty-nine members of the Holy Family all lit up in Technicolor plastic, along with all the major Disney animals blinking and nodding, he always says, “Well, Elvis is dead...but his spirit lives on.” Cracks me up. We’ve got this neighbor who does his entire house and yard in pulsating red lights, along with his tree which is in front of the living room picture window—all in red—and all night long it just throbs and throbs. Especially that blood-red Christmas tree. We call it “The Edgar Allen Poe Memorial House” or, as Dad says, “Subtitled, “The Tell-Tale Heart.” If I lived in that house I’d have nightmares until Easter.
Anyway, Betty said to watch what Liz does to my boyfriend and she hit the nail on the head with the hammer with that advice.
Poor Jimmy. He doesn’t know what hit him. One day he’s got this warm, caring girlfriend (me), and the next day she’s telling everyone in the universe all of his deepest secrets (Liz).
“French can’t french.”
I had just popped over to girl’s bathroom at school at noon to check out the situation. I couldn’t believe my ears. Liz was at the center of a bunch of my friends. Girls were coming in for just a second and staying. The crowd kept growing, all of them listening to what they thought were my words.