by Shawn Sarles
Carefully, Grace folded the flyer and bent over. She slung her backpack off her shoulders and slid the piece of paper into one of its pockets. She’d have to figure out a costume. And it’d have to be something good. Something that would make people notice her.
Halloween—monsters and ghosts and spooky stuff—it was kind of Grace’s thing. In the dark, hidden under a layer of makeup and an over-the-top wig, costume jewelry swinging from her neck and studding her fingers, she could escape. She could be anyone and anything.
Zipping her backpack, Grace started to rise but froze halfway. A breath caught in her throat, but this time it was accompanied by a flutter in her stomach instead of a stabbing pain. Up ahead on the stairwell landing, a boy sat all by himself.
An outcast like her. A cute one. Calvin Lee. She’d had a crush on him ever since they’d shared a carpool in elementary school. But he hardly noticed her existence anymore. Or anyone’s, really. He always had his nose stuck in his notebook, scribbling away, lost in his own world.
Not that Grace had noticed. It wasn’t like she’d been watching him for years. Waiting for him to say hello. To make a move. To fall in love with her.
She shook her head, but kept watching Calvin.
She knew that it was silly and probably all in her head, but she remembered that day. The day of the accident. The day her mother—
The day they’d taken turns standing in front of Elena’s grandmother’s mirror. Grace had spoken that name—Bloody Mary—into the mirror and she’d felt a chill run up her spine. She’d seen someone hidden there in the depths of her reflection. Recognized Calvin’s face. Her soulmate.
Which meant she just had to wait. If she’d seen him, then he must have seen her. They must be destined for each other.
“Out of the way,” a voice crackled, ripping Grace out of her fantasy. She stumbled forward and barely managed to spring to her feet without face-planting. Clutching her backpack, she turned around and met the glossy lips and perfect blonde hair of her harasser. Her former best friend.
“I said move.” Elena waved her sparkly fingernails in front of Grace’s face, snapping impatiently. “You’re blocking my locker.”
The two girls flanking Elena had a good giggle as Grace shuffled out of the way, her shoulders hunched while her ears burned bright.
“What are you even wearing?”
Grace pulled her backpack to her chest to block Elvira’s witchy face.
“What a freak,” Elena muttered as she threw her bag into her locker and checked her reflection in the mirror she had hanging there. Grace watched as Elena puckered her lips and fluffed her hair. As Elena pulled out a tube of lip gloss and reapplied, in the background of the mirror, Grace caught a glimpse of her own flat brown hair.
She’s right. You are a freak.
Grace tried to shake the words out of her head. There was a reason she avoided mirrors. She hated what she saw in her reflection. Hated the mean things she couldn’t keep herself from thinking. She didn’t need someone like Elena telling her she was ugly and a freak. She had the insults covered on her own.
“Henry,” Elena gasped, and Grace blinked away from the mirror. She’d been so lost in thought that she hadn’t noticed the boy sneaking up behind Elena. He wrapped his arms around her waist and lifted her into the air. Elena wiggled out of the boy’s grip and turned to face him. She planted a kiss on his cheek and marked him as hers, leaving a glistening impression with her wet lip gloss.
Grace watched the couple for a second, and then backed away. If only she could be pretty like Elena. Pretty and popular. Then she wouldn’t be so lonely. And Calvin might notice her. Might even ask her out.
Her eyes fluttered up to the stairwell landing, but Calvin wasn’t there. He couldn’t have gone far. But as Grace thought about hunting him down, the first bell rang.
As she was scrambling up the stairs, though, a piece of paper caught her eye, lying flat on the floor right where Calvin had been sitting. She bent down to pick it up, and when she turned it over, a strange feeling hiccuped in her chest. A jolt of something sweet.
There on the paper was a sketch of what looked like some sort of demon. Almost an Elvira look-alike, with its tight dress and dark hair. Its lips were outlined in bright red. A drip of blood ran down its chin. Its eyes were possessed, ghastly.
Grace glanced over her shoulders to make sure no one else had seen. Then she whipped a notebook out of her backpack and carefully pressed the sketch in between the pages, keeping it safe and crisp. She felt light-headed and hopeful as her mind raced and her stomach flipped. Because maybe she and Calvin had something in common after all. Maybe they really were soulmates.
The clamor in the cafeteria was overwhelming as Calvin got in line to get his food. He liked the noise, though. Craved it, even. He opened his ears and let the chaos fill him up.
Trays clattered as they were set down on tables. Forks and spoons tapped out their own percussion line. Mouths chewed, teeth chomped and tore between stories told, jokes were made, and dates were planned out. It was all music to Calvin’s ears, because it distracted him. It prevented other things from rushing in.
As he made it to the end of the lunch line, Calvin paid and spun around to hunt for a seat. He didn’t eat in the cafeteria often, so he didn’t have a usual table. He didn’t really have friends to pal around with either. It was better that way. It kept him from losing his mind. Well, from losing it any more than he already had.
Calvin spotted an open chair in the corner of the room. A seat at a half-empty table that faced the wall. Ideal real estate. However, as Calvin set off to claim it, a hissing jerked his attention away and he couldn’t help turning to look.
The kitchen doors had swung open and a lunch lady had emerged, a fresh vat of bubbling sloppy joe mix in her arms. She breezed past Calvin without incident, but in that brief window before the doors could swing shut, Calvin had seen too much.
Knives gleamed sharply on countertops. An unattended pot had started to boil over on the stove. A package of meat had been left out, bacteria colonies most likely claiming territory on its red rawness.
Calvin blinked away, but having seen danger, his mind couldn’t ignore it anymore. On the other side of the cafeteria, a table broke out in a chorus of “Happy Birthday” as a girl lit a couple of candles and stuck them in a cupcake. An apple fell off another table, rolling across the floor, getting kicked like a soccer ball, passed forward, just waiting for someone to miss, to step on it and be sent flying into the open jaws of the scorching-hot dishwasher.
Calvin blinked again, but he could only see hazard. He could only imagine worst-case scenarios. Accidents. Broken bones. Third-degree burns. Cuts that would bleed out and require fifteen stitches to seal back.
The images flooded his brain. They set his heart racing. He gritted his teeth and tried to push them back, but that didn’t work. It never did. He took one last longing look at that empty chair in the corner of the room—the one where he would have been able to stare at the wall and eat his lunch in peace. Then he dropped his tray on a nearby table and booked it out of there, staring down at the floor so that he wouldn’t pick up anything else.
As Calvin set off down the empty halls, his feet took him where he needed to go. They carried him past the gym and down the science wing. They took him into the library and through the stacks to the back, depositing him in the reference section at a scrawled-on desk.
Sitting, Calvin let his fingers wander across the old wood, feeling the grooves and gouges that generations of students had left behind. He’d sat here on so many afternoons that he had the map of scars memorized. The hearts and initials. The curses. The mindless doodles.
He took a deep breath and tried to clear his mind. But the itch from the cafeteria remained, an electric charge building in his fingertips. Humming up his arms and moving through his whole body.
Even here in his quiet place, encyclopedias and dictionaries and atlases surrounding him, Calvin could hear the whis
pers. He could see the premonitions flashing at him from the dust jackets wrapped around the thick books, the light reflecting off the protective plastic sleeves. They showed him paper cuts and broken toes. An earthquake shaking the heavy tomes right off their shelves and onto his skull. A domino of crashing bookcases that turned the whole library into a graveyard.
Calvin shut his eyes and put his head down on the desk, but it did nothing to get rid of the images. Nothing to keep the whispers from burrowing in.
Finally, Calvin reached into his backpack and pulled out a notebook. He let it thud against the desk and then set his pen down next to it.
He stared at the pen, not wanting to pick it up. But his fingers still itched, more intensely now than before. He hated doing it, but he knew it was the only way to silence the voices. His fingers curved around the pen while he flicked open his notebook with the other hand. He came to a white page and set the tip of the pen against it. He closed his eyes and let the whispers flood in, a soft muttering dragging him under and pulling him along.
He saw flashes of wild hair tangled in knots. The thing’s restless eyes dripping with red tears. Its crimson lipstick clinging to its mouth like it’d just taken a long drink from someone’s neck.
Calvin saw this demon’s familiar face and the visions it spewed, cycling one after the other. His eyes snapped open, a blank look glazing them over, and his pen started scratching. It began filling the white pages with ink. With scenes too terrible to speak of.
He remembered that day five years ago, when everything had changed. When he’d stood in front of that old mirror and whispered that name.
Bloody Mary.
He’d thought it was all a joke. But then something had tingled in his toes. A cold washing over him. Flooding into his lungs. Gripping his chest before it sank its claws into his heart, piercing him to the bone.
He’d nearly collapsed from the pain. And then the thing had appeared in front of him, filling the whole mirror. A vision that only he could see.
It had loomed over him, its face monstrous but still somehow beautiful. Its wicked grin was crowded with two rows of sharpened teeth. Its lips opened wide as if to devour him on the spot. Its bloodshot eyes lined with crimson kohl saw right through him, feasting on his every weakness, swallowing him in their ghastly depths.
He’d blinked and the demon had vanished. But he hadn’t been able to shake that feeling of doom. Calamity waiting around every corner. The rules of Elena’s game.
He was meant for death.
He thought his eyes had to be playing tricks on him, that it was just a made-up game. But the next morning, the visions had started. Terrible scenes had filled his head. Living nightmares that he couldn’t ignore or wake up from. Catastrophes that he could only draw. That he was compelled to put to paper. That wouldn’t stop.
Calvin’s eyes fluttered and he came to. His fingers ached from squeezing the pen so tightly, but he felt a hundred times better. Empty. But the relief only lasted a moment as he glanced down at his creations, at the four pieces of paper he’d unconsciously pulled out of his notebook and filled with ink, the lines crisscrossing and connecting across the white space.
Four separate drawings of four dire scenes.
And then above it all, black lines flew off the pages, darkening the wooden desk, drawing all four pictures together under one monstrous umbrella, the demon’s haunting face hunched over and looking on, reveling in the agony.
Calvin studied the images, a cold sweat trickling down the back of his neck, unsure of what he’d drawn. Of what it all meant. These felt different than his usual visions. More ominous. Like promises. He moved down the line and then paused over the last one. His fingers trembled as he lifted it, holding it close, making sure he hadn’t missed something.
An ache quivered in his heart, and his mouth went suddenly dry. Then he opened his notebook and shoved all four pictures inside. He pushed away from the desk and scurried out of the stacks, swearing that the demon’s eyes followed him as he went, taunting him over what was to come.
“Four.”
Steph called for the set as she wound up, cocking her arm back, measuring out her approach. She took two steps and then leapt into the air, watching the volleyball ease into the setter’s fingers, watching it jump right out like it’d taken a hop on a trampoline, watching as it sailed to the other side of the court, where the opposite hitter took a crack at it and hit it long.
She landed back on the ground, her shoes squeaking against the gym floor, and tried not to look disappointed.
“Good isolation, Steph,” Coach Lee’s voice called from the sideline as she clapped her hands together once. “That would have had the blockers fooled.”
Steph smothered a grimace and nodded. Sure, she would have fooled the blockers. But she would have been able to hit around them, too. If she’d gotten the set.
She glared at their setter, who was in the center of the court, but Elena refused to meet her gaze. That was the sixth ball in a row that Elena had chosen not to send Steph’s way. And as Steph got back in position to run the drill again, she started thinking it wasn’t a coincidence.
“Four,” Steph shouted, demanding the ball as the pass hung in the air, floating toward Elena. But one step into Steph’s approach and Elena had already shaken her off, overcalling with a one and setting the ball quickly to their middle, who wasn’t ready at all. Steph went through the motions, faking an attack, but she couldn’t help watching the middle jump late. She couldn’t avoid rolling her eyes as the girl sent the ball into the top of the net instead of to the wide-open court. Steph’s frustration boiled over and her hands clenched into fists, but before she could use them, Coach Lee blew her whistle and called everyone in.
“That’s it for today.”
The freshman team gathered around their coach, taking squeezes from their water bottles as they listened.
“We’ve got some wrinkles to iron out, but we’re on the right track for next week’s match. And a particular shout-out to Elena for stepping in and taking over. It’s not easy picking up the 5-1 system in just a week.”
Elena beamed as the other girls cheered. It made Steph, who had shuffled to the back, want to throw up.
“And remember, I’ll be choosing our captain soon. We’ll need someone who can pull the whole team together and really lead out there.”
“That’s got Elena’s name all over it,” Kayleigh, the middle hitter, who was also one of Elena’s best friends, squealed. Again, Steph could feel her stomach turning. She had to take a long drink of water to stop herself from mouthing off.
“I’ve got my eye on a few potential captains,” Coach Lee said, not giving anything away as she surveyed all her players. “Now get out of here. I’ll see you all tomorrow.”
And with that, the woman snapped up her clipboard and headed out, leaving the girls to chatter on their own as they packed their bags and peeled off their knee pads.
“You were so good today,” one of the girls said to Elena as she sat down on the gym floor and began untying her shoes.
“Yeah. You’re, like, already a boss out there,” another girl tossed in. “Coach will definitely pick you.”
“I mean, it’d be an honor to lead you all.” Elena’s cheeks reddened as if she were being modest, but Steph could see right through it.
“Don’t you think the captain should be a team player?”
The words came out of Steph’s mouth before she realized it.
“You don’t think I’m a team player?” Elena didn’t seem frazzled at all. In fact, she seemed to enjoy the chance at a confrontation.
“No. I don’t.”
Steph had to concentrate to get the words out, to deliver them without letting her voice tremble. And after that, she didn’t wait for Elena’s reply. She grabbed her bag and took off, taking long strides across the floor and slamming through the gym doors. But she’d only made it a couple of steps before someone grabbed her elbow from behind and spun her around.
>
“What’s the matter with you?” Elena snapped between angry huffs. “You can’t talk to me like that.”
And as Steph eyed the other girl, taking in her twitching eyes and red-hot cheeks, she had to wonder if anyone had ever stood up to her like this.
“Why not? Because it’s the truth?” Steph tried her best to remain calm and levelheaded. “I’m the best hitter on the team—”
“And with Lindsay out for the season,” Elena cut in, “I’m our only setter. You’re a lot easier to replace than me.”
The smirk on Elena’s face couldn’t have been more wicked if she’d planned Lindsay’s freak tumble down the stairs and then stomped on the girl’s wrist to make sure it was broken.
“Look, I don’t know what your problem with me is,” Steph started, “but you not setting me is just going to make us lose.”
“We don’t need you to win,” Elena shot back, crossing her arms over her chest. “And once Coach makes me captain, I’ll prove it.”
“If she makes you captain.”
Elena laughed right in Steph’s face, and it was almost as bad as if she’d spit.
“You think the girls will want you as captain?” Elena clucked her tongue, leaning into the fake pity. “News flash: No one likes you. You’re just a freaky-tall giant. Sasquatch Steph. Why don’t you crawl back to the woods where you came from?”
Steph bristled and then shrank back. No one had ever come at her like that. No one had ever been so direct. Not that she hadn’t known people called her names behind her back. She was tall. An anomaly at six feet and only fourteen years old. Her limbs were long and gangly and didn’t look like they fit her body at all. And she was clumsy, tripping over her own big feet everywhere except on the volleyball court.
There, magically, she felt comfortable. Graceful, even. She felt like she belonged. And she wasn’t about to give that up. Not without a fight.