The Undrowned

by K. R. Alexander

  She just sits at her desk. Smiling, as if she has a secret.

  Smiling, because we have a secret.

  Sometimes she just smiles at her desk or the teacher. But more often than not, I look over and see her watching me.

  Her big blue eyes watery and wide.

  Her lips stretched across her face like a goblin’s.

  At times, she doesn’t look like a girl at all, but something more monstrous, with damp, sagging skin and black-tipped fingers and pointed teeth.

  Puddles form on the floor beneath her.

  I can’t see where the water is coming from.

  I can only see her eyes:

  Watching.

  Watching.

  No one else seems to notice she is different.

  No one else seems to notice she is wrong.

  By the time the final bell rings, I want to scream out my confession.

  Anything to get her to stop staring at me.

  Anything to get those big blue eyes from my imagination.

  When I blink, she’s there, in the darkness.

  She’s there, and she is waiting.

  I practically run from my last class. I slam into at least three classmates while shoving my way to the front door, scattering their books and homework all over the hallway. They don’t say anything. It’s clearly not the first time I’ve done this to people, but it is the first time I’ve done it because I’m trying to get away. I’m practically the first out the door.

  At least I’m ahead of Rachel.

  I head straight home, even though I know my mom will be there demanding I sit down and do my homework immediately and goody-two-shoes Jessica will already be halfway done with hers. It’s better than letting Rachel find me.

  I’m not worried about her telling on me anymore.

  After seeing her eat the fly, or the way her body seemed to change before my very eyes, I’m worried about what she’s become.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Jessica calls out when I slam the front door behind me and lock it quickly. She sits at the kitchen table, homework spread out in front of her, just as expected.

  “Nothing,” I say, glancing out the window. I wasn’t followed. At least, I think I wasn’t followed. I try to calm down. Try to convince myself my heart is only beating fast because I was jogging, and not because I was freaking out over the thought that Rachel might leap out at me from behind the bushes.

  “Doesn’t look like nothing.”

  “Mind your own business, brat,” I shoot back. She just rolls her eyes and goes back to her work. At least the dynamic between us hasn’t changed.

  I expect Mom to come in at any minute and tell me to do my homework, but she doesn’t come down the stairs.

  “She’s in a meeting,” Jessica says, noticing my look toward the steps. “And I don’t think it’s going well.”

  I swallow. I really don’t want to be out in the open when Mom’s done with the meeting. A small part of me almost wants her to catch me not doing my homework—at least having her blame me for something I’d done wrong would feel normal. The fact that everyone is acting like I haven’t done anything when I’ve clearly done something terrible is starting to drive me insane. But the rest of me doesn’t want the drama of Mom’s anger. I take off my shoes and head upstairs.

  I pause, briefly, outside Mom’s office at the top of the steps. Her door is slightly ajar, just enough to see her legs from where she sits in her desk chair. She’s clearly talking to her boss—or, rather, being yelled at by him. I can hear his voice bellowing from the speakerphone. Her office is filled with rolls of graph paper and swatches of fabric and tile and a big computer that she does most of her drafting on. When I was younger, she would let me and Rachel come in here and play Designers—we’d sit around a big piece of graph paper and sketch out our dream home, coordinating all the colors. We made houses with giant pools in the middle and houses on stilts that were twenty stories tall and one that had an entire floor devoted exclusively to puppies.

  That was before Rachel betrayed me. Before things at home started to go south and my parents started fighting. Rachel was supposed to be there for me during all of that. But she wasn’t. She wasn’t, and that makes me feel like it was her fault.

  My breath burns in my throat. I don’t want to be remembering this now.

  Rachel made sure those good times were dead and buried.

  Just like she should have been.

  I swallow the pain and head down the hall to my room, shutting the door behind me and leaning up against it with my eyes closed.

  I can’t help but hope that now that I’m back in my room, things will return to normal. I’ll open my eyes and it will all have been a very strange dream. But I stand there for a long time, until I hear my mom call out to Jessica, asking what she wants on her pizza because she’s too tired to cook, and nothing changes.

  Nothing is going to magically get better just because I want it to.

  I know that for certain when I head to my desk and pull out the textbooks from my bag.

  They’re still sopping wet.

  I’ve been in my room doing homework for all of ten minutes when Dad gets home. It’s like the moment he’s back, the house itself goes tense. I turn down my music. I hear Mom get off her conference call. And a few minutes later, she’s stomping downstairs. I wince before the yelling even begins.

  I can’t even understand what they’re saying to each other, but it doesn’t matter. The effect is the same. I hear the bedroom door beside me slam as Jessica rushes upstairs to lock herself in her room. I can hear her crying.

  I almost consider going into her room and sitting down. I don’t know what I’d say, but maybe being together would make this less miserable. I don’t, though, because that would be suspicious, and even though Rachel hasn’t called me out yet, I’m still not convinced she won’t do just that very soon.

  I put in my headphones and try to drown out their fighting. It doesn’t work. Of course it doesn’t work.

  I can’t focus on my homework, either. Instead, I crawl into my bed and hold my knees to my chest and squeeze myself into a ball. Behind my closed eyes, I can see the watery blue eyes of Rachel peering at me, her thin lips peeled into a deranged sort of smile.

  For a moment, it feels like she’s there, in the room, with me. Leaning over the edge of my bed. Her face inches from mine. Lake water putrefying on her breath.

  I swear I even hear her laughter.

  I don’t open my eyes, though. I want to drown out the thoughts and the yelling. I want all of this to go away.

  It’s not until the doorbell rings and the pizza shows up that I get my wish.

  The house goes silent.

  My eyes open.

  And I blink in shock.

  There, at the foot of my bed, are stains.

  Two wet handprints.

  * * *

  We don’t eat dinner like a normal family. Not anymore.

  Mom is eating upstairs in her office and Jessica is the only one actually at the dining table, her tablet out and a video game beeping away onscreen. Dad and I sit in the living room, silently together. Watching the news.

  I never watch the news. It’s either boring or depressing, and I don’t know why anyone would willingly watch that on their own. But tonight, I need to be on the lookout. Something is going on around here, and I watch the local news with my pizza almost forgotten, waiting for headlines like BODY FOUND IN LOCAL LAKE or GIRL LEFT FOR DEAD, KILLER AT LARGE.

  Every single headlight that passes by outside makes me jump. I’m worried that it’s the cops, or worse—Rachel and her family, out there to accuse me face-to- face, because the game is now up.

  That has to be what today was: her torturing me. Making me wonder what she’s going to do next.

  She’s doing to me what I’ve done to her.

  She’s getting payback.

  And it’s working.

  Dad gets up to go to the bathroom and I continue watching the news. Distrac
ted, I take a bite of my pizza and wince as my teeth crunch through something hard and gritty. Like sand.

  I look at the slice, and to my horror, there are tiny skeletons covering it, little anchovy spines littered amid piles of sand. I gag and spit out what I’d been chewing, dropping that and the slice to my plate.

  When I look a second time, it’s normal pizza. Normal cheese pizza. What in the world is going on?

  Before Dad gets back, I get up and toss the food into the bin.

  No matter how many gulps of soda I take, however, my mouth still tastes like seaweed.

  I make it through an hour of news, and there’s nothing. No reports of missing kids, no Rachel sobbing onscreen and telling the world that I pushed her and left her for dead. Just some car robberies a few towns over and severe thunderstorm warnings for the weekend.

  “You feeling okay, pumpkin?” Dad asks.

  “What?” I ask with a jolt. “Yeah. Why?”

  “It’s just …” He waves his hand at the TV. “You’re watching the news.”

  I try to think fast.

  “Yeah, um, it’s for social studies. They want us to watch the local news and report back on it.”

  “Oh,” he says. He almost sounds convinced. He goes back to staring at the TV, and for a moment I think maybe I dodged his question, but he keeps talking. “How is school, anyway? Do you ever hear from Rachel?”

  It’s like my heart squeezes in a vise. He knows not to talk about Rachel. Why all of a sudden is he bringing it up now? Does he know something?

  “School’s fine,” I say.

  I don’t mention Rachel. I refuse.

  Instead, I push myself from the sofa and start to head to my room. I’ll just watch something upstairs.

  Right as I pass the phone in the kitchen, it begins to ring.

  “Could you get that?” Dad asks. “Probably just a telemarketer.”

  I don’t know why we still have the landline. No one but telemarketers ever call it—I mean, come on, doesn’t everyone have cell phones? I grumble and grab the phone.

  “Hello?” I grunt, ready to slam the receiver back down.

  The sound of static greets me.

  No, not static—

  it sounds like waves.

  I freeze instantly.

  It’s definitely the sound of water.

  Sloshing,

  churning,

  hissing water.

  And over it … under it … through it … I hear her breathing.

  “He-hello?” I ask again, quieter this time.

  Even though I know my dad is in the other room, I feel entirely alone.

  Lost at sea.

  Staring down a monster.

  “You’ve been a bad girl, Samantha,” the voice on the other end says. It sounds like a girl’s voice. Almost like Rachel’s … but not.

  This is raspier.

  Angrier.

  Lower.

  When the voice speaks again, it almost sounds like there’s more than one person talking through the phone.

  “Bad girls always get what’s coming to them.”

  Click.

  The line goes dead.

  “Who was that, pumpkin?” Dad calls from the living room.

  His words don’t register. Not at first. I stand there with the receiver to my ear, listening to the growling static on the other end and trying to figure out if I heard what I thought I heard.

  It had to be Rachel.

  Rachel, threatening me.

  She was pretending at school when she acted like she didn’t know what happened yesterday.

  No—she remembers the lake. She remembers me pushing her in.

  Now she’s playing with me.

  I slam down the phone and rush up to my room. It’s only when I reach the top of the stairs that I realize I never answered my dad’s question.

  I close my door and press my back against it, breathing hard. Even though my bedroom is on the second floor, I fully expect to see Rachel floating outside my window, smiling maniacally, her wet hand pressed to the window. But there’s nothing outside, and that almost feels worse.

  She’s waiting to make her move.

  I just have no idea what she’s waiting for.

  Maybe I should have unplugged the phone in case she calls back. The last thing I need is for her to talk to either one of my parents. Or worse—my sister.

  Jessica would go to the cops immediately, I just know it.

  For a long time I stand there, slowing down my breathing, listening for the phone to ring. But all I hear is Jessica gaming away and my mom listening to music and the faint chatter of the news downstairs. No phone calls.

  Maybe Rachel’s given up for the night.

  Maybe it wasn’t Rachel at all, but someone else, someone trying to scare me.

  Neither option makes much sense.

  If it was Rachel, why not just confront me directly?

  And who else but Rachel would know?

  Something glints out of the corner of my eye, and I look over to my closet.

  I see water

  pooling

  from the door.

  It spreads across my carpet, staining the tan a dark beige.

  As if it’s alive.

  As if it’s coming toward me.

  My heart hammers so loud it sounds like the water has a pulse, but that can’t be possible, can it?

  I can’t look away.

  For a moment, I consider running out the door and down the stairs and outside and not stopping. Ever. Not until I’m five towns away and this is all behind me.

  Except I know that running won’t work.

  In my bones, I know Rachel will find me.

  I remember her sketchbook, hidden under all my clothes. I jolt toward the closet and yank open the door, my feet squishing in the wet carpet. I toss aside my dirty clothes as I search for the book.

  Every

  single

  article

  of clothing

  is soaked.

  The clothes plop wetly behind me, making a further mess, but I don’t care. My hands finally close around the sketchbook.

  It’s dry.

  What?

  I glance behind me.

  The puddle is gone.

  My clothes are all dry.

  The carpet is dry.

  I press my hand against it to make sure.

  What in the world is going on?

  I sink to the floor and, with shaking fingers, open the sketchbook.

  It’s filled with poems. Poems and sketches of girls that look an awful lot like Rachel, only in the sketches she has angel wings and her hair falls in her eyes, manga-style. I remember sitting next to her while she was drawing these, trying out art styles, trying to improve. She was always a much better artist than I was, even though she never thought she was good enough.

  I flip the page, and there’s a sketch of two girls holding hands, walking away. One has angel wings. And one has a cat tail. Even though the girls are facing away, I know it’s supposed to be the two of us. Whenever we would pass notes to each other, we would sign them with little doodles like this. My alter ego was a cat girl, and hers was an angel. The poem on this page, written between the two girls, right above their clasped hands, makes the breath stop in my lungs:

  For a long time I just stare at the page, until my eyes start to water and I have to wipe away my tears, even though I tell myself I’m not crying, my eyes just hurt from looking so long.

  It’s then I see the date at the top.

  She wrote this around the time we had our fight.

  Around the time everything changed.

  A full year ago …

  I flip the page. And continue flipping. My eyes skim the poems, but it’s easy to see the shift.

  In the later pictures, there is no longer a cat girl. No longer me. Or, if the cat girl is there, she’s on the opposite side of the page, and the angel girl is watching her with tears in her eyes.

  As I go, the sad poems tur
n more to hurt. The images are darker, filled with lightning and fire, the angel girl’s wings now shaded black, or turned to bat wings. The poems are all about being picked on, about how terrible life is now that we’re no longer friends.

  The poems make me feel terrible. I mean, she made me feel terrible because of what she did, but reading it on the page is much worse than imagining it.

  I pause on one page.

  It’s a picture of the lake.

  Exactly like yesterday—Rachel sits at the end of the dock, her black angel wings folded against her back, sketching. Something seems off, but my heart hammers so fast and my curiosity gets the better of me, and I check to make sure.

  Yes. This is the last page. The pages behind it are blank.

  This is what she had been sketching yesterday.

  Before I came along.

  Before I—

  I flip it back, and the drawing is different.

  Impossible.

  Rachel no longer sits on the dock, but stands.

  I’m there on the dock in front of her, cat tail curled around my feet.

  “No way,” I gasp.

  I blink.

  And the image

  moves.

  I watch as the drawing of me steps forward. As I jerkily shove her.

  Once.

  A thought bubble appears above her head, asking, Why?

  I shove in response.

  The thought bubble changes. Please don’t.

  A third time. Help me!

  Then she falls into the lake.

  And as I watch,

  the

  lake

  changes.

  Clear waters turn gray.

  My drawn figure turns and walks away.

  And as I watch faces appear in the water.

  Hundreds of faces emerging,

  Hundreds of hands reaching

  grabbing

  dragging

  Rachel

  down.

  Until I blink again, and the page is once more serene—a clear lake, tall trees, an empty dock.

  And two words, scribbled in another thought bubble, scratched into the page as if by claws:

  The last thing I want to do is be near water, but an hour or so before bedtime Mom yells out that I need to take a shower.