The Glare

by Margot Harrison

  “That’s what Mom always says, that screens threw me off-kilter.” I think of the half-formed memories I’ve had in this house. “I got scared or bullied or something, and I acted out. Is that what you’re afraid of?”

  Dad peers at the board, not meeting my eyes. “You were six then.”

  “I know!” I push my laggard rook off his home square, struggling to control my voice, to scrub the anger out of it. “When you gave me the phone, I thought you trusted me. I hoped you did.”

  “This doesn’t have anything to do with trust.” His own voice has gone very quiet.

  “What does it have to do with, then? I know you let Mom take me away; I know you trusted her to do the best thing for me.” And maybe you shouldn’t have. I let the words hang in the air before I go on. “But you can’t just let Mom decide who I am for all time. She acts like there’s this… darkness inside me that I need to control. Like I’m broken and can’t be fixed. Do you really believe that?”

  My hands shake; I can’t look at him. Please say you don’t.

  Dad’s fingers hover over a pawn. When he speaks again, it’s in a rhythmic voice I recognize as his storytelling mode. “When I was a boy, my parents used to send me every summer to stay with Grandpa Frank up in Shasta County. Grandpa lived in a rustic log cabin in the woods, not far from a military base. Some nights he’d sit on the porch with a shotgun between his knees, swigging whiskey, and when I asked why, he said, ‘I can hear them out there, rustling. Coming closer.’”

  Hairs prickle on the back of my neck. He’s not answering my question; maybe he’s even trying to change the subject, but I can’t help asking, “Who were ‘they’?”

  “That’s a question Grandpa Frank chose not to answer, except by introducing me to his stack of books about aliens, conspiracies, Area 51, and secret government mind control. I think he thought they were hosting aliens on that military base, and a few had escaped. Once when he was deep into a bottle, he told me ‘they’ could take many forms, and they wanted to drain our blood until only dry husks were left.”

  I use my bishop to block his pawn’s path to my queen, starting to get an inkling of how this story might be relevant. “Did you believe Grandpa Frank?”

  “When I was too young to know better.” Dad nudges his queen deep into my side of the board. “He was a dark person, my granddad, and when we were alone out there, his darkness infected me.”

  Alone out there—like Mom and me. What is he saying? If Mom is the one with the problems, if her problems “infected” me, then why isn’t he taking my side?

  “Even after I stopped believing, I still had nightmares about ‘them,’” Dad says, his voice calm as if he doesn’t sense the turmoil inside me. “Elaborate ones, all through high school and college. Until, when you were about five, one night the dreams just stopped.”

  “Why?” I try to figure out where his queen’s headed, block her with a pawn.

  “Maybe I finally realized I was responsible for a child now, so I needed to give up childhood fears. Maybe I’d learned to wall off my dark places. For whatever reason, I haven’t had a nightmare since. Anyway, I think that’s check and mate.”

  Sure enough, his queen has cleared a path for his bishop. Maybe the whole purpose of the spooky story was to distract me.

  But I’m playing a different game now.

  “Dad,” I say as he sets the chess pieces back in their box, “I need to find out what a college-prep curriculum is like, because I am going to college. Right?”

  He’s backlit now, his expression unreadable. “I hope so, but that’s up to you—”

  “Up to me, right. Not up to Mom. She doesn’t want me to leave her, Dad, ever.”

  I remember my fitful attempts at rebellion on the ranch: looking at Shannon’s phone, stealing the truck keys and trying to teach myself to drive. But mostly I’ve been good, too good.

  Dad just keeps fussily arranging the pieces, setting each upright, and I say, “Mom’s not a bad person. She wants to protect me, but she can’t always do that, and I wish you weren’t scared to break her rules. I wish you’d give me a chance with school like you did with the phone.”

  Dad turns to face me, his spine straightening, and again I feel that desperate yearning to impress him, to make his face light up.

  “I am not scared, Hedda,” he says in an almost cold voice. “Not of your mother, and not of you. I’m trying to do what’s best for you. To keep the peace.”

  Peace. It’s what he needs to do his work. What Erika, Clint, and I are supposed to provide by staying out of his way.

  Not this time, though. Check and mate.

  “If you’re not afraid of Mom,” I say, “then you’ll tell her I need to try out school. Maybe even stay here for the year, if I like it and Erika doesn’t mind. Unless you really think I’m in danger from computer screens because of stuff that happened back when I was still scared of monsters under the bed.”

  I let him absorb the words, calling his bluff. After a long, long moment, Dad says, “Okay.”

  “Okay? I can go?” My whole body tingles, and I have a sudden impulse to throw myself into his arms, but he’s staring at a spot on the deck to my right.

  “I’ll sign your forms, yes.” At last a small smile curves his lips, and he says, “I’ve never in my life seen a kid so eager to go to school.”

  This freaking level 13.

  Erika took Clint off to some school orientation program, and I’ve been playing all day and into the night. I breezed through levels 10 and 11, only dying about six times each. Level 12 was tough—about ten deaths. Now, though, the Randoms won’t stop coming.

  They hide in the trees, but not the safe ones. There, on the knotty spruce, I spot a glowing blue rune like a stick-figure drawing of a horse. There, on the towering ponderosa pine, a greenish squiggle. If I hug either of those trunks, I’ll be safe, but only long enough to catch my breath. Sometimes the Randoms flicker away. Sometimes they wait for me.

  They can grab you from above, from below, by your neck, by your hair. And when several come at you at once, quick as lightning, you can’t fight. You can’t run. The movement keys go useless, dead, as the screen turns to a negative image and the keening rises to a roar, your whole world coming apart. When I’m in the zone, a death is just an annoyance. But later, when I’m half-asleep, I’ll imagine a Random wrapping a ropy arm around my windpipe or forcing a cold, fleshless fist down my throat.

  Speaking of which—oh damn. I’m dead again. That makes twelve times.

  I should stop.

  I text Mireya, but she doesn’t answer, and for a moment, sitting at my desk before a frozen screen, I’m inside that echoing emptiness, that certainty that I’ll never connect to anyone. I was used to it in the desert, but now I want to push it away, to stop feeling it on me like icy fingers, to stop hearing the breathy whisper in my head: You’re alone, alone, alone.

  One touch of the keyboard, and I’ll be connected again. One more try at level 13.

  It’s after midnight. I should just go to bed. Or finish the letter to Mom that I started drafting hours ago, trying to erase the lie I told her last time we talked:

  Dear Mom,

  You’ve always encouraged me to overcome challenges. To be adventurous. To be brave. Together we took on the desert and even the snakes, and we made the ranch work, and I’m proud of that.

  But you’ve also taught me to limit myself. Not to trust myself. To be afraid.

  I know now what the Glare really is. It’s a game. I’m guessing I found it and played it when I was a kid, and I’m sure it scared me back then, but

  But what? If I’m not scared, why’d I stop just now?

  I’ll probably never send this letter anyway, but it feels good to get the words out. My fingers still itch to work the WASD keys, to click the mouse. I feel so much clumsier in the real world, trying to please two parents who couldn’t be further apart, one of whom wants to control me while the other barely notices I’m there.

&nb
sp; C’mon, one more, just one more before bed.

  I touch the keyboard and bring the laptop to life. Something about all this feels familiar, weirdly right, maybe because of, oh, the hundreds of other times I’ve restarted.

  If I can just beat this level, from now on I’ll spend my nights reading weighty Russian novels and drafting college application essays.

  Then the forest zings to life, and everything else disappears.

  Making it to the tower takes a good five minutes of heavy fire this time, with several breaks behind safe trees. The fear of running out of power before I get there makes me pause the game to wipe sweat off my brow. My posture’s giving me cramps. Once I’m refueled, I make a mad dash at the three waiting Randoms, holding down the mouse for continuous fire.

  They don’t bleed when they die, just crumple into white rags and fly away. Sometimes they blink out altogether. There they go, fluttering through the blue sky like filthy butterflies, lost behind the dark cone of a fir, and wait, right there, what’s—

  Shit. SHIT.

  I’m dead. I knew to do a three-sixty perimeter check, and I didn’t, and now I’m pissed at myself. RIP, Heady. But I feel like I’m starting to see patterns in this level, anticipating the Randoms’ movements, and it’s time to try again. One more freaking try, just one—

  My head snaps back to the screen.

  The forest isn’t back. The game isn’t restarting. Just white words on a black screen: YOU HAVE DIED THIRTEEN TIMES ON LEVEL 13. THIS IS THE END FOR YOU. THANKS FOR PLAYING.

  Seriously? Can it do that to me? I try starting again. Quitting the browser, even restarting the computer. But returning to my saved game triggers the exact same message every time, and I refuse to start from level 1 again.

  I message Mireya: IT WON’T LET ME PLAY ANYMORE. Then erase it and send the same message without the caps lock.

  No answer—maybe she’s asleep. She’ll know how to dig myself out of this dead end, unless this level 13 thing is a cosmic sign that I need to stop playing. Maybe I couldn’t win, so I needed to lose, which sounds annoyingly like something Mom would say.

  Maybe now I can try all the other games Mireya says are so much better, more sophisticated. Except I don’t want to. I want to kill Randoms. I want my forest. I want level 14.

  The dark screen distorts my face, jutting cheekbones framing sunken eyes. Or is that just how I look after hours in the Glare? My face ghostly, as if my flesh is dissolving, my eyes stretched wide with the hunger for more.

  I pull the paper toward me and finish my letter:

  but a lot of things scared me when I was six. I must have been pretty freaked out by what happened to Caroline, and that made me vulnerable, and I acted out and started blaming everything on “the Glare.” I wish you’d understood that, but it’s okay that you don’t.

  I’m not scared anymore. Please don’t be scared for me.

  Love, Hedda

  Something sighs faintly in the bowels of the house. The desk lamp flickers.

  Wind has risen outside, and a branch scrapes the window, reminding me of the strange noise I heard on my first morning here. My screen tells me it’s nearly one. The laptop was sleeping a second ago; my hand must have brushed the keyboard and woken it.

  I pull out an envelope and address it.

  When I reread the letter, it sounds childish. What if Mom jumps on a plane and comes straight here? I imagine her sitting on the edge of my bed in the dark: You can still leave, Hedda. Come back to the ranch and learn to control yourself.

  But I can’t keep lying to her. I need to make a break before this school thing distracts me, before I lose my nerve. Once we’ve talked through it, maybe I can get her and Dad’s permission to stay all semester. Or to enroll in Arizona, so she won’t have to lose me.

  The level 13 frustration has sharpened all my senses to a point, filling me with the need to do something daring and decisive. If I wait for tomorrow, I’ll probably end up stuffing the letter away in a drawer.

  I stick a stamp on the envelope, slip my phone in my hoodie—in case Mireya texts back—and creep downstairs barefoot, already familiar enough with the house to find my way in the dark. The fancy fridge rattles, making ice. The porch light casts a coppery wedge through the window in the front door.

  Outside, streetlights throw ghostly orange pools on the pavement. My bare feet are almost silent. At the corner, the mailbox beckons with the finality of its tight slot, its steel clang.

  When Mom and I talk again, I need to say no and no and no to her. And I will, even if that means excavating dark parts of my past and exposing her half-truths to the glare of day. Even if it means saying a final goodbye.

  I open the mailbox. Slide the letter in. Close it.

  As I return under the rustling cottonwoods, the moon gives a sheen to ragged fringes of cloud and Japanese maples. My phone vibrates against my hip like a promise.

  Before I can pull it out, a wind rises. In the neighbors’ yard, the low branches of a juniper bush jerk back and forth, not with the wind but against it. Maybe their cat’s fighting with a skunk or possum.

  Something catches my eye off to the right, on a privacy fence—a flash of white. I walk faster, gripping my phone like an anchor as it buzzes a second time.

  My feet hammer up the porch stairs. Inside, I lock the door and press my back to it, feeling ridiculous. I check the phone.

  An image fills the screen—a little girl’s face de-faced with bulging, red-veined eyes and horns jutting from her forehead. This must be what I was looking for earlier—Mireya and Lily’s monster version of me. But who has it, and why would they send it to me now—with a message? Ur pathetic, it says.

  Cold hands close around my throat. Mireya wouldn’t send that. I rock back and forth, staring at the image, swimming in a familiar sea of shame. But who would?

  I sit there for what feels like forever, my eyes glued to the phone, till I realize that’s not all. I’m looking at the second text of two, both from the same restricted number. The first text is just an image.

  At first it looks like a random pattern of light and dark, sun and clouds. Then I hold the phone farther away from me, and it becomes a skull.

  Somewhere, in a dark room, a girl has just lost a game.

  Why won’t it let her play anymore? She slaps the edge of the desk in frustration, then sees it’s nearly four in the morning. When she’s running on empty, any stupid distraction can derail her for hours.

  She sets her alarm, turns out the light, and pulls the covers over her head.

  Something hisses, close to her ear, and she sits straight up. Oh, it’s her phone buzzing.

  There’s no message, only an image that’s somehow familiar and mysterious at once, until she realizes what it is—a skull. Sent from a restricted number.

  As she puts the phone down, her temples pounding—did he send that? what’s wrong with him?—it buzzes again.

  What she sees on the screen this time makes her burn with rage. It’s that photo, the one she sent him only after he begged, the one he’s not supposed to show anyone. Why was she so stupid?

  With the photo comes a message: Ur pathetic.

  It’s an unmistakable threat, but he wouldn’t post that pic. He wouldn’t! She fires a text back: You are SICK, Liam, STOP.

  She still remembers how she felt when she sent him that photo—mischievous and light-headed and in love. Burning with shame, she hurls the phone away and rolls over.

  The phone doesn’t buzz again. When she’s half-asleep, something brushes her ear, gentle like her mother’s hand, only colder. A faint radiance, like phosphorescence, bleeds through her eyelids.

  Very, very far away, she hears a familiar keening.

  Mireya pulls up to our house in a rusted Corolla with the windows all the way down. She opens the passenger door and leans out, wearing gigantic sunglasses and a polka-dotted halter top. “Ready for a rager? I like your hair.”

  “Thanks.” Erika showed me how to pull it back with a
sparkly barrette.

  Mireya’s car is reassuringly cruddy like the trucks we had at the ranch, littered with power cords and Trader Joe’s snack bags. I was excited to tell her about Dad’s big yes to school, was waiting to do it in person, but now I don’t know what to say. I haven’t looked at those texts since last night, even to delete them. I don’t want to believe they’re real, or that she could have anything to do with them.

  She fiddles with her phone in its dashboard cradle as we approach the freeway entrance ramp. “Sorry I didn’t answer your text last night. I got into a marathon texting session with Anthony”—her boyfriend—“and then I was wiped. What do you mean, the game won’t let you play anymore?”

  My frustration at not being able to play the Glare seems so trivial now, so childish. I rush through an explanation of how the game cut me off.

  “Huh,” Mireya says, switching lanes to pass an eighteen-wheeler, her hair streaming like black ribbons. “Remember how I said the Glare feels like a rough draft? Maybe this copy doesn’t go past level thirteen.”

  “Maybe.” And then I jump to the part that matters, the part I can’t hold in any longer. “Something happened later, after I sent you that text. I got two texts from a restricted number, and—”

  “What?” She shoots a worried glance at me. “You look really scared.”

  I’d rather keep it secret, but I have to show her. I have to hope she’ll laugh and offer me an explanation that makes sense in the light of day. I wake my phone and pull up the latest texts.

  There’s Ur pathetic. There’s the strange image that looks like a skull from the right distance. But the image of child me with horns is gone.

  I scroll furiously, desperately, trying to make it reappear. I quit and relaunch. Could I have deleted the pic by accident, or accidentally on purpose, my finger twitching without my mind’s consent? But no: That picture and Ur pathetic were the same message. They were.

  I spent at least five minutes last night staring at the mocking image of me, immobilized by shame. How can it suddenly be gone? Could I have hallucinated it?