The Glare

by Margot Harrison

  He didn’t remember the text till he was home again, sitting at the computer, taking hits and staring at an inbox full of old messages from his dead friend.

  His vision blurring with tears, he clicked randomly on a window he hadn’t bothered to close. Next thing he knew, he was dodging and weaving through the game forest, shooting Randoms with Glare-bolts.

  He got a bunch more messages while he was playing, probably about Rory, but he ignored them. The game was a good distraction, but now it’s over. Like everyone else, he has not survived level 13. He is doomed.

  So what? Everyone dies in the end.

  Rory told him not to post the link, but maybe he will, just for fun. Just to see what happens. Wondering if there even is a level 14, he leans back in his chair, gazing at a crack in the plaster ceiling. His phone buzzes.

  He doesn’t need to look; it’ll be the skull. Ha-ha. Terrifying.

  He closes his eyes. What kind of crazy sick fuck would kill Rory? And that poor weird new girl, having to find him. Seeing all that blood.

  The phone buzzes a second time. This time he looks, and what he sees makes him sit upright with a jolt.

  The first text is the stupid skull, yeah. But the second text says, Ur pathetic.

  There’s an image attached—a screenshot of the chat he had with Emily back when he sent her the Glare. Hey, Rory gave me this, thought you might get a kick out of it. There’s a meme that says it can literally kill you, haha. No one ever gets to level 14.

  His eyes sting at the sight of his own words, and his gut twists. Obviously the game didn’t make her jump off the cliff, but still, what was he thinking? How could he send a friend something like that and think it was funny?

  And who’s sending him the screenshot, calling him pathetic? Emily’s in a psych ward now. Did she show someone their chat? How many people know what a callous ass he is? He reaches for the phone again, then glances up as he hears something rustle above him, like a mouse or bird trapped in the vents.

  The crack in the plaster widens. Dust rains gently on his head. The hell?

  Down the hall, multiple voices sing a single high-pitched note—keening, just like in the game.

  Shit. This is weed, not ’shrooms. Maybe his brain is serving up hallucinations so he doesn’t have to think about Rory anymore. Thanks, brain. He watches with mild interest as a bluish-white finger pokes its way through the now-inch-wide crack above his head.

  Time to go downstairs for a snack. He’s just upset, that’s all. Riddled with grief and survivor’s guilt. Not right in his head.

  Sure enough, when he returns, the crack is back to its normal size. The finger is gone.

  Morning light is a cool green haze through the cottonwoods. I lurk behind a row of arborvitae until Mireya’s mom comes down the front steps of the duplex, then intercept her at the door of her Chevy Tahoe. “Hey, Ms. Rios! Is Mireya coming to school?”

  Anil hasn’t messaged me back, and I need to make sure he’s not playing. I must not be hiding my nerves well, or my sleeplessness, because Mireya’s mom nearly drops her key fob. “Hedda! No, she’s not feeling well. She has a cold, and she’s upset about Rory, so I told her to take today off.”

  “My phone’s broken.” Too late, I realize how pathetic I sound.

  I ended up turning my phone completely off, and even that way, I didn’t sleep well. I kept sitting bolt upright, thinking I’d heard the vibration.

  “I don’t think she’s awake yet—she took some NyQuil. Want me to ask her to e-mail you when I check on her?”

  “That would be great.” Ellis and I will drive out to Bolinas today after school, and someone should know where we’re going. Maybe I can even persuade Mireya to come along.

  I want to find the black tower, too, to see it for myself, but that’s not what matters now. The server could be there. Take out the server.

  I’m heading back to Ellis’s house, hoping to catch a ride with him, when the Tesla pulls up beside me. Erika sticks her head out the driver’s window, hair in a messy knot, her expression grimmer than I’ve ever seen it before. “Where are you going? You just disappeared!”

  “I was going to school with Mireya, but she’s sick.” Clint’s playing his game in the back, and I slide in next to him. Ever since that awful night in his room, I haven’t known how to look at him, though if he’s noticed the rush surgery I did on his panda, he hasn’t said so. “Will you take me?”

  “Of course! I said I’d drive you.” Erika’s voice shakes as she pulls out. “You were out late last night, and you didn’t come to breakfast. After yesterday, I need to know where you are.”

  “I was just in the backyard. I’m fine!”

  Clint looks up as my voice rises in volume. Though his expression doesn’t change, I can tell the argument bothers him.

  Not him, I’ll never hurt him. Just thinking about it is like turning over an innocent-looking desert rock and finding a welter of slithering, seething things. I want to be the one who protects and reassures him—his big sister.

  I lower my voice. “I just wanted to check in with Mireya about something. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  Erika sighs. “Good. I’m picking you up at the end of the day.”

  I sit in silence while she drops off Clint at his school, then say, “Some friends and I were talking about going to the beach this afternoon.” Maybe I can prevent a second fight after school.

  “The beach, really? I was hoping to get your dad to come home for dinner. You two should talk after everything that’s—”

  “We’re having a bonfire for Rory, and I don’t need to talk to Dad.” My voice pitches upward again, blood rushing to my temples. It doesn’t feel right lying to her, but I wish she’d stop trying to pretend Dad is one of those dads in books who sit down and have serious little talks that make you feel older and wiser. When Dad and I talk, it always seems to end with him telling me a long story about himself. “He’s not going to make me feel better about what happened yesterday. He’s always away, and I get that he’s had a lot of problems in his own life, but he doesn’t notice things. He’s almost as bad as Mom, and she’s in deep denial about the person she used to be.”

  Just thinking about returning to the desert, to the prison of ignorance Mom built for me, makes me shudder with rage. Stealing the Glare was my fault, but Dad should never have let Mom take me away, and Mom should have warned me. Wasn’t that her job? She mentored Caroline; she knew what really happened better than anyone.

  “You,” I say, “are the only adult who’s really listened to me since I got here. So please listen now. I need to go with my friends tonight.”

  “Hedda.” Erika lets out a long breath. “We’ll discuss that after school. But you and Mike need to talk, too. I’m glad you trust me, but I can’t always be the go-between.”

  “Fine.” I try to focus on the sunlight and the alleys rioting with bougainvillea. “I’ll talk with him.”

  But not until after we’ve been to Bolinas. If I tell Dad everything now, he’ll cock his head to one side and decide I’m just as delusional as Mom, only he won’t even tell me, just start speaking in a new, velvet-edged voice, the way you talk to small children and crazy people.

  I need proof. I need Caroline.

  Is that Anil over by the vending machines, behind the big boy with the dreadlocks?

  He’s headed for the recycling station, or maybe toward the exit. This is the first I’ve seen of him all day, and I leave my seat and sprint across the cafeteria, determined not to let him escape.

  I weave sideways to dodge a group of athletes and crash into someone smaller on the other side, sending us both sprawling to the hard tiles. “What?” she grunts.

  It’s Cheyenne, with her silky hair and eyeliner that makes her look like a cheetah. She brushes herself off, scowling at me. “What’s your problem?”

  What is my problem? The adrenaline’s bleeding away, leaving me cold all over. My left hip aches, and from my new vantage, I can see the boy at
the recycling station isn’t Anil after all.

  I remember standing in the desert and reaching out my imaginary antennae and finding nothing. Having friends feels like the biggest gift I’ve ever received, and the heaviest responsibility. But are these my friends? If even Mireya won’t listen to me, why should they?

  I follow Cheyenne back to her table. She carries a cup of green tea like she’s serving the queen of England, her head high and her bangs sharp as sword grass.

  “I need to find Anil,” I tell her, my eyes sweeping up and down the table full of Mireya’s friends. “I thought he had lunch this period.”

  “I don’t know. He’s probably home because of Rory.” Cheyenne sits down with a hard grate of her chair. “I kind of thought you would be, too, after what happened.”

  Could she have sent me the text asking if I did it? Girls’ nervous laughter sounds in the background, crackly as tinsel, then goes silent. I meet Lily Chen’s eyes, and she drops them immediately. It could have been her, too. Could have been any of them.

  “None of you know where Anil is?”

  Some shake their heads. Most don’t look at me at all. Only Cheyenne stares me in the eyes, her own blue and frigid. “Shall I give him a message from you?”

  “I already messaged him!” There’s nothing more I can do here, but more words leap from my mouth: “Listen, when you visit Emily, don’t bring your phone. Keep phones away from her!”

  Cheyenne’s lips seem about to release words, then clamp again.

  “Whether it’s real or not, it can hurt you. It can make you hurt other people, or yourself. You need to…”

  Ignore it? When I think of the Random sitting on Clint’s chest, the glowing arm wrapped around his neck, I fall backward into a narrow cavity in my mind that smells of rotting leaves. Falling and falling, never hitting bottom.

  It’s a relief to come back to the fluorescent-lit cafeteria—though, if you could flay someone with a glance, Cheyenne would be doing it to me now.

  “I don’t know what really happened between you and Rory,” she says, flinching a little on his name, “but I wish you would just stay the fuck away from all of us. Everything was fine until you came.”

  Fifth period’s over, and a happy hum of voices carries me down the hall. People who didn’t know Rory are singing, laughing, reviewing weekend plans. Every now and then a stranger gives me a rapid sidelong look, and I wonder if they know I found Rory, if they think I could have hurt him, if they sent the text. But they always glance away again.

  I’m almost to the library when I spot Anil walking toward me, tugging off his headphones. Finally! I step into his path, half expecting him to dodge me, but he stops like it’s the most natural thing in the world.

  He wears a bright red-and-black-checked shirt, like a lumberjack only more stylish, and he looks a little sad and distant, but not unfriendly, as he asks, “How’re you holding up?”

  I should be asking you that. “Okay.” Then I blurt out, “I’ve been looking for you all day.”

  “Yeah? I cut some classes and tried to go see Emily earlier, but they wouldn’t let me in. Relatives only. I’m kind of in maintenance mode right now.”

  “I’m sorry to bug you.” I clasp my hands, hard. “And I know this is going to sound weird. But… you did stop playing the Glare, right?”

  I’m expecting a reaction like Mireya’s, or even Cheyenne’s. But Anil only twirls the headphones around a finger, his eyes going hollow. “Oh. Yeah. About that.”

  A stale cavity grows in my stomach. “Did you get to level thirteen?”

  “Last night. Kinda just happened.”

  My heart sinks, and I know it shows on my face, but he’s so weirdly casual that I can’t tell whether he understands why. “You got the skull? Anil, have you seen anything yet?”

  Anil pulls a notebook from his pack, followed by a small, sharp-edged steel ruler with a pocket clip at one end. He shoots me a grin, but his dark eyes are damp, his long lashes glistening. “What should I see? Ghosts coming to take me to the underworld?”

  Behind us, a phone buzzes. We both go still at the same instant, Anil’s hand freezing in midair.

  The smile melts off his face, leaving blankness—and then a look of intense concentration. His eyes seem to be tracking the progress of something behind me. “Emily?” he says.

  Before I can turn and look, motion flickers above my head.

  Keening.

  One of the corkboard ceiling tiles has come loose, leaving a dark crack. Something glimmers up there—and my nerves go taut, each breath an ocean in my ears.

  My phone is off. This shouldn’t be happening. Clelia said—

  She said I should stay away from all phones.

  A blue-white arm unfurls itself and creeps along the ceiling. Its skin is depthless, luminous.

  “Shit. Shit!” Anil staggers away from me, his backpack and notebook thudding to the floor. His arms twist and contort, his hands grasping at nothing.

  “It’s not on you!” Then I realize he’s looking in the wrong direction—not up, but out into the crowd.

  Into the crowd, where no one has a face.

  They’re still laughing and talking and high-fiving. But their heads are white, filmy, featureless, as if they’ve been swaddled in glowing spider silk. Smooth indentations where eyes should be. Struggling holes for mouths.

  They’re all Randoms, and the keening is getting louder, soaring above their talking, and there’s no air to breathe. I need my gun to shoot them, I need the black tower. I need to get past them any way I can, or else they’ll—

  A scream rises in my throat, but I choke it down and blink hard instead—darkness, light. Remembering the mistake I made in Clint’s bedroom, I force myself to visualize the dirt where things grow. I feel it between my fingers—my connection to the earth. When I was six, I tried to make that connection with a knife, but I don’t need to bleed to know I’m real.

  On my second blink, everyone is back to normal. Eyes, noses, mouths. Opaque, non-glowing skin.

  Except Anil.

  He’s his human self, but his eyes are white and wild, his mouth drawn tight with terror. As he turns to bolt, I know he’s still seeing what I was an instant ago.

  A whole school of Randoms.

  “Wait!” I shout.

  People scatter as Anil barrels down the hall, his limbs flailing. He runs from an echoing hallway full of eyeless monsters that will strangle him with their long arms, tear him limb from limb. And there are no safe trees, no black tower for him to run to.

  When we die in the game, it comes to us.

  I dash after him, my vision narrowing to his red-and-black shirt, heart pounding and adrenaline singing. Not you, too. Cheyenne’s right, this is all my fault—

  The crowd closes in Anil’s wake, and I lose sight of him behind the enormous shoulders of a boy in a varsity jacket. “Anil! Please!”

  The press of people drowns my yell; I’m trapped in a dream where the air thickens to molasses. Down the hallway, someone yelps. Voices rise in annoyance, others shrilling with alarm.

  “What’s he on?”

  “Is there a gun?”

  Then everyone’s pressing and surging, curiosity turning to panic, people craning their necks to see what or whom Anil is running from. I’m one of the few people looking toward him, not after him, and I’m just in time to see his mad sprint for the glass door at the corridor’s far end.

  A burly man in a navy-blue suit—a teacher?—darts out of nowhere and seizes Anil by his collar, stopping him short. Anil kicks fiercely, but the teacher is stronger and trawls him in. Anil whirls to face him and slams something into his eye.

  It glints. The sharp-edged silver ruler, buried almost to the clip end. Anil pulls it out again.

  Behind me, somebody screams.

  Fifty feet away, it looks like a choreographed dance, a stage illusion. But the teacher staggers backward, hands to his face. I recoil, too, my head light with the sensation of falling, nausea
blurring my vision.

  Light pours through the glass door. Anil is gone.

  The girl who screamed earlier has started ranting in a raw-edged voice: something about Did you see it? Or maybe it’s a different girl. Half the people in the corridor are yelling hysterically, and the other half are telling them to shut up; this isn’t a drill. All down the corridor, people pour into open classrooms, making beelines for the nearest door. The only ones not moving are the ones watching as the teacher sinks to his knees.

  There’s no blood on his cheek. Shouldn’t there be blood?

  My paralysis leaves me, and I hurry toward the door where Anil disappeared, clammy sweat beading on my palms and neck, my breath coming fast and shallow. I’m the only one who knows what Anil saw, why he hurt that man, and I need to stop him, need to make him understand (not real, not real).

  When I’m fifteen feet away, someone bursts from the door of the nearest classroom, fighting the tide. Copper hair—Ellis.

  He’s headed outdoors, too, taking the hallway in a few bounding strides. I’m about to call out his name when fingers close on my arm, and I turn to find a teacher with dangly earrings and a grim expression.

  When I turn back, Ellis is already dodging the knot of people gathered around the fallen teacher. Arms reach out to stop him, but he yanks free, snaps the glass door, and disappears.

  Is he going to try to calm Anil? What if Anil uses the ruler again?

  I drag the teacher toward the door, trying to see outside, but she pulls me just as hard. “Take cover,” she says, bundling me toward an open classroom. “This isn’t a drill.”

  My phone is silent. My phone is off. It doesn’t matter.

  Maybe Anil’s phone was off, too.

  A dozen people huddle with me behind a teacher’s desk, barely moving. Two boys whisper back and forth until everyone else shushes them. Someone breathes with a sharp little whimper on each exhale.

  I can’t stop myself from running scenarios in my head. Ellis grabbing Anil’s arm, yanking him around, and Anil driving the steel ruler into his eye. Or his chest. Ellis collapsing to his knees, blood trickling down his cheek. Anil running straight into a line of cops, falling in a volley of bullets and a spray of blood.