The Glare

by Margot Harrison

  But we haven’t heard any shooting. Why didn’t I warn Ellis? Why didn’t I yell?

  People keep whispering about a gun, but there doesn’t need to be a gun. Phones pulse in backpacks like bombs ticking off seconds. On the way here, I almost tossed my own in the trash, but the momentum of the crowd carried me on.

  Somehow that sound set us both off. If this is another level of the game, I don’t understand the rules.

  Please let Ellis know what to do. Please let him not have risked his life for nothing.

  Leaves shiver on the windowpane; the teacher didn’t get the blind all the way closed. I try not to check the ceiling for dark cracks, the corners for flickers.

  I keep seeing the blankness on Anil’s face when he heard that buzz, like a phone’s screen before a new app comes up. Everything wiped clean—did I look that way, too?

  My left leg is practically numb, when a skinny, intent-faced boy with a phone whispers to his neighbor, “Gomez’s outside. Says they got a body bag.”

  For who? Tears prickle in my sinuses, but the awareness of the boy’s phone keeps me centered. It’s pulsing. Ticking. Any moment it could buzz, and I could hear.

  People are stirring and fidgeting. The news their phones are feeding them seems to have made fears of a shooter recede, while mine keep mounting.

  “Westover’s still out there trying to be a big hero,” mutters the skinny boy.

  “Mr. Nedrick’s the hero,” a girl says.

  “Nedrick’s not dead. They took him to the hospital.” The boy’s eyes flick to me, then away. “Gomez says it’s the kid who stabbed Nedrick, the one in the plaid shirt. The bag’s for him.”

  I feel my hands come together on my chest. Guilty relief that it’s not Ellis, followed by a sick, sinking sensation. But he was just here. Somewhere close by, a tiny black hole has opened, sucking us toward it.

  “Anil? He’s dead?” And then, though it shouldn’t matter, “But how?

  “Drugs, probably,” another boy grunts.

  The skinny boy ignores him. “Embolism or something? They say he got outside and just keeled over like he couldn’t run anymore.”

  Somewhere, in a room where sunlight glows through closed petal-pink curtains, a girl loses a game that she was going to win. Was supposed to win.

  She’s been preparing for level 13 for days, analyzing the game mechanics, looking for what less patient players miss. She knows that if you touch your Glare-gun to the message carved on the big oak, you receive a 30 percent strength boost for twenty seconds. She knows all the safe trees, and the patterns of the Randoms—how they don’t generally attack and give you a kill shot until they’ve buzzed you four or five times with their ambiguous slithers and flickers.

  But sometimes they break pattern and attack with no warning. That’s what happened this time.

  The screen informs her she is dead for the last time. She takes a screenshot.

  And she waits.

  And waits. She goes downstairs to get a snack, taking her phone.

  She needs to show Hedda that the Glare didn’t kill Rory. Some people need a reason for everything. They don’t want to believe that bad things just happen.

  Like her dad leaving a week after her grandma died. For months afterward, she saw everything through a haze of grief. The world felt like a giant game skewed against her, and she wondered what she’d done wrong. But gradually things returned to normal. She and her mom ordered pizza and laughed at dumb movies. Life went on.

  Rory was a person—goofy laugh, nervous hands, mercurial hair, beating heart. When she was twelve and her cat died, he put together a video called “Fluffer’s Greatest Hits” that made her laugh and cry. She doesn’t know what happened in that car at dawn, but Rory was not code, not rewritable. He was real.

  Her phone buzzes while she’s returning the juice to the fridge.

  So this is it. Moment of truth. She has to admit, she’s curious.

  As she picks up her phone, something moves on top of her mom’s china hutch, ten feet away—but no, it’s a shadow.

  First comes the skull text, then one that just says, Ur pathetic. No image.

  She goes upstairs, whistling, past the family photos in the hallway. She uses the bathroom, then examines herself in the vanity.

  Her breath dies in her throat. The phone slips from her grasp.

  Her heartbeat is loud and distant at the same time, like the pounding of a hammer next door. She can’t move, only stare at the face that used to be hers.

  It has no visible mouth, eyes, or nose, yet something bulges inside it—the outlines of a firm chin and stubborn forehead. Beneath the rubbery bluish-white coating that covers every inch of her, human lips open in a silent scream.

  Not her lips. This isn’t her face. It’s Hedda’s.

  Horns jut from the hairline now, growing inches before her eyes. The forehead swells like a balloon. It’s the monstrous image of Hedda that she and Lily posted long ago, only now it’s inside her, and she can’t get it out.

  She presses her fingertips to the hideous face, and they begin to tingle: cold, cold, cold. She bangs her forehead—its forehead—against the glass, once, twice, three times. Until she feels dizzy and sick. Until blood starts trickling into her—its—eyes.

  Her legs carry her back down the hallway, but her core has gone cold, too. The keening rises around her. The faces in all the photos are gone, replaced by featureless white heads.

  She did something wrong, something terrible, and now the Randoms are coming for her. There are no real people left in the world. They’re all Randoms, every one.

  “You knew,” Lily says, turning her car out of the school driveway. “How’d you know? Why were you looking for him?”

  “It’s hard to explain. Just something he said a few days ago.” I keep staring at my sneaker; the lace is untied, but somehow I can’t bend and tie it. One stray movement could be like hitting a domino and toppling the whole chain. “I just need to see Mireya.”

  Lily frowns, but maybe the world feels as fragile to her right now as it does to me, because she doesn’t press the point.

  We had to wait to leave till the PA system reassured us there was no active shooter on campus, only a “stabbing suspect” who had been apprehended. People around me sobbed, while rumors flew: Anil had an undiagnosed heart condition—no, an undiagnosed psychosis. He died from shock. He died from pure fright.

  Dead is dead.

  I looked everywhere for Ellis until I heard someone say he was in the office being grilled about his act of would-be heroism. Then I got away from school as quickly as I could, pausing only to turn on my phone and text Erika, I’m okay, catching a ride, be there soon, then turn it off. I begged a ride from Lily, who seemed too numb to say no.

  By the time we reach Mireya’s duplex, chalky clouds have covered the sky, and fog hangs low over the brown hills. “You okay?” Lily asks, pulling up. Without Cheyenne around, she seems almost friendly.

  “Yeah. Thank you. Do you want to come in?” Please say no.

  She shakes her head. “Better get home before my mom freaks out.”

  I wait for her to pull away, then hit the doorbell, my heart slamming my ribs. Does Mireya know yet? I need her now—her steadiness, her rational explanations. I need to tell her what I saw happen before she reads too many online rumors. She needs to know shutting down the server will stop this.

  But will it? Based on what I saw today, the signals that trigger us don’t have to be skulls anymore.

  Silence. I hit the doorbell again, then knock in case it’s broken. Mireya’s mom must be at work, but Mireya’s car is here. The curtains are drawn.

  I pull out my phone to text her—oh, right.

  Living without the Glare is slow and hard—I should know. But if other people’s alerts and ringtones can trigger us, then living in the Glare is impossible.

  Did Mom guess that? Or did she do the right thing accidentally?

  I go around back and toss a few pieces of de
corative gravel at Mireya’s window. A neighbor’s dog starts barking. Returning to the front, I trip on my shoelace, then bend and knot it tightly. Feet on the ground.

  On the front porch, I search for a spare key. It’s not under the mat, or in the planter with the geraniums, or in the mailbox, or on the sill of the little sunken window by the door.

  The window’s granite frame continues all the way around. To reach the top, I climb onto the porch railing and stand on tiptoe, holding the door frame for support.

  The key falls from the ledge with a glitter and a tinkle. One scramble in the grass later, I’m opening the door and stepping inside.

  The house is silent, sun seeping greenish through curtains and shades.

  “Mireya?”

  If she were here, she’d have answered the door. But some undefinable quality of the air, like water seething before it boils, makes me think I’m not alone.

  “Mireya? It’s Hedda. I’m coming up.” My heart begins to thud as I reach the stairs. “Mireya, did you hear about Anil?”

  No answer.

  When I reach the upstairs hall, the sizzle of my nerves makes it hard to listen for external sounds. Maybe her boyfriend picked her up and took her into the city. She’s not here, and I’m being an idiot, and I’ll return the key and go home.

  A Frida Kahlo print hangs on her closed door, along with a withered corsage tacked up in a loop of silky ribbon. My knock echoes everywhere, like rain pattering on the roof. It’s too late to turn back.

  I turn the knob and step inside onto something that splinters with a foreboding crunch.

  A tablet, tossed on the floor. The screen is cracked in a spiderweb pattern as if someone hit it with a hammer.

  Light bleeds blearily through the curtains, illuminating posters of all-girl rock bands and cartoon boys with enormous eyes. The bed is unmade, empty. And the desk—

  Bare. The giant monitor lies on the floor beside the keyboard—its screen shattered. On the daisy-printed bedspread, I find a small heap of glass and plastic that was probably once a phone.

  Behind me, something slides. Something crinkles.

  There’s nothing back there but a closet. My nerves go electric, blood rushing in my temples and roaring in my ears. I have to force myself to take small, jerky steps toward the half-open door, fighting for control, as if I’m a puppet with something larger than me holding the strings.

  The closet door is the kind that slides in a groove. I push.

  After Rory, after Anil, I know I can’t be prepared for what I’ll see. The door makes a grating sound.

  When I see her—way at the back, hugging her knees—I almost sob with relief. Her hair covers her face, and her shoulders shake, but she’s fine. Breathing. I extend an unsteady hand toward her. “Mireya?”

  Her hair parts, revealing dark blood caked on her forehead, trickles of it extending all the way to her chin.

  My hands go to my own face as if to hold it together. Again I sense something like a tiny, distant explosion. “What did you—”

  Her eyes pop open, white all around the iris, staring at me. Her lips pull back to bare her teeth. Her hand creeps along the closet floor, knuckles pale on the handle of a claw hammer.

  “Out.” Her voice is a growl, barely human.

  I inch backward, knowing somehow that she won’t hesitate to spring at me and use that hammer the way she did on the machines. “Whatever you saw, it’s gone now,” I whisper. “It’s not real.”

  “You’re not real.” The hand not clutching the hammer points at me, the index finger trembling so violently it blurs.

  “You’re not!” Her voice trails into an animal cry of pain. “You’re one of them. Get out! Get out! Get out!”

  She staggers to her feet and comes for me. I make a grab for the hammer, but she swings it into my hip.

  Pain shoots through me, sending acid into my throat, and I stumble backward as she dashes into the hall, slamming the door behind her.

  By the time I’ve reached the landing, limping, she’s down the stairs. The front door hangs open, revealing only pearly sunlight—she’s gone. I hear the chime of a car lock, then the thrum of a motor.

  She won’t stop until she’s as far from me as possible, hunkered down somewhere she feels safe. Somewhere with no phones, no devices, no Glare. No signals to warn or activate her. No one like me who’s walking around when they’re supposed to be dead—just like her.

  She died in the Glare, and now she understands what I did and how much is my fault. Maybe the Randoms who torment her look like me. Air lurches into my lungs as if I’ve been holding my breath all this time, and I slam the door and run out and down the sidewalk like I could catch her, crying her name, my heart beating a new pattern: stop this, stop it, make it stop.

  “Erika!” I burst into a house where everything is bizarrely the same—naked sunlight glazing the windows in back, cool green filtering through the ones in front.

  But the big TV is playing footage of my school surrounded by police cars, and Erika leaps up from the couch with a yelp. “I called you so many times. Is your phone off?”

  “You got my text, right? I’m fine.” I dump books out of my backpack, trying to decide what to bring. “I need to go out for a few hours to look for Mireya.” The lie comes effortlessly. “She was upset about Anil, and she took off—I couldn’t stop her. Ellis is going to drive.”

  That part isn’t a lie. Ellis has been watching for my return since he got home. I told him about Mireya, and we made our new plan in ten seconds flat, in the shrubbery.

  “Could you do me a huge favor?” I ask now. “Call Mireya’s mom and tell her? She… hurt herself. I’m kind of freaked out about her.” That part isn’t a lie, either.

  Erika already has her phone in her hand. “We’ll take you. I was so worried about you.”

  “No, it might take a while!” I’m already halfway up the stairs. Passing Clint’s door, I spy him reading an actual book. Good.

  If people keep sharing the Glare, how long will it take to filter down to the lower grades? The thought makes me go cold as I stuff a hoodie, my utility knife, and my useless phone in the pack, imagining the sheer futility of trying to persuade Clint not to play a game that everyone describes as grown-up and dangerous.

  I always wanted the forbidden, too.

  I pack the taped-together photo of the place with the tower. Eyeless Raggedy Ann sits with her head drooping, looking miserable. I think of Erika coming in and seeing her, and my hand shoots out and packs her, too. We need to stick together.

  Erika intercepts me in the downstairs hallway. “How long are you going to be gone? I keep calling your father, but he’s not picking up.”

  “As long as it takes to find her. Please don’t worry—you’ll call her mom, right?” I slide past her and open the door. “Ask her to turn off her phone around Mireya. I’ll explain later.”

  Behind me, she keeps begging for explanations, but by the time she reaches the top of the porch steps, I’ve taken them in two bounds and have hurled myself into the passenger seat of Ellis’s car.

  “Go,” I say.

  The sun’s still well above the horizon as we head for the coastal highway, the strip malls and condo developments giving way to fields and trees.

  “I can’t believe you did that,” I say. “Ran out after him. It was brave.”

  “It was pointless,” Ellis says. He hasn’t looked at me once since we left our street behind, just listened while I told him what I saw in Mireya’s house. “People started pouring into the classroom, saying Anil had stabbed a teacher in the eye, and I just—I thought I could help. It seemed so unreal.”

  It’s real. I watch the sun cut tangerine strips on the crowns of the oaks, feel the thrum of his Prius under me, don’t say anything.

  “Anil was my best friend after you left,” Ellis says after a moment. “Fourth, fifth, sixth grade, we rode our dirt bikes all over Gerstle Park. He could always make me laugh. Last time I really talked to him was a
t Mireya’s fourteenth birthday party, and I left early to go to a rager I thought would be more fun.”

  “Anil said you were reborn from the bottom of a bottle of Jack.”

  He stares straight ahead at the road. “He had a good way of putting things. I was sick of being the poor kid who was traumatized by his sister going batshit, so I became an asshole.”

  “You’re not an asshole. You ran after Anil when nobody else did.”

  “And I really helped.” His knuckles whiten on the wheel. “Sorry, Hedda. Here I am making this all about me again.”

  I remember the letter I wrote to Mom—a necessary letter, maybe, but also a desperate challenge to her. I remember forcing Dad to look at my scars. “I’ve done some of that, too. I should have warned Anil better, sooner.”

  “You did everything you could. I should’ve talked to Anil and Mireya, too, but that past shit got in the way.”

  A blinding blue haze peeks over the horizon—the ocean. He steers us toward it.

  “You’ll see Mireya again,” I say. “If you want to apologize to her for stuff that’s way in the past—well, she’ll probably tell you to get a grip, but then she’ll accept your apology.”

  He laughs half-heartedly. “Hope so.”

  She should be here with us. She would tell Ellis to stop “wallowing” and get with the program. She would tell me it doesn’t matter whose fault it is; the Glare is not going to take us down. For Anil, for Rory, for all those future people who might play it, we’ll stop this.

  But when I close my eyes, I see her hunched in the closet with the hammer, blood on her face.

  “I sure as hell hope so,” Ellis repeats. “I guess it’s just—well, when people die, they take a piece of you. When I got to Anil outside the school, he was curled up on the ground. All the tension was gone, like he was a bag of groceries someone dropped, and I knew he was dead before I saw his face. It was just so surreal—everybody running around inside, terrified of him, and there he was. I wanted him to jump up and attack me.”