by Jen Brooks
Tess peels back the comforter from sleeping Kylie, and I’m struck with immense guilt for never telling the sleeping Kylie her life is about to change. I don’t know if it’s better to be the Kylie I told or the Kylie I left ignorant, but events are pushing along now, and there’s no time to back up and give the other Kylie a choice.
Sleeping Kylie is still dressed except for her bare feet. She wears a Pennington track long-sleeved shirt and pale blue jeans. Awake Kylie’s wearing dark blue jeans and a thin yellow sweater. Tess says, “For the sake of the boy over there who’s going to watch this, it would be better if you lie down next to her.”
For my sake? Kylie hesitates at the directions but doesn’t look over at me. Tess gives her a nudge, and Kylie gets into the bed by first sitting and then pulling up her feet and lying back. Before her body reaches any kind of settled position, she brushes against real Kylie, touching her for the first time, and my world turns inside out.
I don’t know what I thought it would be like. Maybe two halves of a deck of cards getting shuffled together. Maybe a magical blue light glowing around them, full of sparkles and peace as they blink from two people one second into one person the next. I am not prepared when blood and skin and hair and clothes and arms and ears run together like the smudge of a wet finger painting. Legs kick out and melt, puddle-like, into each other. Wet slapping sounds. Covers rustling sounds. Another sound like something thick clearing from a clogged drain. A membrane forms around the melted flesh and clothing, keeping the folded colors inside to overlap one another. It’s the worst horror picture I’ve ever seen. My throat contracts like it’s ready to vomit. Tess takes my hand. Her strange burning pierces my palm and shoots up my arm. My hand turns to liquid, like my former girlfriend and wished-for girlfriend in front of me. When I look down, I expect to see my hand and Tess’s merged, but I see two regular hands.
The pool of Kylies stretches and pulls, and a set of fingers slides down on the inside of the membrane binding it all, five white fingertips in a dark stew. A face pushes up toward the ceiling, squashed by the pressure of the barrier into something vague and featureless. Tess shoots more heat up my arm, spreads warmth through my shoulder into my chest, through my bowels, into my legs. Her compelled reassurance mixes with my natural fear and overwhelms me, distances my horror over the gore in the bed, blurs my line of sight, dulls the pain of regretting the choice to do this to Kylie, the pain of hating myself, the world-maker who destroys.
I can’t concentrate anymore on what’s happening to Kylie. Tess’s comfort thing fills me so completely that all I can think of is Tess, the shape of Tess, the smell of Tess, the sound of her sarcastic voice an inch from my ear. Her mouth really is an inch from my ear, whispering, “It’s almost over, Jonathan.” Her one hand is firm in mine, but I feel like a hundred of her hands stroke me all over, a hundred of her voices whisper, “It’s gonna be okay,” while dampening the snap and slosh of the merging on the bed.
A voice buried under all of this cries out for me to pull my hand from Tess’s. I should witness every last detail of Kylie’s trauma without a filter. I’m losing her. With this transformation she’ll be changed forever. The shape on the bed becomes recognizably human, wired with red arteries and blue veins bright against sallow flesh, twice the size of Kylie. My little buried voice cries out once more, and I find the strength to yank my hand to try to free it. Tess yanks back and then lets go, only to grab me from behind and wrap her arms around my abdomen, shooting her warmth down, then up, and I’m utterly lost. I shudder in her arms while Kylie transforms before me, and I have only a vague notion of something seeping through Kylie’s forming skin, soaking in a red pool through the bedsheets into the mattress, dripping thickly onto the floor.
I lose the strength in my legs and lean against Tess, dissolving into something not quite me. I try to focus on Kylie, but there’s nothing to see. Just a bed with a girl. Tess sets me gently down on the floor. She goes to Kylie, and the absence of her touch clears my head. Anger replaces the warmth.
“You shouldn’t have done that to me,” I say.
She doesn’t respond, just pulls on Kylie’s shoulder to roll her over. Kylie is asleep.
“Not asleep,” Tess says. “Unconscious. Merging takes a little while to recover from, but she looks okay.”
I move to the bed, careful not to come close enough to accidentally touch Tess. Kylie does look remarkably okay. Her face is a warm, healthy pink with no puff around her eyes. She’s wearing girlfriend Kylie’s yellow sweater, but the Pennington track logo from the real Kylie’s shirt is emblazoned on the front. The color of her jeans is somewhere between the pale blue and dark blue of both Kylies’ originals. She’s wearing the socks and running shoes girlfriend Kylie arrived in, but her hair is pulled up in the knot real Kylie wore to bed.
Tess standing so close makes me feel icky, and I want her to leave. Her part in all this is done. “How long until she wakes up?”
Tess shrugs. “She’ll be fine when her alarm goes off.” I glance at the clock. Barely twenty minutes have passed since we showed up. “But between now and then you should close the other world.”
I forgot about that. “I will,” I say.
“Want me to help?”
“No. Just go.”
“Are you . . . mad at me, Big Brother?”
“You shouldn’t have done that to me.”
“What, shielded you from the worst of watching a merging happen to someone you love? Made it so you wouldn’t think gruesome thoughts every time you looked at Kylie from now on?”
“I deserved to suffer through it.”
“You don’t deserve any more suffering, Jonathan. You’ve had enough.”
“That’s not for you to decide.”
“I know what I did was the best way to help you.”
“I don’t appreciate your brand of help. I’ve come to associate you with unnatural things.”
A flash of hurt changes her face. I’ve stepped over the line. Didn’t she say earlier I’m the first human being she’s felt concerned for since she became a world-maker? Shouldn’t I be more careful before I blast that carefully placed concern to smithereens? But can she really blame me for lashing out at this moment? The night’s events have me so worked up, I don’t care. Kylie and Kylie are gone, and it’s all I can do to keep from tearing my hair out wondering what will wake up in that new body.
Tess doesn’t stay hurt more than a millisecond before something darker replaces it. She smiles—a great, big, feral smile that exposes teeth like a wolf’s. Her irises swell and turn black like her outfit. I shrink away from her as she takes her revenge for my selfishness. “I assure you, Jonathan Aubrey, I am the most natural thing in creation.” She leans over Kylie once more, bends so close to her face that I’m afraid she’ll bite her, or lick her with a big wolf tongue. “She’s perfect, Jonathan. You’re a very lucky little man.” Her words are sharp like her teeth. Her tone entirely satisfied with what’s been done tonight.
“I think you should go now.”
“What? No ‘thank you’?”
“Gratitude might come later. Right now all I know is that you haven’t been honest with me.”
“I have never told you a single lie.”
“But you haven’t told me the whole truth. Like what happened between the crash and the day you popped back into my life?”
Her lips close and her eyes narrow. “I’ll tell you what. You enjoy your brand-new Kylie tonight. Tomorrow I’ll give you proof of my honesty.”
I do not like the sound of that, but I want her to go away. “Just give me some space.”
Is this how Kylie felt when she asked me for space? Because I really think another second together with Tess will send me over the edge.
Tess flashes her canines at me once more, then disappears.
In her absence the room’s air, which felt stiflingly heavy,
becomes easier to breathe. The heat that has built up in my skin dissipates, and I kneel beside Kylie’s bed. Her chest expands and contracts with gentle sleep. It’s done, and she will never again be in Kylie-Simms-is-my-girlfriend. It’s time to close the world that gave me so much and trap myself here to see what becomes of me.
I rise and turn toward Kylie’s window, concentrating on the same window in the other world that I was invited to climb through on nights when I needed comfort most. Closing that world tonight is the same as sealing that window forever, and as I pry open Kylie-Simms-is-my-girlfriend one last time, I fill myself with destructive imagery—fire, flood, horrified faces floating in an airplane cabin. Kylie-Simms-is-my-girlfriend yawns open on the other side of a bridge connecting the spheres in the darkness. I almost change my mind and cross over to say good-bye. I never had the chance to say good-bye to my world of childhood in the crash. There is no cemetery for dead worlds. No place to someday find the nerve to visit and mourn. About to die is the place where I’ve shared a hundred hot chocolates at Lacy Pastry, where I run seven miles with the guys and place third in track meets, where I walk Kylie to class and get credit for the work I do in those classes, where my teachers approve of me and my coach respects me, where people who pass me in the hall smile and say hello. My foot is raised, but before I can run to my haven from all I’ve never been able to bear in real life, the world closes and is gone.
Kylie-Simms-is-my-girlfriend is gone. GONE. The ache of total loss is too familiar. I hold it close as penance for the suffering I’ve put Kylie through. My girlfriend has no world, and she’s subject now to the same rules I am. And the same freedom to choose anyone at all to spend her life with.
Kylie lies on the near side of the bed, but there is enough room against the wall for me to climb in beside her. I won’t, though. I don’t know what kind of Kylie will wake up and see me there in the morning. But I can’t leave. I have to make sure she’s all right when she wakes.
I pull her desk chair up beside the bed and sit down. After a while I’m too tired to sit any longer and need to rest my head, so I get down on the rug and use a stuffed animal from the shelf for a pillow. I fall asleep to the rhythm of Kylie breathing. And the nightmare of waking up without her.
CHAPTER 23
I WAKE LONG BEFORE KYLIE does. not that my rest was very deep, with all the buzzing in my head and the hardness of the floor. Kylie first rolled over at midnight, and I got up to check on her. Then the night became a series of Kylie tossings and Jonathan checkings until suddenly it’s almost six o’clock and I’m wondering if I should let the alarm wake her or do it myself. I can’t let her sleep past six, because her mom will surely come in, wondering why she isn’t up and getting ready for school.
After hours of pseudo-tending to her, I’m almost sure she’s physically okay. Her sleep even seems peaceful. My dreams, on the other hand, have traveled through a wasteland of grief—sepia-toned worlds strewn with the dead, Jonathans calling out in crowds that won’t hear, twisted-faced Kylies pointing accusing fingers: How could you do this to me?
I didn’t mean to do it. I mixed everything up and couldn’t sort it out again. I’ll make it up to you with all my soul if you’ll let me.
The alarm clock reads 5:59, and I decide it’s best to let it beep as usual. It will keep her parents at bay if they’re accustomed to hearing it get turned off. It will also let Kylie wake up according to her normal routine.
I return to the chair. I want to talk to her but don’t want to be the first thing she sees. Seconds pass. More seconds. More seconds. This is the longest minute ever recorded in history.
Finally the alarm goes off. Kylie stirs immediately, lifts her head to see the time, and reaches over to hit the off button. I’m glad to see she doesn’t hit snooze. Girlfriend Kylie never hit snooze.
She lies still. Strangely still. I can’t see if her eyes are open or closed, since I’ve positioned my chair against the wall so I’ll be out of her view. I’m hoping I’ve successfully employed Tess’s invisibility technique as a backup defense. I’ve never before watched Kylie awaken when she didn’t know I was beside her, so I don’t know if this pause is normal. Does she usually take time before rolling out of bed? Is she remembering last night? Is something wrong with her after all?
She shifts position and rolls her upper body so she can see over the bed to the floor where I slept. Her eyes sweep the room, including the chair where I sit. “Jonathan, are you still here?” she whispers.
She sounds normal. She looks okay. No strange tics. No anxiety in her voice. As far as I can tell, she’s just had a normal night’s sleep like any other.
I still don’t know how close she wants me to be, but I let myself become visible and lean forward in the chair. She rolls over onto her back and stretches.
“Good morning,” I say.
She yawns and turns her head to me. “You didn’t have to sleep on the floor, but I was too tired to say so last night.”
“You saw me . . . after?”
I expect her to say After what? but she just takes a deep breath, a healthy breath, and says, “I knew you stayed the whole night.”
I try to separate traces of girlfriend Kylie from traces of the real one. The shape of her mouth, the movement of her hands, the shine of her hair. All of her looks like the real Kylie. All of her looks like my girlfriend.
As her eyes rake me in return, my body tenses. While I have the same old eyes to gaze upon the new her, she has brand-new eyes to size up the old me. There is no parameter anymore to make her love me, so if one Kylie no longer has to love me and the other never did . . . this could be it for us. Maybe her feelings are confused, since there are two sets of them filed away in there. I wish I knew how much the real Kylie liked me before I did this to her last night.
She slides her legs over the side of the bed and sits up. “I’m going to take a shower. Will you stay here until I get back?”
The total lack of drama in her demeanor throws me. This should be a momentous moment. I nod.
“I’ll be quick.” She throws back her covers and looks to the back of her door. My girlfriend Kylie keeps her robe there, but nothing hangs from the hook in this world. A fret crosses her face, and she goes over to the closet, finds a robe, grabs some clothes and heads for the shower, closing the door firmly behind her.
I don’t know what this means.
While I wait, I inspect the bed. I have a vague recollection, through layers of Tess’s interference, of it being soaked in blood and flesh. I touch the sheets, poke under the comforter, get down on hands and knees to peer underneath. Distorted memories accompany me on the search, but I don’t find any evidence of trauma. Despite my anger with Tess, I’m glad I can’t picture the scene in exact detail. I really don’t want to have to think of it every time I look at Kylie from now on.
Kylie is quick returning from the shower. She’s wearing a blue tank top and the jeans she slept in. “You need to swing by your house on the way?”
“On the way where?”
“To school, silly.”
Silly? “If there were ever an excuse for a sick day, this would be it.”
“I don’t feel sick.” She grabs a brush and drags it through her wet hair.
I stop short before saying something else. Maybe she doesn’t remember what happened last night. Does she think she’s still real Kylie? She couldn’t, or she would be freaked out that I broke into her room. Does she think she’s girlfriend Kylie and we’re still in Kylie-Simms-is-my-girlfriend?
She blow-dries her hair halfway and pulls it into a ponytail, then throws on her Pennington track zip-up hoodie. She stuffs some workout clothes into her gym bag and draws it and a backpack over one shoulder. “I’m starving. Mind if we drive-through for hot chocolate and a bagel too?”
Although I’m relieved, I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop. Since I’m still not sure what she
remembers, I choose not to rock her boat at this moment. “Sure,” I say. “I’ll meet you in the car.”
“Okay.” She shuts her window behind me, and I sneak over to the Kyliemobile using my invisibility trick. Once inside I let myself become visible again but duck down so her parents won’t spot me. Kylie comes out a few seconds later and drives me to Uncle Joey’s house. I run in and do a superquick shower and change—five minutes, tops—and we get drive-through breakfast on the way to school.
Pennington High’s driveway is packed with the usual line of cars and buses, and we have plenty of time to stuff down our bagels while waiting in traffic. When we make it into the parking lot, Kylie picks a spot on the far side. She cuts the ignition and doesn’t get out.
The mood in the car changes. Maybe all the casual lightness of getting ready and scuttling off to school was just make-believe. Perhaps Kylie has been stalling while she decides what to do with me. I put my hot chocolate into the cup holder and brace myself. Kylie takes a breath big enough to oxygenate a whale and then exhales slowly. “Jonathan,” she says.
We’ve parked with our backs to the comings and goings of Pennington commuters, so I have nothing to stare at but trees and the bright sky between the branches. Those red buds have swelled into something that will be leaves very shortly.
She shifts in the driver’s seat so her whole body faces me. “Jonathan.”
I close my eyes. I just can’t bear it.
She shifts again, and the next thing I know, her hand is touching my cheek. Her fingertip tenderly runs the length of my scar. I press my lips together to bite back an emotion, glad that my eyes are closed, because I don’t want her to see the desperation in them. A tender touch can’t flow from hate, can it? I didn’t realize I needed her to touch me more than I’ve ever needed anything else in my life. She doesn’t hate me, and that might be enough.