by Ryan Schow
“Does she know you…do this?”
“It’s a misunderstanding, Cameron,” he insisted. But there was no misunderstanding. He’d been arrested. That’s what the article had said. He was arrested, his label dropped him and his fan base was shrinking the same way it did for the Dixie Chicks when they came out and said President Bush was an embarrassment to Texas and basically a goddamn half-wit. Not that the two bore much resemblance…
“Sure, dad,” she chided. “Because they always get these things wrong.”
“I need you to come out here with me and your mother to do a photo shoot. It’s basically what my publicist calls a uniting shot. I have to be seen as a family man, Cameron, and a Christian. That’s the only way I’ll survive this.”
“I’m not exactly photo ready,” she said, itching the scabbed over spots on her breasts and belly.
“I don’t care. We’ll get you fixed up.”
“No.”
“Jesus,” he hissed. “You’re as stubborn as your mother!”
“Maybe we’re all just sick of you being a homo and not copping to it. Bruce Jenner, he got girl tits and maybe lopped off his pecker and he has his own show on TV. He’s still making money and he changed his entire gender. Which makes him a lesbian, I guess, since he says he isn’t into dudes. And you’re worried about…what, being gay? Or bisexual?”
“I’m not gay.”
“Sure, dad. Whatever. It’s totally the same thing.”
“No it’s not!”
“Well it is to me!” she said, and hung up. He called several more times, but she didn’t pick up because people were knocking on her door, laughing and calling her a “faggot’s daughter” while saying her dad was seen “trolling the dorms for teenage cock.” Cameron crawled in bed, curled into a ball and realized there was no way out of this.
“You deserve everything you’re getting,” the voice in her head said.
“I know,” her heart replied.
3
An hour later, she dared to look on Facebook, then SocioSphere and what she saw broke her. The phone continued to ring. People continued to knock on her door, squealing their verbal obscenities through it.
It was all too much.
Cameron crawled out of bed, went pee, then stood and stared at nothing. Raven basically said when it came to offing herself she was a chicken. She wasn’t anymore.
“I’m not.”
Walking over to the vanity, she opened the top drawer, clutched a silver pair of scissors in hands cold and bloodless, hands as cold as the dead. She met her eyes in the mirror, held them longer than she wanted, then let her gaze fall to her neck, to the throbbing line that ran like a blood highway to her brain.
“Bye,” she said, and then she stabbed that very spot: her carotid artery.
The pain was immediate, a sharpness bigger and more permanent than anything she had ever felt before. What have I done? she wondered. Standing on unsteady legs, she looked up in the mirror at the blood water-falling down her neck and onto her white robe. There was so much blood! Her hand found the counter, grabbed it, felt the rest of her body going as cold as her fingers had been. The scissors fell from her hand, but she barely heard them hit the tiled floor.
The strength drained from her, fast, miraculously; this wasn’t some cry for help, and it wasn’t a diet suicide attempt. This was real. Her legs gave out. She fell to the floor, toppled over sideways and bled out inside a minute. The last thing she saw was her contorted reflection in the mirrored handle of the silver scissors she used to finally solve all these unsolvable problems of hers.
Blood Red Entrails
1
Okay, so I have some decisions to make. Don’t worry though, it will only effect the next eight hundred years. Yes, I’m being a freaking drama queen, and yes, I feel whiney like Bella in Twilight’s New Moon when she lamented her life and the losses she sustained for hundreds of pages. I wish I had an Edward to miss. If my decisions centered around a guy, that wouldn’t be so bad. The world is full of plenty of hot guys. But it’s not that. I become a terrorist, a murderer, a veritable nomad.
I’m shattered inside.
So I have to decide what to do with my life.
Emotionally, I’m seriously having a hard time thinking about what I have and will become. The trip through future me’s past (my future) delivered to me a grim view of the path ahead should I decide to continue in future Raven’s footsteps. Which I won’t.
Days have passed since I killed myself, since I burned my body and set my soul free. All I seem to do anymore is cry. And drink. I started drinking wine, but ended up with Bourbon, and all I have to show for it is explosive diarrhea and a headache the size of Alaska.
I’ve been in my room for days now, not answering the two knocks at the door, not eating, not even bothering to answer my phone when both my mother and father call. The only call I answer is Sebastian’s call.
He says, “What are you doing?” and I say, “I killed myself.”
“Are you drunk?” he asks. “Because you sound drunk.”
I was. “It’s not what you think.”
“Is this a cry for help?”
“No, dumbass, this isn’t a cry for help, and it’s not because of you because you’re just a boy in a town I fled looking for something I might never find. You’re a tragedy for sure, but not my tragedy.”
“Wow, okay…where are you?”
“In my dorm room.”
“I didn’t know you were in college.”
“I’m not. I’m in boarding school.”
There’s a lot of silence to which I start laughing. He thinks I’m in high school, that he might have slept with a minor, and he did. Not that I care. People twice my age aren’t as mature as me.
“H-how old are you?”
“I’m whatever age I want, Sebastian. My ID says I’m legal, but really, you stuck your dick in a minor.”
And then I laugh and laugh and laugh until one of us hangs up the phone. When I wake, it’s in a pile of vomit. Sometimes, being yourself, trapped in the shell of your body, it’s worse than prison. It’s worse than a life sentence where all you have is guilt, your inability to undo your past transgressions and your absolute powerlessness to make right everything you’ve ever done wrong.
I think of lying in the fire of the incinerator and taking my own head. Just letting it fall onto the grate and wither amongst the flames until my life—like her life—is reduced to ash. Can I do this? Can I end myself so as not to become what I’ve become?
She said I need to kill us both. That’s what the future me said. That’s why she traveled back for me. To tell me this. To implore this of me. Can I do such a thing to my parents, with whom I’ve come to make peace? Just end it to save us all? Can I do this to Brayden, whom I’ve come to love and rebuke in identical measure? I don’t know.
What I do know is I can’t be the person I will become. That’s the decision I made. The one I’ll have to make every day for the rest of my life. Crawling out of bed, famished, cranky, stinking of booze even to myself, I shower long and hard, using up every last drop of hot water. Then I brush my hair, do my makeup, rinse my mouth with Listerine twice and head to the cafeteria where dinner is in full swing.
My mind spreads its tentacles, finds the non-triplets with Damien and Caden; they’re all eating dinner, talking, carrying on as if I never existed. As if tragedy hadn’t befallen me, taken them from me.
Friends, I muse, how they come and go. How one day they are your everything, and the next day someone else has replaced you. My tentacles then find Brayden…with Julie, and I sigh. Oh how I wish I could stop his future with her. Spare them both the misery.
Retracting my invisible tentacles, I stroll through campus, my heart clamoring around in fits and starts. It’s clunking around like an old motor—a spastic motor—one that no longer works right because of all the abuse it has meted out and taken.
When I reach the cafeteria, when I think about what I’m about to
do, my stomach drops with nervousness. It sits smooshed like a slug of worried meat plopped down at the bottom of my stomach.
I walk inside, see them, and they see me.
Their senses spring to life, although none of them show it. The boys, they see me and they think, wow, she’s hot, but dark and attractive in a way only bad boys crave. They wonder if my genitals are pierced, how many tattoos I have, how many boys I’ve slept with…how many men. This wasn’t what I was hoping to inspire when I took on this look, but whatevs. According to future me’s memories, how I look worked for centuries, so I can’t be all that upset with my choices.
I make a b-line straight for the non-triplets table, then say, “Georgia, Tempest, Cicely, can I have a word with you outside? It’s about Abby.”
They all look at each other, then nod and follow me.
“Is she okay?” Damien asks.
“Yes,” I say.
“Girls?”
They follow me. I detach my mind from theirs because for some of them, the thoughts roaring around in their brains, they’re too much for me to handle. I used to care what they thought about me, if they liked me or not, but I’m not Savannah anymore. Not Abby. I love them all, equally but differently, which is why I have to have this talk with them.
When we are outside, I turn and face them and, without pause or hesitation, I say, “The Abby you know, the one who tried to hang herself, she is not the Abby that started out as Savannah Van Duyn. She was a purposeful imposter, a stand-in. Georgia was there when the real Abby was shot and killed. That Abby, your Abby, she is dead. She’s been dead for a long time.”
The girls, one by one, they ask a few questions, get some cold answers, and then they start to cry. Everyone but Georgia who knows the truth. “I almost died,” Georgia says looking deep inside me. No, I think. She refused to blink as she says, “Death isn’t always the end.”
She’s trying to tell me it’s okay to tell them the truth. But it isn’t. The less people know about me, the less they deal with me, the better. I hurt everyone I love. People die. Even Georgia, whom I adore, who was my savior once upon a time, she shouldn’t know the things she knows, that I’m Abby, Savannah.
“Abby was a wonderful girl,” I say, “a friend of mine as well, but it was her time. She will be missed, but not that much because you guys didn’t really know her.”
“We did, too,” Tempest says, sniffling. “And you’re a cold bitch for saying otherwise.”
“Who are you anyway?” Cicely asks.
“A friend.”
“You should tell them the truth,” Georgia says, looking at me with eyes so dark I’m certain my skin will start to sizzle at any minute. “They deserve to know. Especially after Maggie.”
The two girls look at Georgia, the same as I’m looking at Georgia. Like, WTF??? Why is she doing this? Making me tell them truths I don’t want to tell them? Because of Maggie? Is this because having your friends die off is tragic? They’ll deal. They’ll get over it and move on.
I know. I’ve seen it.
“The truth is, she was shot and Dr. Gerhard tried to save her,” I explain. “He couldn’t though, so he had her shipped off to a mind sciences doctor in New Mexico who couldn’t revive her either.”
Georgia burns me with her eyes. I feel my insides heating up. So I heat hers up instead, my eyes turning dark, but not black. Tempest and Cicely back away from me. They see the big showdown going on between me and Georgia and Cicely says, “What is this? What’s going on between you two?”
In my mind, telepathically pushing the words into Georgia’s brain, I say, “I’ve seen my future and it’s the most awful thing I’ve ever seen. I can’t be her. I need to let you and the others go.”
“No,” Georgia says out loud. Tempest and Cicely are practically squirming through the entire exchange, and it’s only just now dawning on Georgia that I communicated telepathically with her. If she knew I could do this, she didn’t let on.
“I have to,” I whisper. She then surprises me by breaking the big fire showdown and grabbing me in a hug. She holds me when I don’t want to be held and she hangs on when I want her to let go.
“Georgia?” Tempest says.
“We’re your friends,” Georgia whispers in my ear. “We love you.”
“I can’t,” I say, and things inside me are cracking.
“Yes.”
When she lets go, she turns to Cicely and Tempest and says, “Guys, this is Raven. Who was once Abby, and once upon a time, our friend Savannah Van Duyn.”
2
There is no way I can stop the tears. My eyes flood with relief. At first, I was like, are you kidding me? Georgia telling them this, it felt like a stab of betrayal. But then my bewildered friends come to me, one by one, hugging me, teary-eyed and asking me a million questions I have only long answers to.
The four of us end up back in my dorm room with me telling them the entire story of who I am, what I am, and how I have come to be what I am now and hundreds of years into the future. When they learn I killed Tavares, they don’t know how to take me. Not even Georgia.
“That’s why I wanted distance, from you,” I say. “For your safety. Whatever programs are in my head, whatever ticking time bomb lays in wait in the folds of my brain, it’s unpredictable. I don’t want to be having lunch with you guys one day and then just snap and kill all of you.”
Why am I telling them this? I wonder. Looking at the consternation in their eyes is proof that I shouldn’t be revealing these things. They can’t understand. It’s written all over their faces, that this is impossible for them to wrap their mortal brains around such outrageous revelations.
I’m wondering, why did I tell them anything? I could have kept the truth to myself. Given them the bare bones overview of how I survived death. But I didn’t. I don’t.
What made me finally break and spill out my most sacred secrets is that after I lied and told them Abby was dead and gone, I suffered the brunt force of their grief—all at once—like a debilitating weight upon my own chest, a torrent of emotion ripping through my psyche.
This is how I feel about Maggie. That she’s really, truly gone. Maggie’s memory still sits like a salted wound inside me. Like something small and rotten, something so deeply disturbing, something so tragic, I would never wish it on anyone, let alone my best friends.
So rather than leave them with all that sorrow, which should have been right, it felt easier to bend to Georgia’s will and cop to everything. So I spilled my guts. I spared them not one gruesome detail. And now that everything is finally in the open, I do what I did to Tavares: I erase their memories of me.
All of them.
These memories of me, I erase them from every corner of their minds like I never existed. I do that and send them on their way, and then I cry so hard and for so long I sob myself to sleep.
In this slumber, however, a different form of grief passes through me. It’s like a ghost, or some nefarious wraith on a mission to steal the souls of the unwanted. At first, I’m not sure what it wants. In my dream, though, when I look up, I see the most unusual looking boy, a boy in his late teens, or early twenties, with a twist of dark hair, eyes the color of the ocean under a dark gray sky, and a sneer on his lips that makes me think he’s up to nothing but mischief.
A bad feeling worms its way inside me.
He walks toward me. I’m not afraid, even though I should be. This has me walking toward him. The feelings inside me compound. Nausea spills through me like a swill of poison, a ravenous force so potent and unrelenting I know in the instant that what I’m feeling is him. My psychic shields spring up, exorcising his reach and power from my body. This erases the smile from his nearly inhuman looking face. We square off and he says, “I’ve been looking for you.”
“You and every other scumbag in town,” I say.
“For a girl about to die,” he says, that Cheshire grin returning, “you’ve got some awfully big balls.”
“Says the dick-eater
with the stupid hair and raccoon eyes,” I reply.
And with that, my eyes pop and sizzle, then crack wide open and gush hot with blood. The pain is instantaneous, as is the blindness that suddenly, fiercely becomes my entire waking world. Jolting up in bed, I’m sweating, screaming, pawing at my eyes. They’re fine. A bit blurry, but fine.
I lay back down, blinking and wiping gobs of sleep away. Slowly the room comes into focus. Getting up, I head into the bathroom, and because the dream felt that real, I check myself in the mirror. My breath catches. The world turns on its axis. For the first time in a long time, the fear that hit me in the past, it takes on a new form. I’m paralyzed. Mortified. Unable to even breathe. My reflection…oh, God…OMFG! Stained in two thick, mucus lines, having pooled and drained sideways off my face and from my eyes, are two very wide trails of caked, smeared blood.
“No.”
But my psyche, she says yes. Like she knows something I don’t. In the back of my mind, I’m sure I know what’s going on. Whoever is hunting me from the future, they’re here. Like Alice said in the desert. She warned me. He’s here.
Washing the entrails of blood from my face, my head a cacophony of questions and wonder, I can’t stop the gunfire hammering of my heart. Who is this boy? How did he get in my head and attack me from afar? Something even more daunting startles me and weakens me, the dread piling on more than ever: how close is he, and does he know exactly where I’m at?
I have done a lot of things in these last years: defeated monsters of science, buried an unkillable Nazi war criminal alive, stopped a pedophile from his own reign of terror, thwarted and killed maniacal doctors and a crooked Senator, massacred an entire regimen of guards at an underground Air Force base occupied in part by something inhuman, something reptilian. Will this boy be any different?
He feels different. No, he is different. It takes me a moment, but then I put my finger on it—the reason I am teeming with such trepidation. He doesn’t feel…stoppable.