A Semi-Definitive List of Worst Nightmares

by Krystal Sutherland

  “What if you’re not afraid of anything?”

  “You’re the one that said everyone’s afraid of something.”

  “Yeah, but what if your great fear is of, like, Halley’s Comet or something, and you spend your whole life avoiding all of this good stuff for no reason. Seems like a waste.”

  Esther had never thought of it like that before, and she had to agree, he had a point. Still, the risk was too great. “I can’t,” she said to him. “I just can’t.”

  Jonah didn’t cross 50. Lobsters off the list now that it had been conquered. Instead he tore it off and shoved the little bit of paper in his mouth and chewed it up and swallowed it. “You’ll be swayed. Once you see the footage, you’ll be so swayed.”

  Death didn’t come for them on the beach, or when they were riding Jonah’s moped home, or later, when they didn’t get food poisoning from the expired lobster sauce.

  How Esther imagined it in her head: Death was busy most of that day with a car bomb in Damascus and a particularly stubborn widow who refused to shuffle off her mortal coil. Dark robes fell like tar over a skeleton as he moved silently down the hallway of a palliative care ward of a hospital. Eight foot tall, scythe in one hand, crow atop his shoulder, his darkness swelled until it filled the hall from floor to ceiling, but the nurses and visitors walking past him noticed nothing.

  In her hospital bed, a white-haired woman, little more than animated dust now, woke with a start and stared wide-eyed at something she could feel more than she could see. She stretched and reached and grasped for the call button but it was no use. It was time. The Reaper was at the end of her bed, his cloak swirling around him like he was underwater even though there was no breeze. The woman raised her hand toward Death. She reached out to him, embracing him, ready for the pain to be—ah, no, wait, actually . . . she flipped him the bird.

  The Grim Reaper spent the night by the woman’s bedside, tapping his skeleton fingers on the metal railing of her bed, occasionally checking his watch, then tapping his fingers some more. The only reading material was a trashy magazine with the Kardashians on the cover. Death sighed and picked it up and started flipping through the pages.

  It was going to be a long night.

  • • •

  THE NEXT MORNING, Esther was pulled from sleep by the sound of someone knocking on the front door (the doorbell had been disabled many years ago, around the same time the WELCOME mat was removed)—a noise capable of sending a chill of terror down the spines of all the inhabitants of her home. All of the morning sounds that had permeated the atmosphere seconds ago—the birdsong, the sizzle of butter frying in a pan, Eugene humming—went silent, as though the house itself had stopped breathing. It was a defensive tactic, like an animal hunted in the forest would use. Remain still. Remain silent. Wait for the threat to pass. Such a strategy was normally employed by people trying to avoid getting sucked into conversations with religious door-knockers or political canvassers.

  Esther, too, had become part of this collective silence. She remained still in her bed, unbreathing, until the intruder’s footsteps went down the stairs and across the oak-strewn lawn. Then came the distant sound of a moped starting, muffled by trees and the glass of her bedroom window. The house woke up again. Eugene scuttled down the hall. Fred crowed. Rosemary turned the stove back on. Esther imagined her mother crawling out from where she liked to hide, squirrelled away in the crawl space under the sink that she’d cleared out after watching Panic Room for the first time.

  Someone opened the front door. This was followed by Eugene yelling: “Esther! Delivery!”

  Esther got out of bed and went to find her brother in the kitchen. In his hand was a box wrapped in newspaper. On it was a quote written in thick black marker:

  “Everything you want is on the other side of fear.”

  —Jack Canfield

  “It’s from Jonah,” she said. She went back to her room and grabbed her phone. She already suspected what she’d find inside the box.

  ESTHER:

  I’m not watching the video.

  JONAH:

  Why not?

  ESTHER:

  Because I shall not be swayed.

  JONAH:

  You’ll be swayed. Oh girl, you’ll be so swayed.

  Esther didn’t watch the video. She would not be swayed.

  8

  THE LOCKER BANDIT

  THAT MORNING, Esther brewed her coffee with Red Bull instead of water. “I wish to enter the fourth dimension,” she explained to Eugene. He screwed up his face as she sipped her chemical concoction while sitting cross-legged on the kitchen floor. Laid out on a picnic blanket before her was the swag she intended to smuggle and sell that week, everything she had baked the night before: a dozen double chocolate fudge brownies, peppermint shortbread, two dozen cookies, two dozen Rice Krispies Treats, and one entire caramel tart. She wrapped each piece individually and stuffed everything she could carry into her backpack.

  Late last year, an inexplicable spike in adolescent obesity (despite the changes in the cafeteria) had led to rumors among the faculty that Cakenberg was dealing sugary treats to the student population. Esther couldn’t afford to get caught; getting caught would mean suspension, and suspension would mean the end of her little business. In the last year, she’d made a decent profit—not enough, yet, to get her to college, get her out, but a couple thousand dollars, enough for an emergency fund.

  When the batch was ready to be smuggled, she went upstairs and dressed as Eleanor Roosevelt. Three strands of pearls at her neck, hair pinned off her face in curls, legs encased in sheer hose, sensible brown shoes fit for wartime. Esther liked to dress as powerful women—it made her feel powerful in turn, like stepping into their skin. One needed to feel formidable on the first day of school. Who better to go into battle than Eleanor Roosevelt? (Well, Genghis Khan, maybe, but the goal was to survive the day with dignity, not rape and murder the entire student population and take over their lockers through sheer brute force to ensure that all subsequent generations of seniors shared her DNA. Eleanor seemed the safer option.)

  On the ride to school, Eugene seemed quieter than usual, which meant that Eugene wasn’t speaking at all. Whenever they stopped at traffic lights, he would press his thumb deep into the raw burn on his palm, though he never flinched with pain. Sometimes he slipped into a shadow that was inside his own head, where not even the brightest light could reach. Esther didn’t know how to help him, so she simply put her hand on his forearm as he drove and hoped that would be enough to communicate how much she loved him.

  They picked Heph up on the way to school, and she drifted down to the car from her house, tall and gangly and ghostlike as ever.

  “How did your adventure with Jonah go?” she signed.

  “I no longer fear lobsters,” Esther said.

  Hephzibah’s eyes widened. “It worked? That’s fantastic!”

  “Don’t get too excited. I’m not doing it again.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s too dangerous, tempting fate like that.”

  Hephzibah gave a disapproving glance, but Esther looked away from her before she could sign something too sensible and/or inspirational about facing her fears.

  As Eugene turned the familiar corners that would take them closer and closer to the school grounds, Esther began to sweat. It always happened like this. Every school day. First the sweating, then the fidgeting, then the hammering heart and the hand that closed around her throat and choked her words before they could get out of her mouth. Esther pictured herself as she knew her classmates saw her: ugly and imperfect and too weird to be allowed. Red hair, unbrushed, falling in wild tendrils past her hips because the length of it made her feel safe and she was too scared to get it cut. Skin flushed with freckles, not the cute smattering on the cheeks that some people had, but dots so thick and dark they mad
e her look diseased. Hand-sewn clothes, the stitches as flawed and lacking as she was.

  To try and calm herself, Esther unfolded and read the note Rosemary had written for her. The same one she wrote at the beginning of every school year.

  To Whom It May Concern:

  Please excuse Esther from participating in any and all class discussions, presentations, and sports activities. Please do not call on her or single her out in class, read her work in front of other students, or go out of your way to acknowledge her existence in general.

  Warm regards,

  Rosemary Solar

  Esther held the note tightly and took a deep breath. One more year of people staring. One more year of people laughing. One more year of desperately trying to disappear.

  When she got to school, she went to her locker before first period to store her baked goods so she wouldn’t have to walk around all day smelling like a vanilla-scented criminal.

  “You sneaky son of a bitch,” she muttered when she opened it.

  There, sitting solitary in the middle of her securely padlocked locker, was a single raspberry Fruit Roll-Up.

  9

  THE TERRIBLE SECRET OF DAVID BLAINE

  THE REST of the week went like this: On Tuesday, Esther put a second padlock on her locker in addition to the first, a combination one this time, something that Jonah couldn’t pick. In the afternoon, she discovered three more Fruit Roll-Ups in her locker, along with her grandmother’s stolen bracelet. The locks didn’t appear to have been tampered with.

  On Wednesday: her library card, a copy of Romeo and Juliet from said library (which now had two lobsters in Elizabethan clothing on the front cover instead of people), and seven Fruit Roll-Ups.

  On Thursday: Eugene helped Esther seal her locker with industrial strength magnets and a new padlock. By this point in time, the legend of Jonah Smallwood, apparent master thief, had spread throughout the school, and a small group of people huddled outside her locker after last period waiting to see if he’d been able to break in today. Esther hated being observed by them, until she realized they weren’t watching her—they were there for the magic show. Inside her locker—a dozen Fruit Roll-Ups and fifty-five dollars in an envelope.

  “That guy is good,” said Daisy Eisen.

  “I’m getting a David Blaine vibe here,” Eugene said seriously. The twins firmly believed that Blaine was capable of performing genuine magic.

  “It’s possible,” Esther conceded with a grin.

  On Friday: Thank God she’d shifted her entire haul of illegal baked goods, because now even some of the faculty had come to watch the unlocking of her locker. She’d duct-taped it shut that morning to prevent tampering. The locker still looked untouched, but when she sliced open the tape with a pair of nail scissors borrowed from her English teacher, a small avalanche of Fruit Roll-Ups spilled onto the floor. The crowd cheered. There, wedged in between her biology and math textbooks, was the unopened box that he’d delivered to her house on Monday morning.

  “I’m fairly sure this constitutes harassment,” she said as she prized out the newspaper-wrapped box with the stupid inspirational quote written on it.

  “Only if you’re not enjoying it,” signed Hephzibah.

  “God, Hephzibah, you’re so wise.” Because she was enjoying it. Seeing Jonah’s handiwork was like having her own personal magic show every day.

  Esther put the box into her bag and drove home with Eugene and Heph, wondering if Jonah Smallwood was sprinkled with some kind of enchanted dust as a child.

  • • •

  ONCE she was in her room, she messaged him.

  ESTHER:

  Did you break into my house?

  JONAH:

  No! Your mom got the box from your room. I didn’t go snooping or anything.

  ESTHER:

  How’d you know I hadn’t opened it yet and had just decided to never see you again?

  JONAH:

  ’Cause if you had, you would’ve already sent me a message that said: “I’ll see you on Sunday.”

  ESTHER:

  So cocky.

  JONAH:

  Open the box.

  ESTHER:

  This had better not be Gwyneth Paltrow’s severed head.

  Esther unwrapped the newspaper. Inside was a box, inside of which was a thumb drive.

  ESTHER:

  Are you trying to infect my laptop with a virus?

  JONAH:

  My dastardly plan has been foiled.

  ESTHER:

  I can almost promise you this won’t sway me.

  JONAH:

  Key word: almost. Now watch the damn clip, woman.

  So she did. She plugged the thumb drive into her laptop and when the media player opened, she hit play.

  The clip was short—two minutes and thirty-seven seconds to be precise—but it was beautiful. Where Jonah acquired the necessary cinematography skills to make GoPro footage look like a movie trailer she wasn’t entirely sure, but he had, and it did. The background was muted and misty, but Esther was bright. She shone like the sun, caked in butter. Her hair was spun sugar. Her eyes were blue candies. He’d edited the footage to create a short story. Like they were intrepid teen explorers, plunging out into the unknown to face their fears.

  Jonah filmed Esther mostly in moments when she hadn’t realized she was being filmed. When she’d floated in the water alongside the boat, her hair fanned out around her like a mermaid, looking particularly odd because she was fully clothed and fully shoed, a lobster resting in each of her palms. The goddess of crustaceans, our lady of hard exoskeletons. And then the last shot: her, on her front porch, her hair a damp twist of red sorbet, freckles bright across her cheeks, grinning into the camera.

  “What are we, Esther Solar?” came Jonah’s voice from offscreen.

  “Fear eaters,” she said. Except it wasn’t her who said it, or at least not how she remembered herself saying the words. She remembered being weirded out by Jonah’s paper eating, but this Esther . . . this Esther on-screen was part wolf, her breath hot and her eyes wide with fire. She’d never seen herself this way before. Sometimes, when she looked in the mirror, she faded at the edges. Not like Eugene, not like how he flickered in and out of existence. Her edges were soft, and her color was dim, and sometimes little particles of her dusted off and bled out into the air. But not in the video. In the video she was whole and solid and the saturation had been turned way up so that the freckles on her skin looked like a flurry of fall leaves.

  1/50 said the final frame.

  “Every Sunday for the next year,” Jonah had said at the lake. “Fifty fears. Fifty weeks. Fifty videos. Fifty chances to meet Death personally and ask him to break the curse.”

  Esther picked up her phone and sent him a message that was only five words long.

  I’ll see you on Sunday.

  10

  2/50: MOTHS

  THE FORTY-NINTH fear on Esther Solar’s semi-definitive list of worst nightmares was moths, thanks to the repeated watching of The Mothman Prophecies and The Silence of the Lambs, and one particularly traumatic run-in with a common house moth when she was in middle school. (The insect flew into her mouth.)

  Esther sat on her front porch in the rain, elbows resting on her knees, dressed as Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Her semi-definitive list of worst nightmares was folded open next to her. 49. Moths and/also Mothmen was circled.

  Jonah pulled up on his moped and ran through the rain with his hands over his head. Esther was relieved to see that he had not, in fact, dressed as the Mothman, which was much appreciated.

  “Damn, Jackie O,” he said when he saw her. “Not enough people can pull off white gloves these days.” Then he sat next to her, not so close that he was touching her, but close enough that she could feel the warmth radiating off him a
s his skin dried his damp clothes. He smelled intensely of himself and was, like her, dressed for another decade, with orange corduroy pants and a pale blue silk shirt with ruffles, his hair a thicket atop his head.

  “Pretty sure I told you I was reupholstering a couch today,” she said, tapping her phone. Esther had sent the message when she woke up that morning in a panic that she would have to see him again. It seemed worth a shot. After he hadn’t replied, she’d resigned herself to the fact that Jonah Smallwood was a parasite who could not easily be shaken off, and had come to sit on the porch to wait for him in an ever-increasing state of dismay.

  “Which is why I brought this,” he said, unzipping his backpack and spinning a staple gun around his fingers.

  “Are you ever going to let me skip a fear?”

  “Nope.”

  “What excuse can I try next week?”

  “You have to graffiti public property.”

  “That’s not fair. You know I won’t do that.”

  Jonah grinned. “Yeah, that’s the point.”

  Cut to: A shot of Jonah and Esther from behind, now inside her house, kneeling in front of a ratty sofa. He turned to her, in profile, and said, “Did you really go out and buy a couch to reupholster just so you wouldn’t have to face your fear of moths?”

  Esther turned to him. Their faces were very close together. “I found it on the street and dragged it two blocks to my house, but yes.”

  “That’s nasty. This couch is definitely some kind of crime scene.”

  “Which is why we have to reupholster it,” she said, holding up the empty staple gun and clicking it twice.

  Three and a half hours later, Jonah, Eugene, and Esther were sitting on the reupholstered couch. It was hideous, a lumpy, yellow, floral monstrosity. They were not very good upholsterers. Or perhaps they were excellent upholsterers, but the couch was simply beyond redemption.