by Ryan Schow
It was her last thought.
4
I can’t stand it when girls cry over boys. I mean, seriously, give me a break. Then again, I never had any serious boyfriends, so I never really loved and lost. But this whole debacle with Jake, it sort of feels like a broken heart. For heaven’s sake, I lost my virginity to him when I was Abby!
God, I soooooo want to turn into one of those girls right now!
But I can’t.
My brain though, it’s a shaken beehive! Talk about feeling like you’re nuthouse ready! I can’t help wondering, should I start drinking? Can I even get drunk? I’m not quite human but is it possible anyway? Jake proved he could get shit-housed, then again, his buzz lasted less than a few minutes and one righteous beating at best.
The amount of drinks he must have put away!
I roll into campus, park the RS5 in dorm parking and walk inside thinking that, as much as I’m trying to take Jake’s truths at face value, I am desperate to round up some tangible proof that the whole time travel subterfuge is a ruse.
The picture he carried of the birthing room taken before we arrived, decades old before we arrived, that was tangible enough, wasn’t it? Did it matter? I mean seriously, what a horrible excuse for shooting a girl in the face and leaving her for critter bait! But there were reasons that scared him, made him behave so violently and erratically. Wow. What a perverse puzzle he had turned out to be.
I’m so pissed at him right now!
So pissed I don’t even bother opening the dorm’s main door as much as I use my mind to shove it open and breeze through. With everyone at lunch, the place feels like my own and what I want to do right now is break stuff.
And what’s up with the disappearing platinum blonde? What does she want? Why’s she following me? Worse still is my telepathic locator (as I’ve come to think of it). Why can’t I find her with it? Where in the f*ck is she disappearing to?
My vision throbbing, my face hot with agitation, I turn into my hallway and that’s when I see the boys—Caden and Brayden—outside Abby’s door, banging and pleading with her.
My senses flare, tentacles reaching out, wanting to know what the fuss is all about. That is about the point I see her and…oh my God!
Both boys are looking at me, panicked, their eyes and faces so filled with fright I dare not crawl their minds.
“Move,” I say, shoving them aside. I step back, then kick the big wooden door in, parts of the door jamb exploding into Abby’s room.
“Holy shit,” Brayden says as he now sees what I saw in my mind mere moments ago.
I’m already inside. Already in front of her, looking up at her dead, dangling body. As some doom-and-gloom song drones on and on, memories of Maggie cripple me, assaulting my senses, weakening everything strong and certain in me.
Maggie was listening to Lana Del Ray’s Born to Die; this is no different. This song now playing, it’s just another voice growling out more reasons why life sucks and should end.
“Cut her down from there,” Caden says. My mind bumps off his, his sorrow too much for me to bear. It’s like having your blood drained too fast.
“Don’t touch her,” I say.
I’m standing in front of her, staring up at her, and the boys, they’re putting their hands on me, trying to console me, telling me we have to get her down. My eyes are on Abby—my stand-in—but my mind is also flashing on Maggie. All I can think about is how she looked laid out in the bath full of red water, with her eyes shut, her wrists cut open and her clothes perfectly folded on the tiled floor.
I turn to the source of the song, lift my hand, shut it off from ten feet away. This stills the boys. They’re at my back, wondering with freaked out minds how I just did that.
Abby hangs lifeless from the ceiling fan, neck bent sideways, face a purplish blue. The fan, it’s half fallen out of the ceiling with bits of sheetrock and sheetrock dust all over the dark hardwood floor beneath her. The puddle of urine is fresh and pungent.
She shit herself.
Small flowers of sadness wither inside me. These bursts of emotion, this heart wrenching knot, it becomes motion and energy inside me, devouring me, overwhelming me, making me feel like the scream building inside me will eventually have the power to topple this building.
“Why did she do this?” I ask, my voice choked with emotion.
“There was a video,” Caden says, holding up his phone. “It went viral.”
Then slowly, Abby’s eyelids drift halfway open. Her eyes shift, focus, find me. OMFG, she’s still alive! I lift my hand and her body rises up in the air six inches, the stress coming off the fan. Behind me I feel the boys backing up. At this point, I can hear their thoughts colliding into my head, as well as Abby’s thoughts. Narrowing my focus, pushing the boys back with my mind, I make a slicing motion with my other hand and the bedsheets are severed clean.
“How are you—?” Caden starts to say.
With my mind, I shut both boy’s mouths. Levitating Abby horizontally, then down to the bed, I psychically read her vitals. She’s not getting out of this one easy. Her neck is cranked in a difficult position, but it’s not broken. Still, things are strained in there and she’ll be sore for days or even weeks. Her throat is raw, blood vessels burst in her eyes and her bowels have evacuated. What she needs is…life.
That’s fading quick, though. Her eyes close again, this time permanently. Her last breath goes as I just stand there mouth agape, unsure of what to do.
I put my hands on her abdomen and her heart and I thrust all my energy into her, imagine it pouring into her, supplying her, reviving her. Was she alive a moment ago, or was that merely a symptom of the freshly dead? My eyes close and I shove and shove and shove life into her, not knowing if it will help or if this is just me trying to not lose another friend. Even thought I don’t really know her, she’s still me. Still my replacement. Part of my family in an odd, dysfunctional way. Which is why I feel so angry and so sad I could cry, or curse.
If she dies, what will Christian do? What will Margaret do?
They both love her, me, but they won’t know the difference between me and her if she dies. To them, it will be me dying. She can’t die.
While I’m probing her, seeing inside her, I feel a weighted, almost ethereal connection to her soul. But she’s not in her body. I feel her hovering above. Turning my head, looking up to the ceiling above, I know where she is. I also know why she’s not here, in this body.
She’s looking down on the scene, deciding.
Life or death?
I know this routine. I know it. The boys, they’re thinking, why is she looking up there? Their thoughts bounce off me; I don’t want them in my head. I only want my thoughts, and my connection with her. With Janice Millworth, a.k.a. Abigail Swann.
“She’s dead,” I say, “maybe for good, but only if she decides.”
This was why the doctor who was not human but not alien, this was why he looked up and found me, how he saw the part of me we know as spirit, or soul.
“You can choose,” I tell Janice’s soul telepathically. She stirs when she realizes that I’m talking to her. “If you choose to live, I’ll get you out of this school. I’ll take you home, to your real mother and to your step-father.”
In my mind, I project to her this statement: And I will avenge you. I’ll make this stop for good.
Within moments, her soul comes slamming back into her body and I sigh with relief. Her eyes, they slowly crystalize with life, with emotion; they tell me so much.
“I’m going to take you home,” I whisper. She’s practically comatose.
In a voice choked raw, a voice so caked with the gravel of asphyxiation, Janice Millworth says, “Stop…her.”
“You know who did this to you?” I ask. Already I know the answer. When I died, I saw everything, knew everything, felt everything. For her it must have been the same.
“Camer—” she starts to say before her voice breaks off.
Cameron O’Del
l.
My mind is an electric ball of pure, unbridled rage. I carefully pull Janice/Abby into my chest, hug her, then say, “I’ll stop her.”
Standing up, my body moves with renewed purpose. The thing about bullying is that, on that rare occasion—an occasion such as this, where people have killed themselves—to stop the bully, you must trump the bully. You have to be the monster that scares the bully, the thing that ends the bully. I don’t want to do this. I really don’t.
But I must.
For the Maggie’s of the world, and the Abby’s of the world, for the millions of children suffering aggressive taunting, intimidating and cyberbullying each year, this needs to be done.
“Help her,” my mouth says to the boys, whose mouths still won’t work because I shut them with mental duct tape.
5
My telepathic locator chimes right in on Cameron O’Dell. She’s in her room, agonizing, pacing, holding a bloody rag to her hammered nose, feeling like she’s definitely gone too far. She has. I release the boys’ bodies from my control, take Caden’s phone from him without resistance, then open the door and storm out into the hallway, letting my mind and my body sink into such a dark space of retribution, I feel my morality shutting down. I let go. Embrace only retribution.
The awful things I’m about to do, they’re not—
“I’m coming with you,” Brayden announces, suddenly at my side.
“Brayden,” I say, snapping out of my deepening sociopathic state. “No. You can’t. It’s just…you can’t. No.”
“This is not unfamiliar territory for me,” he says, keeping pace. I know exactly what he means. He doesn’t know I know this because he doesn’t know I’m the original Abby, but in a superior body. To him, I’m just another GMO kid. Another one of Gerhard’s/Holland’s dolls.
All the ballsy shit I’ve done, all the reckless, illegal, downright insane things I initiated, things everyone else would be horrified knowing, Brayden was with me on. He was an active, willing participant. What he’s gone through with the old me, I know he would be fine coming this time, too.
“I want her to suffer,” he says. I’ve never heard this kind of passion in his voice before. Except for when we went to Santa Monica to kill Demetrius Giardino. “You’re going after her aren’t you? Cameron O’Dell?”
“Yes.” We get to the elevator and I push the UP arrow. I so very, very much want him with me because I miss him like crazy. “But you can’t come with me. You can’t…see…what I’m going to do. You can’t be a part of that.”
“Screw her,” he says.
“This is some next level shit, Brayden. It’s not right, but it has to be done.”
“I said I can deal.”
“Your head’s already loaded with nightmares. You don’t need this one.”
“My head’s fine,” he argues.
“It’s not like before,” I say. “This isn’t Heim, or even that kid Georgia cooked. This will be worse.”
“How do you know—?”
The elevator button dings and the doors open. I step in, but make it impossible for him to follow. With my telepathic powers, I paralyze his legs. Startled, he looks down at them, panics, then looks up at me and knows I’m doing this.
“How…how are you possible?” is the last thing he says as the elevator doors close.
I just look at him, not once blinking or breaking from his gaze.
6
On the way up the elevator, I access Caden’s phone and watch the video. The space behind my eyeballs starts to hum and swell. My heart digs in, accelerates. Hands become fists that crush and grind Caden’s phone and that disgusting video to pieces. Cuts open on my hand; cuts close on my hand. The elevator doors open. Not fast enough.
I want to kick a hole in this world. Embrace it… Shove it down, I tell myself. There’s no morality here.
In my mind, I get to Cameron’s door and kick it in so hard it swings open then back. My hand shoots out, telekinetically stopping it from shutting. It pressure cracks four feet down the middle. That’s what I saw in my head, but that’s not how it went. Instead, I simply open the door with my mind and level my hateful gaze on Cameron. On the other side of it, Cameron is sitting in her bed, terrified, her eyes choked with fear, her eyes beet red from the tears. She pulls a bloody twist of toilet paper out of each nostril. I don’t even feel bad for her or her potato-smashed face.
All I have is rage. All I know is that revenge, as necessary as it is, will be the one thing that will make this social abortion stop once and for all. She speaks and I’m sickened.
“Raven?”
Inside, I am a hydrogen bomb. My organs seethe. They are inflamed. So unstable at this point, they are demanding release. In some vulgar corner of my psychotic mind, I understand the things Georgia feels. How the fire inside of her requires an escape. How the animosity fuels the fire and the need for retribution infects every last cell in your body until you internally combust, heaping a nuclear tide of vengeance upon those who’ve wronged you and those you love.
My eyes are blacker than night. They pin Cameron down. “You motherfucking c*nt,” I growl. My voice is so smoked with vapors of indignation, I can’t believe such abysmal language is coming from my mouth. The world before me is pulsing on the edges, clouding my eyes with static.
I can’t stop seeing it, that awful video—it’s running on auto play in my mind. My head sees Maggie, feels her passing; I’m strangled with frenzy. My head sees Abby, purple faced and hanging limp from the ceiling fan. My eyes see Cameron.
I am wrath.
Stepping inside the room scares the shit out of her. She scampers backwards on the bed, her head darting left and right looking for escape. Using my mind, I slam the door shut so hard it rattles the entire wall and causes a pressure crack to split a good three feet of the door’s inside shell.
My hand shoots out. I link with her body. The Bluetooth connection that will be her end. She squeals and whimpers, fighting my control. My head tilts sideways, part of me surrendering to the beast inside.
In my mind, I imagine raising her in the air; she raises up.
I envision her arms and legs pulled spread eagle. This happens before my eyes. Deeply satisfied, I don’t fight the darkness inside me. My mind is untethered. Using the paralayers and my newfound telekinesis, I drag her body across the room and press her sprawled out frame into the wall. Her back, head and heels feel nailed to the wall, eliciting from her a painful groan.
Hands and legs spread, pinned to the wall, she is all mine. I turn her body. Head goes to two o’clock, crotch sits at eight o’clock. With my mind I tear off her clothes, leaving her in only her light pink bra and lavender underwear.
She’s freaking out, too scared to cry. “What…are…you?”
“You went too far,” my mouth snarls.
“I know.”
“The last time you did this, people died.”
She’s looking at her wrists, trying to pull them loose. I crawl her mind, something I have not done with her before, and it’s like swimming in sewage.
“Kristen played the piano before she killed herself,” I say after a moment inside her head.
Kristen Whales was Cameron’s first victim. My mind finds Kristen’s mother lightening quick, surprising even me. I’m suddenly inside her head, seeing her dead daughter’s life with a sort of clarity that renders me nearly helpless. I feel everything more deeply then ever before. So much so I ache to weep for the loss, not only for Kristen’s mother, but for the world Kristen would have touched.
“When she would play,” I say, “it was gorgeous. That was her gift. If she would have lived, she would have been one of the best pianists in the world.”
Cameron’s thinking I can’t know this, but I do. Kristen was that good.
“If you were me, if you could connect the dots of who she was to who she would have become, where she would have landed in life, the things you’d feel would destroy your heart.”
She can’t l
ook at me; she’s perfectly still in her shame, perfectly silent.
“Your stole her dreams. You stole her from her parents, and from the world who would have adored her. You ended a life, Cameron. You stamped out a dream.”
“I know!” she finally screamed. She started to cry, to make that ugly face even cute girls make when things seriously go awry.
With my mind, I start pulling out her curly blonde hair, ten to twenty strands at a time all exiting her scalp, tip to follicle. Her crying turns to wailing which becomes her freaking the hell out. With each pull, hair and bits of flesh come out by the roots. She’s screaming from the pain, from the horror of what I’m doing, so I slap an invisible hand over her mouth and this scares her so bad, yellow urine blooms dark in her greyish-purple underwear before drizzling onto the floor beneath her. She’s screaming and crying, but no sound is coming out.
It’s like watching everything with the mute button on.
Pushing down everything good and kind in me, I yield to my darker self. My hatred for her is a singular force. Using my mind, I put the plucking-out of her hair on autopilot.
“Patricia’s father used to molest her at night,” I say, telling her about the other girl who killed herself as a result of Cameron’s bullying. “Her mother knew what Patricia’s father was doing. She saw all the signs, but she ignored them. Do you know why she stayed quiet? Why Patricia’s mother never did anything?”
Cameron is crying hard now, shaking with pain and fear, screaming even though her wide open mouth and strained vocal chords are unable to produce a single octave of noise. Her entire body is heaving out her agony, it’s sucking in air, pushing out terror, but in total silence. All the while, her hair is being ripped out, chunk after bloody chunk, falling to the floor beneath her as she transforms from something once pretty into something now damaged.
I’m in Patricia Blalock’s father’s head now, and all I have is a turbo-charged neediness to inflict the masses with an unchecked loathing. His wants become my wants and right now what I want to do is ravage Cameron’s mind to the point of no return. I want her to never recover. The part of my mind that’s now Tad Blalock’s mind never wants her to get better. Or heal.