[sic]

by Scott Kelly

  Easy to see how beautiful she was, despite the clothes. Full lips, freckles, natural blush to her skin. More life than the rest of us; honeyed milk. Somehow smiling even when she wasn’t. Cameron was the one who flowered.

  “I need you to take this knife out of my hand,” she said, staring directly ahead, eyes unfocused.

  A few inches of blade jutted from between her thumb and index finger, pointing toward me. Cameron had a knife.

  “What the hell?” I asked, stepping back.

  “I can’t give this up,” Cameron whispered.

  “Do you have to point it at me?” I lowered my voice, glancing back at my snoring dad.

  The dagger tipped toward the ground. “I got tagged.”

  “What are you talking about? Just drop the knife. I’ll pick the damn thing up.” Didn’t want to go near her.

  “I’m having a rough day, and I need help,” Cameron said, thick lips wrapping around each word. “I’m going to tell you a story, and then I’m going to give you this knife. Are you okay with that?”

  “Of course,” I said without hesitation. “Of course I’ll help you. Come in. Just put that thing away, would you?”

  “I can’t. I have to give it to you. But first, I need to tell you why. Quick. My timer started a few minutes ago.”

  I didn’t want to turn my back to her, so I tried to seem calm as I walked backward into the center of the trailer and motioned her into my room, extending my arms like a gentleman.

  “Take my bed, please.” It was the only surface in the tiny room suitable for sitting. I perched on a table in the corner, far away from the knife as possible.

  “You really can’t set that down, just for a minute? You’re making me jumpy,” I complained.

  “I really can’t. Let me talk. What happened to me when I was a kid, with Mr. Gimble—it changed me. Something happened to my head—not physically, but inside me. I got this knife when I was twelve. I stole it from my mom, about a month after Mr. Gimble got tired of her and they decided I would pay the rent.” She rested the dagger across her palm, stainless steel blade glinting in the light. A cheap knife, one that folded back so it would fit in a pocket, with a wood-grain handle and bronze clasps. Brown rust—blood?—stained the grip.

  “This thing was in my pocket for years, I took it with me every time I went to go see him. Always told myself I’d cut him open. Never did, though. Only person I’ve ever cut with this thing is myself.” Cameron pulled the sleeve up her arm. Angry red lines, running vertical, some still scabbed with blood. At least a dozen marks, from wrist to elbow, exposing her to the world.

  “I couldn’t even testify against him in court. I’m so weak, Jacob.”

  I stood up. “You’re not weak, Cameron—the fact you’re alive means you’re not weak. You’re just hurting. But, cutting isn’t helping anything.”

  “The hate is eating me.” She opened her hand and stared into it. From a distance, it was hard to see the damage, the cuts were so light. But the edges around her palm lines protruded slightly, puffy scar tissue. “I lengthened my life lines,” she joked, extending her palm.

  I was somewhere between vomiting and crying. She looked at me, must’ve seen my expression, then sighed. “I’m weak, Jacob. I couldn’t testify. Emily found me tonight. We got to talking. She told me about you two—gross, by the way—and tagged me. I wondered, you know? After no one played all summer, I wasn’t sure if Eureka was gonna disappear, or what.

  “But when I got tagged, none of that mattered. I had to choose something. The knife was in my pocket, and I wanted to give this up. I know it’s wrong. I want to let the hate go. I came to you because I needed someone to see me do it. After all this, I couldn’t just…throw the thing away, you know? It’s been with me through a lot.” Her voice began to drift at the end of the speech, as though she only now realized these things for herself. I watched her resolve waver.

  “Please,” I said. “Hand me the knife. Handle first, if you don’t mind.” I held out my hand.

  Cameron stared at the cutting tool, bottom lip firmly clasped between teeth. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe talking to you was enough. This knife is one of the only things I have left of my mom, you know? As long as I don’t cut.” Her eyes drifted to the exit.

  “What? Come on, Cameron. Don’t be this way. You just told me about the knife. I can’t pretend I didn’t hear.”

  “I have to go,” she said, standing. “This was stupid. You can’t understand.” Crimson hair shielded eyes; she stood and started to leave, forcing me to act.

  I leapt across the tiny space, gripping her from behind, my fingers around her elbow, away from the blade. Cameron tensed, resisting me, twisting and pushing a scarred hand at my face. I didn’t want to let go of her knife hand, I reached around with my other and—

  —sharp pain, intense pressure and a dull ache in the center of my palm. As I yanked back, the sharp metal tip clung to my flesh; hungry, demon thing. In a flash of anger, I spun my childhood friend to face me and seized the blade with my slashed hand. I squeezed and pulled; Cameron gasped and let go, offering no resistance. I flung the dagger behind me—it clattered to the ground in the corner—and clutched my hand to my chest.

  “Christ, Jacob!” Cameron gasped, tears already falling.

  “It’s okay, it’s only a few cuts. Be strong. You got tagged, you have to do this. Do you want to disappoint me? Disappoint David?” I squeezed my blue shirt, now black with blood.

  She turned soft with concern. “Let me see.” Her hands gripped my arm; they were rough with scars. I winced and let her open my fingers. One deep puncture and two long cuts marred it, bleeding softly. I yanked a dirty towel from the floor. “I’ll be fine.” I sat down on my bed; the sight of my blood made me light-headed.

  I followed her eyes to the corner of my room, where the knife fell. “Hey. Over here. Forget about it, okay?”

  Cameron shook her head, then turned to me, brow wrinkled. “That’s a lot harder than I thought it would be. I’m sorry, okay? I’m so sorry. But, thank you. I knew I could count on you; you’re always there for us. Hell, you saved me from Mr. Gimble in the first place, and you’ve never asked for anything. So, thank you.”

  Guilt sizzled, foul chemical reaction in my chest. She’d already stabbed me; may as well bare my secrets. “I didn’t call the police on your dad,” I said. “Steven did.”

  She actually smiled—just barely, corners of her mouth flailing under the weight of her depression. “Steven told me, like four times. You think he wouldn’t use that to try and make me like him? Of course he did.”

  “Oh. So then why’d you thank me?”

  Cameron smirked. “You gave him the idea. You tagged him, you dared him to do it. It really was you, Jacob, and you never tried to take credit for it. At least, not the good parts.”

  Was it me all along? Did I cause Kent, Steven and Cameron to lose their homes, did I save Cameron from further abuse?

  I didn’t know what to think. I knew my hand hurt, though. “I am going to destroy that knife,” I told her. “So I want you to put it out of your mind. No more revenge. You don’t have to kill Mr. Gimble, you don’t need to punish yourself. The best thing you can do is be happy. I don’t know what I can say to make things any better—probably nothing, but—”

  Her scarred hands clutched each other, looking lost without the knife. “There’s nothing you can say. This is good, though. There’s nothing fair about what happened, but I made a decision to at least change this one thing. I can stop this stupid emo shit.”

  “Cutting is stupid emo shit, Cameron. Play Eureka. Move past that. Plus, we’re too poor to be emo. I can’t afford the hair product.”

  Cameron smiled, at last. I smiled too; she had that contagious effect. She leaned forward, shifting her weight across the bed and landing on top of me. Arms circled me, clutching at my back; she buried her face into my shirt. I held my bleeding hand away from her, squeezing the towel as hard as I could.

&n
bsp; “Thank you, Jacob. Thank you for being here. Thank you for being normal. Thank you for being one stable thing in this goddamn nightmare.”

  21. Memento mori

  The next day—a Saturday—Cameron called our trailer’s land line.

  “I want to tag Steven,” she said. “But I need your help to smooth things over. The last time I talked to him, things didn’t go so well.”

  “What happened?”

  “Me. He…wants to be my boyfriend. I don’t see him that way. But he starts talking about how he’s really the one who saved me from Mr. Gimble, and not you, like he’s gonna convince me I owe him. It’s stupid. But, I still want him to play Eureka. I need you to break the ice.”

  We discussed details for a few more minutes. When she hung up, I was excited about the plan. Steven said he quit, but I had faith he’d come around and decide to play. His decision was based off a jealousy of David, not any sort of real logic. I needed to make sure he understood that.

  Things seemed simple, and were, up until Cameron arrived at my trailer with a friend in tow.

  “Hi,” I stammered. “Nice to see you.”

  Emily barked a short laugh: “Don’t make this weird, please.”

  So it was going to be that way—the affection was gone. I downplayed my disappointment: “Why would I?” I shrugged. “There’s nothing to be weird about.” Except, y’know, having sex with my childhood friend and then being ignored.

  Emily rolled her eyes. I decided not to give her any more ammunition, and kept my mouth shut.

  I parked the car a block away from Steven’s house; the girls waited while I walked up. Sure, it was a single wide, and the lawn needed mowing, but it was a house. Dropping out of school must’ve been working for him.

  Pushed on the doorbell—nothing. After I rapped my knuckles across his door, it swung open.

  Steven had changed. His straw hair was now molded by copious amounts of gel into short spikes, bleached at their tips. The big coke bottle glasses were replaced with small, rectangular frames, and a stud pierced his right ear.

  He spread his arms; I hugged him, thumping his back with my palm. “Good to see you,” I said. The words were true.

  “Good to see you, too. Come in!”

  The place reeked of cigarette smoke; ashtrays littered every surface. Bare walls were punctuated by a single round clock; everything was utilitarian and tidy, save the stream of smoke rising from an ashtray near his computer. A lamp in the corner provided all the light, so our shadows splayed out in gross dimensions on the walls.

  He sat on a stool next to his kitchen counter.

  “So, got any video games?” I asked, grinning.

  “Like you wouldn’t believe. Looks like you won’t be holding a controller anytime soon, though. What happened?”

  I held out my hand, wrapped in white bandages from the night before. “Cooking accident,” I lied. “You’d beat me the same, with or without.”

  “Well, sit down, at least.” He pointed to a stool near the counter.

  I stood still. “How’ve you been?”

  “I’m all right. Dropping out of school was the right thing to do; now I’m working, making money, you know. Life.”

  I didn’t, but I nodded anyway.

  “Hope High sucks,” I said noncommittally. “Really boring.”

  We stood for a moment; I found myself more nervous than I’d expected. How did I broach the subject? Seconds ticked by.

  “So, what’s the deal?” he asked. “I get the feeling you didn’t come here to catch up.” Steven reached for a pack of cigarettes on the kitchen counter and lit one.

  “I wanted to talk to you about Eureka.” I finally took his offer, and sat down on a cheap futon. The aluminum ribs of the seat dug through the thin padding.

  “Wait—are you ‘it?’” Steven looked ready to run.

  I spread my hands, palms facing up. “Why do you care? You quit. But no, I’m not ‘it.’ I promise.”

  He studied me behind his new glasses. “I believe you. You could never lie to me, anyway—I see right through you. C’mon, before you start in on this whole Eureka thing, let me show you something.” I followed him into a small bedroom hot with electronic equipment. The sound of fans; the glow of LEDs. Spare cables hung from hooks in the ceiling. Computers were stacked side by side, some atop others, and three monitors faced him.

  “Is this where you command your robot army?” I joked.

  “I’ve been doing this data retrieval,” he said, “where people screw up their computers with viruses or mistakes or whatever, and I piece the information back together for them.”

  “Sounds interesting,” I lied.

  Steven sat down at his computer chair, all mousy, folded over with nervous excitement. He turned the three monitors on. Every few moments he reached to an ashtray and flicked his cigarette.

  I noticed some black ink scrawled on the side of the smoke. “What’s that?” I asked. “On your cigarette.”

  Steven pulled the cig from his mouth and presented the tightly-rolled cylinder of tobacco between two fingers. “Sometimes I write on them. Nontoxic ink. I feel like, if I put something really important on a piece of paper and smoke it, it’s inside me. Kinda stupid, I know. This one says ‘who they say you are.’”

  “Short for ‘you are who they say you are?’ What David wrote on the baseball concession stand?”

  Steven glanced down. “Didn’t say I never listened to him, just that I had some issues with management. Shut up and look at this.”

  He clicked through some files until a girl’s picture filled the screen. She was about our age; pretty brunette, cherry-red lips, ponytail, cheerleading outfit.

  “Is she a client?” I asked. “Good work, man. She’s hot.”

  Steven nodded. He opened another folder, this one filled with pictures. He flicked through a few—the girl with friends, playing tennis, riding a horse. Family moments.

  Another folder held her favorite music. Another, the profiles she’d built on different websites, and still another held a repository of forum posts and chat files. We spent a while scrolling through this stuff—the girl describing her first experience at a concert, her first kiss, her worst enemy, all the usual bullshit. She was honest and sincere; seemed like a nice person.

  “You have her phone number?” I asked, half joking. “Seriously, how did you end up with her computer?”

  “Her name is Rachel,” Steven answered. “Her parents sent the computer to me.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Rachel died a month ago. Car accident. They want me to put together a DVD of the photos on here. I finished it two weeks ago.”

  Stunned silence. I rocked awkwardly back and forth on my feet, hands in pockets, standing over Steven’s shoulder. “Oh,” I said. “Sorry.”

  “It’s all right. I never knew her when she was alive. Except now, I might know her better than anyone. This is what I’ve been working on. It helped me get over Cameron, really.”

  “Get over Cameron?”

  He nodded, face sullen. “She never wanted to be more than friends, you know? Kent humiliated me every step of the way, always bullying me, picking on me. Showing her my…lack of manliness. Why would she like me?” His voice tightened; he exhaled slowly, calming himself. “It’s okay. There are other girls out there, you know?”

  “Living girls. Living girls, Steven—this isn’t an improvement. Though, y’know, I’m sure she was great. Was.”

  “She’s beautiful,” my friend admitted, skin so pale in the monitor’s light that he seemed all blank, unrendered polygons. “I don’t know. Could you just let this go? The computer is like life support. She’s dead, sure, but I’m just now getting to know her. So she’s not totally dead, right?”

  He clicked through picture after picture of Rachel running, practicing cheers, posing with friends, eating lunch. Her image reflected off his glasses, as though projected from his mind.

  “She’s totally dead, man. What’s th
e point? Yeah, she seems great, but how much does that matter, now?”

  Steven clenched his jaw as he let out a frustrated moan. “I know this seems crazy, all right? I’m not an idiot. I don’t know. I’ve been obsessing, a little. I feel like she’s mine, somehow.”

  “Now that’s just creepy, Steven. Don’t fall in love with a ghost.”

  My pale friend stood from his chair, sighing as he did so. “I know; you’re right. I’ve known for a while, but I figured you were here to tag me. And if that’s the case, then I want to give Rachel up. I wanted to make sure you knew what you were doing, before this all started. What it will cost me.”

  “I didn’t lie; I’m not ‘it.’ Listen: a living, breathing Cameron told me that she wanted you back in the game. She asked me to come here and talk to you, because she knows we’re friends. At least you have a chance with Cameron, right? Better than this.”

  Steven seemed to brighten at the mention of Cameron. He even smiled. “She said that? She wants me to play?” He looked back at his computer. “But, you pretty much have to choose between Eureka or a normal life, right? It’s a big commitment. If I play, I’m going to play all the way. Once I start, there’s not going to be any stopping me. Graduation was nothing.”

  I smiled. “It doesn’t have to be that extreme, right? You can just use Eureka to better yourself.”

  “That’s watered-down medicine, though. Eureka works because it makes you uncomfortable. If you start filtering out the stuff you don’t want to do, you’ll break the whole game. Besides, if David can do it, why can’t I?” Steven asked.

  “Fair enough, then. The girls are actually waiting out front. You ready to meet them?”

  Steven nodded, then took a deep breath. “Cameron’s out there, right?”

  “Cameron and Emily.”

  He nodded again, walking to a mirror on his bedroom wall and running fingers through his hair. A few spikes were rearranged, glasses cleaned. “Let’s go.”

  I followed him to the front door; he pulled it open to reveal Cameron and Emily, standing side by side, grinning. “Hi,” they said.