The Looking Glass

by Jessica Arnold

  “Why would I need your help?” she spat.

  Tony recoiled. And Alice laughed—she laughed at the stupid, helpless look on his face. Her unexpected power to wound rushed through her, molten lava through the steel that had become her heart. It was so overwhelming and incredible that she laughed even harder.

  “Why would I need you?”

  His eyes were shining. She could break him with her pinky finger and her own power thrilled her.

  But as he bit his lip and turned away, Alice felt the tiniest twinge of sympathy, and that was enough. Her steel body shuddered and shattered. Her heart resumed its pounding. Guilt swept over her—fresh and strong—and her hands were pale and shaking.

  She was panting. Her chest heaved—up, down, up, down. Her eyes were on the grass. She could hear Tony breathing, or was that her? Were those really her breaths, labored and uneven?

  “What do you want, Alice?” he asked.

  What do I want? Alice thought numbly. Oh God, what do I want?

  And then the anger that had been holding her together broke—snapped like a twig. She collapsed onto the ground, sank down onto her hands and knees, not crying but taking heaving breaths, the kind that came after there were no tears left. A second ago she had been powerful, frightening even; now she knelt on the grass helpless, hardly able to breathe. She couldn’t see—her eyes were blurry—but she felt Tony come closer. She felt him stop right in front of her, she felt him hesitate, and then there was an arm around her and she had her head on his chest and she was breathing in the smell of his soaking shirt.

  She blinked. The world came back into focus and she was exhausted; the anger that had exploded out of her had left her empty as a smoking gun. She began to realize that, though Tony still had his arm around her, his hand, cupping her shoulder, was tense. There was something stony about the way he held her that made her feel as if she’d curled up in the cold embrace of a statue.

  Alice pulled away.

  “Tony?”

  He wouldn’t meet her eyes. When he spoke, his voice was labored and low. She watched him closely, still bitter, but also confused. She hadn’t expected him to be angry. She had expected him to be ashamed.

  “Do you mean it, then?” he asked.

  She realized that she had never answered his question. What did she want? She still hardly knew.

  He shifted his weight to his other arm. “You don’t want my help.”

  Why couldn’t she answer? Only a second ago she had been so full of words that she couldn’t stop them—they came bursting out of her. Now she had nothing. She couldn’t muster up even a yes or no.

  He shook his head. “You know, you say that you’ve been watching me, but I don’t believe you.”

  Why? She thought it so clearly that for a moment she thought she had said it. Then she realized her mouth was still shut tight and he was still frowning and looking away.

  “If you’d been watching me,” he continued, “you would have seen that the only thing I’ve been trying to do—ever since I saw you the first time—all I’ve been trying to do is help you.”

  She felt as if she were choking. She pressed her hand to her throat and her skin was cold. She swallowed hard, breathed in deeply; the smell of grass filled her nose.

  “And I have to wonder, what have you been seeing? Because you haven’t been seeing me. I don’t think you know me at all.”

  “No,” she gasped out.

  He stared at her and she stared back. Though his eyes were open, there was something oddly closed about his face, as if she were staring at a photograph of him and he wasn’t really there. Silence had rarely seemed so interminable. It stretched on and on, and the sound of the crickets didn’t fill the empty space, but rather emphasized the quiet.

  “The first night you saw me,” she said at last, “you were afraid when you found out what … what I was.”

  He did not answer. He did not blink.

  “You went running. You were terrified.”

  Finally a reaction. He sat up straighter. “How in the world did you know that?”

  “She showed me.”

  “Who showed you? I wasn’t in the hotel. How could you have seen that?” He sounded angry now.

  “There’s this … ” He was glaring at her and, as much as she wanted to, she didn’t dare look away. “There’s a girl—the witch, actually. She showed me things.”

  Alice didn’t mention that she had asked to be shown.

  “A witch showed you,” Tony repeated. She couldn’t be sure if that was sarcasm in his voice or surprise. Maybe he didn’t know either. “A witch,” he said again.

  “The witch. The one Elizabeth wrote about.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “I just know,” Alice said. She had no desire to explain; she’d sound ridiculous babbling about the feeling she got when the girl spoke—the too-bright glow of her eyes. “Who else could it be?”

  He frowned, but he didn’t disagree. Then, seriously—she could tell this was what he really wanted to know—he asked, “How did she show you this stuff then? How did she know?”

  The fogged-up glass, the silver pool, it all seemed too ridiculous to say out loud. Alice considered lying, but couldn’t come up with a better story. So she decided to be vague, because it was the details that made her sound crazy. “I just saw it. I don’t know how.”

  “But how did she know about me?”

  Alice threw her hands in the air. “I don’t know,” she said. “She knew everything about me, too. It’s not just you.” She paused, then repeated, “She knew me, too.” This was true, and it assuaged some of the guilt Alice was fighting to keep contained. Sure, she’d looked into Tony’s head, but she’d been forced to watch some of her own less-than-happy memories too. Not to mention that she’d been trapped in a creepy house for days on end with only a witch for company. If that wasn’t an excuse, she didn’t know what was.

  Anyone would have done the same thing. She didn’t have to feel bad.

  She wanted to cut her nagging conscience out of her head with a carving knife and drown it in the pool.

  “What else did she show you?” Tony demanded.

  Alice considered mentioning the car fiasco, but Tony might totally freak out if he knew just how much of his past she had seen. Best to stick to the evening he already knew she had watched. That was what she wanted to know about anyway. She hesitated, choosing her words carefully. It was hard to keep her voice steady with the unpleasant mixture of anger and guilt churning in her stomach, leaving a taste bitter as bile on her tongue.

  “She showed me that you wanted me dead.”

  Tony’s mouth fell open. He gaped at her and then—without warning, so suddenly that she actually jumped—he laughed. He pulled his glasses off and wiped the corners of his eyes.

  “You want me to die,” Alice said, furious. “What’s funny about that? This isn’t a joke!”

  “Is that what this whole thing has been about?” he asked, shaking his head. “You said it earlier, too—that I want you to die. Is that why you’re so messed up tonight? Because this witch told you that I wanted you dead and you believed her?”

  “No!” Alice protested. She couldn’t believe he was making light of this. “I’m ‘messed up’ because I’m under some crazy curse and I’m probably going to die and nobody cares! My parents—you heard—they want to let my heart stop beating. Well, you know what? Let them! If nobody cares, then neither do I!” She stopped; she was breathing hard again. Then she added, almost spat, “You certainly don’t care. I don’t know why I ever thought you did.”

  This wiped the smile off his face—at least a little. He ran a hand across his forehead, sighed, and said, “Alice, I’m going to ask you that question again and I want you to listen closely to me, okay?”

  She turned away.

  “Fine, you don’t have to look at me. But listen. A witch—the same witch that helped Elizabeth cast this curse or whatever it is—this same witch told you that nobody
cared about you and that you should give up. This witch told you that you might as well die and you believed her?”

  As he spoke, something cooler than anger and warmer than fear tugged at the corners of her mind—a calm but insistent doubt. She tried to push it away—it confused her—and she said huffily, “Do I have any reason not to believe her?”

  “Let me tell you why I was laughing,” he said. She considered turning around to look at him, but she didn’t want to give him the satisfaction.

  “For a minute there, I thought this girl had maybe shown you something real. But saying that I want you to die—there hasn’t ever been a bigger lie than that. I was scared after I saw you—that’s true. But ever since then, I’ve been killing myself trying to figure out how to help you live, not die.”

  “Why should I believe you?”

  He laughed again, but this time it was grating. “Why do you think I’d be here if I wanted you to die? If I wanted you to die, I’d be in the hospital with your parents, begging them to let you go a little sooner. I’d go yank the plug myself—it wouldn’t be hard, right? Easiest murder ever. But I’m not a killer. God, what kind of psychopath do you think I am?”

  She whipped around, thinking perhaps that she would see the lie in his eyes, see a telltale smirk. But what she saw was the same face she had seen before—a face that was insistent, but no longer angry. Eyes that were bright, as blue eyes sometimes were, but that did not glow as the witch’s eyes did. His mouth was set. And Alice, who had lied enough to know what it felt like, couldn’t find any dishonesty about him—not in his voice, not in his body.

  No. Her mind protested. It kicked against her and yelled in the witch’s voice and punched at nothing with the witch’s small, childlike hands.

  But he was right. He was here. He was waiting for her and why else would he be waiting? It would be easy to pull the plug, to go to the hospital and break a machine or two.

  And yet he was here.

  She looked around her. The world suddenly seemed brighter, more sharply cut, more real. It was like in The Wizard of Oz, when everything changed from black and white to color.

  The girl’s voice still rang in her ears, but she shook her head and it faded away. She blinked. It felt as if a bubble around her had popped; she breathed in deeply and the air was fresh and cool—such a beautiful thing, breathing. Living.

  The witch had lied.

  She must have been smiling, because Tony broke into a grin. “There’s Alice again,” he said.

  Alice opened her mouth, but then shut it. Ashamed—she was embarrassed. Should she apologize? She had called him a murderer. How could she apologize for that?

  “Guess I win this round?” he asked. “Tony, one; evil witch … well, let’s give her half a point for effort. Seems only fair.”

  “Three-quarters of a point,” Alice said, her voice soft. Her heart still pounded.

  “Really?”

  “She’s pretty convincing.” Alice shivered. She could remember so clearly—still—how Tony’s thoughts had felt in her head, how strongly he had wanted her to disappear. She shook herself. Even now, it would be too easy to slip back into believing. It had been so easy.

  “Fine,” said Tony. “Fine, but if she gets three quarters, then I get one and a third—I think I deserve a bigger lead than a quarter point.”

  “That seems arbitrary.”

  “It is. But you know what they say—history is written by the victors.”

  For the first time in what felt like days, Alice smiled. Her lips had a strange, plastic feel as they curled back, as if they had hardened and shrunk.

  “Fair enough,” she said. It suddenly occurred to her that she was cold. The damp towel was a lump on the ground and she picked it up, wrapped it around her shoulders. It didn’t help much—the heavy, cold fabric only made her shiver—but the sharpness of the chill brought her to her senses somehow. Her brain kicked into gear again and started gaining speed.

  “The key,” she said, remembering why this trip had been so important to her in the first place. “There’s still time. We have to find it—now.”

  “My dad has something,” Tony said. “It’s kind of like … okay, not like, it was a metal detector.”

  He looked her in the eye, very serious now. He didn’t question the sudden change of subject and she didn’t bother to explain.

  “What I’m trying to say,” he said, “is that my dad modified this metal detector to read some kind of ghost residue—don’t ask, I don’t understand it—and I could try to, you know, put it back together the way it was before. I think we can use it to find your key.”

  So this was the idea he had mentioned before. Alice felt her cheeks flush; the answer had been right in front of her the whole time. “Oh, okay. That—that’s great.”

  She paused, then added, “Thanks.”

  “Just give me a second,” he said, and stood up and ran back into the hotel. He returned five minutes later with a haggard-looking metal detector. As he held it out, Alice saw that it looked old and unreliable, not to mention that there was a whole handful of wires looped around the outside and secured to the handle with electrical tape. He began to tug at the wires, pulling out a few, rearranging others, the tip of his tongue stuck between his teeth.

  “How do you know how to do that?”

  He didn’t look up; his fingers were a blur. “I read a lot. And I like stuff like this. It’s kind of a hobby.”

  “Fixing metal detectors?”

  “Fixing anything.” He patted the metal detector handle. It looked as if it might come apart if the wind blew too hard.

  “Great,” she said, as enthusiastically as she could, but she felt her newfound hope give a weak, nervous flutter. “It’s … great. If the attic window was over there,” she said, “then I expect that the key would have landed somewhere in this general area.” She got up and Tony followed. He gave her a nervous smile, then said, “Okay, let’s give this a go.”

  He began to pace slowly, methodically, back and forth, as he worked his way across the lawn. Alice watched him closely, her fingers crossed behind her back. In her mind she seemed to hear a quiet ticking as the seconds of her time in the real world flitted briefly into the present and were immediately absorbed into the past. She was jumpy with nerves, and when she thought she heard a footstep nearby, she started and whipped around, only to see empty green grass and a tree branch waving in the wind.

  The witch … her hands curled into fists. If the girl had threatened her, ordered her, tried to force her to give up, Alice would have been angry. But this—the manipulation, the lies, the careful scheming—it made her blood boil. It made her violently mad. Alice could imagine the witch sitting in the shadow house, waiting for Alice to come back—the grin on her face.

  The metal detector beeped and Alice jumped again, hurrying forward as Tony reached down, felt around in the grass, and picked up a quarter.

  “At least it works,” he said, shooting her a faint grin.

  Alice was so tense that she couldn’t squeeze out a response. She thought she might explode, or simply crumble into a million pieces. An image of Tony using the metal detector to find pieces of her scattered across the lawn flashed through her mind and was at once sobering and bizarrely funny.

  “I’m a sophomore, you know—junior next year, I guess. You are too, right? How do you like school?” said Tony. His transparent attempt at conversation calmed Alice more than it should have; the sound of something other than the wind and the metal detector muffled her worries.

  “School is fine. People … not so much,” she admitted. She felt oddly comfortable talking to him now. It was hard not to feel closer to him after she’d lost her head right in front of him and he’d helped her screw it back on straight. When she looked at him, she felt solid—safe. “I was popular in middle school,” she admitted. “But when I started high school—I’m not sure what happened. My aunt died that summer, and … people said I was different. Boring. I just felt tired a
ll the time. I guess I didn’t care.”

  Tony froze for a moment, then asked, “What happened to your aunt?”

  “Cancer.”

  Even now, two years later, everything inside of her went cold when she thought about it. Her grandmother had died of breast cancer in her late twenties; Alice had never met her. Her aunt had barely made it to thirty—she died two weeks after her birthday.

  Alice’s mom was thirty-two. The doctors said there was a test and that if she was positive for some gene, she’d get the cancer too. But her mom said she was fine, refused to be tested.

  Would she want to know? Alice wasn’t sure.

  “Terrible,” said Tony.

  Alice looked at him with new respect. Everyone else at school had just said “sorry”—as if they could be sorry. Half of them didn’t even know she had an aunt.

  “It is,” said Alice.

  Their eyes met. His were serious and honest. Her stomach unclenched and warmth flooded through her, despite the cold towel. It spread from just above her belly button all the way up her chest and neck and into her cheeks.

  Then the moment was gone and Tony resumed his search.

  “I used to be pretty cool, too,” he said, “when I was stupid and stuck-up and had a car. Had lots of friends then. But … well, there was an accident and I started being responsible. They call me Mr. Wordsworth now. And I know that should be a compliment, but it isn’t. They think I’m boring and I read too much.”

  “You crashed the car,” Alice said, before she could stop herself.

  “It was actually—”

  He stopped.

  “How did you know that?”

  “Your dad … I heard him say something about it to … someone.” She knew it was a frail lie, but she couldn’t let him know how much she had seen. Shame made her cheeks burn and she was glad it was so dark.

  “My dad hasn’t talked about it for years.” Tony hands were tight around the handle of the metal detector. He was staring and now she wished it were less dark just so she could see that look on his face more clearly. She was sure, if she were just a foot closer, if it were just a bit lighter, she would be able to read his expression and it would say something important.