by Dima Zales
“I love you!” he calls out to me as I head down the stairs, and before we’re out of earshot I say it back. I come down into the lounge, and the roommate is sitting on the horrible orange couch.
“I’m really sorry,” he says, and he should be. Of course, I don’t say that.
Instead, I shake my head. “You couldn’t know. Don’t sweat it.” I’m just grateful he didn’t show up an hour earlier. The way things were going, neither Brian nor I would have heard him, and wouldn’t that have been some introduction?
He extends a hand. “Jason,” he says.
I shake it. “Sara.” I try to make myself believe my next words, or at least make them sound believable. “Pleased to meet you.”
Beth is laughing her head off. If this had happened to anyone else and I was just hearing the story rather than participating in it, I’d probably think it was funny, too. That isn’t any consolation at the moment, though.
“At least he didn’t interrupt…”
I go very red. “I thought about that already. I think I would have had to kill myself,” I say. “Or maybe him. Or him, and then myself.”
I see there’s an envelope on my desk; I’m happy for any distraction right now. “Yeah,” Beth says as I pick it up. “Looks like your mother got the pictures back.” I tear it open, and she’s right. There’s our Christmas tree, there’s Dad and Bob wearing their matching Santa hats, and there are several photos of Brian and me, all dressed up. I pass them over to Beth, who’s already holding her hand out for them.
She whistles. “Wow. You weren’t kidding. You really do look like a different person,” she says. “I thought I did a good job on you that night we went downtown, but – God, that was nothing.”
“I didn’t recognize myself when I looked in the mirror,” I say, and then I tell her about Mrs. McGuire not recognizing me, and my Dad’s little joke. “Gretchen, that was the name he made up.”
Beth gives me what I can only call an “evil grin” and it occurs to me I probably shouldn’t have mentioned that. “I love it! It’s taken two and a half years, but I’ve finally got the perfect nickname for you. Gretchen!” I definitely shouldn’t have mentioned it.
Sara is in her dorm room, looking in the full-length mirror that Beth has hanging from the back of the closet door. She’s dressed for bed but the girl who stares back at her isn’t; she’s ready for a night out on the town. Sara’s hair is all over the place, and her eyes are barely open; the girl in the mirror has her hair styled perfectly, and her eyes are wide open and bright.
Sara looks down at herself; she’s still in her night shirt and pajama bottoms. She looks back up, and the girl in the mirror steps forward, out of the mirror and into the room. She says to Sara, “You can go to bed if you want, I’ve got better things to do.” The girl walks over to Beth’s bed, where Beth is asleep under the covers. She pulls the blankets up, and Beth is fully dressed, fully made up, and she snaps awake in an instant. The girl extends a hand and pulls her up.
“I was waiting for you, Gretchen,” Beth says while Sara watches, saddened but not at all surprised that her nonexistent older sister is stealing her best friend away. “Let’s go,” Beth says to her, and then, to Sara, “Sorry, you’ve been replaced.” Beth and Gretchen walk out, leaving Sara behind…
I open my eyes, and I can’t see anything – it’s pitch dark. No, there’s a little light, coming from under the door, and also from the glow of my alarm clock. It takes my eyes a moment to adjust. It’s three-thirty in the morning.
I wonder why I woke up? I don’t have to go to the bathroom. I’m not thirsty. It doesn’t make any sense. I look over at Beth’s bed, of course it’s empty –
No, it isn’t. She’s there, sleeping very peacefully, it looks like. Why did I think she wouldn’t be there?
I don’t know. I must have had some reason, but I can’t remember now. I’m just being stupid, I guess. I lie back down, pull the covers over me. Maybe I can get back to sleep. Maybe…
… Sara is in an unfamiliar room. No, she realizes, not unfamiliar. It’s a bedroom, one she remembers very well even though she can’t remember why she does. She looks around, and recognizes everything she sees – a Rolex watch on the dresser, a beautiful painting of a ship at sea with the sky orange and red as though it were on fire in the background. And now, coming in the door, a large, powerful man, dragging a girl, a teenager, in behind him. Sara stands only a couple of feet from the bed, but she can move no closer, and neither the man nor the girl take any notice of her. On closer inspection, Sara can see that the girl is barely a teenager, probably twelve or thirteen at a guess.
The man raises his fist, and Sara screams. She tries to turn away, but she can’t. She can’t even close her eyes; all she can do is watch, and scream…
I – someone’s shaking me. My throat’s burning. I can’t – I don’t want to open my eyes. I sit myself up, very quickly and I vomit, all over the floor, all over myself. Someone makes a disgusted sound, and I try to stand but my legs won’t hold me up. I go down on my knees, and I vomit again.
I hear someone running, and the door opening and my own ragged breathing. I finally open my eyes. I’m in my room. I’m kneeling on the floor of my dorm room in a pool of my own vomit. The remains of my lunch and dinner are all over my clothes and my sheets and the floor.
And now I remember why. It’s coming again, I retch, but there’s nothing left in my stomach to come up.
“Oh, God! Sara! What’s going on?” It’s Beth. She’s coming in the door. She’s got a big wad of paper towels and a trash bag. She wipes my face with a wet towel.
“It happened again,” I force myself to say. I can barely hear my own voice. “And she was – she was a little girl. Like junior high school. And – it was worse,” I tell her, dry-heaving again while she tries to clean me up. “There was – there was so much blood. She was – you can’t imagine.”
She looks at me with a mixture of pity and horror, but she somehow keeps herself focused. “Get those clothes off,” she orders, and when I do she drops them into the trash bag. I hold my hand out for some paper towels and keep cleaning myself off. “Get your bathrobe, go take a shower,” she tells me, and I do as I’m told. As I very slowly walk to the bathroom, I see that she’s taking the sheets off my bed and putting them in the trash bag as well.
I want to thank her or at least say something, but I can’t make any words come out. I just do what I’m supposed to do, hang my bathrobe on the hook, get in the shower and turn on the water.
I don’t have any idea how long I’ve been here in the shower. From the way my skin is pruning up I think it’s been a while. I’ve just been standing here under the water, barely awake.
How did that – down at my feet, there’s my little plastic basket with my soap and shampoo and everything. How’d it get there? I don’t remember carrying it in. Beth must have brought it in for me. I didn’t even notice her doing it. I reach down for my soap and start washing myself.
I’m just about done rinsing my hair when Beth’s voice echoes in the bathroom. “Sara?”
“I’m here. I’m almost done,” I say over the sound of the water. I guess she’s satisfied with that, because I don’t hear anything more. I finish up, dry my hair, brush my teeth, and I feel something close to human when I come back to my room.
“I knew you needed time, but I was starting to worry. You were in there for almost two hours,” Beth says. I see that my sheets are back on the bed. She follows my glance. “Yeah. When I got back upstairs with the laundry and you were still in the shower, I figured that was long enough.”
I go to her and hug her tightly. The tears start flooding without any warning. “You – I – thank you!”
She lets me cry as she maneuvers me over to my bed and sits me down. “You’re my best friend. What was I going to do?” That just sets me off blubbering all the more. On top of everything I saw, I feel awful for what I did to her. I woke her up in the middle of the night, threw up all
over her stuff as well as mine, she had to clean it all up and she isn’t complaining at all. I don’t know what I ever did to deserve a friend like her.
I don’t have any idea what time it is. All I know is, Brian has his arm around me, trying to comfort me. It’s not really helping all that much. I keep flashing back to the nightmare, and how young she was, younger than the other girls, and how much blood there was. I’m barely holding on right now, and I feel like I’m two seconds away from bursting into tears again, or bringing up my lunch, or both. But we have to talk about it. Don’t we?
Beth is here, too, sitting over on her bed. “I don’t want to ask – I know how hard it is – but do you think it’s happened, or is he just anticipating it?”
“I don’t think he’s done it yet,” I say in a weak voice. “It wasn’t until I dreamed about the car, both of the other times, that’s when he actually did it. So she’s still – I hope she’s still alive.” It’s a pretty thin hope.
Brian gets up from next to me, and goes to my desk to grab a blank notebook. “Maybe we need to be more logical,” he says, sitting back down. “You said the very first time you had the nightmare was – what, right after Thanksgiving?”
I can’t forget it, however much I’d like to. “The Saturday after, that Saturday night.”
Beth takes her calendar down from the wall – it’s last year’s, she hasn’t changed it yet. “So that would be, what?” She flips back to November. “The 25th. Saturday the 25th.”
Brian writes that down. I want to crawl under the covers and shut out the world but I have to do this. I have to remember everything they’re asking me. “I kept having that nightmare the next few nights. The one with the car was, it was a Sunday,” I’m sure of that. How do I know? It has to do with Beth – I remember now. “You had me go see Dr. Ritter the next morning and I remember that was a Monday.”
“So that’s, what, December 3rd?” Beth asks, looking at the calendar. “Eight days between the first dream and – and when it happened.” Brian writes that, too.
“OK. So the next nightmare was when I was in Dr. Ritter’s lab. That was a couple of days later, Tuesday night, I think.”
Brian pipes up. “Right. I remember that. So that’s December 5th.” He jots it down.
“And the next time with the car – the next time it…” I can’t continue. I can’t bring myself to say it.
“The night of the Secret Santa party,” Beth answers for me. “That was a Wednesday,” she examines the calendar again. “The 13th.”
I don’t want to be doing this. I want to forget all about it. But the images keep coming into my head, and if there’s anything I can do to save that little girl, I have to. Right?
And then it hits me: this is my fault. It’s all my fault.
Beth and Brian notice that I’m no longer listening to them, I’m just sitting here looking down at my feet and trying not to do – I don’t even know what. Brian wraps his arms around me. “What is it? What just happened?”
I don’t recognize my own voice; it’s completely lifeless. “If – if she dies, it’s because of me.”
Brian holds me tighter, and Beth is staring at me with more worry than I’ve ever seen on her face. “What are you talking about?” she asks. I honestly believe that it hasn’t occurred to her, and I love her for that. But she’ll figure it out soon enough on her own; I might as well be the one to say it.
“It’s my fault. Because I warned Jackie. So he picked this other girl. She’s going to die because Jackie had the dumb luck to live down the hall from me, and she didn’t.” Because when it was somebody I knew, I found a way to do something. But when it’s some random girl, too bad, she’s on her own. Just like poor Amelia, and poor Katie.
I don’t know how I’m keeping any control at all; I want to scream, or beat my head against the wall until it’s bloody, or – something. Anything. I don’t want to think about this anymore. I don’t want to be responsible for picking who lives and who dies.
“Sara, don’t be ridiculous! You can’t blame yourself!” Beth is looking at me now like I’ve completely lost my mind. She’s not far off.
“What if it was Chrissy?” She winces as though I just slapped her. “What if it was? How would you feel, if you knew I saved Jackie, but it meant that Chrissy…” I can’t – I won’t say it out loud.
Beth gets it now. She looks close to tears herself. Brian is holding me even closer, but he’s also looking at the notebook. “We just have to do something to save her, that’s all there is to it,” he says.
I don’t know how I keep myself from shouting at him, shoving him off me and down to the floor. I guess I have that much self-control left. “How the hell do you expect us to do that?” is what comes out, but I somehow keep at least part of the anger and the pain out of my voice.
He’s still holding me. “I don’t know,” he says, and then he takes a deep breath, and lets me go. He beckons Beth over to my bed, so he can show us both what he’s written in the notebook. “But I think we’ve got eight days to figure it out.”
It’s right there. The time between the first nightmare and the car, eight days. It’s the same for the second one. If that stays the same – if that’s the pattern every time – we have a chance – I have a chance. Maybe she doesn’t have to die after all.
My head feels clearer, my stomach settles down. The sky outside seems suddenly lighter. There’s still a chance. “I could kiss you!” I say to Brian. Then I remember that he is my boyfriend and I can kiss him whenever I want, and I do.
13
(January 13-15, 1990)
My relief at Brian’s revelation doesn’t last long. There’s the little problem that we don’t know who the killer is or where he lives. And then a much worse thought occurs to me – even assuming Brian’s right about the timing. While the girl is hopefully alive, for all we know he could already have her. She might be locked up in his basement right now.
God, I can’t think about that. I don’t dare mention it to Brian or Beth. I wonder if they’ve already thought of it and they’re afraid to bring it up to me?
We keep talking but none of us has any brilliant brainstorms. By six o’clock, having spent all day hashing and rehashing this, we walk over to Lardner to dinner – it’s just opened for the new semester today, now that enough students are back from break. I go through the hot food line and give everything there a pass; I can’t help but laugh when I finally sit down at a table, a bowl of cold cereal on my tray. “What’s so funny?” Brian asks.
“With everything going on, it’s kind of comforting to know that there’s always something you can count on.”
Beth knows exactly where I’m going and she finishes for me. “Good old Lardner Commons. Guaranteed to be inedible, seven days a week.” We all laugh, and for the first time all day, it’s with genuine humor.
We’re almost finished when Melanie Vondreau sits down next to me. “Hey, Sara. I just wanted to thank you.” I have no idea for what, which she can tell from my blank stare. “Biochemistry. I ended up with a B-plus. You saved my ass,” she says. “I couldn’t have a C on my application for the Livingston scholarship.”
That snaps my mind back to the subject of school for the first time since Wednesday afternoon. Melanie’s looking at me, expecting some sort of response. “Well – good. I’m glad,” I say and it almost sounds like I mean it.
I don’t, though, because if she’s applying for the Livingston scholarship, she’s competing against me. It’s a partial scholarship to medical school, and it’s awarded by the Biology department. There’s only one recipient each year. You have to be in pre-med, obviously, and you have to have at least a 3.5 grade point average to even apply.
A C in an important class like Biochemistry would have really hurt her chances – and boosted mine. And I went and helped her anyway. I really hope whatever karma I’m due for that particular good deed comes to me soon. God knows I could use it.
…Sara doesn’t know where she is
at first; it’s the strangest place she’s ever seen. It looks like a ruin of some kind, maybe an ancient temple? Vines and weeds poke up through the stone floor and out of the cracked walls. The air is hazy with dust. Sara has no idea what’s going on, until Melanie Vondreau runs past her, breathing hard. Melanie’s dirty blonde curls spill out from under a fedora and past the collar of a battered brown leather jacket. To top the outfit off she’s got a bullwhip hanging off her belt. It’s clear to Sara now – she remembers that Melanie was among the people watching “Raiders of the Lost Ark” on the communal VCR last night.
Sara watches Melanie run until she suddenly pulls up short, two steps away from a yawning chasm. Behind Melanie, off in the distance but growing steadily louder, Sara can hear indistinct shouts and the sound of many running feet. Melanie backs up a few steps and jumps the chasm at a run. She doesn’t quite make it; she barely manages to catch one hand on the lip of the chasm, her legs kicking uselessly over what seems like a bottomless pit. And standing over her on the safe ground of the other side, Sara sees herself. The dream-Sara is wearing a crisp white linen suit and an extremely smug expression as she looks down at Melanie. Melanie struggles futilely to climb up, and dream-Sara watches for a while before sighing heavily. “Oh, very well,” dream-Sara says in a dreadful French accent, reaching down, grabbing Melanie and pulling her up to safety…
… without transition, Sara is in a bedroom, one she’s been in many times before. She knows everything in the room even before she sets eyes on any of it. She looks towards the door, knowing what’s about to come through it, and sure enough, it opens…
I’m waiting for the door to – no, I hear something. Not footsteps, but ringing. A loud, insistent ringing. It’s not stopping. The fire alarm.
“Wha – hey, turn that off!” Beth stirs awake, looking accusingly at me. “Why’d you set the alarm?” Then she’s sitting up, and she has the good grace to look embarrassed. “Right. The fire alarm. I wonder who did it this time?”