Marcus Ellenbee had already been in the library for nearly forty five minutes when Victoria Rosewood arrived. He was by far the shortest boy in his year, and Victoria was the tallest in hers; as she neared the table he was sitting at, their size difference was almost comical. With an uneasy smile she sat down, and after they had greeted each other and opened their books there were a few moments of shaky silence. At last, she spoke, trying her best to make contact with his eyes, which were putting up a fight and looking everywhere possible besides at her.
“What kind of music do you listen to?”
Marcus looked, briefly, as if he’d been asked why the sky is green, or if he had any nice fish in his pocket. Victoria was staring intently at him now. It was far from a strange question, but not one he had expected to be the first words either of them spoke to each other. He shook his head slightly, then answered.
“Uh…old stuff, mostly. I like big band, 40′s stuff, 60′s brit-rock…” He pursed his lips a bit as his words trailed off; he felt immediately as if he’d said the wrong thing, and wished he had thought of something a little more conventional. Victoria looked deep in thought, categorizing this information and storing it in a file with Marcus’ name and face on it. At length she nodded shortly, and smiled at him.
“Very cool. Don’t see a lot of taste like that in this place. Tell me you’re a Billie Holiday fan.”
“I wouldn’t trust anyone who didn’t like Billie Holiday. No way they have a soul.”
Victoria laughed warmly, and all at once Marcus was at ease. He couldn’t have imagined himself being the sort of person that would interest Victoria Rosewood even a little bit. She had this wild, bohemian air about her, and was arguably the most popular person in the school who was not disliked by a single person. While he knew, as did everyone, that she had a transcendent and all-encompassing love of music, he was so used to regarding his own tastes as obscure (as they had been painted by others) that he simply assumed he could not relate to her.
“So, you like this class? Not a lot of sophomores are willing to put themselves through it.”
“I’ve always loved medieval writing,” he responded, his fingers smoothing one of the pages on their aged text. “There’s this…I dunno, a sense of wonder, I guess. All the texts from this period are so self-assured and wide-eyed, in a way that’s totally not ignorant, even though we may think of those times like that now. Honest, maybe? It’s hard to describe. Their capacity for belief is awesome.”
“Wow,” Victoria breathed, and she stared at the pages of her own book, as if trying to discern some special sign or quality that she felt she couldn’t see.
Marcus looked up suddenly, his face reddening.
“Sorry, that was a really lame answer, wasn’t it? I’m kind of a nerd about this stuff, I-”
Victoria laughed, and Marcus’ blood seemed to freeze in his veins. He had fooled her into thinking he was cool, and now she knew the truth and was going to let everyone know they were right about him, and he was going to be more of an outcast than ever, and now she was talking and he decided to listen to what was probably his social death sentence.
“Would you stop being so jittery around me? I’m not a piranha. I’m more of…a clown fish, maybe? Mm. No. A dolphin. Smart and beautiful. And totally friendly.”
“Er,” he stammered, now a deep tomato scarlet, “sorry, it’s just, you know, you’re-”
“What,” she snapped, head tilted. “Popular?”
Marcus’ mouth hung open slightly, as he searched for words. He had absolutely no idea where he stood with her at that moment, and was quivering with anxiety over his precarious position.
“You gotta stop worrying so much, Marcus. Labels like that apply at this place only in the broadest sense. It’s worse your first two years, I’ll admit, but once people adjust to this place, you’ll find a pretty clear divide between people who are halfway decent and people who think their God’s gift to humanity, and I would more than surely like to hope that it doesn’t take more than a couple minutes to tell which group I’m in. So stop trying to put yourself down, because I can guarantee you every last person at this school is as lame as you are.”
“Except for me,” she added, grinning broadly. “I am, by far, the coolest person here, and I officially declare you cool enough to hang with me. That good enough for you?”
Bereft of words, Marcus simply nodded.
—
Summer Vargas chewed her bottom lip idly. It was a habit she had picked up in the last four days, in which she had not so much as looked at an illicit substance. Jessica Beauregard was quietly supportive, although she was inwardly ecstatic that her roommate was taking care of herself, even if it was only with the aim of winning a contest. Though she was accepting her roommate’s alternative lifestyle, she guiltily wished she would abandon it.
Having grown up without anyone of Summer’s dubious disposition around her, Summer was unsure what to expect of her impromptu detox. She half-expected her roommate to go into sudden fits and calling out desperately for reprieve, to be assaulted by constant, intense mood swings, or perhaps to relapse so suddenly and strongly that she did permanent damage. Even she regarded these scenarios as wildly dramatic, but was surprised to discover that the only change in Summer’s demeanor was what seemed to be a pervading and mysterious nervousness.
Summer had not been one to react to anything with any real sense of interest, but she had developed a jittery nature over the last few days that didn’t seem to be physical. Jessica had seen her looking over her shoulder more than once, and a couple of times she actually jumped at things she had seen out of the corner of her eyes. Both were things entirely uncharacteristic of her, and when asked about it she simply said it was coming down off of her near-constant high and that she would be fine.
While this explanation was enough for most of her friends, Jessica did not believe it. Perhaps it was a result of living with her, but she felt that it was something more primal than withdrawal. It seemed, to her, like Summer was actively afraid of something. Moreover, the dark bags under her eyes had only grown darker, though her skin tone overall had brightened a shade. She broached this subject only once; Summer vehemently denied it, attempting to laugh it off, but she would not meet Jessica’s eyes as she said it. Unsure of what she could do, however, Jessica simply attempted to stuff her worries into a dark closet and tried not to dwell on them.
So it was that she looked away from Summer’s new lip-biting habit and attempted to focus on the set of calculus problems she’d been given for the night. Though she found the class on the whole rather simple, the workload was still excessive, and she was sleeping almost silently by eleven.
One o’clock came, and Summer rubbed her eyes to keep herself awake. She knew that she could not last much longer like this. She licked the blood from her raw lips, and gave her entire body a shiver to try and shake off the chill that was running up her spine. Four days, roughly two hours of sleep altogether, stolen in short bursts during lulls in classes. Her free time had been spent mostly drawing in a small notebook, whose pages were now filled nearly to the brim with abstract whorls and lines that formed an intricate pattern that served to keep her mind occupied. Two weeks, she knew she shouldn’t have agreed, but she wanted to prove she was more than a junkie, and she had no guarantee it’d happen again, and she thought about how she’d eaten her hamburger before her fries at lunch when it was normally the other way around, and soon she was embraced by the warm depths of sleep, curled against the wall, a look of sublime peace on her face.
It started as a whisper, the gentlest ghost of a sound in the distance, so quiet it may not have even been a sound at all, but it drew closer and clearer and soon she was hearing words, chanted over and over again in a language that she could not understand, and even as she tried not to hear it she knew there was nothing she could do now that it had begun.
The dull grayness began to take form; she had no body here, no presence, but simply watched from afar as shapes began to emerge from the nothingness. There was a cat, thin and golden, and it looked forward with its ears forward, but suddenly turned its head to look at where she would have been if she was real anymore and its eyes widened before it bounded off. There was a ground now, it was cobblestone, and someone was stumbling across it, crying in deep, heaving sobs. Their form was obscured, as if seen through warped glass, and she could not see who it was. A hard rain fell, the drops coming from nowhere.
Everything suddenly tilted, and she was in a candlelit room. A short, jet-haired boy was standing before a red-haired girl who was standing in the corner. He was right up against her, one arm supporting him gently against the wall, and above his head the soft light played across her face, but it too was warped. He began to speak.
“It was you. It was always you.”
Through the filter that hid the girl’s face, she thought she saw the outline of a smile.
Now she was watching another scene, a different boy who had shaggy blonde hair. He was rocking back and forth, eyes shut tight, whispering to himself, holding a large pair of headphones so tightly to his head that his knuckled were bone-white. Suddenly they opened, the white visible through the perpetual gloss that seemed to hide identity from her, and he got up and began to run, snatching a knife off of a table that materialized in her field of vision as he ran past.
The body suddenly jerked back, however, and now it was falling, red trails marring a suddenly clear face. It turned, slowly, clearly falling but with nothing but abstract shapes around it to judge location, and looked at her. The boy spoke to her then, right to her, but the words swirled in the ether and were lost before they reached her. Turning his head back, he hit the ground hard, the sickening mixing of a thud and various cracks echoing throughout the scene, and as it fades back into the gray emptiness the sound grew louder and louder, until it was overwhelming, drowning out a sound she now recognized as her own screaming.
Her eyes bolted open, and already she could feel the cold sweat that soaked her. Someone was shaking her madly, but her vision was unfocused and her body unresponsive. Jessica’s face was almost as wet as Summer’s, and she called her roommate’s name through heavy sobs, and as she saw the girl’s eyes open she embraced her tightly. Gradually, Summer began to feel her physical body again, and she turned her head slowly and attempted to speak through a hopelessly dry mouth.
“Water…”