Worm

by wildbow

  He screamed, struck her with enough force that she wondered if he’d had knuckle dusters she hadn’t seen.

  Knuckle dusters… a weapon. She belatedly remembered the knife, looked up at the girl with the eye shadow.

  The figure in the black cloak had the knife-wielding girl, the knife hand twisted behind the girl’s back.

  With a sharp, calculated motion, the arm was twisted a measure too far, the eye shadow girl jerked off balance so the weight of her body would only help twist it further. The girl screamed, dropping the knife, and she flopped to the ground, her arm gone limp, dangling from the shoulder at an angle that shouldn’t have been possible.

  The figure in black turned on Lao. She swept her cape to one side, and momentarily became a living shadow, a transparent blur. When she returned to normal, her posture was different, and the knife had disappeared from the ground. It was in her hand.

  Emma watched in numb horror and awe as the girl advanced on Lao, who crab-walked backward to get away. She closed the distance, stretched out one arm, and delivered a single scratch with the knife, cutting into Lao’s right eye.

  Other thugs had already fallen. The one who’d held her arm before she pulled it free was slumping over, unconscious. The woman who must have been standing next to Emma’s father, was lying prone on the ground on the other side of the car, a pool of blood spreading beneath her.

  That left only one, the thug who’d held Yan’s left arm. He was on his feet in a moment, running, Emma’s backpack in one hand, open, the contents from the glove compartment falling free. Useless, trivial items. A bag of candy, the driver’s handbook. Things he’d taken only because he could.

  The girl in the cloak was small, Emma noted. Younger. Again, the cloaked vigilante became a virtual living shadow, flung herself down the length of the alleyway, faster than the man was running. She moved past him, ducking low as she materialized into a normal form. The knife raked across the side of his knee, and he fell. He twisted as he hit the ground, kicked out with one leg, and caught the girl in the side of one knee. She tumbled landing on top of him.

  The ensuing struggle was brief and one sided. He tried to grab his attacker, found only immaterial shadow. He turned over, getting on hands and knees to push himself to a standing position, but she moved faster, going solid as she loomed over him, one hand on the wall for balance. She tipped, let herself fall, and drove his face into the pavement with all the weight she could bring down on him.

  A second later, the cloaked girl was holding one of his hands against a door just to his right. She used the stiletto to impale his hand to the wood, bent the blade until the handle snapped away.

  “Emma,” her father said. He was out of the car, embracing her. “Are you hurt? Emma?”

  One hand absently tried to claw her own strands of hair from her mouth, failing to get all of them. She settled for leaving the hand mashed against her mouth, as incoherent a gesture as anything she might have said if she’d been able to speak.

  Wordless, the girl in the black cloak limped a few steps away from the fallen boy before adopting her shadow form, floating away, untouchable.

  * * *

  “Emma?”

  Emma stared at her bedroom ceiling. It was her sister’s voice.

  “I went to that store, got that shampoo you liked.”

  Emma turned over, pulling the covers tight, staring at the wall instead.

  “I just thought a shower must sound pretty good right about now.”

  There were still scraps of paper stuck to the wall with blue tack, the corners of the posters she’d torn down in a fit of emotion. All the words in the English language, and there wasn’t one for what she’d felt. Not anger, not fear, not resentment… some combination of those things that was duller, heavier, suffocating. The eyes of the boys from the posters had been too much.

  “…Okay,” her sister said, from the other side of the bedroom door. “We love you, Emma. You know that, right?”

  * * *

  Her mother spoke through the door, “Emma? Taylor’s on the phone. She’s still at summer camp. Do you—”

  Emma sat up in bed, swung her legs around until they hung off the end of the bed.

  “No.” Her voice was a croak. How many days had it been since she spoke?

  “If I explained, maybe she could—”

  An image flashed across her mind’s eye. Taylor, on the other end of the phone, laughing, blabbering on, happy, just before the incident.

  The tables had turned.

  “If you tell her, I’m never coming out,” she croaked.

  There wasn’t a reply. Emma stood from the bed and approached the door. She could hear her mother on the other side.

  “—doesn’t want to talk to you right now. I’m sorry.”

  A pause.

  “No. No, I don’t.”

  Another pause, briefer.

  “Bye, honey,” Emma’s mom said.

  Floorboards creaked as her mother walked away.

  * * *

  “…a therapist. You could go alone, or we could go together.”

  She grit her teeth.

  “I… I left her number by the phone. We’re all going to be out. Your sister’s at a thing related to the college dorms, a pre-moving in orientation. Your mom and I have work. You know our phone numbers, but I was thinking, uh.”

  A pause.

  “If you were thinking of doing something drastic, and you didn’t feel like you could talk to any of us, the therapist’s number’s there.”

  Emma hugged her knees. Her back pressed hard against the door, the bones of her spine grinding against the door’s surface.

  “I love you. We love you. The doors are all double locked, so you’re safe, and there’s food in the fridge. Your sister bought that stuff from the store you like. Soaps and shampoos.”

  Emma clutched the fabric of her pyjamas.

  “It’s been a week. You can’t—you can’t be happy like this. We won’t be here to bother you, so warm yourself up some food, treat yourself to a nice bath, maybe, watch some television? Get things a step back to normal?”

  She stood, abrupt, paced halfway across her bedroom, then stopped. Nowhere to go, nothing to do.

  She stood there, staring at the wall with the torn corners of poster still stuck to it, fists clenched.

  “Bye, honey.”

  She was rooted to the spot, staring at a blank surface, listening as her family went about their routines. There were murmurs of conversation as they got organized, orchestrated who was going in which car, what everyone was doing for lunch. Quieter fragments of conversation where they were discussing her.

  The door slammed, and she heard the locks click, a sound so faint she might have imagined it.

  It was only after everyone had left that she ventured out of her room.

  Coffee. Cereal. She went through the motions, reheating a mug of the former and preparing the latter.

  She hadn’t finished either when she stood and ventured into the bathroom. She didn’t touch the bag of expensive soaps and shampoos, instead using her father’s regular shampoo. She soaped up with the bar soap, rinsed off, then stepped out of the shower to dry herself.

  Once she was dressed, her hair still damp, she approached the front door, hesitated.

  She pushed through, left it unlocked behind her. She couldn’t shake the worry that if she stepped back inside to find keys, she might not be able to step through the threshold again.

  Her teeth were chattering by the time she was at the end of the street, and it wasn’t cold out.

  Her thoughts were a chaotic jumble as she walked. Her stomach felt like a blob of gelatin, quivering with every step she took.

  The stares were worst of all. As much as she tried to tell herself that she wasn’t in the middle of a giant spotlight, that people didn’t care, she couldn’t shake the idea that they were watching her, analyzing her every move, noting her wet hair, noting the hunk of hair at the back that was shorter than
the rest, crudely chopped off. Were they seeing her as a victim, someone so full of fear and anxiety that her every movement practically screamed ‘easy target’?

  Perhaps the dumbest insecurity of all was the worry that somehow they could read her mind, that they knew she was doing the dumbest thing she’d ever done.

  Every step she took, the white noise of her fear consumed a bit of her rational mind.

  She found herself back at the mouth of the narrow one-way road. The dumpster had been moved, the van was nowhere in sight.

  This was different from feeling like a victim, because here, she knew she really was begging to be attacked. To loiter around in known gang territory, unarmed? It was senseless. This time, they might really carry through with their threats. All it would take was the wrong person seeing her.

  Emma couldn’t bring herself to care. She was scared, but she was scared every moment of every day, had been for the last seven days. Right now? She was more desperate than scared.

  She’d hoped she would run into the girl in the black cloak. She wasn’t so lucky. Her stomach started protesting that the half-bowl of cereal hadn’t been enough, but she stayed where she was. She hadn’t brought a wallet, a phone or watch, so she had no way of getting food, nor any idea of how long she was really waiting.

  When the sun was directly overhead, she turned to leave.

  There was no place to go. Home? It would be too easy to shut herself in her room, to hide from the world. There was nothing she wanted to do, nobody she wanted to talk to.

  The world was an ugly place, filled with ugly scenes, and unlike before, she couldn’t shut it out, couldn’t shake the idea that something horrible was happening around every corner. Thousands of people suffering every second, around the world.

  What got her, the nebulous idea that haunted her, was the impact those scenes had. There were so many defining moments, so many crises, big and small, that shaped the people they touched. The biggest and most critical moments were the sorts that wiped the slate clean, that ignored or invalidated the person who had existed before, only to create another.

  Emma had fought in a moment of desperation, as if fighting could make her stronger than Taylor, set herself apart. Except she’d failed. It was unbearable. She hated herself.

  Her eyes watched the crowd, searching for the people who were eyeing her, judging her. She couldn’t find any obvious ones, but she couldn’t shake the belief that they were there.

  “Takes guts.”

  She could feel her heart leap into her throat, wheeling around, imagining the Asian girl with the eye shadow standing behind her.

  It wasn’t. The girl was dark-skinned, slender, with long, straight hair. She had a hard stare, penetrating.

  “Guts?” Emma couldn’t imagine any word less appropriate.

  “Coming back. The only reason you’d do it is because you were looking for revenge, or you were looking for me. Or both, depending on how cracked you are.”

  Emma opened her mouth, then closed it. The realization hit her. This was the girl with the black cloak, announcing herself.

  She asked the question she’d gone to such risk to pose to the girl, “Why… why did you wait? You saw me in trouble, but you didn’t do a thing.”

  “Because I wanted to see who you were.”

  Before, Emma suspected she’d have been offended, aghast at the idea that this girl would leave her to suffer, leave her life at risk, just for an answer to a question. Now? Now she could almost understand it, oddly enough. “Who was I?”

  “There’s two people in the world. Those who get stronger when they come through a crisis and those who get weaker. The ones who get stronger naturally come out on top. There’s ups and downs, but they’ll win out.”

  “Who was I?” Emma asked, again.

  “You’re here, aren’t you?” The girl smiled.

  Emma didn’t have an answer to that. She shut her mouth, all too aware of the people walking past them, going about their everyday lives, overhearing snippets of their conversation and yet failing to pick up anything essential.

  “I want to be one of the stronger ones.”

  “I don’t do the partner thing, or the team thing.”

  Emma nodded. She didn’t have an answer ready.

  The other girl’s eyes studied her, and she seemed to come to a decision. “It’s a philosophy, a way of looking at it all. You can look at the world as a… what’s the word? One thing and another?”

  “A binary?”

  “A binary thing. But not black and white. It’s about the divide of winners and losers. Strong and weak, predators and prey. I kind of like that last one, but I’m a hunter.”

  Emma thought back to how readily the girl had taken the thugs apart. “I can believe that.”

  The girl smiled. “And what you have to keep in mind, is the biggest question of all is one you’re answering for yourself, right now. Survivor or victim?”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “On this violent, brutish little planet of ours, it’s the survivors who wind up the strongest ones of all.”

  * * *

  Emma stood from the kitchen table, aware that her entire family was watching her.

  It’s all mental.

  Three weeks ago, she might never have imagined that she’d be able to resume life as normal, to not be afraid.

  Perhaps it was more correct to say that she was afraid, she just wasn’t acting it. Faking it until she could make it the truth.

  “You’re going out?” her sister couldn’t quite keep the note of suprise out of her voice.

  “Sophia’s dropping by,” Emma said.

  Just want to forget it happened, put it behind me. Move forward.

  “Taylor got back from camp this morning,” her mother said.

  Emma paused. “Okay.”

  “She might stop by.”

  “Okay.”

  Emma couldn’t resist hurrying a little as she collected her dishes and rinsed them in the sink.

  “If she comes by when you’re not here—”

  “I’ll talk to her,” Emma said. “Don’t worry about it.”

  She made her way to the front hall, stopped by the mirror to run a brush through her hair. It had all been cut to match the piece that had been cut shorter with the knife.

  She couldn’t wait for it to grow in, as that alone would erase just one more memory that reminded her of her moment of weakness and humiliation, of how close she’d come to dying or being mutilated. Until it did grow in, it was yet another reminder of all the ugliness she wanted to be able to look past.

  Sophia was waiting outside by the time she had her shoes on.

  “Heya, vigilante,” Emma said, smiling.

  “Heya, survivor.”

  She could see Taylor approaching, tan, still wearing the shirt from camp in the bright primary blue, with the logo, shorts and sandals. It only made her look more kiddish. Broomstick arms and legs, gawky, with a wide, guileless smile, her eyes just a fraction larger behind the glasses she wore, a little too old fashioned. Her long dark curls were tied into a loose set of twin braids, one bearing a series of colorful ‘friendship braclet’ style ties at the end. Only her height gave her age away.

  She looks like she did years ago. Way before her mom died. Like she’s nine, not thirteen.

  “Who the fuck is that?” Sophia murmured.

  Emma didn’t reply. She watched as Taylor approached the gate at the front of the house, walked up the path to the stairs where she and Sophia stood.

  “Emma!”

  “Who the fuck are you?” Sophia asked.

  Taylor’s smile faltered. A brief look of confusion flickered across her face. “We’re friends. Emma and I have been friends for a long time.”

  Sophia smirked. “Really.”

  Emma resisted the urge to cringe. Fake it until I make it.

  “Really,” Taylor echoed Sophia. The smallest furrow appeared between her eyebrows. “What’s going on Emma? I haven
’t heard from you in a good while. Your mom said you weren’t taking calls?”

  Emma hesitated.

  To just explain, to talk to Taylor…

  Taylor would give her sympathy, would listen to everything she had to say, give an unbiased ear to every thought, every wondering and anxiety. Emma almost couldn’t bear the idea.

  But there would be friendship too. Support. It would be so easy to reach out and take it.

  “I love the haircut,” Taylor filled the silence, talking and smiling like she couldn’t contain herself. “You manage to make any style look great.”

  Emma closed her eyes, taking a second to compose herself. Then she smiled back, though not so wide. She could feel Sophia’s eyes on her.

  She stepped down one stair to get closer to Taylor, put a hand on her shoulder. Taylor raised one arm to wrap Emma in a hug, stopped short when Emma’s arm proved unyielding, stopping her from closing the distance.

  “Go home, Taylor. I didn’t ask you to come over.”

  She could see the smile fall from Taylor’s face. Only a trace of it lingered, a faltering half-smile. “It’s… it’s never been a problem before. I’m sorry. I was just excited to see you, it’s been weeks since we even talked.”

  “There’s a reason for that. This was just an excuse to cut a cord I’ve been wanting to cut for a long time.”

  There it went. The last half smile, wiped from Taylor’s expression. “I… what? Why?”

  “Do you think it was fun? Spending time with you, this past year?” The words came too easily. Things she’d wanted to say, not the whole truth, but feelings she’d bottled up, held back. “I wanted to break off our friendship a long while back, even before your mom kicked the bucket, but I couldn’t find the chance. Then you got that call, and you were so down in the dumps that I thought you’d hurt yourself if I told you the truth, and I didn’t want to get saddled with that kind of guilt.”

  It was surprising how easily the words came. Half truths.

  “So you lied to me, strung me along.”

  “You lied to yourself more than I lied to you.”

  “Fuck you,” Taylor snapped back. She turned to leave, and Sophia stuck one foot out. Taylor didn’t fall, but she stumbled, had to catch the gate for balance.