Full Tilt

by Neal Shusterman

Page 13

 

  My hand passed through the glass as if there were no glass at all.

  I could see my fingers on the other side of the mirror, and I almost screamed. They were short, stubby claws. I moved my fingers, feeling how my flesh had changed once they’d passed through the looking glass. I pulled my hand back quickly, and my fingers returned to normal, tingling from the change they had undergone when they had passed through.

  Then I heard a sound behind me and turned to see the creature once more. It was breathing heavily, tears rolling down its stretched face, splashing onto its huge, bulging belly. It didn’t chase me, but loped toward me cautiously, and I grimaced. Does your face hurt? the old joke goes. Because it’s killing me.

  The creature got closer and looked at me for a long time. Then it looked down at its bloated belly and said in a wet, slippery voice, “Do I look fat to you?”

  My knees buckled. I almost fell through one of the distorting mirrors but kept enough of my balance to stay on the right side of the glass.

  “Maggie? Is that you?”

  And she sadly nodded her lopsided head.

  “Crashed our bumper car,” Maggie said as we crouched at the dead end, listening to the distant wails and explosions echoing in the maze. At first I couldn’t understand her speech, filtered through that mess of a mouth. But after a while it was kind of like listening to Shakespeare: The more I listened, the more I could understand.

  “Crashed our bumper car but couldn’t stop. Had to get another car. Had to ride. Don’t know why. Couldn’t stop. ”

  “It’s all right,” I told her. “I know what this place does to you. Tell me what happened next. ”

  She drew a deep breath and rested for a moment. It was a real chore for her to speak with her tongue so thick and her jaw so misaligned. “Found a manhole cover. Ride symbol on it. Knew it was the next ride. Pried it open. Jumped in. Wound up here. ” Maggie reached up a distorted hand and wiped away a tear from her smaller eye.

  “Where’s Russ?” I asked her. “What happened to him?”

  She shuddered. I could see that this was the hardest part for her, and I braced myself for the worst.

  “Running through the mirrors. Both of us. I fell. I fell again, through the mirrors. One mirror, then another, then another. Couldn’t find the first one. Kept trying, couldn’t find it. ” Her voice got higher and harder to understand. Now her large, swollen eye began to drip heavy tears. “Russ saw me. He saw me, and he didn’t help me. He saw me like this, and he ran. Couldn’t look at me. He ran!”

  After that her words dissolved into sobs, I reached out and took her in my arms as best I could.

  “I won’t run from you,” I told her.

  “You did!” she accused. “You did, you did, you did!”

  “I didn’t know it was you!”

  But that didn’t stop her tears. “Russ knew!” she wailed. “Russ knew, and he ran anyway. ”

  “I’m not Russ!”

  Slowly she began to calm down. Far off I heard another blast, and booted footsteps resounding through the maze, but I didn’t care about all that right now. I know this is a strange thing to say, but I’d never felt closer to Maggie than I did at that moment.

  I found myself leaning forward and kissing those swollen, sagging lips. It was the most repulsive thing I had ever done, yet it was the most wonderful. When I looked at her again, she’d stopped crying. She was still the same mess she’d been a moment before. I mean, it wasn’t like the kiss had changed her from a frog into a princess, but something had changed in both of us in that weird little moment.

  “I’ll fix everything,” I told her, promised her, swore to her. There was a way out of every ride. Cassandra had said so herself. Not just for me, but for Maggie, too. And maybe . . . maybe even for Quinn.

  “Listen,” I told her, “this path was a dead end, but the next one might not be. We’ll go together. ” I took her misshapen hand and held it tight. “I won’t let you go. ” But she was not quite ready to believe me.

  “I hate myself,” she said, not wanting to look me in the eye. “I always have. ”

  And maybe from somewhere deep down, she was telling the truth. I mean, I know I’ve hated myself from time to time. But the thing is, that feeling comes and it goes. Mostly it goes. But I figured Maggie had fallen through one of the distorting mirrors that took that tiny little feeling and made it so big that it buried everything else under it.

  “Russ was right to run from me. ”

  She must have fallen through the feel-sorry-for-yourself mirror, too. This situation was getting much too serious, so I looked at her stretched jaw. “C’mon, Maggie, why the long face?”

  “Ha-ha. ” She hit me on the arm, but I just smiled back. I can’t quite say I grew used to the distorted image she’d made of herself, but I’d stretched my own mind enough to accept it.

  “Stop looking at me!” she said, hiding her face. “I’m terrible. I’m so ugly!”

  And then I got an idea. It was either a really great idea or a really bad one, but I was willing to take my chances. I smiled at her. “You can say that again!”

  She looked at me, uncertainly. “What?”

  “You’re not just butt ugly,” I continued, “and you’re not just coyote ugly—you’re coyote butt ugly. ”

  “Shut up!”

  “You’re so ugly, your driver’s license doesn’t have a picture. Instead, it just says, ‘You don’t wanna know. ’”

  “Stop it!” she yelled, but now she was laughing.

  “You’re so ugly that . . . you’re so ugly that. . . ” But I was fresh out of lame ugly jokes.

  So she came up with one: “I’m so ugly, my face is registered as a lethal weapon. ”

  I laughed, she laughed, and before long we were both caught up in one of those silly giggle fits where you can’t even catch your breath. And it was great, because suddenly it didn’t matter what she looked like. I could see gratitude in those mismatched eyes, and they were the same shade of green they’d always been. I could still see the girl I knew.

  We wound around deeper into the maze, encountering dead end after dead end. I tried to keep track of every turn we took, but it was just too much. Every once in a while we encountered other mutated riders. Some were furious and waved their arms at us angrily. Others were terrified and ran away. Still others just sat there morosely, like orangutans at the zoo, resigned to their condition.

  “If I can just figure out the combination of mirrors you passed through,” I said to Maggie, “we could get you back to normal. ”

  “I tried,” she said. “I tried too many. I kept turning right, then left. Didn’t do any good. Each one was worse. ”

  And then something occurred to me. None of these mirrors were solid—not a single one—which meant that the mirrors weren’t actually holding us in.

  There were no walls holding us in!

  I turned to face the mirror beside me. Could it be that easy? Of course it could. What better joke for Cassandra to pull than to make the answer so obvious, you looked right past it? You walked around it, changing direction again and again and again.

  I looked at my reflection. One shoulder higher than the other, a nasty curved spine. I took a step toward the mirror, and Maggie squeezed my hand hard.

  “No! Don’t!”

  “Trust me,” I told her. There was no reason she should; I knew no more than she did. But she took a deep breath, and together we stepped forward, through the mirror.

  I felt the change like an electric shock as I merged with my reflection, becoming what I saw. I could feel the distortion inside me—the sickening swelling of organs and the shifting of bones—but I refused to panic. I held tightly to Maggie’s hand. I didn’t turn around, I didn’t turn left or right, getting confused as to which direction I started out in. Instead I stepped forward again into the next mirror. This was a really bad one, altering the way I felt about myself. I’m wrong! I’m always wro
ng! I can’t make a good decision! I felt the mirror turning me uncertain and indecisive, making me feel that no matter what I did next, I was doomed, doomed, doomed.

  Maggie felt it too. I heard her moaning and trying to loosen her grip on my hand, not trusting me, not trusting herself. If I gave in to those feelings, we truly would be doomed, so I fought my own mind and made my feet move, stepping forward again through the next mirror, and the next, and the next, always moving forward. My stride became a limping lope; my eyesight turned cloudy and full of double images as my eyes changed sizes.

  Through it all, Maggie held my hand. At the times when I came to mirrors that slowed me down because of what they made me feel, that was when she took the lead, pulling me on, even when I didn’t have the strength to move forward.

  There came a point when my body had become so unnaturally bent and convoluted that moving forward was next to impossible. One foot dragged, the other moved sideways. My whole body ached and strained against itself as if, at any moment, my joints would give way and I would collapse into a blubbery mess on the bone-ridden ground. My own frame looked as bad as these bones did, and I wondered whether they were actually the bones of other unfortunate riders or whether they were just put here to force everyone trapped in the maze to give up hope. We must have passed through twenty mirrors. I began to worry that maybe my theory was wrong.

  I stumbled, and Maggie helped me up. I felt my face and turned to her. She didn’t look much worse than she had when I first found her, but then, she couldn’t look much worse than she already had.

  “Now we’re the same,” I told her. My voice was so distorted, I could barely make out my own words.

  She touched my face, which was numb and rubbery. “We always were,” she said.

  Do you know what it’s like to be turned inside out in every way you can be and have the worst parts of yourself exposed to anyone who happens to be looking? Maybe you do—after all, it happens to us a little bit all the time. I guess lots of people would look at you and run, like Russ. But to have someone who won’t run—someone who won’t use your shame against you—that takes someone special. Having that person with you in the worst part of the maze makes all the difference.

  I honestly don’t know if I could have made it any farther on my own, but Maggie was there, and it was all right. We were the same.

  I took her hand again and kept going. If moving through the mirrors was a mistake, I didn’t care. I was going all the way, until there was nothing left of me. We pushed through five more mirrors. Ten. Twenty. Then finally the reflections started to get just a little bit better. The feelings I had inside began to lighten just the slightest bit.

  A few mirrors more, and my eyes went back to normal, the twist in my spine was almost gone, and my arms were just about the same length. I was almost myself, and when I looked to Maggie, she was almost herself again too.

  Finally we stood at the last mirror. I knew it was the last mirror because the reflection it gave back was perfect. Well, maybe not perfect, but me, in all my imperfections. As I stood there I felt the urge to look anywhere but straight ahead, as if the mirrors on either side of me were daring me to take a final glance. I resisted. I forced myself to take that giant step through the last mirror, to find myself facing a pea green sky and an endless salt flat.