The Agony House

by Cherie Priest

  That August, she’d be turning seventeen—so things were about to get really different. Or so she assumed. That’s what everyone always said, at any rate.

  But that first day in June, she saw the sticker on the bottom right corner of the soon-to-be-torn-down shop window.

  She was on her way back from the University District, where she’d been camping out in a park with her notebook—plotting a novel she hadn’t told anyone about, and waiting for her dad to notice she was gone. Her dad worked a lot, but sometimes he did it from home, not his office downtown. Even when he was home, it usually took him a few hours to look up and see that she wasn’t there anymore. They got along all right, but that was mostly because they didn’t spend much time together. May thought maybe she reminded him of her mother. She didn’t take it too personally.

  Anyway, she had a key to the apartment, and she came and went as she chose, to and from the thrift stores, bubble tea shops, and coffeehouses, where she still got hot chocolate instead of coffee. Her memories of Libby still stung sometimes, but she hung on to them. She might as well. The whole city was haunted by her.

  So the sticker on the very last building before Olive Street shouldn’t have caught her eye at all. It was vinyl, and cheap. The edge was starting to peel. The colors were a little faded. It was round with a black border.

  But within this border was the outline of a girl with shiny blue hair. She wore a pink puff-sleeved dress, a tall gold crown, and red Chucks. In her left hand, she held a purple sword shaped like a katana.

  All May could do was stand there staring at the sticker so hard that she couldn’t see anything else. Her breath caught in her throat and she tried to choke it back down, but it stuck there like a big wad of gum. She tried to cough, and that worked a little better—except then she was crying: that dry-heaving cry where nothing comes out.

  It didn’t make any sense. It wasn’t possible.

  She reached out and touched the sticker anyway, barely believing it was real. It couldn’t be, could it? She nudged her fingernail under the peeling edge, trying to pry it off in one piece—but it tore instead, and she was left holding the bottom half. The hem of a pink dress. The fire-engine-red shoes. The hand with a sword. Yes, it was definitely Princess X.

  The rest of the sticker refused to budge, so she pulled out her phone and took a picture.

  She kept staring at the stupid vinyl sticker like maybe it’d pop to life and tell her that none of it was ever true. Not the bridge. Not the car. Not the water. Not Libby’s closed casket and her empty house, with an empty room, and an empty closet where the boxes of Princess X memorabilia used to be.

  Maybe none of it was true. Or at least not the most important thing.

  Maybe Libby was alive.

  Her phone started to buzz. It was her dad. She didn’t answer his call, because she had a feeling that her voice would sound like mud, and he’d want to know why. Instead, she put the phone away and walked slowly toward home, her mind reeling with a mix of confusion and excitement. What did the sticker mean? Did someone find their old notebooks, scavenged from some distant Value Village basement? Had someone from school decided to carry the torch? Was it just some bizarre, unlikely coincidence?

  No. She didn’t believe that last one for a minute. She didn’t know what the sticker meant, but it meant something.

  “There you are,” her dad said when she came in the apartment door.

  “Here I am,” she confessed.

  “I called.”

  “Sorry,” she offered, but didn’t explain. “You want to get some lunch?”

  His shoulders lost some of their stiffness, and he relaxed into his usual slouch. “Lunch would be great. What are you thinking?”

  “Mexican,” she said firmly. If she couldn’t hold it together over Mexican food, she could always blame the tears on jalapeños.

  They wandered around the corner to a mom-and-pop joint that knew them on sight, and they slid into their preferred booth. They ordered their usual, and played the small-talk game until their food arrived.

  Once it did, he prodded at her.

  “Nothing’s wrong,” May assured him around a mouthful of sour cream and beans, but she didn’t look at him when she said it.

  “I didn’t ask what was wrong. I asked what was up. You’re … spacey. And you’ve used all the extra napkins to blow your nose.”

  She thought about lying. He would’ve liked it if she lied—if she could tell him something minor and dumb that wouldn’t inconvenience him. But May was a terrible liar, and she didn’t think it’d matter if she told him the truth. If it made him uncomfortable, well, fine. It made her uncomfortable too.

  “All right, if you really want to know …” she began slowly. “It’s about Libby.”

  He got quiet for a second. “What about her?”

  May laughed, and she wasn’t sure why. It hurt a little. “Okay, you remember that thing we used to work on? Princess X?”

  “It’d be hard to forget her. You made me and your mother drive all over town, trying to find those boxes.”

  “Of course I did. They were important. I wanted them back.”

  Things went awkward and silent until he said, “Sorry,” and looked down at his plate.

  “It wasn’t your fault we didn’t find them,” May said quickly.

  “It was nobody’s fault, I guess. But you know, for a while after you and your mom left, every now and again I’d walk by a secondhand shop and stick my head inside. Just in case they’d turned up.”

  “You … you did?” She was surprised and touched, but she wasn’t sure how to tell him that, so she didn’t.

  He grinned. “You beat the habit into me.” He took another big bite of burrito.

  “But you never found them, or you would’ve said something.” It was more a statement than a question. “So it would be really weird if Princess X turned up someplace now, right?”

  He stopped chewing. Swallowed. Took the last napkin off the table and dabbed at his mouth without ever taking his eyes off May. “Turned up … where?”

  “On a window, down on Broadway. There was a sticker.”

  “I assume you took a picture of this sticker. Show me.” He gestured with his fork.

  She dredged her phone up out of her bag. Her hands shook while she loaded the image. “Here,” she said as she handed it to him.

  Her dad squinted down at the small screen. “I’d say that’s only half a sticker.”

  “I know. I tried to pull the sticker off first, but I ripped it. Here’s the other half.”

  Despite her best efforts, the sticker had contorted itself into a cigarette-size tube of unwieldy stickiness. She forcibly unrolled it and smeared her palm across it, struggling to make it lie flat. It stuck to the plastic tablecloth, but tried to curl up again the moment her hand was out of the way.

  Her dad held the phone next to the sticker, mentally mapping them into a single image. He cocked his head to the left, then the right. “That is weird.”

  “Weird? It’s impossible.”

  “I wouldn’t say that. We didn’t find the boxes, but someone else might have. Maybe some kid picked them up someplace and thought it looked cool.”

  May slid down lower into the booth, the last bites of her enchilada grown cold. “I doubt it.”

  “You don’t doubt it,” he said. “You don’t want to believe it, and that’s not the same thing.”

  Her eyes were watering again. She fought them for control of her face, and mostly won. “Oh yeah?”

  He sighed. “I know you want to believe that Libby’s still out there someplace, drawing Princess X. But whatever this sticker means, that’s not it. I’m sorry, I really am.”

  She wanted to be mad at him, but it could’ve been worse. She could’ve been trying to explain everything to her mom, and what a wreck that would have been. Her mom would have laughed and said she was wrong about the sticker. Then she’d go back to playing Internet Scrabble, and May would get so mad that she�
��d launch into another ugly cry, and they’d fight, and May would hate her for lying about something so obvious, and not even caring about it.

  At least her dad didn’t tell her she was an idiot. He didn’t always get her, but he never dismissed her out of hand. He took everything seriously, which was great sometimes. But at that moment, May wanted the fairy tale, and if that’s what she wanted, he wasn’t the guy to talk to.

  So they quit talking about it. And once they got home, they watched the Venture Bros. on Netflix. Episode after episode, until her dad announced that it was bedtime and turned off the TV. That’s how he always preferred to change the subject: with a remote control.

  Over the next couple of days, May saw the princess everywhere.

  The one on the window, that was the first. One slapped on a stop sign. One on the side of a public mailbox. One nearly eroded from a sidewalk; it’d definitely been there awhile. One on the side of a city bus. And then she had to start making note of the graffiti too, because someone’s Princess X stencil saw a whole lot of action downtown. May found the artwork next to the storm runoff drains. Down at the Pike Place Market, beside the big brass pig across from the fish-flinging guys who always end up on postcards. Beside the world’s first Starbucks, which was brighter and more packed with tourists than Starbucks tend to be anyplace else.

  The quest for Princess X became a scavenger hunt. Every time she found an image, she snapped a picture and then asked anyone nearby—any shop workers or stall merchants, anyone who might linger from day to day—if they knew what it meant, or if they’d seen who put the image there.

  The answer was always no, no, no.

  May stalked the streets in sunglasses and earbuds, even when the sun wasn’t out and there was no music playing on her iPod, just so no one would talk to her, and she could hunt for Princess X without being bothered. She moved through the city like a spy, watching and listening without being seen or heard. She’d never had a problem being invisible, especially when she and Libby were together. Everyone had always looked at Libby.

  She kept her eyes peeled for graffiti artists and punks, watching for anyone who might be the sort to slap stickers on public property. She watched the skater kids and the cosplay girls, the students at bus stops, and the little grade-school goons with lunch boxes.

  And without meaning to, she kind of watched for Libby. Some part of her wondered if she wouldn’t find more evidence of Princess X lurking in the spots the two of them had spent the most time together, and it gave her an excuse to visit their old stomping grounds. May didn’t expect to just chase the stickers straight to Libby’s ghost or anything. She just stopped avoiding their favorite places, that was all. She hadn’t even realized she’d been doing it, but it was true—she had always stayed away from their old hangouts, taking the long way around.

  But not anymore.

  Their favorite bookstore had closed, and then turned into a record store … and then that had closed too, but the storefront was still there. May thought of the rack of comics that used to be in the back, where Libby flipped through the books endlessly, looking for any artwork cool enough to copy.

  “Copying is the sincerest form of flattery,” May used to tell her.

  She could still hear Libby’s voice, clear as a bell from three years away: “It’s also really good practice.”

  She already knew Black Tazza wasn’t open anymore, so there was no point in visiting it. She checked out the old Walgreens where, once upon a time, she and Libby used to shop for lip gloss and nail polish while they waited for the bus. There was always time to try one more swipe of lipstick across the back of their hands, testing to see if it’d look good against their skin. There was always room for one more sweep of pearl pink, candy apple, or cinnamon blush.

  She didn’t see any of those colors anymore, but she saw two other girls giggling and spreading lip gloss wands over their wrists, arguing over what looked better. Instead of getting teary, she went ahead and smiled.

  Outside on the bus stop sign, someone had slapped a Princess X sticker. That made her smile too.

  Finally, two whole days after discovering the sticker on Broadway, she caught a break.

  She was sitting in Volunteer Park at the edge of a pond, next to a fake great blue heron—a statue that hypothetically scared away the real ones so they wouldn’t eat the koi. She had opened her notebook and turned to the notes for her novel in progress, but she couldn’t concentrate enough to do much more than doodle in the margins. There was too much else on her mind, and really, all she wanted to do was sit down and write some Princess X stories.

  It had taken awhile to learn how to write by herself, without someone to sketch out the pictures she described. It was a lot harder to tell stories without a friend, and with just the words to work with—because May never could draw for crap, and she never did get much better than crap. But once she figured out a few things, writing came easy. Ideas had always been her strong suit. Now it was just a matter of getting them down on paper.

  She looked up at the enormous brick water tower behind her and tried to see it as something other than a turret in Princess X’s haunted house. It was part of a castle instead—or a prison where the worst of the worst were locked up for life.

  Then a guy with a skateboard came shooting toward her so fast that she had to jerk her feet out of the way. With a rattling clatter of asphalt-chewed wheels, he passed her by and continued up to the overlook, where a big round sculpture called the Black Sun framed the Space Needle on a clear day.

  She scowled after him. But then fading into the distance, on the back of his bag, she saw a familiar logo. It bobbed and bounced as he kicked up the board, and vanished as he set the bag aside. He dropped himself onto the edge of the sculpture’s big platform, pulled out a pack of cigarettes, and sparked one up.

  Before May even knew what she was doing, she’d picked up her own bag—a beat-up canvas messenger with an octopus on it—and slung it across her chest. She strolled toward the skater, but she’d gotten so good at being invisible that he didn’t see her until she was standing right in front of him, blocking his view of the reservoir.

  He looked her up and down without any menace or even appraisal. She thought maybe he was trying to make her step aside, using the power of his brain.

  She didn’t move. She just said, “Hey.”

  “Hey,” he said right back at her, without blinking. He was about her own age, give or take a couple of years in either direction, with scraped-up elbows and holes in the knees of his jeans.

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “Go for it.”

  She nudged his bag with her shoe. “That sticker …” she said, but when he turned the bag around, she realized she’d been mistaken. “That patch, I mean. Where did you get it?”

  He jabbed it with his finger. “This one? My girlfriend got it for me.”

  “Okay, then where’d she get it?”

  He shrugged. “The website, I guess. You can get stickers, patches, all that kind of stuff. Why? Are you a fan?”

  She swallowed hard. “Of the … website?”

  “Okay, I guess not. You got a pen?”

  She dug one out of her bag and handed it to him. He grabbed her hand and turned it over so her palm faced up. Across it he scrawled:

  She read the URL over and over again, choking on it.

  “Thanks,” she managed to say as she stepped away from him and started back down the hill.

  It wasn’t just her wacky imagination, not somebody’s cute cartoon with a coincidental resemblance, not a bad case of nostalgia showing her what she wanted to see. It was Princess X. Her Princess X. Libby’s Princess X. It was on the Internet, and that meant it was real.

  May shook her phone as though she could intimidate more battery life into it, and of course she couldn’t. But she was only a few blocks from her dad’s apartment, so she ran all the way there. She sweated through her T-shirt and sweater, which was a very attractive look, she was sure�
�but she made it home, let herself inside, then slammed the door shut and dashed for her bedroom. She grabbed her laptop and dragged it into the living room, where the wireless connection was strongest, and waited what felt like forever for the machine to boot up.

  “Dad?” she called out. It had only just occurred to her that he might be home. But he didn’t answer, and that meant he wasn’t working from the back room today. Good. She wanted some privacy.

  Her browser popped up, and she plugged in the URL that she already knew by heart. She wormed herself out of the damp sweater and threw it on the floor, then grabbed a throw from the back of the couch and wrapped it around her shoulders like a shawl.

  IAmPrincessX.com.

  There it was.

  May took a deep breath and let it out again, measured and slow.

  The website was mostly done in black and gray with pink and red accents, achieving a surprisingly dark look for a story about a blue-haired princess in a puffy dress. May dragged the cursor around—it wasn’t an ordinary arrow, but a tiny purple sword! She loved it!—and examined the page pixel by pixel.

  Beneath the banner was a large shot of the princess with her sword, flanked by the ghost of a woman on one side, and a slender, brown-haired man on the other. The woman was sad and ethereal, trailing ectoplasm and tears, with seaweed in her hair and blood pouring down the front of her dress. The man was small-eyed and angry, with too-long, knobby limbs and grasping fingers that had too many knuckles.

  And the princess herself … she was no simple cartoon anymore, but a fully fledged character. She had wild black hair with electric blue streaks, and her mouth was set in a determined line. She looked very much like May imagined Libby might, had she lived to see high school. Tough and pretty. Slim and tall. Ready to kick some butt.

  At first, May thought the page was static, but when she noodled with the cursor, drawing it over here, over there—she discovered Easter eggs hidden in the images. The ghost’s bloody chest wound revealed hover text that read, SHE DROVE FOR AS LONG AS SHE COULD. In the same way, the man’s right hand declared, PINS AND NEEDLES, PALMS AND KNIVES. The princess’s katana sword urged May, FIND THE FOUR KEYS.