by Shaye Easton
Behind them, Luke whispers something across the table, and the group starts laughing again. The girls smirk. I clench my fists. Around me, the wind picks up, blowing my hair in front of my face.
“Ooh, scary,” the blonde says. I realise she’s the same one I burned at the front of the school all those weeks ago. She turns on the mock sympathy. “We just figured you’d be more comfortable down there, seeing as hunched over and having a fit is your natural state.”
I can’t dignify this with a response. I won’t.
“What? No comeback?”
I turn away.
“Not gonna burn me again?”
I keep walking.
“What are you afraid of, Melissa?” and this time it’s Caden’s voice—loud, clear and serious. I stop dead in my tracks and look back. Except it wasn’t Caden—he’s not here. It’s just the girls, smiling, and the douchebags, laughing. Suddenly everything is wrong and dark. The clouds have swallowed up the sun and their smirks are all around me, big and close-lipped and creepy. My spine tingles.
“Did you see a ghost?” the blonde asks, and her voice echoes around the four walls of the courtyard. Suddenly, it’s not a courtyard anymore—it’s a box, it’s a cage. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost, Melissa.”
I shake my head and my mouth falls open. I don’t make any sound.
Two of the boys behind her are wearing hoodies over the regulation uniform. They lift the hoods over their heads and start making Ooohhh noises, their fingers dangling and dancing in the air. It’s all very immature. It’s chilling.
The wind sends my hair into a frenzy. I tuck the stray strands behind my ears with shaking hands. “You’re hilarious,” I say, and keep going, keep walking, eyes latching onto the open doorway at the other end of the courtyard like it’s my lifeline.
“Freak!” the girl shouts and she just wants attention and I was wrong, there’s nothing creepy about them at all. “I can see a loony bin in your future, Croft!”
I round the corner into the hallway and I’ve made it. I breathe.
I keep going until I emerge into the field beyond the building and the littering of trees and the lonely, dead gardens. I keep going, eyes on the ground, until I run directly into someone.
I pull back. It’s Caden Coleridge. I’ve run into him again.
“Are you alright?” he asks.
My skin is tingling. The breeze is calm back here, languid, and it touches my bare arms like a thousand invisible hands. I hug them close. “Why would you ask me that?”
He nods at my arm. I look down and realise I’ve scraped off the skin along my forearm. The blood wells up in spots, little crimson beads glittering in the patchy light.
But it isn’t what I was asking. “I thought you were ignoring me.” I don’t ask the question but it’s there: Why are you speaking to me?
“I was.”
“But?”
“Things have changed.”
“Changed how?”
He looks up, looks around, raises his hand as if touching the breeze. “There’s something I need to tell—” suddenly, he stops, his eyes widening as they focus on something over my shoulder.
I wave a hand in front of his face. “Hello? Anyone home?”
“We have to go,” he says, and his voice makes me shiver.
“I’m not going anywhere,” I reply adamantly.
“Yes, you are.” He grabs my upper arm, his fingers dangerously close to the edge of my uniform’s sleeve and tries to tug me back towards the building. “We need to leave, now.”
I look over my shoulder, following his line of sight. “I don’t under—”
Then I see him. A man in a dark jacket, striding towards us. What the fuck? “Who is that?”
Caden tugs at my arm again and my feet start moving. “We need to run,” he says, picking up the pace.
“Why? Who is that man? What’s going on?”
“Just trust me,” Caden says. “Can you do that?”
“Not really!”
“Then it’s time to start,” he replies, sending one last look over his shoulder. “Now run!”
I do as he says, breaking out into a sprint beside him and bursting back into the central building, gut-instinct driving me forward. “This way.” He tugs at my arm, leading me right. Behind us, the man has disappeared, but I don’t doubt that he’ll be back. I let Caden direct me as we run down the empty school halls, taking turn after turn until we reach the front entrance.
“We need to get to my car,” Caden says as we dash outside. I can feel my heartbeat in every part of my body, hammering in my chest, my head and my legs. My feet pound against the pavement as I run and when I send a look over my shoulder, I see the man framed in the doorway to the school—the same doorway we just ran through.
“He’s right behind us!” I yell, panic creeping into my voice.
“Just keep moving! My car’s up ahead!”
We reach the car park and I follow Caden through the maze of vehicles, skidding around them in my haste to both keep up and get away.
“Here,” Caden says, “here, here, here!” He has his keys in his hand and he unlocks a black sedan, yanking the passenger side door open. “Get in!” I slip inside the car quickly, slamming the door shut as he runs around to the other side, jumping into the driver’s seat.
As he fumbles with the keys, I look out of the window in front of me and my blood runs cold. The man—whoever he is—strides straight towards us, and now I can see his face. He’s only young, maybe in his early to mid-twenties, but he has an aura about him that seems to point to years of experience. His jaw is roughly structured and square-shaped. He has noticeable stubble growing around his mouth and along his jaw. The most abnormal thing about him, however, are his eyes: two brilliantly crimson points that seem to burn with an endless resentment. The more I look, the more I realise why they strike me as unusual—they’re changing colour.
Before my very eyes, his irises go from a deep crimson to a glowing fiery red, and suddenly I get the sense that they do much more than just change colour.
“Caden…” I say, unable to tear my gaze from the man with the glowing eyes. “Now might be a good time to get going.”
“Just a sec,” he says, and a moment later, the engine roars to life.
The man has stopped in front of the car, but his eyes only grow brighter, until it seems that he’s cradling flames in his gaze. “Caden!” I practically yell. “Drive!”
Beside me, Caden grabs the steering wheel and slams down on the accelerator. We screech backward before spinning wildly to the left. Not a moment later, I feel a force hit the tail end of the car, jolting us harshly as we skid across the parking lot. The car tilts for a moment, leaning precariously on two wheels. I hold my breath as I wait for the moment when gravity will finally send us smashing into the ground. But it doesn’t come. The car rights itself. Caden regains control and we speed off just as another blast rocks the ground behind us. I’m thrown up. My seatbelt catching me roughly and all the air leaves my lungs. But we keep going.
“What the hell was that?” Caden asks, and I think, Shouldn’t I be the one asking that question? I spin around in my seat, my eyes catching sight of the burning hole in the car’s rear end. And then further back, the man, his eyes back to black but heating up again as he runs after us.
No way… I think. That’s not possible…
But no—somehow, in some way, that man just burnt a hole in the back of Caden’s car.
With his eyes!
Chapter Seven
“Well?” Caden asks as I flip back on my seat. “What happened?”
My chest rises and falls in time with my quick breathing. I discover I can’t move. I’m frozen this way: hands gripping the seat until my knuckles whiten; eyes staring blindly straight ahead; mind racing at a million miles per hour as I process what I just witnessed. What the hell is going on? “He just—” I stutter. “He just burnt—”
Caden keeps driving and the sch
ool falls far behind us. I say, “You better have a good explanation for all this.”
He stares straight ahead, ignoring my statement. “I’m taking you to a friend of mine. He’ll know what to do.”
“Do I get to know what’s going on?”
“Depends. Do you really want to know the truth?”
“I wouldn’t be asking if I didn’t.” and now I can move again. At least, I can move my head—my hands have yet to learn that they have purpose beyond squeezing the life out the car seat. I cast a look sideways at Caden who’s deep in thought. His knuckles are white too, his hands clutching the steering wheel tightly as he works something over in his mind.
“Your disease isn’t a disease, Melissa,” he says at last, and it seems to take a great amount of effort for him to say. “You’ve been swapped.”
I sit in silence for a second, trying to comprehend it. “Swapped?”
He doesn’t give me a direct answer. “Have you ever seen those movies where the characters switch bodies?”
I shake my head.
“What about the popular one? With Lindsay Lohan?”
“Lindsay who?”
He takes his eyes off the road long enough to raise an eyebrow at me. “You don’t watch many movies, do you?”
“Not really,” I admit.
“Well, imagine if someone took out everything that made you you, and put it into someone else’s body. That’s what being swapped is.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I wish I was. When you were a kid—around four, I think—someone swapped you with another child and because you were so young, no one noticed. You became her, she became you, and life went on.”
I blink. I thought the ghost thing was weird. This is a whole new level of nuts. “Who was the other child?”
“I believe you knew her—Sara Falconer.”
I stare at him in disbelief. Sara Falconer? Sara from my childhood, from my dreams?
“How do you know that name?” I demand, thoroughly freaked. I knew he’d researched me—he made that pretty obvious the first chance he got—but there’s no way he could have learnt about her. Not without some serious investigative devotion. “Have you been stalking me?”
“What? No! Of course not. Why would you even—” I swear I can see the light bulb flick on. “You don’t believe me.”
“Of course I don’t believe you! Have you been listening to what you’re saying?”
He sighs. “Look, I get it. I sound crazy. But can you at least humour me? Just for a bit?”
I take a deep breath. “Fine,” I say, and force myself to speak calmly. “So I was swapped with Sara. Why don’t I remember this?”
“We think maybe your memories were erased.”
“We?” I parrot, flabbergasted. “It’s we now? What am I? A research project? Who else have you got stalking me?”
“You’ll find out soon enough.”
It’s not a good enough answer, but I only huff and fold my arms. “Fine. At least answer me this—what does any of this have to do with my disease?”
“You’ll find out soon enough,” he repeats. Now he’s just being mean.
“Oh sure, just drop a bomb on me and walk away. You can clean up the mess later, right? Totally fine.”
“In your defence, you’re handling this fairly well.”
It’s because I don’t believe you, Moron. Everything he’s said has just bounced right off. I’m Melissa Croft. I live with my mum and dad, Louisa and Thomas Croft. They’re my parents. This is my life. This boy knows nothing.
The radio’s a low babble, voices and melodies getting tangled up in the hum of the engine. I watch the road, refusing to speak another word. He can humour himself. I’m not participating. I’m diseased and it sucks but nothing he says can change that.
“What are you thinking?” he asks as if that isn’t a total invasion of privacy.
“I’m thinking you’re a moron.”
“But I’m a moron who makes sense, am I not?”
“No,” I reply, spying a glowing light—a spirit—as it flies up towards the clouds, freed from the weight of its old life. “No sense at all.”
***
Caden pulls up in front of a two-storey house and turns off the engine. The house is nothing out of the ordinary, blending easily in with the rest of the grey houses on the street. There’s a small patch of grass marking the front lawn, an even smaller path leading up to the front door, and a low, pointless concrete wall operating as some sort of fence. I’d never have looked twice.
Caden swings open his door and steps out. I do the same. “Your friend’s place?”
He nods. “He’s more of an uncle, really. I live here at the moment too.”
“How come?”
He looks up at the house and stops before the gate. “My dad’s on a business trip.”
Something about the way he responds makes me think he’s not being entirely truthful. “Is he really, or is that just what you tell everyone?”
Caden doesn’t look at me but I see the smallest of smiles appear on his face. “Come on,” he says, swinging the gate open. I shut it behind me after we’ve both walked through, feeling absurd. If he hadn’t just opened it, I’d definitely have stepped over the pathetic excuse for a fence instead.
Caden steps up to the front door and knocks.
“No keys?”
“It’s a temporary arrangement. Dad will be home soon.”
“What about your mum? Where’s she?”
“Corven Lake Cemetery.”
“Oh,” I say, and the sound is loud in the sudden tense quiet. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked.”
He shakes his head. “It happened a long time ago. It’s okay. Life goes on.”
Before I can reply, the door opens, revealing a man with greying hair and a rough, wrinkled face. His nose is a little crooked like it was broken at some stage and never properly reset, and his entire jaw is coated in grey stubble. At first glance, he seems like an average old man, a little scruffy around the edges, possibly drinks too much alcohol. But then I meet his eyes and I realise that couldn’t possibly be true.
They’re black. Just like Caden’s.
He frowns. “What are you doing out of school?”
“I panicked. An un—,” he cuts himself short, flashes a look at me, continues, “—someone turned up. They blew a chunk out of my car. I had to get us out of there.”
Caden’s so-called friend doesn’t appear particularly concerned. He may, at a glance, look like a typical scruffy old man, but his black eyes tip the whole look out of whack. He’s not the nice old guy who has too many plants and collects his morning paper in his pyjamas and invites you over for tea and biscuits. He’s the creepy old man peering at you from behind his blinds as you walk down the street, who everyone suspects has a body buried in his backyard or a terrifying collection of metal saws in his basement.
“I’m Randall,” he says, “but you can call me Rand. You must be Melissa.” He steps forward with a sudden burst of energy to shake my hand.
I keep my hands by my side. “I can’t—”
Rand blinks at me. Then something seems to click and he tips his head back to laugh. “Right. Of course.”
“You know me?”
He chuckles. “Sweetheart, everyone knows you.”
I stiffen. “Who’s everyone?”
“Come inside,” he says, ignoring my question. He moves to one side, drawing the door open wider. I take a step and stop before him, my feet hitting a faded green mat. “Who’s. Everyone,” I repeat, refusing to have my questions swept aside. I was brought here against my own volition, and I want someone to answer for it.
He looks down at me, then right at Caden. “Strong personality,” he mutters and walks off down the hall.
I glare after him, anger swelling within me. Caden places a hand on my shoulder. “Let it go. You’ll get your answers when he’s ready to give them.”
He continues on past, but I don’
t move an inch. “Why don’t you just tell me then?”
“I’m not meant to,” he says, pausing to look back in my direction.
“But what about that swapped thing? You told me about that.”
“I shouldn’t have.”
I frown. “Why? Because Rand said so?”
“Because everyone said so,” he replies—although his tone indicates that he is less than happy about it himself—and continues down the hall.
As I follow, I take notice of the house’s interior. Light wooden floorboards. Creamy beige walls. There’s a wooden staircase to my left and on my right, an open door leads into what I take to be a kitchen and dining area. Ahead of me, the hall spans the length of the house before opening up into a living room, a couch poking out from around the corner.
The house itself is quite modern—all clean angles and polished metal fixtures and contemporary hanging lights—but the furniture and possessions I pass look like things you’d buy at a secondhand shop. Tables and chairs made from dark scratched wood. Mirrors and paintings with ornate yet tarnished golden frames. A faded red and gold floral runner with fraying tassels. Atop wooden shelves, painted vases and standing photo frames and ceramic trinkets sit gathering dust. In the corner of the living room, there’s even a gold metre-tall statue of a woman draped in linen cloth, holding a pan of water above her head.
Rand’s already sat himself down on a worn used-to-be yellow couch. He gestures for us to sit, and I reluctantly take a place next to Caden opposite him.
Rand doesn’t waste any time. “What do you know?”
“Excuse me?”
“It’s not like Caden kept his mouth shut. What has he told you?”
“Uh…”
Caden interjects. “She knows about spirits and ghosts, and saw a man blow a hole in my car with his eyes. I also may have mentioned she was swapped with Sara Falconer,” he adds.
Rand’s eyes skip to Caden, and I swear he’s about to get angry. But whatever emotion I caught building up melts away in the next moment. He shakes his head, smiling lopsidedly. “See what I mean,” he tells me.
“I suppose I’m here because you have a theory about my disease?”
