by Sarah Porter
I guess Elena can hear the difference in me because she rests her hand on my shoulder. She’s actually too nice of a person to keep up the aggro act for long. “Not to me. To this old, scruffy guy with an extremely creepy voice, like a little girl’s. Do you know who that was?”
How can things keep getting worse? “No idea.” I finally turn to face her. “Elena, listen, I really need to know what they were saying. Just the fact that it was about Ruby…”
“How can you not know? You were really that far gone?” She doesn’t expect an answer, though. “I only heard part of it. And most of what I did hear didn’t make much sense. But the old guy said something like, You should give me Ruby. Something about a trade? And your alter ego got pissed off. I think threatened to kill him, even.”
Dashiell’s planning to use my body to go around committing murders? That sounds like a fantastic idea. And would giving somebody Ruby mean what I think it means?
“Everett, listen…” Elena pulls me closer. I can feel her breath on my cheek. “Will you please just tell me what’s happening to you? Because there’s no way I can believe you aren’t in trouble, not when I’ve just heard some alter-ego thing talking through you.”
“He’s not my alter ego,” I say. “But I shouldn’t even tell you that much.” I guess I am in trouble, but it’s not like there’s anything she could do to help, even though it’s sweet that she wants to. I’d rather die than let her get tangled up in this, anyway. “He’s just, like, hanging out.” That makes me laugh again, but sort of hysterically.
“He has to be. Part of you, I mean. He kept saying that Ruby is his sister. His darling sister, even. So what else could he be?”
I don’t answer that—and Elena is seriously too smart for silence to throw her off. I’d have to actively lie my ass off to stop her from doing the math, and I can see it in her face: her eyes go wide when she gets it, then narrow again as she shoves the idea away. Too crazy.
“So, my—whatever he is—he definitely told the old guy no? He said, You can’t have Ruby?”
“Those were his exact words, as it happens. How did you guess?” Okay, that would be more sarcasm. She’s looking for a less insane hypothesis than the true one, I can see it, and all the alternatives involve me being either psychotic or a massive liar. It’s funny that she was just talking about cats, because there’s one rubbing at my ankles right now—nosing me pretty hard, like it would enjoy watching me trip and break my head open.
“I know him really well, is how,” I tell her, and the hysterical laugh is back. I can’t stop it. “We’re close.” I hold up crossed fingers. “I mean, like that. We’re the absolute closest.” So close that I share his memories. So close that I was about to experience his death from the inside, and I would have gone through with it if I wasn’t worried about you.
“Goodbye, Everett,” Elena singsongs, parodying the kind of chirpy girl that she definitely isn’t. “See you and your whatever around!” I watch her stomping away from me, her blue-streaked hair fluttering, her blue fuzzy jacket reflecting in the plate glass on the stores. I’ve never seen Elena this angry before, and we’ve been in the same classes off and on since kindergarten. But, really, the more she hates me the better. Dashiell’s about a million times too interested in her, I can feel it. What the hell was he thinking, coming out and showing himself to someone I have to deal with every day? And if she tells everybody—
She won’t, though. I realize why I didn’t ask her to keep her mouth shut: it’s because I knew I didn’t have to. Asking her to keep it a secret would have basically been an insult.
Realizing that kind of makes me love her a tiny bit. But not too much. Because that would be a terrible idea. As terrible as Dashiell trading Ruby, though for what? When he was a kid he liked action figures, but now?
I’m just heading up the steps of our house—right, I’m supposed to be grounded—when I feel Dashiell tense inside me like he’s just noticed something that bothers him. You’ll have to stand down for a while, Never-Ever. I’m afraid it’s important. Don’t go kicking up a fuss.
And our brownstone topples into blackness in front of my eyes. Fine. I can’t deal with being myself anymore, anyway. The last thing I feel is one hand digging out my keys in a hurry while the other grabs my phone, and then I’m under. Nobody in particular, floating peacefully along in the slime of nothingness.
Maybe it would be the perfect solution to this mess if I just stayed here. At least it’s nice and dark.
RUBY SLIPPERS
It’s Everett; Ever with Dashiell streaming through him again. His fingers twirl my hair and then give a little tug, and his face is so near mine that I have to squirm away before I can sit up. My head is throbbing; the painkillers must have worn off.
“Ah, Miss Slippers, didn’t I ask you to kindly stick to alternative dreams—to any dream but that one, in fact? Doesn’t that leave you enough options? You could have dreamed about a meadow full of towering rabbits, a ship caught in a storm, a little hut on chicken legs, but no. You had to go and put yourself in danger again. I can’t always be on hand to extract you.”
“Where’s Everett?” I ask. My voice comes out in shrill bursts and I can’t control it. The shadows in Dash’s eyes sway like branches at Everett’s name, and I know he knows exactly what I just saw. “Everett just called me.”
“Where do you think he is?” Dashiell smiles at me; Everett’s mouth is bending in a strange wind. “He’s still a bit depressed over his tiff with you this morning, but he’s perfectly safe, Ruby-Ru. Just like you’ll stay safe, if you’ll only listen to me and keep away from zones that I’ve warned you are unhealthy for both of us. Never is exhausted. He’s taking a much-needed rest.”
“Dash, I saw what happened to him! You know I did. There was blood all over him, his shirt was soaked, and his throat … I can’t understand how you could do that.” He’s sitting on my bed and I’m squeezed against the wall, as far from him as I can get. He reaches out and catches my hand in his, then drags my fingers from the bottom of Everett’s chin down to his collar: warm skin shaken by a pulse like footsteps wandering through an endless corridor.
“Never-Ever made a choice, my Ru, and he was entirely aware of what he was doing. He joined forces with me of his own free will, and I made the process as easy for him as I possibly could. You can feel for yourself that his throat didn’t suffer any lasting damage from the episode. Did it? Hasn’t he been blasting away at his video games and bickering with you, as physically intact as ever?”
Maybe all of that is true, but it doesn’t make me feel any calmer.
“But he felt it when you did that to him! He must have been scared out of his mind, and he went through as much pain as he would have if—if that happened in real life.” My voice drags out of me in a thread of sound, stitching into silence so that I can barely get out the words. Dash still has a grip on my hand.
“And how do you know that, Miss Slippers? You almost sound as if you were speaking from personal experience.”
I can’t believe he can say this to me, not when we both know.… All I can do is gape at him, breathing hard and trying to stop the heat flooding my face and eyes. Dashiell stares back, then sighs and yanks my wrist so hard that I topple forward.
Straight into his arms. I’m struggling but he keeps me clamped tight against him, with his cheek pressed to mine and his breath rushing in my ear.
“Dash, let me go!”
“It was only a dream, my sweet Ruby Slippers. A bone of vision, buried deep beneath the earth. But even so, even knowing that you wouldn’t be harmed in the slightest, drowning you was still the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. There. We’ve come to the crux of what’s troubling you, haven’t we?”
There’s nothing left inside me but formless aching. How can I make that into words? I’ve stopped fighting and my forehead falls onto his shoulder. I could almost forget that this shoulder has been Everett’s for sixteen years, because even the blood thrumming in my ear
sounds like Dashiell: a tone deeper than a voice.
“This is all happening because of me, Dash? I’m the one who let you come home?”
“You brought me home, Ruby-Ru. You passed through a terrible ordeal for my sake, but that was the only way you could get me out of that place. And you have no idea what you saved me from, sweetness. Are you sorry that you did?”
The river enclosing me in its cold body, the water reaching deep into my lungs. Somehow I hadn’t thought about the possibility that Dash might have done that to me out of desperation—that the pain and terror I went through might have been trivial in comparison to everything he’d been suffering. Maybe he didn’t have any choice.
“Dash? What happened to you? That place—is that where everybody ends up when they die?”
“Not everyone, no. A very small percentage, as far as I can make out. There are certain conditions that make some of us more susceptible to getting trapped in the borderlands. There’s what you might describe as a fickle quality to our deaths, as if we’d been caught sporting with our own mortality, so maybe getting stuck is our punishment for indecisiveness? And then there are some among the dead in that place—the cruelest ones—who choose to take advantage of the fact that not everyone can get across. Do you understand, Ruby-Ru?”
“A little,” I tell him. Take advantage? I want to ask what they were doing to him but the words halt in my throat. If Dash isn’t telling me the details, it’s probably because he knows I couldn’t stand to hear them. Just thinking of Dashiell being trapped is enough to make me want to claw and thrash at the limits of my own skin.
“The people in control there were vicious when they were alive, the worst kind of gangsters and sadists, and they’re vicious now. And my only hope of escape was through you. My lady of slipping and sliding would be the keyhole where I could effect my own slipping away. But for that I had to hurt you, Ru.” I’ve been pressed against him for so long that when he tips me back flaming hoops wobble in my vision. He holds my face in both hands. “So are you sorry now that you swam out to me? If there had been enough time for me to explain, would you have refused and abandoned me there?”
His thumbs brush the tears from my cheeks. I hadn’t known I was crying.
“No,” I tell him, and I know it’s true. Even if the consequences of what I did are brutal and terrifying, I never could have left him alone in that nightmare. “I would have come for you, Dash. No matter what I had to go through.” I’m still figuring it all out. “But then—if I’d already brought you home, weren’t you living in me? The way you’re in Everett now?”
“Exactly so. That’s how I was able to discuss the situation with him.”
“Then why did you have to hurt him, too? Dash, if you were safe, you didn’t need to—to do what you did to him!”
Because it would be one thing if it was just me. That would be so, so much easier for me to accept than the thought of Ever suffering.
Dash’s face tightens, and I almost think he’s angry with me for challenging him.
“Ru. I did need to. Because it wasn’t easy for you, carrying me on your own. Never and I were both there that day by the East River, remember. We agreed that the strain was too much for you, and Never chose to step in.” A pained smile twists his mouth. “He wanted to protect you from me, if you can imagine that, Ruby-Ru. As if there was anyone, living or dead, who cares about you more than I do. I’ve done my best not to take offense, but it’s been a real struggle.”
I’m listening to Dash, watching him billow inside Everett’s face like wind throbbing in a sail, here in my ordinary robin’s-egg blue room on what should be an ordinary autumn afternoon. A skateboard rattles along the street outside and leaf shadows crest on the curtains. And at the same time I’m still picturing Everett, his face waxy and bloodless above the crimson trench opening his throat, and Dashiell with his head lolling back and the needle in his arm. Did I wound one brother to save the other? Could I have done anything else?
“Dash? Were you murdered?”
Bizarrely he laughs at that, though his brows are still drawn and his smile is more like a grimace. “Ah, Miss Slippers, I’ve been wondering when you’d ask me that. It’s not a simple question.”
“How can that not be simple? Either somebody else did that to you, or…”
He shakes his head. “It isn’t a binary choice, Ru. Not in the least. Let’s just say that my death had a number of components, and murder might have been one of them.”
“That doesn’t make any sense, though!”
“In any case I believe that you’re the one who owes me an explanation. Didn’t I explicitly warn you against returning to that dream again? I thought I’d shut down the routes you’d be likely to follow there, too. So how did you wind up there?”
I’m lost again. Dashiell’s words carry my thoughts down dizzying channels and I can barely understand. “It was my phone.”
“I could tell that you had your phone with you. Very unusual, carrying an object from this side into the dreamspace that way. How did that come about?”
“Someone called me. I guess I was already asleep, and I didn’t know it? And then my phone pulled me down a storm drain.”
His forehead is furrowed. “Was it Mabel? She wouldn’t be likely to think of using a telephone as bait, though.”
“Someone else. He tried to get me to climb a fence to him.” Everything that happened before I saw Everett’s corpse seems faded, uncertain, and I’m straining to remember. “His head was a dollhouse.”
“His appearance is no help to me. Can you recall anything else? This could be important, Ru-Ru.”
“He said he’d been a movie director.”
Dashiell cracks up laughing so hard that tears come to his eyes; he almost sounds relieved. “Oh. That idiot. They’ve taken so much from him that he can’t remember his own name, but it hasn’t made him any less vile, has it? If he’d only asked me, I could have told him he’d be wasting his time making a play for you. It would be beyond his comprehension, though, that a girl your age could be so much smarter than he is.”
“He wanted—the same thing you did? To get out?”
Dash stops laughing. “If only that were all, Miss Slippers. I’m afraid the fact that you’ve taken me on—it will make the others regard you as a hot prospect, to express it crudely. Easy, if you’ll excuse the term. And ditching their bodies hasn’t made them lose their old desires; it’s only made it impossible for them to scratch all their nasty little itches. What they’d do with a sixteen-year-old girl in their possession doesn’t bear thinking of. You can’t let yourself slip into that dream again, but if you do you need to stay far away from everyone. No matter what they try to use to coax you closer. Do you understand me?”
I understand enough that nausea rolls in the pit of my stomach. “I think so.” But I can’t stop picturing Ever. The gash in his throat seems to run across the blue wall in front of me; the plaster peels back and blood gurgles through staring arteries. “Dash, I mean, when Everett came to you—in that dream, and you say he was making a choice—”
Dash looks bored now; I can’t help seeing it. He’s been playing with my hair all this time, but now he lets me go and tips against the wall. “Yes, Ru-Ru?”
“Did he know what you were going to do?”
“Never-Ever knew precisely what would happen. We’d discussed it. And he accepted that pain out of love for you. His attitude grated on me, I admit, but I had to admire the nobility of the impulse.”
“If he did that for me, then isn’t it my fault?”
“How could someone else’s choice be your fault? It was a difficult experience for him, but Never will be a better and a stronger man because of it. If anything, Ru, you gave him a chance that he needed desperately, if he was ever going to appreciate his own worth. Never proved his mettle, and he did it for your sake. No one can take that from him.” Dashiell tips his head and considers me for a long time, and I’m sorry I ever doubted him. “But you’re t
he one who did it for me, sweetest Ru. You’re the only one who would. And I won’t forget that.”
He leans in and kisses me on the mouth. So softly and slowly that it’s almost like Everett isn’t still here between us.
ALOYSIUS
Charlie comes knocking catside to inform me of matters that need my attention. He intrudes just as I’m getting into the spirit of the thing, disemboweling a plump rat behind some garbage cans. One must take one’s little pleasures as they come. But, well, if Charlie’s report is accurate—if my temporary removal from the scene has led to such an act of insolence—then ceding the froth of blood on my jowls is a sad necessity.
Seven decades of death haven’t sufficed to teach the sad fool anything, it seems. He might have recalled the punishments he’s endured in the past. He might have deduced that we can strip him of all he has left. Do you try to snatch so fine a rat as she is—all of sixteen, pink and beaming—from the cat’s jaws and still escape a maiming? Not if I’m the tom in question.
No beating heart is presently on hand to provide us with their mental frills and furbelows, palaces or lilies or spinning wheels as the case may be. When no one living happens to be visiting us, we enjoy a scenic view of gray haze. An equally gray river. In the haze, the ruins of a man await, pinned in place for my convenience.
“I believe you were aware that I’d taken an interest in Miss Bohnacker?”
He lacks anything that might be termed a personal appearance, as do I, but it’s no trouble for us to recognize one another. “Aloysius! I was only teasing her. A little harmless flirtation as she happened to be strolling by. I thought it would warm her up to the idea. Make her more welcoming to you, when the time comes.”
“You called me Aloysius.” He doesn’t respond. “Can you recall other names? The names of your three wives, perhaps? Your four children?”
“Four? There were four?” He yanks at his bonds. Tantalus’s tongue uncoils to lap the sweet juice of information. “Aloysius, were they fine boys? Are they still alive?”
