The Tenth Girl

by Sara Faring

  “Where you going, sweetheart?” one calls, his taunt echoing through the air, the heckling of an unseen stranger. Perhaps the girl herself, though her blank expression suggests she doesn’t register the words. “Come sit on Daddy’s lap.”

  It is easy enough to ignore them, too, because so many of them are the damned; doomed to be trapped at Vaccaro School forever. Can they sense it yet? Can they feel the doom in their fake bones? A man struts into the house, studying its ruined contents with a mix of scorn and hunger, as if it’s a torn Advent calendar filled with half-eaten, moldy chocolates. He urinates on the caramel-colored silk on the wall, leaving a steaming stain—He shouldn’t do that to his new home, I think to myself.

  And that’s when I see her—the girl—drift from her mess at last. A flicker of white and red, diving from the patio toward the chunk of ice.

  Lord in Heaven.

  She’s going home. A home beyond the ice.

  It’s now or never. This is my only opportunity to be led to the girl’s exit into the Other world and take her place. To seal her inside and protect my cousins forever.

  I dive after her, falling fast and hard toward the ice. Freed from the constraints of my Vaccaro School body, I am so much more than it was, not less. I shoot through the air in powerful surges. Formless, shapeless, propelled forward solely by my will. I’m catching up to her, speeding through the fake air, the air no one breathes, moving in a fashion one might think of as floating, but which feels more like—yes, willing myself forward. And I’m closer than ever to the glacier looming in front of us. So close to the ice face I can feel its cold on the cheeks I no longer have. I look back, and we’re far from the hillside island. We’re farther than I’ve ever been. The entire hill house is melting into the water. Lopsided. I can see the crack in Vaccaro School, a jagged split running through it, exposing the slick of raw scales underneath.

  I try to remember how I arrived at the start. The route I took. I can smell the driver’s sweat—its tangy hamminess—and remember how I thought he might rob me and leave me for dead. I almost laugh.

  Where is he? What is he?

  I flit closer to the girl, stained in my blood, and I wonder, briefly, what abuse my body did sustain back in the house, and what abuse it has sustained before. It’s hardly a consolation that we heal here: The numbers, the strings of numbers, they’re better than any God-made atom in that case. They’re forgiving and cruel in their own ways. But they are not enough. It took befriending one of the Others—Angel—for me to know.

  I think of what the girl said about owing so much of my experience this go-around to Angel. She’s right, of course. I don’t want to believe I’ve evolved solely because of him. I don’t want to believe I’ve grown past what was expected of me or meant for me solely because of him. But I know in my implanted heart of hearts—that place where logic cannot exist—that I have done more than rewrite the rules of this place because I knew a soul like Angel. I have become capable of rewriting the rules of who a person can be.

  We loom above the ice: It is a perfect blue between us. A lint-gray cloud in the distance winks at me, then. It loosely follows the shape of a cottage. She flies for it, and I follow.

  Inside it is a small bed constructed from the same cloud. A small dresser of cloud, beside a chair of cloud. A nightstand of cloud, visibly free of contents. It’s like my bedroom, like every staff quarter in the house. But there’s also a kitchenette of cloud, too, as there was in Carmela’s hideaway for her lost daughter, with a sink of cloud, a counter of cloud, an oven of cloud, a refrigerator of cloud. Incongruous. And I see it—there, by the bed. A closet door made of cloud. I tremble. Could it be that easy? To dart inside the closet door made of cloud and enter the creator’s body, dooming her to a life inside her own game forever? I edge toward it.

  “I smell a rat,” the blood-drenched girl says, flipping around. “I’ve been followed.”

  She doesn’t lock eyes with me, but I don’t think she could. I don’t know if she can see me—perhaps she can only sense me. Disembodied characters are different from disembodied players—that much is clear, from her drifting eyes. Her hair radiates around her head in inky swirls. She presses a hand into the cloud cushion of her cloud chair, clears some space to sit. “Do you like my cloud house? Fit for a god, the Barbie DreamHouse for airheaded bitches I never had.”

  I don’t say a word. I couldn’t, anyway. I inch closer to the closet. All I need to do is dip inside.

  “You shouldn’t have come here, whoever you are,” she says, clear-eyed. “Is it you, English teacher? You know you can’t escape this place. You can explore its boundaries until your fucking character’s heart is content, but you’re trapped like a reptile in a cage.”

  I flit up to her, so close I could feel her breath if she did breathe, and she sweeps a hand across her forehead. “You are not human,” she says. “You aren’t even subhuman. If you try to leave this place, you’ll dissolve into nothing. That’s less than dust, in case you’re not getting it. You only exist inside the cloud. I only hope you didn’t tell your friends your god-awful, ridiculous escape plan, or I’ll have to spend a half hour recoding their spirits.”

  I push into the closet, finding nothing but cloud. Panic blooms inside me, threatening to choke me. But I am stronger than this panic, because it comes from me, and I am so much more than dust scattered in the wind—if only because I can, indeed, be found in nothing.

  Godlike, isn’t it?

  “You think I would be enough of an idiot not to restrict exit and entry to unauthorized users?” Her voice is calm enough, but I know she herself is no god. She is human, imperfect. Subject to rules I am no longer subject to myself. “That would be dangerous. There are usernames. I mean, passwords. And, uh, other precautions.”

  I eye the rest of the room—swing around it, darting in and out of cloud wall here, cloud wall there. Where is her exit? I flit up to her, try to take her by the shoulders, spook her, and she stiffens. Bats the air.

  She can’t see me at all, and she can’t get any purchase on me. I have no body. I am formless. And she … she is cagey. I can see it in the way she smooths her hair. She has a body here, and that is a vanity. She was never fully in control as she thought. She never expected me to free myself from my own body, to sacrifice it to this world. She doesn’t know me, the figment, at all, nor how I’ve outgrown her rules.

  For a fatal millisecond, her eyes flick over to the kitchenette.

  The kitchenette.

  And though she fights it, I catch a glimpse of her face falling before she pastes the serene smile back on her face. She crosses her legs. And I remember: She told us herself she didn’t build this place—her lost partner did. The one who said, You can stick your head in the gainsboro oven if you’re unhappy about it.

  The gainsboro oven.

  The nothing smiles at her. Its lips would be ice blue.

  I dart past her into the recesses of the oven as she leaps toward it herself, groaning like a lost soul desperate not to be locked in hell for good, pulling at my crystalline mass with palms that cannot feel me, biting at me with a mouth that cannot taste me. She’s coming with me, she’s following me, but that’s the rub, isn’t it? I’m leading, and she’s following me. She should’ve darted past me first thing. She shouldn’t have indulged her curiosity, her need to feel in control. She never should have doubted that I was at least as smart as she is.

  My truest creator and I never would have made such a foolish mistake.

  You know I have no player number. I’m divine, fool.

  220 220 220

  It takes a moment. Of a sore kind of warmth, of rippling energy. But the oven cloud parts to let me through. I swim inside; I hear her screaming somewhere, but the sound dies out, just as she will. The cloud’s warmer here: It’s gray-pink, like cracked coconut juice. The farther I swim down the canal, the warmer it gets. Walls are reddish coral. Mutable. You wouldn’t imagine the inside of a cloud to be like this. It’s close, I th
ink. And there’s no way back. For the last part, I close my eyes. The cloud matter is too thick and hot like blood to keep them open. Like milk. Like sap.

  36

  ANGEL: ONE WEEK LATER, 2020–∞

  Every time I try to reenter the game, the same warning flashes across my vision: Vaccaro School Game File Corrupted. I can’t for the life of me get past that stage of upload. I tear my hair out. Restart my systems dozens of times. Whimper in my room in increasingly stained sweatpants. Rack my brain for some kind of plan, any kind of plan.

  But, fuck, it is some kind of beautiful, at least, to feel I need plans now in the Other Place. That gentle thought wriggles up every now and then to greet me.

  Liese doesn’t bother me, if she’s even noticed I stopped playing. She never bothers me anymore, not since I took a leave of absence from school after Rob died and I locked myself in my room. She leaves a microwaved meal at my door every night and a yogurt and a sandwich there every morning, which is admittedly very generous.

  At night my mind fills with scenarios of Mavi’s possible escape. At first, they are radiant, more vivid than the darkened room around me, that’s for sure. She managed to convince Charon of her realness and bartered for an escape. She rewrote her own code and spirited herself into a perfect fairy tale, a bougie existence in Buenos Aires with an impossibly cool Significant Other and a cat named Pedro.

  But these fantasies feel hollow, as pointless as hoping that Rob or Mama will return from the dead.

  I tell myself to be grateful—to treasure the extra time I had inside Mama’s imagination. But everything feels unresolved.

  One morning, after sneaking into the empty kitchen and downing a tankard of leftover sludgy coffee, I resolve to track down Charon. I scour message boards online for any mention of Mama’s partner or the game in general, and there’s dead air in the place of any gossip or good info. No one answers Mama’s office phone line. I open my desk drawers, rifling around for the number she gave me for someone at her company once. But I must have thrown it out. I’m about to bust my head into a wall when the knife, that knife, the edge of that knife, glints at me from its papery grave at the back of the drawer.

  The knife cut too-hot treads, and now I’m here.

  A hunter’s knife. I bought it because it was the sharpest and most efficient. I knew just how to cut, and where, and with what kind of pressure, to punish myself, or to dispatch myself in exactly the way I wanted. It wasn’t long after Rob, and I was seated in this very chair, in front of my computer. It was an impulse. I knew the statistics by then: Anywhere from 30 percent to 80 percent of suicide attempts are impulsive acts. These in particular were more likely to be committed by younger, unmarried people with less physical illness. I knew all the damn statistics, and I still dragged its metal edge across my skin, shocked at the icy heat of the raw strip, overwhelmed by the horrific beauty of the beads that bubbled up instantly to meet it.

  I recoiled. Anger rushed in, a bracing fury. But then my screen lit up, bathing me in light, exposing it, and me, and what I mistakenly thought was my cowardice, and my in-box showed a new message that should’ve been filtered to spam.

  It was an advertisement for a fucking game. I won’t say which, because I don’t believe in signs, but I grimaced, and paused, and thought to myself: Motherfucking wonder, until the very end.

  * * *

  I shut the drawer on the knife. I stand up, open my bedroom door, rush through Liese’s deadening mauve rooms, so primly decorated with their silk flowers and ruffled pillows, and I crack the front door open for the first time in ages.

  The sunlight out on the street blinds me—it comes from everywhere, blanching every exposed inch. I’m still blinking to myself, adjusting, when I reach the bus stop and the city bus to Mama’s office brakes in front of me with a colossal, dusty sigh.

  It’s not an uncomfortable ride, but it feels disorienting in the extreme being immersed in the real world again. I find myself gawking at average trees and plants, marveling over the textures and colors of their leaves like I’m newly born, which I kind of am.

  Turns out the office is shuttered, dust on the windowsills. FOR RENT, reads the sign propped in the window. I can’t make sense of it.

  When I trudge back to the bus stop, I pass the homeless shelter Mama sometimes volunteered at over the holidays. I usually avoided this place because it depressed me to think of her, and there are usually junkies outside ranting and raving. But this time I also think of Mavi—think of her mentioning that she spent a few crucial nights at a Buenos Aires homeless shelter in her memory, and she’d always feel grateful to the staff. There’s a sign reading VOLUNTEERS NEEDED FOR CANNED FOOD DRIVE—and I almost smirk, thinking of our many canned meals in the house toward the end. I step inside.

  Somehow, I spend about four consecutive days at the shelter, sneaking in and out of the house when Liese and He-who-must-not-be-named are busy. I organize cans with an old woman with swollen hands and a head scarf named Mira, who is as regimented yet well-meaning as Morency, and a mustachioed guy with a bad cold named Larry, who turns out to be as sweet and gentle as Lamb. When we run out of cans to sort, I help them organize files and streamline some of their systems. Each night, I fall into bed exhausted, and I dream of Vaccaro School again. Nothing seems quite real, still, but who am I to say what real is? By Friday afternoon, Mira’s informing me that there’s no more to do for now and instructs me to go home and rest for the weekend. So I do.

  Saturday morning, I wake up and trawl through the news. That’s when I see the first details.

  Immersion Therapy Players Suffer from Catastrophic Memory Loss, the headline reads. I piece the details together, hands shaking, as more and more articles pop up on the web from different sources, each touting some new flashy little nugget. Players of various immersion therapy games have been reported by family and loved ones to be suffering from extreme memory loss and schizophrenia. My mouth goes dry as I read that one older man named Brock Deveraux briefly claimed to be a young girl of thirteen named Gisella, much to the terror of his wife of thirty years, until he “came to his senses” and remembered his identity—though his behavior was never the same. Namely, he became obsessed with Shirley Jackson and her body of work. No foul play was believed at that time, though medical experts are researching the effects of old-style immersion games on a damaged psyche.

  While I scrabble to track down Brock Deveraux, I hear a knock on my door.

  “Yes?” I shout.

  “Angel?” comes a voice. Liese’s. “Can I come in?”

  I take a deep breath in and out as I find his home address in Arkansas on Google Maps: a crummy bilevel thing, though it’s nicer than ours.

  “Sure,” I answer, even though I’m positive she’s only going to chew me out.

  She pushes in, eyeing the room with a fair amount of disgust (I’m not dirty! Just messy!), and she clears clothing from my bed with outstretched fingers like pincers before sitting. “Did you see this nonsense about video game players losing their minds?” she asks, knowing full well what Mama did for a living and how I spent my time. “Thank Christ Rob isn’t around to get hooked on this crap,” she says, and I clamp my teeth down on my tongue. “Uploading their consciousness? Do these idiots know what this even means? It’s cheap escapism. The experts are saying code could be uploaded right back into a human being if the game was old enough and lacked new security features. These jerks could be walking around with brand-new fake personalities right now. Though that might do some people I know some good.” She crosses her leopard-print-clad arms, disappointed by my lack of engagement. “Well, Angel, you’re sullen as ever. I thought you’d be out of your mood, seeing as you’ve been well enough to sneak in and out of the house every day this week. Where exactly have you been going? Do you think it’s sensible for someone in your position to be bumming around outside all day? You’d be better served by getting back on your feet and reenrolling in school. Don’t you think that’s what your mother would wa
nt you to do? It’s what Rob would do. If he could.”

  I swallow the hot lump in my throat. As if she knows what Mama and Rob would think about anything.

  Normally, I would either shut down or lash out, depending on the amount of energy I had. But I think of Mav, of her strength, of her resilience. Of her ability to stick to her intuition when she is alone in the world with it. Of her ability to know herself when those closest to her throw everything into question. And I don’t have to be a worthless sack of shit.

  “I’ve had enough, Liese,” I say softly, feeling a part of me unlock.

  Every day is an opportunity to prove we are different—to build new patterns of behavior. Life doesn’t surprise us with mystical transformations of the self. It surprises us with loss and requires that we do the rest of the fucking work.

  “Enough of what, exactly?” she says sharply. Smelling blood. She’s not a bad person, Liese, but we’ve never understood each other. And we’ve never been able to stop provoking each other, just to see if we can scrape down to a deeper level where that understanding might live.

  I’m trembling—somehow manic yet oddly calm as I answer. Eloquence coming from a place I can’t identify. “Everyone is irreparably damaged, okay? Everyone makes mistakes. I know what I did, and I’ll live with it every day of my life. I miss Rob so damn much, Liese. But I’m fighting hard to make myself better. To make myself worthy of this life. I’ll reenroll in school this semester, I promise. I’ll go to that counselor, too. But I want you to promise me you’ll give me space, too. We need to … I don’t know. We need to try to heal ourselves apart. I’m almost eighteen. I can do this, I promise.”

  I expect her to bite back—That’s rich coming from you, or You have a lot of nerve bringing up this positive psych BS. But she’s silent for a second or two. And during her silence, the doorbell rings—a tinny rendition of that song from The Sound of Music. It flusters both of us, the sound, because we never get visitors on our doorstep, and He-who-must-not-be-named wouldn’t ring.