But she’d never thought about what it had been like for Scott. She’d never considered the effort he’d put into helping her, or the sacrifices he’d had to make just to bring her the books she was too lazy (or too much of a truant) to get herself.
And there’s more to it, isn’t there? Mary had to face the fact that there was.
Have I been taking advantage of Scott?
It was a brand-new thought. She’d always assumed that Scott did what he did—helped her—out of kindness, because he was, well, such a sweet guy. It never occurred to her that Scott might have ulterior motives. Like, say, an enormous crush on her. She’d never dreamed that she was asking a lovesick boy to perform menial tasks and leveraging his crush to get what she wanted.
But that’s not really true, is it?
Mary had to admit that it wasn’t.
Because who was she kidding? Of course she knew Scott had a crush on her. She’d seen his eyes skate over her body many times (not just that night two weeks ago when he’d appeared at her apartment door with her books). If she wasn’t aware of Scott’s attraction, then why did she flirt with him? Why did she play it up the way she did, getting close to him, calling him sweetie and honey, touching his shoulder, kissing his cheek? (The memory of how that had felt for Scott—that desperate, mournful cocktail of fear and desire and frustration and loneliness—was completely vivid.) She’d been taking advantage of Scott for a long time; really, as long as she’d known him.
How often have I done that? Just demand that the people around her help her? As far as Scott was concerned, she had to admit that she couldn’t remember a time when she wasn’t leaning on him. Didn’t I introduce myself just to get the notes for a math quiz? she thought uncomfortably. I did, didn’t I?
It was even worse than that. Scott knew it. He could see it in her eyes. Mary thought she was fooling Scott, but she wasn’t.
And yet he does it all anyway, she marveled. He knows what I’m doing—he knows the score—and yet he doesn’t stop; he still does what I ask.
Mary was fascinated, engrossed with what she’d realized. She kept propelling Scott’s soft body forward, her mind overwhelmed by these new revelations. I take advantage of Scott, she admitted. I totally take advantage of him—and he suffers, because of me. She thought about Scott’s memory of hauling her books all over Manhattan and nearly felt sick. I’m sorry, Scott. I’m so sorry.
THE FIFTY-NINTH STREET subway station was much more confusing than Mary had realized—she hurried onto a departing train, jamming Scott’s thick body in among a harried crowd of late-morning commuters, only to realize, four stops later, that she was going in the wrong direction. She pushed through the irritated crowd, escaping, only to realize that she’d disembarked at a local station and would have to climb to the street to catch the train headed back the other direction.
By the time she got to Chadwick, Mary’s body—Scott’s body—was covered in sweat, and she was panting hoarsely as her heartbeat thumped dangerously. Heart attack; Jesus Christ, I’m going to have a heart attack, she thought dazedly as she collapsed against the cast-iron mailbox on the corner of Eighty-second Street. Her lungs were on fire; she felt like she’d smoked an entire pack of Trick’s Dunhills in one night. She gasped, burping slightly (and tasting blueberry), and had a single, horrifying moment when her vision darkened and she was sure, absolutely positive, that she was about to vomit, but she waited, the taste of blueberry Pop-Tarts replaying through her mouth as she coughed up spit, and then she felt all right; she could see and breathe again.
This morning, she thought again, incredulously. It was beyond real—the overcast sky, the crowds of students in front of the school, the cell-phone calls and blaring headphones and endless screeching of the younger children; Mary took it all in, through the haze of pain.
Scott Sanders was not in shape—that much was obvious to anyone—but Mary had never stopped to realize how much it hurt when he tried to exert himself. Back in eighth grade when Scott had just barely missed the school bus that was leaving for Chadwick’s famous year-end day trip, all the students had laughed, pointing out the windows at his diminishing figure as he tried, and failed, to catch up. Mary had laughed just as loudly as the rest of them. She remembered it vividly, staring through the bus’s safety glass window at Super-Dork Scott running pathetically after them, finally collapsing against a parked SUV and—for the grand comic finale that Scott always managed to orchestrate back then—setting off its car alarm, which made the entire eighth-grade Chadwick class applaud in unison. The bus drove away and left Scott on the sidewalk, his anguished red face vanishing into the streetscape behind them. Mary had thought it was hilarious.
Now, with her lungs burning like twin blowtorches, she didn’t see what was so funny.
Trick …?
Her own voice, in the back of her head. Unusually vivid; it didn’t sound like a memory at all. Mary didn’t know what had made Trick’s name pop into her head, but—
“Come on.”
Trick’s voice, Mary realized instantly. It was hard to hear; difficult to pick out in the crowd. “Let’s walk.”
“Walk?”
Mary’s own voice again—also distant.
I’m not remembering, she realized suddenly. I’m hearing that.
That’s really me.
Mary craned her—Scott’s—neck, squinting as she strained to see. It wasn’t easy. Scott’s short body was getting battered around by the thickening crowd of Chadwick students as Mary pressed forward, trying to catch a glimpse of herself. She’d seen Trick’s golden curls, just for a second, but then her view was blocked again.
She hadn’t intended to scream—not at first. But the moment she saw herself—saw freshly showered Mary Shayne in her darling little FCUK T-shirt and her billowing trench coat and her blown-out hair—she was overcome with a frenzied need to protect herself from everything that was coming.
“Mary!” she screamed.
A clump of first graders in front of her turned toward her, their mouths and eyes wide open, like alarmed cartoon characters. As soon as she got her breath back, she screamed again. “Mary! Mary!”
The crowd was moving now, surging closer. Somebody’s hand slapped Mary in the face as another student pin-wheeled around, startled. The view through the crowd on the sidewalk was wide and deep, flickering with movement. She realized she was moving again, feeling Scott’s muffin-top fat rolling up and down as she stumbled forward. She couldn’t see Patrick or herself through the rest of the crowd, when—
There. Eye contact—Mary Shayne’s bright blue eyes, looking right at her.
“Mary, look out!” she screamed. “Look out, you’re in danger!”
Scott’s glasses tumbled from his face, dropping to the pavement—she heard their gold frames clattering and scraping against the cement. Blinded, she kept running through the blur.
But that’s me! she thought desperately. It’s still morning—I don’t have to do any of it! I’ve got time to get away.
“Mary, for Christ’s sake—” she screamed again. Her voice—Scott’s voice—was rasping so painfully that she had to start over. “Mary, you’ve got to listen—you’re in serious danger—”
It was like slamming into a tollbooth gate at high speed. The pain was incredible as Mary’s chest—Scott’s chest—slammed into some kind of horizontal immovable object, like a padded bar of cement.
“Hey, assface!”
Pete Schocken’s voice, from right up close. Mary couldn’t see a thing, but she suddenly smelled spearmint gum.
“What the hell, man?”
Definitely Pete. Mary was astonished. For years, Mary had thought of Pete as a buzz risk—a boy not to be around when he’d had a couple too many trips to the keg, because a drunk Pete Schocken would always manage to make the World’s Most Inept Pass at one of the girls (okay, at her) before the evening was over. He was basically harmless and he never remembered any of it by Monday morning, but pushing his hands away while trying
not to spill a plastic cup of Belvedere vodka onto someone’s kitchen floor was not how Mary liked to spend her time when she went out.
But Pete’s so nice, she marveled. He had never seemed to have a mean bone in his body, as far back as she could remember. He was a teddy bear, a sweetheart, a boy who would always buy you another drink or call you a cab. Hearing him call anyone an assface—let alone her—was as shocking as hearing a nun say it.
“Mary, please listen,” she tried again, panting as she shouted some more and her throat burned. The football players were surrounding her, pressing in, and she couldn’t see a thing. She had to assume that Real Mary was still within earshot. “You’ve got to get out of—”
It was like getting struck by lightning—her vision flashed white and her ears popped as she was smacked, powerfully, in the face. Her eyes were stinging; she was now truly blind—the pain spread across the skin of her cheeks like flame through paper.
“Chill out, you goddamned freak!”
That’s Silly Billy, she recognized distantly. Billy Nelson—another boy she’d never imagine raising a hand to hurt anybody—calling Scott Sanders a “goddamned freak,” his voice booming down like God yelling the Ten Commandments.
“Mary, run!” Mary screamed again. “Please listen—you’ve got to—Ow!”
A fist collided with her collarbone, hard. She’d never stopped to think about how hard a boy could hit you if he was really trying, if there was nothing to hold him back. She lost her balance, tipping over backward as she kicked with Scott’s short legs and felt her feet slip. Real Mary still hadn’t responded—she seemed to be getting further away. Scott’s book bag slipped from her rounded shoulders and thumped to the ground, its contents spilling out. She landed against somebody’s crumpling legs, and the sidewalk was pressed against her cheek, rough and cold. Between somebody’s running socks, she could just make out the diminishing figures of Patrick and Real Mary, walking farther down Eighty-second Street.
“Mary, run!” she screamed one final time. Real Mary didn’t pay any attention at all—she just kept walking away.
No, no, Mary thought weakly as she rolled painfully up from the ground, trying to pick out individual voices from the yelling and laughing all around her. Please, no more … I can’t take anymore.
Her face was swimming in a sea of red—Scott’s book bag, she realized, wiping tears and dirt from her eyes and face, staring at the red fabric as she gasped for breath. They had stopped hitting her; that was the important part. It meant she could—
Mary froze in place, on all fours on the crowded sidewalk, staring down at the contents of Scott’s bag, which had corkscrewed out along the sidewalk. Shama’s physics test, and an iPod, and a stack of notebooks—
—and a roll of silver gaffer’s tape.
The spool of tape rolled lazily across the cement, circling like a dropped coin. Mary stared at it, mesmerized—in her memory, Joon squealed and twisted and panicked in the slashing, freezing rain, the silver tape over her anguished mouth, blocking her screams.
Inside the book bag, Mary finally saw what she’d been carrying, why the bag had felt so heavy. Coils of thick white nylon rope—yards and yards of it—were stuffed inside, nearly filling the bag.
It was Scott, Mary thought dazedly. Oh my God—it was Scott!
Was that even possible? Could Scott have killed her?
The stampede of students had somehow missed what had happened; they kept moving, legs and hands colliding with her as she stared into the bag. There was something else in there, something she didn’t recognize at all—a folded sheet of silver cloth. She had no idea what it was, or why Scott had it.
Was sweet little Scott Sanders a murderer?
Another, even stranger possibility occurred to her right then—a new thought that made her feel a deep, arctic chill.
Have I come back as my own killer?
Was there some cult or religion in which that happened? The murder victim comes back as her own murderer? Mary didn’t know anything about cults or religions. It sounded more like The Twilight Zone than any kind of—what did you call it?—theology.
But I’m here, she told herself, staring at the tape. She was still sitting on the sidewalk. I’m here, and I’m Scott—and it looks like he killed me.
The woozy feeling was coming over her in earnest. Bright lights, bright sky—it was all very bright. Scott killed me, she thought again, but somehow the idea seemed harmless, meaningless—she was drifting, she realized, losing her bearings, returning to whatever strange white void she’d first encountered ninety minutes ago, when she woke up in Scott’s bedroom.
“You okay, Sanders?” A distant voice—she couldn’t recognize it. It was a voice from another planet, coming from far, far away.
Is this it? Mary wondered as the brightness from the chrome reflections and flecks of mica and the dazzling sky grew brighter and brighter. The whiteness engulfed her like the whitecaps of a coastal tide flooding a beach, like snow engulfing a landscape, covering all detail, blotting out all shapes and colors, washing the world away into an endlessly bright field of white.
2
JOON
BLINDING WHITENESS, A FLASH of lightning, silent and bright, like platinum fire; the roar of heavy rain and the freezing sting of cold water on her face. Mary blinked at the pain of the bright light, the afterimages fading as she shook the water from her eyes.
Oh my God, it hurts—
She had been lying on the sidewalk, nursing the pain of her—Scott’s—bruised backside and thighs, and then, with all the smoothness of a particularly good DJ mix, she was somewhere else, with incredible pain running through her arms.
It was difficult to breathe; something was covering her face. She didn’t know what it was.
What the hell—? Where am I?
Her eyes finally cleared and she looked around, gritting her teeth at the incredible agony in her arms. She was suspended, she finally realized; her arms were pulled straight upward, with the entire weight of her body hanging straight down. She struggled, wriggling in place, and felt herself swinging like a pendulum, which made the pain in her arms even worse.
Lightning flared again, a silent fire like a photographer’s flashgun, and Mary saw where she was.
She was outdoors, at night, in the middle of a rainstorm, surrounded by primeval forest, suspended from high above by ropes that cut into her wrists like barbed wire. Straining to tilt her head upward, black hair falling in her eyes, Mary saw the thick ropes stretching far overhead, converging in the blackness above.
Tipping her head downward, she felt a horrifying wave of vertigo and nausea come over her. She was high up in the air, suspended over a vast drop.
Far below, a wide, rushing stream was raging like a river, casting foaming spray around jagged rocks, running down a steep incline toward a tremendous black culvert beneath a spillway of moss-covered boulders. She got all that in one flash of lightning—just the bare outlines, lit up like an X-ray—but it was enough. The vertigo was overpowering; it reminded her of the feeling she’d gotten once, years ago, when she made the mistake of leaning as far as she could over the edge of the Brooklyn Bridge guardrail.
Straight ahead, she could just discern a pale haze of yellow light, and in front of it, a wide black mass.
Mary tried to scream—and couldn’t. Her mouth was sealed shut.
She heard herself making a desperate, high-pitched wail, like the crying of a wounded, trapped animal.
And suddenly, Mary realized where she was.
It’s changed, she realized. I’m somewhere else—I’m someone else.
She had spent an hour—if that—as Scott Sanders at the beginning of that same Friday, the day she died. Just long enough to get to Chadwick and try to warn herself to run from all the horrible events to come.
But it hadn’t worked.
And, just as she’d discovered what Scott had in his book bag—something that barely began to explain the mystery of what had happened to
her—she’d gone somewhere else. She’d become someone else.
And she knew where she was, of course. The slipping headband and the glitter of the sequined dress she was wearing only confirmed it.
I’m Joon, she thought, incredulously. I’m Joon, hanging from the tree. I’m about to die—I’m about to fall to my death.
The black mass in front of her—the enormous shape looming like the evil witch’s gingerbread house in the fairy tale—was the deserted house; the farmhouse she’d driven to, with Amy, after panicking that Joon had been abducted at her surprise birthday party.
The glow behind the house was coming from the headlights of Patrick’s Mercedes. Amy never turned the lights off, Mary remembered.
She barely managed to avoid vomiting, realizing it would be fatal—there was nowhere for the vomit to go, with the wide piece of gaffer’s tape that was plastered over her mouth—as she felt the ropes vibrate and shake, and, a few feet above her, begin to fray and snap.
No, no, no—
Mary remembered vividly what had happened to Joon.
The raging stream far below was bubbling and roaring, miniature white-water rapids splashing the jagged, mossy rocks that were scattered between its banks.
I don’t understand, Mary thought miserably. Her suffering seemed to go on endlessly, without any rhyme or reason. She moaned again and struggled with the ropes, and her movement made her begin to pivot in place, to twirl like a yo-yo on a string, to spin in circles—
(spinning in circles)
And, again, something jogged her memory; a sudden wave of déjà vu tickled against the extreme edge of her perception, maddeningly out of sight.
7 Souls Page 17
