by Jeff Sampson
But nope. A guy, some random guy at school, looked at me and thought, What a heifer. What a pig. And then wished, if anyone named Emily had to die, that it had been me. The “fat” one. That way he could continue to think about Emily Cooke’s hotness without having to feel weird about how she’s now lying on a cold slab in a morgue somewhere.
I blinked and stared at the screen some more, feeling like there were crowds of pretty teenagers standing in my room and ogling me, judging me. I could almost see long gone Sarah Plainsworth giving me that withering glare of hers. My cheeks burned, and though I didn’t really believe the words I was about to say, I whispered to myself, “I’m not fat.”
It didn’t matter what I said to myself, though, because I knew this to be true: All that mattered was how others perceived you. If others saw me and thought, Big ol’ fatty hambeast, then that’s who I was. And now everyone at school would see this and know all about what Terrance Sedgwick thought of previously invisible me.
The clock ticked away on my computer from 8:07 to 8:11 and still I couldn’t stop from sitting there, staring at my computer screen and feeling utterly embarrassed by that one stupid comment.
And then, at 8:14, my guts twisted and I gasped.
A massive shudder ran through my body, as though the ground was quaking beneath me, and I fell out of my chair onto the floor. I clutched my stomach, clenched my teeth, and felt my toes curl. Another twist inside my gut and I dry heaved, but my stomach was unwilling to release whatever poisons I was sure were swirling inside of me.
I tried to call out, but the only sound I could make was a pitiful squeak. Not that anyone would hear me if I did yell, anyway—my dad was downstairs with his headphones turned up while he played his game, and my stepmom and Dawn were out. Whatever this was—a seizure?—wasn’t stopping, and I couldn’t breathe, and I couldn’t move, and no one could help me, and oh God was I going to die?
And then, as the red digital numbers on my nightstand alarm clock switched to 8:15, it was over.
I felt . . . different.
I felt good.
I lay on the floor, my breathing calming as my heart slowed from a frantic pounding to steady, confident thumps. I arched my back and stretched my arms above my head, cricking my neck as I did. My entire body felt stiff, atrophied from lack of any appreciable amount of movement. This wouldn’t do at all.
I grabbed the edge of my desk and pulled myself to my feet. Emily Cooke’s blog was still open on my computer screen, Terrizzle’s message of my fatness front and center. I read it again.
And I laughed.
“Oh, please,” I said aloud. Seriously, Terrance of all people should not be calling people fat. The boy wasn’t exactly svelte himself.
I turned to my right and caught my reflection in the mirror. The image was blurry even with my glasses on, so I squinted to see better. Hoodie two sizes too large? Check. Completely plain face and hair? Double check. No wonder Terrizzle thought I was a fatty.
But I could show him, couldn’t I? If bad teen romantic comedies taught me anything, it’s that glasses-and-ponytail girls are always in need of emergency makeovers. So I snapped the glasses off my face and let my hair down. Without the glasses I didn’t need to squint anymore—I could see fine. And though that shouldn’t have made any sense, at that moment all I thought was: Wicked.
I tilted my head. Better, but not quite right. I tore off the oppressive hoodie and T-shirt I’d had on underneath, then studied my torso, clad only in an old-lady bra my stepmom had bought me. My hips and chest? Sure, they were wider than some other girls’, but in a definite old-school, busty-pinup-girl sort of way. But my waist was more or less narrow, in no way fat unless your idea of fat was anyone above a size zero, in which case you needed your head examined.
Ten minutes later, I regarded myself in the mirror again. I’d raided the part of Dawn’s closet dedicated to her clubbing clothes and had a brand-new look: a slinky, sparkly, and backless gold shirt that accentuated my décolletage, a black miniskirt, and some tall, black, spiky-heeled boots. With a pair of dangly gold hoop earrings to finish the ensemble and my eyes and lips done, I looked like Dawn normally does when she’s ready to hit the clubs. Which is to say, less comically sleazy than I’d looked the night before.
I was definitely stepping up my game and was well outside the realm of “chaste.” The main goal was to look like some fat teen guy’s late-night fantasy. Perfect for how I planned to mess with Terrance’s head.
I opened the bedroom door, then hesitated—I could probably slip past my dad, engrossed as he was in his video game. When his construction jobs slowed down like they always did this time of year, my dad spent all his free time playing online role-playing games. He was oblivious during the best of his endless days of online gaming, but I didn’t want to chance it.
So I turned to my window. It was dark outside, but there was a depth to the darkness that I needed to explore. I raised the window. The rain had petered out sometime during the evening. A cool fall breeze rushed into my room and blew back my hair, smelling of damp leaves and excitement.
As with the night before, I used my desk chair to boost myself up, then stepped one foot out the window. Unlike the night before, no one called me, no one barged into my room to see if I was okay.
I ducked my torso through the window, then my other leg, and balanced on the windowsill. Clouds billowed above in a moonless sky, and the glistening road beneath me was empty. I could hear the neighbor kids next door watching something on TV.
With a quick breath, I placed my heeled boots against the siding of the house, tensed my arms to push myself free, and leaped.
For a few elated seconds, I flew through the air, weightless and hollow and completely fearless. I sensed the ground approaching before I saw it, and as I arced down I pulled my body into a crouch and positioned my feet in preparation.
I landed perfectly, silently. On spiky heels. On a sidewalk about thirty feet away and twenty feet down from my bedroom window.
You know what I realize now? Of course the leap was something clearly not in the remote realm of possibility for normal, average, everyday Emily Webb. But on that night, with the adrenaline pumping and excitement skittering across my skin, I didn’t thinking anything of it, as though leaping from my second-story window was something I did every time I felt like going out.
I slowly stood. Making sure my top and skirt were straight, and my hair still in place, I turned east down the empty road. Terrizzle’s house was that way. I knew because Megan lived near him, and we’d of course seen each other around the neighborhood. Which was probably how he knew about me in the first place, seeing as how we didn’t have any classes together.
I stood on the sidewalk beneath the flickering streetlight and thought, The only thing better than embarrassing Terrance would be embarrassing him in front of a witness.
So, first stop: Megan’s house.
Stop after that: Terrizzle’s place.
After that: Who knew? I had hours to go before morning. And I intended to have as much fun as those few hours would allow.
Satisfied and unable to stop grinning, I strode down the street, determined to own the night.
Chapter 4
What am I?
I intended to go straight to Megan’s house. Really, I did. But as I strutted down the street that first night, distractions surrounded me. Around me, houses were dark under the black sky, shrouded in the shadows of the towering evergreens that rose toward the starry night. From each house, yellow light glowed through curtains and blue light shimmered from TVs.
I could feel the snapping of the electricity coursing through the power lines over my head. It sizzled against my skin as I walked beneath the streetlamps, making the fine hair on my arms bristle. I stopped in the sulfurous glow of one streetlamp, closed my eyes, and spread my arms, taking it in. It reminded me of the one and only time Megan and I had gone to a tanning salon.
Megan. Right. I was on a mission.
Back to business, I lowered my arms and moved on. A few of my neighbors’ front lawns were overmanicured, choked with carefully tended trees and rosebushes. Overwhelming the scents of wet grass, leaves, and flowers was the thick stench of an animal farm along with some sort of sharp chemical odor. Whatever manure these people were using was totally nauseating.
A car horn blared, and headlights blinded me. I shielded my eyes as brakes squealed, felt a rush of air as a bumper came barreling toward me. I leaped back as the car jerked to a stop, an inch away from hitting me. Only then did I realize I’d left the sidewalk and had been standing in the middle of the road, driven there by the stink of all the fertilizer and chemicals.
The car that had almost hit me was boxy, its engine loud and grumbling. A total junker. The guy in the driver’s seat leaned out his window and threw his hand in the air.
“Get out of the road!” he shouted. “Stupid bitch!”
What did he just call me?
I lowered my arm slowly. The guy’s hair was greasy and long, his eyes rimmed red.
I didn’t move. “I’m not stupid, and I don’t respond well to name-calling,” I said. “Say it again and see what happens.”
Cursing, the guy pressed on the gas and the car roared. Exhaust, tinted red from his taillights, billowed out the back. Tires screeched as he lurched forward, right toward me. He apparently wasn’t bothering to swerve.
I stepped calmly back toward the sidewalk, a rush of wind blowing back my hair as he zoomed past. We could have left it at that. But before the guy passed all the way, he reached his left hand out his window and threw something over the roof of his car. Right at me.
My hand shot into the sky before I’d even realized I was about to be smacked in the face. I lowered my hand to discover that I had snatched an oversize plastic Taco Bell cup out of the air. Watered-down soda and half-melted ice clinked inside.
The guy had thrown his drink at me.
Well, now, he shouldn’t have done that. Name-calling, trying to run me down? I could maybe forgive that—I had been standing in the middle of the road, after all. But throwing things was totally uncalled for.
I gripped the cup tightly, plastic crumpling, and sprang forward. Arms pumping and sticky soda spilling out of the cup, I raced down the street, my heels clacking against the asphalt.
The guy’s brakes complained as he paused at the end of the street at the stop sign. So what if he threw drinks at teen girls walking on the street? At least he obeyed basic traffic laws.
What a guy.
I stopped right next to his window, breathing easily despite how fast I’d dashed. The guy was checking the road to the right, didn’t even see me—until he turned his head left to make sure it was safe to go. Then he jumped back in his seat, startled.
“What—,” he sputtered.
“You dropped something,” I said.
I lobbed the Taco Bell cup into the car. It smacked his chest, hard, and syrupy brown liquid splattered his windshield and across his shirt. I jumped back to avoid being splashed.
Jaw tensed, the guy fumbled with his seat belt and the car door at the same time. “What the f—!” he started to scream.
I laughed wildly, totally exhilarated. Someone messed with me, I got even—a concept that before today had been totally foreign to me. Totally foreign to simpering daytime me, that is, who reacted to any sort of aggression by ducking her head, apologizing, then hiding in her room until it all blew over.
This was so much more fun.
Before the guy could finish getting out of his car, I turned and ran north down the street, feeling like I was flying. Even in heels, I made each bounding step with ease, some part of me just knowing how to move like an Olympic athlete. I heard the guy following, ranting and raving, his footsteps plodding. He gasped for breath after only a brief chase, and I felt a little disappointed—there was no way this guy could keep up with me. How boring.
So I slowed down, turned around, and jogged backward. He lumbered forward, soda dripping from the ends of his stringy hair. Behind him, his car sat running in the street, the driver’s-side door wide open.
“Come on!” I called. “Are you really gonna lose a race to a girl in a miniskirt and heels? I mean, really.”
“You’re . . . you’re crazy!” he gasped as he drew close. “I’ll—”
“You’ll what? Pass out after making another few insults? Is your plan to beat me down with that barbed wit of yours? Or do you have more trash to throw at me?”
I stopped altogether and put my hands on my hips. The guy—completely out of shape despite being stick thin—stumbled toward me, panting.
Then anger surged over his face. His muscles tensed—first his jaw, then his arms, then legs—and I knew, I just knew, that in two more steps he’d leap at me.
So when he did, I simply stepped to the side. The guy barreled forward, grasping at nothing. He tripped over his feet and fell to his knees, landing with a crack against the wet sidewalk. Hissing in pain, he rolled onto his side.
I stood over him. “I’m tired of playing,” I said. “If you see me again, just drive around.”
With that, I turned and sauntered between a row of hedges into someone’s dark backyard, leaving the stoner behind me.
I stopped, taking in my surroundings. The porch light was off, but I could make out a partially inflated kiddie pool by the sliding glass doors. Inside it, brown leaves and evergreen needles floated atop stagnant rainwater. Next to the kiddie pool there were a few dirty, cracked plastic lawn chairs. The rest of the backyard—the grassy area—appeared to be empty.
I started to hike across the backyard when a thought hit me.
What am I?
It seemed a useless thought, coming from the daytime part of my brain that I wished would stay hidden. What was I? I was Emily Webb. I was hot, and I was smart, and I was quick enough to chase down cars on a whim. Duh.
And I had a mission. I needed to get dominant. I needed to find someone like me, someone better than average, someone agile and intelligent, someone who smelled right. I needed to be away from the stifling world of manicured lawns and blaring TVs and kiddie pools—needed to be under a canopy of trees, preparing.
“Wait,” I said aloud. “What?”
I squeezed my eyes shut and shoved back the out-of-place desires and daytime me’s questioning voice. It didn’t matter what Daytime Emily had to say about the weird urges. My mission was to find Megan, then find Terrance, then do something to get back at him.
Ready to get back to the business of vengeance, I continued across the lawn, toward the back fence. As I did, something barked to my left.
It was a small, curly-haired dog, standing in front of a doghouse I hadn’t seen in the darkness of the backyard. It flattened back its ears and growled.
I turned to the dog, considering it. Then I lunged forward and spread out my arms, like a bully psyching out a little kid on a playground. The dog yelped, tucked its tail between its legs, and darted inside its house.
I straightened back up and laughed.
From now on this would be me, I decided. No more hiding in plain sight. No more taking trash talk from anyone—especially not from yappy little dogs. No more being afraid to speak my mind. My usual self spent so much time worrying about how others would perceive her that she never actually did anything. What kind of life was that?
I knew it deep down in my bones: I was a new Emily Webb. And this new Emily Webb was better than the old one in every way imaginable. Was even better than the Emily I’d wanted to be back in junior high.
I reached the back of the yard, sidled between two trees, coiled my legs, and prepared to leap over the fence. But then I stopped. Suddenly I felt as though someone was close, watching me. So close that it made the tiny hairs on my arms stand on end.
Thinking it was the cracked-out driver guy following me, or maybe even that dog, I spun on my heels to face whoever was behind me.
No one was there.
Exc
ept I could still feel someone, some thing, looking at me. Even though the yard was empty. Even though no curtains moved at the back of the house in front of me.
Now I realize I should have paid more attention to that sensation. But then, at that moment, I grew quickly bored and brushed away the feeling. I turned away from the yard and leaped over the six-foot fence as if doing so was perfectly normal.
I continued north, shutting out all the distractions—voices seeping out of walls, cars pulling into and out of driveways, animals cawing and barking and mewling. I passed the small library that looked more like someone’s house than a place to check out books—the midpoint between my house and Megan’s. The homes went from being mostly two stories with big yards to mostly one story and cramped together.
Megan’s house stood dark at the end of the street. All the windows that I could see were shadowed, and though Megan’s car was parked at the curb in front of her small lawn, her parents’ cars were gone.
Perfect. No nosy adults getting in my way.
I strode across the street and headed around the side of the garage to Megan’s window. It was closed and the curtains drawn, but I could see her shadow moving in the orange glow of her desk lamp.
My plan was to crouch in the bushes beneath her window, slam my hand against the glass, and freak her out. But that changed when I heard the strains of a guitar being tuned and the thumping of drums. The garage.
Hmm. Scare Megan or go see what her brother was doing with his band? Angry Megan, or boys playing rock and roll?
Really, there was no question.
The Vesper Company
“Envisioning the brightest stars, to lead our way.”
- Internal Document, Do Not Reproduce -
