The Glare

by Margot Harrison

  Mireya presses more keys, and the forest disappears. “That was my saved game. I’m going to make you your own avatar.”

  She pulls a second chair over to the desk and pats the seat. “You have to come close enough to use the keyboard.”

  Feeling like an idiot, I sit down beside her. The Glare is asking for username and phone number. Mireya types Heady over my shoulder, and I try to laugh, but my throat is too tight. “Why does it need my phone number?”

  “It wants to send you texts, I think. Don’t worry, I’ve scanned it for malware.”

  I pull the phone out of my backpack—sleek and perfect and utterly unused—and try to look like I’ve entered my password a million times, but my finger trembles as if the screen burns it. “I still don’t, um, remember my number.”

  Mireya grabs the phone and starts tapping the screen, while I resist an impulse to grab it back. Mine.

  “Here we go.” She reaches around me to type again. “Your phone’s set to silent mode with most of the numbers blocked. I’m going to turn vibrate on and unblock everything, okay?”

  I nod. The forest is back, seething green and red, with the tower in the distance. The gun in the foreground has returned, too, accompanied by the words LEVEL 1 and a black bar.

  “You use the keyboard to move yourself around, and the mouse to turn your head, aim, and shoot. Here, like this.”

  She reaches out her hand, but mine is already on the keyboard, going straight to the W, A, S, and D keys. Forward, left, backward, right—it’s awkward, but it works.

  When I look up again, Mireya’s staring at me. “You do remember.”

  “I guess my hands do.” I click the mouse, and a bolt of light bursts from “my” gun, startling me backward from the screen. “What do I shoot at?” We were always running from something in the dream, but I don’t know what.

  “You’ll see. Try to get to the tower before your gun powers down—the bar shows your power level. You can hide behind any tree with a symbol carved on the trunk, but only for five seconds. Ready?”

  I nod, and the game comes to life.

  At first nothing happens. Leaves quiver in an imaginary breeze. Clouds drift over the tower, which looks about as far away as Bent Rock from our ranch. I hear cicadas to my left, distant birdsong to my right. My head whips that way—is it real or in the game?

  “To the tower!” Mireya hisses.

  She points out the speakers on either side of me. I work the keys, moving my second self across the screen in clumsy jerks. When I collide with a tree, my real body recoils, and Mireya giggles. “It’s okay, Hedda. Not real.”

  Not real. As I backtrack around the tree, toward the tower again, something white flickers in the corner of my eye. A stray reflection? A high, thin sound bleeds from the speakers to my right and left—keening. It vibrates through me, tensing every muscle; I’m primed to react to that sound. They’re close.

  I speed up, working the keys more deftly now, and dodge the next tree in my path. A flash of white above.

  This time I ignore it—until it solidifies and slithers off a tree bough and drops to the ground in front of me. It’s human-shaped, but it has no clothes or sex or face, like the little walking person that tells you to cross the street.

  Mireya shrieks, “Shoot at it!”

  Too late. The blank person swells to fill the whole screen, its eyeless face right up against my game self’s face, its long arms raised as if to hug me. The keening is deafening. The whole image judders and flashes, then goes ghostly white like a photographic negative. I clutch at my throat like I’m being throttled—and maybe, in the game, I am.

  Not real. Not happening. I draw a deep, shaky breath as the screen turns completely white, then black, and Mireya says, “You’re dead. Want to try level one again?”

  When I don’t answer, she bends over me, a steady hand on my shoulder. “You okay? That’s a lot to take in.”

  “What was that thing?” I can’t stop imagining how the fingers of the almost-person would feel around my neck. Cold and slimy—no, dry and chalky, like the dust inside a long-untouched vault. Like the hand I thought grabbed me on the plane.

  “A monster. I call them Randoms because they’re animatics—sketches without details. The designer probably meant to go back later and make them scarier.”

  I think they’re scary enough, but I can’t chicken out now. “So as soon as I see one, I aim and shoot.”

  “That’s my girl—they’re easy kills. Ready to go again?”

  And I do go—again and again.

  I follow my instincts, like the one that told me the keening signals the arrival of Randoms. The first time I manage to reach the tower, I hold my breath in anticipation of something miraculous, but find only a dark funnel open to the sky. Following Mireya’s instructions, I step into the circle of light and watch the power level on my gun ratchet up, just like fueling a car.

  “You’re getting better at this,” Mireya says as I exit the tower and plug the Random that was waiting for me. “You’re sure you don’t remember playing it?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.” When I reach down deep, I find a memory of a shape that could have been a Random, looming immense on my bedroom wall and making me freeze in terror. Maybe it was just Mom’s or Dad’s shadow as they stepped into my room. Or maybe that shape wasn’t actually on my wall; it was on my screen.

  On level 3, Randoms start coming at me two at a time—one from the east, one from the west, or one from a tree branch, one from the deadfall. Sometimes my movement keys stop working, the leaves flurrying wildly, the screen darkening like I’m being dragged underground. Once that happens, there’s no way to save myself. I’m in the middle of a particularly nasty death like this when a buzzing noise from the wrong direction—behind me—makes me jump.

  As I catch my breath, Mireya hands me my phone. I’m back in my body again, feeling everything I’ve been ignoring: shaky hands, stiff shoulders, beads of sweat trickling down my temple.

  “Erika’s calling you.” Mireya peers at the big Glare-screen. “Oh shit, it’s two in the morning.”

  The phone slips from my hand to the carpet. I was supposed to be back in an hour—what happened? I feel like only minutes have passed since I started playing. I feel like I’ve been trapped in that forest for months, dying over and over.

  And the weirdest thing is, I don’t want to stop.

  Mom says, “You sound tired.”

  “We went biking yesterday in this amazing park. I ache all over.” I go on, detailing how Dad almost wiped out on a downhill, and we spotted wild turkeys and maybe a bobcat, and even Clint forgot about the Glare and acted like a regular kid. I don’t mention the real reason I’m tired, which is that Mireya and I stayed up late last night playing the Glare. Again.

  It’s been the same routine for the past five days: We bike or hike or go to the beach, and then Erika and I make dinner and drink tea and talk, and then, at night, I go to Mireya’s and play. My eyelids are crusty from lack of sleep, yet somehow each morning the Marin light gets me up and ready to restart the cycle. Maybe I’m making up for lost time.

  I’m getting better and better, Mireya says. Granted, she’s on level 12 while I’m on level 9, but I can handle Randoms coming at me from three directions now. Mireya says the game’s “ultra basic” because the levels all look the same, and often she zones out on her phone while I play, but I can’t seem to stop.

  During the day, to balance things out, I stay away from the Glare except when Mireya messages me. I don’t look up random things on my phone the way she does, even when I want to. Control.

  I wish I could tell Mom how good it feels.

  She says, “You sound happy, too. Like you and Mike are really reconnecting.”

  “I think we are.” I do feel happy, deep down in my bones, though Dad’s occasional appearances don’t have much to do with it.

  Just for a second, I teeter on the edge of spilling everything: I know what scared me. I understand so mu
ch better now. I want her to know that I’m connected now, free of that echoing emptiness. She must remember the feeling of being linked to other people herself; she can’t entirely hate it—

  “What’s that noise?” she asks sharply.

  Damn it. I left my phone out on the table beside the landline, which is on speaker, and a text just came in. “Clint was using the electric pencil sharpener.”

  “Kids still use pencils?” she asks while I check my phone.

  There are no words in the text, only a picture of an ash tree with a smattering of red leaves and a symbol glowing on its trunk—one of the “safe trees” from the Glare. Adrenaline sharpens my focus, and my pointer finger twitches, reaching for a mouse that’s not there.

  It’s the fourth text I’ve received like this since I started playing. Mireya hasn’t found much online info about the Glare, but she thinks the game uses the texts to “nudge” us to come back, like it’s saying, Where are you? Connect with me. She says that makes it an “alternate reality game,” though I’m not sure how a text is more “real” than anything else on a screen.

  I’m grateful for the nudge now, because it’s stopped me from being dangerously honest. “I got Clint into drawing with colored pencils. Mine were still up in my room.” What Mom doesn’t know won’t hurt her.

  I know all the names, faces, and pronouns of Dad’s employees from his website. Kai, the receptionist, is barely older than me and so cool that I feel like I’m still covered with ranch dust. They have spiky hair dyed midnight blue, a tattoo of peonies above their plunging neckline, and a silver lip ring.

  When I introduce myself, they give me a big smile and say it’s cool to meet me, but then they peer at their screen and frown. “Is Mike expecting you?”

  “No.” Once I figured out how close Dad’s company was to home, I decided to come and surprise him. His so-called “days off” are just brunch or dinner or an outing with us, after which he disappears again. Plus, I have an ulterior motive: I want to ask him about school, which starts on Monday.

  I pull a plastic container from my pack. “I just made snickerdoodles, and I thought I’d stop by and give him some.” It seemed like a good plan at the time. But the office’s decor—perfectly sanded maple walls and floors and ceilings, interrupted only by stark black-and-white photos and framed awards—makes me feel like an intruder.

  Kai’s eyes light up. “Oh my God, can I have one of those? I just let Mike know you’re here.”

  I peel open the container. “Please do.”

  Ten minutes of waiting on a hard maple bench later, Dad joins me, phone in hand. He wears a sport coat over his T-shirt, which I’ve learned (from Erika) means he has meetings today.

  “How did you get here?” He looks genuinely surprised, as if I’ve trudged ten miles.

  “Walked.” I hold out the cookies again, hoping for a reaction like Kai’s. “It’s ten blocks. These are fresh-baked.”

  Dad sits down and takes a cookie absentmindedly. He tenses as his phone gives a brief buzz, his eyes flickering to it—then returns his gaze to me. “I’m sorry, honey. Just having a full day. We’ve got a few things to submit on deadline, and meetings.…”

  “No problem!” I keep my smile big and fixed—trying to look as cheerful as the full skirt I’m wearing, which is printed with sunflowers and borrowed from Erika. “I should’ve checked ahead. I was wondering if you’ve thought about—”

  “Well, of course you should see this place. I should have given you a tour days ago. Maybe Kai can…”

  He whips his head in Kai’s direction, and I take the opportunity to change the subject: “School starts Monday. My friend Mireya says she’ll show me around, if I could maybe just enroll, even for a month—”

  Dad is abruptly beaming, but not at me. “This cookie is amazing!” he says, as if he only just realized what his mouth is full of.

  My fingers claw at the edge of the bench. “Thanks. Just sugar, flour, butter, cinnamon. Anyway, I—”

  The phone buzzes again. Dad does some intense swiping and tapping, then gives me a big smile as if we were never interrupted. “If college doesn’t work out, you could be a pastry chef on one of those baking shows, Hedda.”

  “Thanks, but—”

  “Joke. I know you’re all about the academics.” His hazel eyes meet mine at last. “So you’ve made a friend.”

  “Mireya Rios—you know her.” He looks blank; maybe he doesn’t. I start to tell him how Mom’s career inspired Mireya to design games, but halfway through, his phone demands attention yet again.

  This time, instead of answering right off, Dad glances at it guiltily, looking remarkably like Clint when he knows he’s not supposed to be using his tablet at the table.

  “It’s okay!” All I really want now is not to be here taking up space, in his way. I want to be back at my desk playing the Glare, which Mireya’s just downloaded to Erika’s laptop for me so I can keep conquering the levels while she’s at her summer job.

  I get up and smooth my sunflower skirt. “You’re busy. I should be getting back.”

  Dad darkens the phone with a snap of his thumb, like he really means it this time. “Hedda, I do hear what you’re saying. How about we talk tonight? Would that work?”

  “Fine. Totally fine.” If you’re home tonight—but I manage not to say the words aloud.

  Dad gets up, too, his eyes flitting from me to the dark screen and back, and pulls me into a hug that feels like a Band-Aid slapped on an oozing wound. “Tonight, then. Maybe we can get out the old chessboard. You sure you don’t want Kai to call you an Uber?”

  “No! I like walking!”

  And I smile stiffly at Kai and march out on the perfect maple floor, past the perfect photos, keeping my head high, until I reach the watery sunlight and the bay breeze and let the stupid tears flood my eyes.

  You’re stupid. You’re boring. He doesn’t even care whether you go to college or not; he just pretends because he’s supposed to. I tell myself that’s not true, that he’ll be home tonight, that he mentioned the chessboard because he remembers teaching me to play, that I’m an important part of his life. And then I tell myself I don’t care if he cares about me, because as long as he enrolls me in school and pays for college, I’ll be fine. But the whole time it just replays in my head: how he kept glancing from me to his screen, like I was less real than whatever he found there.

  You excited about the party? Mireya texts as I walk back.

  I send back a face with heart eyes, relieved for something else to think about. She’s invited me to a beach party day after tomorrow, and I’ve been researching on my phone, stuffing my head with her friends’ names and hobbies and hair colors and favorite songs and movies. If—when—I go to school, they could become my friends, too. No more hanging out with the goats.

  Not that I never miss the goats. Sometimes I even imagine snapping them with my phone and putting them online with personality profiles: Buttercup, two and a half, in a relationship with my stallmates. I enjoy eating petunias and will hurt you with my horns if you’re not careful. But that would mean reconciling Mom to my new self, my phone self, and that’s unthinkable.

  The phone buzzes again, calling me out of my gloomy thoughts, connecting me. What about school?

  Working on it.

  I’m losing to Dad at chess. Just like old times.

  We’re playing on the deck in the aftermath of a grilling extravaganza, while Erika cleans up inside. The sun has sunk behind the trees, Mount Tamalpais a notched blue wedge in the flamingo sky. I spend five minutes mulling over the consequences of moving a pawn, then give up and randomly nudge a knight.

  Dad captures the knight with his bishop.

  “Why do I suck so much at this?” I ask.

  “You don’t suck. You’re just out of practice.”

  I still remember what he said when I was six and he taught me to play this game: You catch on like wildfire! He seemed so happy, so proud, but later he must have figured out I was
n’t a prodigy, just good at memorizing which pieces do what.

  I’d do anything to beat him, just to put that glow on his face again.

  “You need to concentrate.” He sounds a bit smug now. “Stop pushing. Let it flow.”

  I wonder if he said the same thing about video games. He or Mom must have taught me to play them, and when I try hard, I come up with a fragment of memory: Blue light glancing off Dad’s glasses, his hand guiding mine as I try to shoot aliens, but never fast enough!

  I wish I could tell him about the Glare, but he’d probably start harping on Mom’s rules again.

  “I can’t concentrate.” I zip my bishop slantwise and capture Dad’s pawn, no doubt laying myself open to another attack.

  Dad rests his chin on his hand. “Let’s slow down, then. You wanted to talk about something this afternoon.”

  “Yes!” I run through all the possible openings in my head, but before I can choose the best one, he says, “School. You want to go to school.”

  I lean forward, all my nerves suddenly jangling with the intensity of my need to convince him. “It starts Monday, and Mireya would drive me. She says you need AP courses for a good college. Erika says she’d do the enrollment stuff.” I know he hates having extra paperwork. “All you’d have to do is sign.”

  Dad inches his queen toward my bishop, his brow furrowing. “You know I wouldn’t stand in the way of that. I think you’d benefit from a month or so in school. But your mother left you in my care, and I promised her I’d—”

  “Follow her rules. I know. I know.” Bitterness rises too quickly from my stomach, choking me. It’s always about the damn rules. He’s always shifting responsibility, but I can’t let him do it when I finally have a chance to change things. I need to confront the problem head-on, even if it makes him uncomfortable.

  “What are you afraid will happen if you don’t follow the rules? If you let me near a computer or two? Are you afraid I’ll go off-kilter?”

  Dad blinks hard, then takes off his glasses and wipes them. “I’m not sure what you mean, Hedda.”