The Glare

by Margot Harrison

  “Hedda, what’s wrong?” Mireya looks really disturbed now. “What’s this text?”

  “Nothing. It’s not important.” I darken the phone and shove it in my bag, hands still shaking. “Just one of my standard newbie phone mistakes.”

  If I tell her what I thought I saw, she’ll not only think I’m off-kilter, she’ll think I have issues with her. Who else would or could send that photo? I grope for a safe explanation of my mood. “I’m just kind of pissed at my dad. We talked, and I got him to agree to enroll me in school—”

  “No way!” Her whole demeanor shifts, her smile radiant beneath her blowing hair. “That’s awesome, Hedda! We’re going to have a blast.”

  “I know!” I make myself smile back. “I just wish I hadn’t had to practically force him. I wish he wasn’t so hands-off my entire life, letting Mom decide everything. It makes me feel—”

  “Like he doesn’t care?” Mireya sighs, but at least she doesn’t look unsettled anymore. “Hedda, my dad’s a tech guy, too. He’s not great at dealing with the real world, so basically he slithers out of the hard stuff. He slithered out of his parenting responsibilities, and he knows any attempt to take them back this late in the game will piss my mom off. I’m guessing your dad’s a slitherer-outer, too.”

  “I guess.” It’s not pleasant to realize you’re part of your parent’s definition of the “hard stuff,” like a tax form or a root canal.

  “It doesn’t mean he doesn’t love you, just that he’s… limited. Don’t take it personally. You got what you wanted; that’s what matters.”

  “That’s what matters.” I try to believe it.

  By the time we reach Muir Beach, fog has rolled in, bringing a chill. At the base of a wooded cliff, Mireya’s friends huddle around a fire pit, hoodies draped over their trunks and bikinis. The sweet aroma of weed mingles with the bite of liquor. A hypnotic beat drifts from speakers propped in the sand.

  Mireya takes a drag off someone’s joint and offers it to me, but I shake my head. She goes around the circle introducing me, the names flying by too fast as I try to match people to their photos.

  Here’s Mireya’s boyfriend, Anthony, a freshman at Berkeley who likes Malcolm X, punk music, AeroPress coffee, and piercings. He has a boxer, Moxie, who is cute in a hundred different poses. Here’s Lily Chen, who likes to snap pictures of herself in the mirror. Her girlfriend skateboards, and I’ve seen her latest injury in bloody, glistening detail. Here’s Anil, who mountain bikes and is allergic to peanut butter.

  Off on the edge of the surf, two boys are tossing a Frisbee back and forth. The taller one laughs in a loud, uncontrolled way, and with a start I recognize him—Ellis.

  I shrink into myself so he won’t notice me, not that there’s much danger of that. Not a word from him since the barbecue, so apparently he’s not as nostalgic about our shared childhood as he let on.

  I turn to Mireya, hoping for a scowl of complicity—What’s he doing here?—but she’s already grabbed Anthony and is pulling him into the surf with her. Her friends return to their conversations, muffled by the moist air. Sitting on the edge of the circle, I watch their bodies appear and disappear, their slick heads bobbing above the fog.

  Near me, two girls languidly argue about where in San Francisco’s Japantown to find “the best mochi outside Tokyo.” They have curtains of salt-frizzed hair and long, dangly earrings. I consider googling “mochi,” but I’m on a Glare break.

  I try to make eye contact with Lily Chen, but suddenly she’s busy sucking face with a girl with a crimson plume of hair jutting from her forehead, apparently the skateboarder.

  Lily’s just a stranger now. She probably doesn’t even remember mocking me. And the photo I thought I saw—it must have come from the darkest recess of my imagination.

  Still, I don’t feel comfortable with these people. At least thirty feet up, on the edge of the cliff, shaggy black spruce carve out the soupy sky. If I were up there leaning against a trunk, breathing in the sharp scent and staring out to sea, nobody would be able to point me out as the weird girl who’s sitting alone.

  I close my eyes and see the forest of the game—pine, spruce, yellow aspen, an oak dotted with red, moss, dead leaves. I miss it.

  “Hey, nice boots.”

  What is it with boys and boots? I roll over, and the boy adds, “I’m Rory.”

  Rory is slight with a pompadour of cotton-candy hair—pale pink and blue—a tiny nose piercing, and horn-rimmed glasses. He offers me a flask, and because why not, I take a swallow.

  We’re near a speaker, so I have to say my name three times, but then he leans closer and says, “You’re the one with the Fuchsia Groan avatar. I was obsessed with those books freshman year. I love how her hair’s described—like a pirate’s flag.”

  “You read the Gormenghast books?”

  Suddenly we’re having a conversation like two strangers who just discovered friends in common. Sparks fly from the red-tinged flames as we debate whether Fuchsia’s feelings for Steerpike were her downfall, or whether an angry teenage girl locked in a castle is always headed for disaster.

  As dusk falls around us, the reek of alcohol thickens. People chase and splash in the black waves, their shrill cries distorted by the fog. Lily and her skateboarder are two humps under a blanket. One mochi girl has disappeared; the other sits by the fire, busy with her phone.

  Branches stir on the cliff edge, making heads turn. Laughter and curses drift down from above. Over Rory’s shoulder, I see a boy raising his phone to film the cliff. Something white darts on the screen.

  My muscles lock, my breath wheezing in my throat as all my game-honed reflexes say, Random. The camera’s flash blinds me. When my eyes clear, there’s a boy in a white T-shirt hanging over the cliff edge. He’s clinging to a root with one hand, his long legs dangling and kicking.

  “What the fuck, Westover?” somebody yells from down here. “You’re gonna break what’s left of your head open.”

  Ellis again. Did he lose his footing on the edge, or is he there on purpose?

  “Nah.” Ellis’s voice drawls like a slowed-down record. “Went to rock-climbing camp, dudes. ’M fine. Levi, you’re gonna owe me a case of Lawson’s.”

  “If he’s doing that on a bet, he’s trashed out of his mind,” Rory mutters.

  A handful of girls gather below, whispering and giggling as Ellis creeps his way down the cliff face, somehow finding footholds and handholds in the sheer stone. I catch phrases like “so messed up” and “still hit that.”

  “It’s like Westley in The Princess Bride,” I say because he is a good climber, or else just extremely desperate and strong.

  “Awesome movie,” Rory says.

  “There’s a movie?”

  He looks at me like he hopes I’m kidding. A cheer goes up, and I glance back to see Ellis leap the last six feet or so to the ground. He staggers across the sand, suddenly looking much drunker than he did up there, back-slaps a few guys, and stops in front of me.

  The cocky grin slides off his face. “Hedda.”

  Something clenches inside me as I remember our awkward goodbye at the barbecue, but I force myself to smile. “Hi, Ellis.”

  “You’re using a phone.” He says it like an accusation, his eyes narrowing. “I saw you walking down the street with your face in one.”

  My face burns. Why was I so clueless when he asked to “follow” me? But I did end up following him, and he even followed me back.

  Behind me Rory says, “Ellis, chill out.”

  Ellis laughs derisively but doesn’t look at Rory, his eyes still fixed on me. “Don’t you miss the desert? It misses you.”

  Then, before I can say a word, he lopes off toward the surf, yelling something about washing the sweat off. I hold my breath until he’s gone.

  “Dude is messed up,” Rory says as a dripping Mireya collapses beside us. The mochi girl winces out of the way, then leaps up as her phone buzzes. Frowning at it, she steps out of the circle of light.


  “We’re going to start the corn!” Mireya hands us both ears to shuck.

  Rory kicks a speaker farther into the sand so we don’t have to shout. “Mireya, Westover’s being a dick to her. You should kick his ass.”

  I protest, while Mireya says, “She can handle him.”

  “Speaking of weirdness,” Rory says, “do you have any idea who designed that shooter with the black tower? Mireya says it came from you.”

  The fire blinds me for a second, the world jerking on its axis. No one else should know about the black tower. Only Ellis and me.

  Then I understand. “You mean the Glare? You’re playing it, too?”

  Passing Rory the aluminum foil, Mireya says, “I sent him the link, Hedda—hope you don’t mind. Rory’s my shooter guru; you should see him slay those Randoms!” She mimes firing a rifle.

  “Yeah, well.” Rory tears off a sheet, not looking at me. “It’s a pretty basic game, but the text alerts were probably hot stuff back in the day. Gives it this whole alternate-reality angle. While you play, you’re looking for those runes, so when you see them in a text, you get triggered and start jonesing to play again.”

  If he’s such an expert, maybe he can explain what happened to me last night. “Have you gotten to level thirteen yet?”

  “Not yet, I—”

  A scream tears the air in two.

  We turn our heads just in time to see her—a girl running. A girl in midair with legs flailing like she wants to keep racing right over the whitecaps. For a fraction of a second I think she will. But she’s not falling like Ellis at the end of his precarious climb; once she left the cliff edge, she had no control. Wind shear tips her, and she lands in the sand with a dull thump and a sharp crack.

  “Caleigh?”

  “No, that’s Emily!”

  The fog and the sophistication and the alcohol-weed miasma peel away, leaving a bunch of scared kids running around in the dark. My head spins, and I keep hearing that cracking sound.

  Phones light up in people’s hands. A couple on the cliff edge yells down frantically. Rory runs for the cliff, and I follow, my legs unsteady.

  This isn’t supposed to happen. This is a party. Our interrupted conversation mixes in my head with what I’m seeing, making me dizzy. Safe trees. Black tower.

  Lying in the sand, the girl cries in long, frayed moans. It’s the mochi girl, the one with a slim aqua streak in her long, perfect hair. Her arms thrash against the chest of a boy who keeps telling her to stay still, the EMTs are on their way. Ellis is suddenly there, too, pressing her shoulders down, whispering to her.

  “Don’t move her!” somebody yells. “I think she hit her head.”

  The girl keeps trying to raise her hand with something in it—her phone. “Just kill me!” she moans. “Please!” Her right leg is contorted as if a giant picked her up and corkscrewed it, showing a white flash of bone.

  I turn and face the luminous fog over the sea, fighting nausea. Unstuck. Off-kilter.

  “Kill me!”

  The raw fear in the cry makes me whip back around. People keep aiming their phones at her—will this moment be posted for everyone to see?

  “I saw her get a text,” someone says behind me. “How much you want to bet it was from that asshole Liam?”

  See? Mom says in my head. She wasn’t at home in reality. Her feet weren’t on the ground. Words pushed her over the edge.

  “Totally batshit. What’d she take?”

  The girl keeps moaning, begging for death, and the clammy air presses into my pores, weighs down my lungs. I stumble toward the surf, its lacy patterns stark white against the dusk.

  A hand reaches for mine—Rory. He’s shaking, but his voice is steady. “It’s okay. Just breathe. She must’ve slipped.”

  But I saw what happened. She didn’t fall. She ran like something was chasing her.

  The parking lot swarms with flashers, the air gritty with the EMTs’ radio chatter. We watch as they load the girl—Emily—onto the stretcher and sedate her, silencing her screams at last.

  A couple who were hooking up on the cliff tell the cops and everybody else how Emily sprinted up the path and crashed through the trees, past their hiding place, and kept running. “I saw her face,” the boy keeps saying. “Something scared the shit out of her.”

  The cops detain a few of us, the ones caught with something stronger than alcohol, and shoo the rest away.

  Driving home, we shiver in the chill that sets in here at nightfall, our skin goose-pimpling. Mireya doesn’t close the windows. For the first time, California seems to press around me like a living thing, a vibrating darkness pocked with neon. The edge of a continent, where people do things I can’t fathom.

  Maybe there is no normal. No on-kilter. I wish I could go home tonight and feed the goats and shoo the chickens into the coop and say good night to Mom, but it’s too late for that.

  When Mireya pulls up in front of my house, neither of us makes a move to leave. She seems subdued, smaller.

  “It sucks that your first party had to end that way,” she says. “I’m sorry. My friends—they aren’t usually into the hard stuff.”

  “You think it was drugs?”

  “PCP. Some heavy shit like that. You don’t run off a cliff because your boyfriend dumped you.”

  So she saw, too. “She was scared.” The cottonwoods in front of Ellis’s house rustle, showing the pale sides of their leaves.

  “She was high.”

  I don’t want her to think I’m a total innocent, so I change the subject. “Can you ask Rory about the Glare? Why it won’t let me keep playing?”

  “Sure, but you could ask him yourself, you know. You know how to do this stuff.” Mireya picks up her phone and taps on it. “I should get going. You won’t tell your dad you were there tonight, will you? It might make the news.”

  “My dad?” I try to imagine him waiting up for me, worrying, asking me how the party went, and before I can stop it, a contemptuous laugh bubbles out of me. I still feel the sting of that visit to his office. “He might ask about something like that if he cared enough to be home.”

  Her hand finds mine in the dark. “Oh, girl. Like I said, don’t take it personally. Stay strong.”

  I squeeze her hand back, feeling deep inside me the outlines of that six-year-old who ached to impress her daddy. Even now, I can’t help hoping things will be different now we’ve had that talk. He wouldn’t have told me about his nightmares if he didn’t trust me.

  Meanwhile, I don’t want to slither out of the hard stuff myself. I want to be a good friend. “Are you doing okay? Emily’s your friend, right?”

  Mireya checks the phone again; it turns her face tangerine. “Yeah. I’m checking in with our friend Cheyenne at the hospital. What about you? I know you’re not used to dealing with, well, situations like this.”

  The words ring like a challenge. I stiffen my spine and open the door. “Is anybody? I just need some sleep.”

  Something goes plock against my window, like hailstones. My eyes pop open.

  How late is it? The cup of mint tea Erika made for me sits on the bedside table, half-full and cold.

  Plock. I slide out of bed and go peel back the curtain.

  And stagger away, my heart cantering, at the sight of a face. White in the darkness, pressed right against the pane, staring at me.

  I clap a hand over my mouth just in time to stop the scream, because the face is attached to a lanky body that’s gesturing at me to open the window. Ellis Westover crouches on the roof, clinging to a corner of the gable like a flying monkey that somehow got separated from the Wicked Witch’s retinue.

  Trying to breathe normally, I force the balky window up and jiggle the screen. Ellis shakes his head and whispers, “Just come down, okay? Need to talk.”

  You’ll break your neck! But before I have a chance to say so, he scrambles down the shingled roof on all fours, grabs the edge, swings his legs over it, and disappears. I stand soaked in sweat with my mouth
open, wondering if I dreamed what I just saw.

  Still drowsy, I creep downstairs, already well aware of which steps creak. I hesitate before opening the door, because Ellis is obviously still drunk or otherwise off-kilter. Mireya said he wasn’t actually dangerous, but I’m on my guard.

  When I step outside, he’s sitting on the porch rail, straddling it with a jagged grin on his face.

  “You could have just messaged me,” I say. Has he come to apologize for what he said earlier?

  As I sit down opposite him, he draws his knees to his chest, shivering in the crisp night air. He stinks to high heaven of something stronger than beer, but he sounds reasonably coherent as he says, “Wanted to be sure I’d get your attention. Look, I’m sorry about before. I wanted to talk to you, and I told myself I’d leave you alone, and then I just—well, it came out mean.”

  There’s a pulsing urgency to him, like he’s one of those angry drunks you avoid on the midway. My face heats up. “I don’t understand.”

  “Look, I was gonna steer clear of you until you left. Nothing personal, but it was just too much… heavy baggage. I like to travel light.”

  “Okay.” The word comes out sounding sarcastic.

  “I didn’t mean it that way, Hedda. Promise.” He pulls a phone from his jeans. “But we have to talk now. The skull. You saw the skull?”

  “The what?”

  The pounding in my head rises all at once as I stare at the picture he’s showing me. It’s distorted, staticky—a photo of another screen. A dark cylinder encloses a blinding-white circle, the sky seen from the bottom of the black tower. The clouds form a face: empty eye sockets, jutting jaw, bared teeth.

  It’s the exact same skull text I got last night. From the game.

  Cold sweat beads on my temples. “Who—where did you get that?”

  “Emily’s phone. Somebody sent it to her right before she jumped, from a restricted number. You remember, right?”

  “Remember what?”