The Glare

by Margot Harrison

  What if I’m just a specimen to her? What if she did send me that ugly image, just to mess with me, and I accidentally deleted it? The tiles blur as I remember the warm thrill that snuck up my spine every time she texted or messaged me and I realized I had someone to tell things to. A friend.

  As if it remembers, too, my phone buzzes inside my hoodie. The message is from her, but I don’t even read it, just click over to the two texts from last night. I scroll up and down, up and down, faster and faster, willing the image I remember to pop back into existence, because it was there. Ur pathetic, my phone keeps telling me, and scarlet juice is pooling on the dingy pink tiles, and all this has happened before. I remember this.

  I close my eyes, my whole head buzzing now, as memories swarm through my mind. I’m in a bright kitchen—this kitchen, but with the countertop closer to eye level. A distant grandfather clock tick-tocks, tick-tocks.

  On the counter sits eyeless Raggedy Ann, one of her Mary Janes resting on a tablet. On the tablet’s screen is a picture—a skull. In my hand is a knife.

  Blood drips off my left forearm onto the floor, two currents of blood flowing into a single river. It trickles in the cracks between the dingy pink tiles that Mommy wants to replace with new travertine. I feel no pain, just icy tingling, as the clock ticks off seconds of the night.

  And I feel something else—pride, because I’ve finally figured it out. Once I finish writing the words on my skin, once I release the Glare inside, I will be really, truly alive, and they’ll never come after me again. No more taunting pictures that disappear before I can ever show them to anybody. No more phantoms looming and disappearing on my bedroom wall. No more Ur pathetic. No more them.

  They won’t get me, because I’m real and they are not real.

  White flashes across the doorway. I try to ignore it, raising the knife in my shaking fingers.

  “Hedda!” Mom’s voice, scared.

  But it’s not Mom, because it has no mouth or eyes or nose, only glowing white blankness. Its wrist stretches like elastic until its fingers clamp me, cold and slippery as fog, and I scream and scream, because I’m dying again—

  And I’m back in the present, on the floor leaning against the cabinets, knees to my chest, staring at the doorway to the living room. There’s nothing there but shadows, an oblong of carpet, the faint hump of the couch. No sounds—no keening, no rustling. Nothing.

  Nothing, but tears roll down my cheeks.

  I sit there for a while, shuddering and gazing into the dark, and then I raise my left forearm and look at the old scars there. Mom’s told me dozens of times how, right after we moved to the ranch, I fell out of a cottonwood and cut my arm on a barbed wire fence. But do I actually remember the accident, or only the story?

  As always, when I look at the scars I see faint outlines of letters. N t rea. And now I know what they’re meant to say: Not real.

  Someone was using a knife to write there.

  “I know now, Mom,” I say. “I know what you meant when you said the Glare knocked me off-kilter.”

  Mom says, “Your dad told you.”

  I expected her to be angry, like she’ll be when she gets my letter. Furious at me for disobeying her rules and discovering the truth. But instead she sounds resigned, possibly even relieved. Like she’s been dreading this moment so long she just wants it to be over.

  “No! Dad didn’t tell me anything. I figured things out and I remembered.”

  I’ve taken the landline out on the deck, where I can see the blue haze of the bay. The warm, golden sunlight makes everything that happened last night seem impossible—Emily’s legs flailing in the air, Ellis vomiting, Mireya backing away as I practically yelled at her. She texted me last night saying, I’m sorry, and eventually I texted back, Me too, just need to sleep, but I don’t know if things can be the same between us.

  Far away in Australia, Mom is adjusting to the new reality. Knowing, as I do, that we can never go back. “Oh, Hedda,” she says.

  “You should’ve told me.” That seems to be my refrain now. “It’s not normal for six-year-olds to hurt themselves like that.”

  Her breath comes faster, sharper, serving as confirmation, or close to it. The scars on my left forearm glisten in the California sun.

  She says, “The moment I came into the kitchen and found you—doing that—is something I still have nightmares about. As a parent, it doesn’t get worse. I think we’ve both spent the last ten years healing.”

  How could I heal from something I didn’t know about, something she hid from me? “You should have told me about the game, too,” I say, zeroing in on what I need to know.

  “The game?”

  “The Dark Web game called the Glare. The skull texts.”

  “Oh, those creepy texts you were getting on your tablet.” Her voice tightens at the memory. “It was those two little friends who wouldn’t stop tormenting you with nasty posts. After I talked to their parents, I thought things were over.”

  “Mireya and Lily didn’t do that.” The timeline is starting to come clear. “After I had a fight with them, after what happened to Caroline, I started playing the Glare. It wasn’t just screens in general affecting me, Mom; it was that game. Did Caroline give it to me? Do you know?”

  She makes a dismissive sound. “Hedda, there was no one game. You played anything you could get your hands on, but Caroline was a bad influence, yes. I’ll never forget the night I came home after midnight and found her in your dad’s study glued to some game on the big monitor, so zoned out she barely looked up when I spoke to her. Then I went upstairs and found you wide awake and playing a game on your tablet! I was only starting to understand the effects of the Glare, but that was the last time Caroline Westover ever sat for you.”

  I try to rein in my impatience. “Please don’t say ‘the Glare’ when you’re talking about the whole internet.”

  “But that was your word for it, Hedda, always. The Glare.”

  “I was a little kid!” I wonder if screens could affect me in a way they don’t affect other people, making my brain go haywire like a bad smoke detector reacting to innocent grains of dust. But it wasn’t just me. “I know how you feel about screens, Mom. And you’re right—they’re powerful. I can barely get Dad away from his phone long enough to notice I exist. But ‘screens’ didn’t make Caroline hurt herself—or me. I think the Glare did.”

  I try to explain the legend of the Glare, pretending to know about it solely from my own memories and Mireya’s googling. But when I get into the stuff about Randoms and dying thirteen times, she cuts me off: “Does it matter? Video games all reprogram you to crave them. Your friends’ bullying isolated you, so you turned where you’d always turned—to a screen.”

  I stare out at the bay, fists clenching. Please, Mom. Listen for once.

  But she goes right on: “It got to the point where just hearing a phone or tablet buzz would turn you into a nervous wreck. You’d ask me to come look at another ‘mean picture,’ and there’d be nothing there—or only that skull.”

  Nothing there. She thinks it was just me, but it wasn’t; it can’t be. “How do you explain what happened to Caroline, though? She was sixteen, not six.”

  “Video game psychosis. Ask your dad—it’s a real thing. Caroline’s little brother used to come over and fill your ears with scary stories about her, which didn’t help with your anxiety. You haven’t been talking to him again, have you?”

  Warm blood floods my face. “What happened to me wasn’t Ellis’s fault. He said I showed him the Glare.”

  “I don’t know whose fault it was. I just know you spun a paranoid delusion, because that’s what the Glare does—what screen culture does. It makes us scared, all the time.”

  She clears her throat, as if running out of steam now that I’ve stopped arguing with her. “I’m glad we’re talking about this. All these years I’ve been afraid to tell you, worried about how you’d react—and yes, I know that makes me a coward. But will you promise
me not to get too close to that Westover boy? I’m not saying he’s a bad kid, but what happened with his sister threw him way off-kilter.”

  And there it is again. We’re just off-kilter, all of us, from too many screens too young, and if she ever knew more about the Glare, she clearly doesn’t now.

  “I promise to avoid Ellis Westover,” I say in a flat voice. If Mom were really listening to me, she could tell I’m lying.

  “Dad!” I dash down the stairs as he opens the door, headed to the office on a Sunday afternoon. “Can you wait just a second?”

  His shoulders hunch as if he’s afraid I’ll confront him again. “I’ve signed your forms, hon. Erika’s got them.”

  “I know! Thank you.” I feel almost guilty now. “I’m really excited about school tomorrow. I just wanted to ask you one thing. How well do you remember Caroline Westover?”

  He blinks. “Your mom’s intern.”

  “Intern?”

  “She was your babysitter, too, of course.” His head bobs toward the Westovers’ house. “The girl who—”

  “I know what she did! But I thought she was only the babysitter. She worked at your company?”

  Dad rolls his shoulders. “At a company where your mom was moonlighting, actually. Sinnestauschen Labs. We were both working multiple jobs while we got our start-up off the ground.”

  “What did Caroline do there?” It’s not like Mom to omit a detail, even a trivial one.

  “From what Jane said, she was mainly a tester, but with a talent for design. After she hurt herself, your mom decided she suffered from video-game-related psychosis. That’s when Jane started going to meetings of a screen-free group in the South Bay. It didn’t take her long to decide you were in danger, too.”

  My throat tightens. “Did you believe that?” If he knows what I did to myself, then he must have worried about me.

  But Dad only sighs and says, “You know your mom and I have different views on this. Why were you wondering about Caroline?”

  “No reason. Just that I saw her brother yesterday.” I want to ask him more about Caroline, but a voice deep inside me whispers, Don’t let him know you played the Glare. Don’t let anyone know. It’s our secret. So instead I pat his arm awkwardly—he’s wearing a T-shirt, no meetings today—and say, “Thanks again.”

  Going back upstairs, thinking about school, I skip every other step, and when I arrive at the top, my phone buzzes.

  Seeing Mireya’s name light up on the screen, I can’t be mad anymore. I fit again, a piece of the world connecting to other people. The echoing emptiness retreats.

  Hey, like I said, I’m sorry. Can I still drive you to school tomorrow?

  I send her the most sheepish emoji I can find. I’m the one who should be apologizing. How’s Emily?

  Still in the ICU, but stable. Rory & Anil are coming over, you should too. See you on my porch round 10?

  All the lights at Mireya’s house are out, but someone’s moving on the porch. As I cross the street, weed wafts through the air along with a deep male chuckle. Mireya calls, “Hedda?”

  “Hedda!” It’s Rory, sounding so friendly my heart leaps again. Someone’s happy to see me.

  They’re huddled up there in the dark: Mireya and Rory in the porch swing with his head on her shoulder, and their friend Anil perched on the brick railing with a joint in one hand. “Hey,” he says, offering it, his teeth flashing in a shy smile. “Join the party.”

  “No thanks.” Their postures are tense and intimate at once, like they’re waiting for something. I squat with my back against a pillar, feeling guilty for everything I said to Mireya last night. I still wish she’d told me about the Glare, but it’s not her fault I can’t dismiss the idea of an evil game as easily as she can.

  “How’s Emily doing?” I ask.

  Rory and Mireya look at Anil, who says, “She had bleeding in her brain today—from the concussion. They’re doing surgery to stop it.”

  “I’m so sorry.” Is that the right thing to say? I want to ask if Emily was playing the Glare, but it’s not the right time, and anyway, Mireya swore only Rory was. I can’t start doubting her again when we’re just making up.

  “So, tomorrow, Hedda,” Mireya says. “You gonna come experience the glory of San Rafael High with the rest of us normies?”

  I nod, trying to look more casual than I feel. “Can’t wait.”

  She plucks the joint from Rory’s fingers. “Don’t expect to have your mind blown or anything. School is bullshit.”

  “What’s the big deal about school?” Anil asks.

  “Her mom homeschooled her so she wouldn’t use computers. Some technophobic weirdness.” Mireya flicks something off Rory’s forehead. “But now we’re corrupting her.”

  An electronic burble slices the air, and all three of them go stock-still like they’ve seen a ghost. Anil fumbles in his jacket, pulls out his phone, and starts tapping it. After a moment, his shoulders go slack. “It’s okay. Just my mom bugging me about driving my little sister to swim practice.”

  Mireya exhales audibly. “When did you last hear from Chey?”

  “Around four, when they were prepping Emily. I don’t know when it’s supposed to be over.” Anil pulls his knees up, trembling. Mireya stands up and starts rubbing his shoulders.

  Rory inhales, the joint glowing. “It doesn’t feel real,” he says to me. “I mean, when it happened, I thought it was just like Ellis clowning around on the cliff. Like, she’d land on her feet and we’d laugh.”

  “I know.” I press my back to the brick pillar like it’s stopping me from falling off a cliff of my own. Ellis seemed so sure the skull text made Emily jump. But why would it affect her that way when I’m fine?

  A pale figure emerges from the dark, jogging toward us on the sidewalk, the streetlight revealing coppery hair. Speak of the devil.

  Ellis lopes up two porch steps and stops a few yards from us. “Hey.” For an instant his eyes lock on mine. “Any news?”

  “She’s still in surgery.” Rory holds out the joint toward him, a half-hearted motion.

  “No thanks, dude. I’m training.”

  “Yeah?” Anil asks. “When’s the meet?”

  “Next week.”

  You were right, I could say to Ellis if we were alone. But I can tell from the others’ postures, from the tone of Anil’s voice, that they don’t like him. Mom warned me away from him, too.

  “Better get to it.” Ellis jogs back down the steps. “See you guys tomorrow?”

  “See you!” Mireya calls as he runs down the street, a tart note to her voice.

  When he’s out of earshot, Rory says, “Guess he’s got a special training regimen. You see how wrecked he was last night?”

  The others giggle. “He’s been acting weird,” Mireya says. “Laid some shit on Hedda about stuff from the past.”

  “Past?” Anil grimaces. “I thought Westover drowned at the bottom of a bottle of Jack and was reborn as a jock asshole.”

  “What did he do that’s so bad?” I know why Mom hates Ellis—she wants to blame him for my off-kilterness—but they must have better reasons.

  They share glances. “Ancient history,” Mireya says. “We used to all hang out, but we were kind of dweebs—”

  “Are kind of dweebs,” Rory corrects.

  “Right, and so was Ellis, but then he got shiny new friends, and he ditched us the night of Anil’s fourteenth birthday party, and after that he ghosted us like we were the problem.”

  “That’s the worst.” Like I know anything about having friends beyond the fact that I don’t want Mireya to hate me. Next time we’re alone, I’ll apologize for everything I said last night in depth, but for now I get up. “I should go.”

  “Already?” Rory sounds disappointed.

  “I didn’t get much sleep last night. You’ll tell me if anything happens?”

  “Absolutely,” Mireya says. “Be here at seven thirty for your ride.”

  I don’t know what to wear to a rea
l high school. Erika’s promised to take me shopping, but we haven’t had a chance yet, so I try on outfit after outfit that stinks to me of ranch dust even though everything’s been meticulously laundered.

  Finally, frustrated, I sit down and search on the laptop for “what teenage girls wear to school this year.” That leads to a lot of clothes I can’t buy because I don’t have a credit card and couldn’t get in time for school tomorrow anyway, and next thing I know, I’m searching “Caroline Westover.”

  Articles scroll down the screen. Most are the kind with lots of pop-up ads and headlines that practically say, Come look at the freak show!

  Caroline Westover, 16, injected Drano into both eyes with an eye dropper. Her affluent parents, who were attending a wine tasting in Napa Valley, had left her six-year-old brother in her care.

  A neighbor, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said he heard Caroline repeating the words, “I can still see.” In fact, according to Dr. Elias Sorkin of Marin General Hospital, the teen had virtually no vision following the accident, but he had confidence cataract operations would eventually restore some of her sight.

  I click and click. Sixteen-year-old Caroline had springy copper curls, blue eyes like Ellis’s, and a radiant, teasing smile. In one photo, she swans for the camera, showing off a white leather fringed purse.

  An online rumor that Caroline participated in a “wannabe blind” community has not been substantiated. She has been admitted to a psychiatric ward, hospital officials said.

  None of the stories mentions anything about a video game. Only this:

  Staff at Sinnestauschen Labs, where Caroline interned two months before the incident, called her a talented aspiring game designer. Jane Vikdal, her former supervisor, said she trusted Caroline with testing experimental software.