The Glare

by Margot Harrison

  Bacteria aren’t Randoms, and this silly maze that’s supposed to represent the human digestive system isn’t my forest or my tower, but it’ll have to do. The maze pops up again, and I’m off—dashing, flitting, hitting the button till it rattles. No matter how much I nourish my little avatar, I feel empty.

  When I die again, inches from a broccoli floret, Clint asks, “Want to do multiplayer?”

  We play as a team for a while, his avatar running out ahead and clearing a path for mine until we start working like a single unit rather than two separate ones. “You’re good,” Clint says in his matter-of-fact way.

  “Thanks.” But not good enough to beat level 13. I recline in the beanbag again, starting to feel tired of the game and its good-nutrition preaching, and examine the stuffed animals lined up on Clint’s bookshelf. “Why’s there a blindfold on your panda?”

  “What? Oh, him.” Clint hops up on the bed and tugs the red bandanna off the bear’s button eyes, looking sheepish. “He shouldn’t have that.”

  “But why?”

  “I was watching a Goosebumps movie a long time ago—years, I think—and Po doesn’t like to be scared.” He fixes me hard in the eye. “I mean, I know he’s not real now, obviously. But back then I wanted to make sure he wouldn’t see.”

  L13Survivor hasn’t responded to my message. A few anonymous people are jeering at me for believing the Glare legend, calling me stupid and gullible. No one has anything to say about Caroline.

  I’ve studied enough of these forums now to know that the more L13Survivor warns people to avoid the Glare, the more they’ll beg and bully, demanding a link. It’s forbidden fruit, and everybody wants a taste. But maybe that’s only because they’re like Mireya, not believing.

  Something clanks downstairs. An AC duct hums, vibration rising from the soles of my feet.

  My phone buzzes, and the room goes still, sound sucked from the world till I can hear blood pumping in my ears. I’m connected. Not alone. It’s obviously Mireya, it’s always her, but…

  But L13Survivor says the skulls keep coming until you hurt yourself or someone else. As I remember that skull on my screen, the clouds forming gaping eyes and fleshless cheeks, something white flits in the corner of my vision. Just the curtains.

  I get up to check for a breeze outside, but the air is stiflingly still. On the porch roof, a pale pool of moonlight flickers against dark shingles. No Ellis tonight.

  I drop the curtain, balling my fists. If I ask Rory and Anil to stop playing the Glare, will they laugh at me the way Mireya did? Will they want the forbidden fruit even more?

  I died thirteen times on level 13, and I’m fine.

  I plop down on the bed, scoop up Raggedy Ann, and examine the snipped fabric where her eyes should be. Clint blindfolded his panda to keep it from seeing what he was afraid to see. I close my eyes and try to imagine myself six years old, sitting in that desk chair and playing a game I wasn’t supposed to play, full of scary monsters that ambushed and throttled and suffocated me.

  I lie in bed, Ann tight to my chest. The computer screen is dark, but the darkness is full of… things. Every time I drift toward sleep, I almost hear something, and then I open my eyes and almost see something. I can close my eyes, but Ann has no eyelids, so she has to see it all.

  Is that a real memory, or just imagination? I’m shuddering, hugging the doll so hard she seems to have become part of my body. The phone buzzes again.

  Adrenaline surges through me, warm and angry. Not again. I drop Ann and go grab the phone.

  There’s a text from Mireya, just checking in, and a new e-mail alert. Reminding myself to figure out how to turn off all these notifications I thought I wanted, I click to a message from someone named Clelia Rosenbaum.

  The subject line is “Sinnestauschen.” And for a moment I seem to be falling, the wind whistling and keening in my ears.

  The ground hardens under my feet again, and the glowing letters resolve themselves into words.

  I saw your forum post. I know about the lab and Caroline, yeah. If you’re playing, STOP.

  Somewhere, in a room ironically illuminated by a red lava lamp, a boy has died thirteen times on level 13.

  So that’s all there is to it. I’m dead. Feeling satisfied and let down at once, he takes a screenshot of the “death message,” e-mails it to a friend (with strict instructions not to post it anywhere; he promised), clicks to another window, and waits.

  He knows what to expect. First the skull, then the text that says simply, Ur pathetic. He has screenshots of both texts Emily got, thanks to her friend Cheyenne, so he can compare them. Maybe Emily really was playing the game, though Mireya swears she didn’t give it to her.

  He doesn’t want to believe the Glare made Emily jump off a cliff. But if there’s even a sliver of truth to the legend, if he can document it, he’ll become a legend himself. He needs to know, and he’s not afraid.

  His phone vibrates at last, and here’s the skull, right on schedule. His heart skips a beat, then subsides. He writes down the time so he can figure out how many seconds it took.

  He’s read all about game-induced hallucinations, ranging from ghostly menus to Tetris blocks floating in midair. The brain is good at fooling itself. But those flimsy apparitions never killed anyone.

  His phone vibrates a second time.

  He reaches for it, knowing exactly what to expect, and sees—no, that’s not possible. The leering Joker avatar is so painfully familiar it makes his throat close.

  SirGanksalot hasn’t contacted him for nearly three years, not since that disastrous failed raid when they had a blowup and Ganksalot turned into a troll and called him words he doesn’t like to remember. His face used to burn whenever he thought about it, and he deleted his account and never played that game again.

  But there it is, the hated avatar, right beside the exact words the boy was expecting: Ur pathetic. Restricted number.

  Why’s Ganksalot after him now? Does he know about the Glare? Is he using it to take some kind of nasty little revenge?

  The phone goes dark, and the boy stands up, his heart zooming from zero to sixty. There’s a staticky rush in his ears, like a dead radio station or a high wind in dry leaves. It grows louder as he sees a luminous flicker just inside the closet.

  He’s in there, something inside him says, though that makes no sense. SirGanksalot could live anywhere, be anybody. There’s no reason to think he’s become a psycho stalker.

  The boy yanks back the folding doors, tosses aside the piles of fallen clothes. Nothing. Well, of course nothing. That second text, though.

  When he picks up the phone again to check, he finds only the skull followed by the words Ur pathetic. His enemy’s avatar is gone like it never existed, but he knows he saw it. It wasn’t his imagination.

  Somewhere in the distance, he hears keening.

  All the screens are starting to bother me.

  Nearly every teacher uses a SMART Board, and for some classes we use laptops and tablets, and between classes it’s phones, phones, all the time. My eyes itch from staring into the bluish light, and when I refocus on real things, my vision blurs.

  Right now I’m focusing on a girl in a cheerleader uniform who glances back and forth, from her phone to Ellis Westover, as he talks between bites of fries. He’s got that lazy grin I remember from the barbecue, like nothing he’s saying is serious. She has full lips and a waterfall of auburn hair, and when she reaches out and rubs the scruff of Ellis’s neck almost absentmindedly, I tense.

  Anil is staring at them, too. “Shit, did Westover bag Jerusha Pierce?”

  Mireya bonks him on the head with Hard Times. “Sexist language. Maybe she bagged him!”

  “I’m sorry, I’m just in awe that that dude ever hung out with us.”

  “His loss,” Mireya says, while Lily offers, “I have it on good authority that guys aren’t Jerusha’s thing.”

  On the way out of the cafeteria, Ellis and the cheerleader drift apart, and he head
s to his locker. I walk past him with my head down, wishing Mireya weren’t off doing her post-lunch makeup routine.

  A tap on my shoulder makes me swing around—and there he is, his face sober and focused now, no trace of the grin, an oxford shirt hanging out of his jeans. “Hey! You ran away yesterday like somebody was after you.”

  Blood rushes to my cheeks. “You seemed busy.”

  “You said something about Caroline.” His voice lowers on her name, and it’s like we’re back on my porch, alone in the dark. “Did you remember something more about her and the game?”

  He edges back to his locker, where we’re out of the crowd, and I follow like he’s pulling me on a string. I can’t help it—I need to talk about this without getting one of Mireya’s lectures on my internet naivete. “No memories. But… I’ve heard that Emily actually was playing.”

  I’m half-afraid Ellis will try to make me rat out Anil, but he just says, “Figured. You and Mireya, you’ve stopped, right?”

  I nod. “It won’t let me play anymore, remember? But I’ve only had the one skull text, and nothing’s happened to me.”

  “Good.” He says it the way someone might say “yet.” “Could anybody else be playing?”

  Anil. Rory. I know Rory the best, but I can already tell he won’t listen to me; he’s playing because of the legend. Maybe they both are. How do you fight that? “I don’t think so,” I say guiltily. “But listen, I’ve been doing some research. Did you know your sister used to be my mom’s intern?”

  Ellis shakes his head. “I knew she had some internship, but not where.”

  “A place called Sinnestauschen Labs.” I explain about my forum inquiry, then take out my phone and show him Clelia Rosenbaum’s e-mail.

  Ellis’s brow corrugates as he reads. “Who do you think that is—this Clelia person?”

  “No idea.”

  His expression continues to darken as I explain what Sinnestauschen does and how Caroline tested software there. “Maybe the Glare is something the lab invented, a game designed to addict people, and Caroline was the first to test it.” It’s making more and more sense in my head: If a game made Caroline hurt herself, wouldn’t she want to warn other people? But anonymously, so they wouldn’t think she was crazy and lock her up again. “Maybe your sister is L13Survivor.”

  Ellis shoves books in his pack. “She can’t be—I’ve seen those forum posts. They started when Caroline was locked in the psych ward without internet access.”

  “Okay, so maybe it’s not her. But when we were six, I got the Glare address from Caroline—you said that yourself. Which means that, if she’s out there somewhere, she could be—”

  “She’s out there.” He clips the words too sharply. “She might even be reading that forum.”

  “You think?” I’m surprised he isn’t resisting my theory anymore. “Do you know if she left stuff in her room like, I don’t know, files? Notes?”

  “She wiped her devices before she… got hurt, and all she left were paper diaries and scrapbooks. I read them—standard teenage girl stuff. Nothing about ‘Whoops, I tested a killer game and accidentally gave it to a kid.’”

  “I’m not trying to blame your sister, Ellis. I know you don’t want to talk about her.”

  “When did I ever say that?” The late bell rings, and Ellis hoists his pack onto one shoulder. “She’s not L13Survivor, Hedda. But I don’t think L13Survivor sent you that message.”

  “Who did, then?”

  Ellis leans down, his face abruptly inches from mine, so I can see his now-faint freckles.

  “Clelia Rosenbaum was a lady who used to clean our house when I was little,” he says. “She was at least seventy. Caroline loved her. She always said if she became a spy and needed an alias, she’d use Clelia’s name.”

  Caroline read my forum post. Caroline sent me a message warning me away from the Glare. I’m still trying to absorb it as the last bell rings and I follow Mireya down the corridor, dodging groups of kids who are wearing face paint and chanting about beating some rival team.

  She was always just the faceless heroine of a gruesome cautionary tale—“the babysitter.” Now she’s real. I need to write her back, but there are too many questions to ask. What if I scare her away?

  Lily nearly barrels into us, phone in hand, her hoodie half on and her backpack unzipped. Mireya grabs her by the shoulders to stop her forward momentum. “Look where you’re going, girl!”

  Then she must see, as I do, how wide and scared Lily’s eyes are, because she asks, “Emily?”

  Lily’s gaze darts to me, then back to Mireya. She looks like she ran all the way to us, her small frame straining with the effort of each breath, and now words burst from her:

  “Her dad—he had his phone in the hospital room. He got a text, and Emily went berserk. She grabbed the phone and smashed it, like to bits smashed it, and then she got out of bed and tried to crawl out of the ward dragging her broken leg, screaming and crying the whole time. It took three nurses to get her down and give her a shot, and now she’s in restraints.”

  Lily stops for breath with a gulp, leaning back into the arm Mireya’s wrapped around her shoulders. Her eyes glisten with tears, and I feel mine filling, too.

  “Shit,” Mireya says. “I thought they said she’d be okay.”

  “Me too.” Lily sniffles and rubs her eyes. “Cheyenne thinks it was her dirtbag boyfriend’s fault for trying to visit her. He wasn’t in the room, but the whole time she was yelling at him to leave her alone, to stop texting her. And she was scared, Chey says. Like an ax murderer was after her.”

  “I love it,” Erika says as I twist in the mirror, savoring the strange feeling of a filmy skirt against my legs. “That color brings out the pink in your cheeks.”

  She’s right; I look more like the girls at school now. Like I actually care. I have a sudden urge to blow-dry my hair into sleekness and put on lipstick like Mireya. “It’s not something I could ever wear on the ranch, though.”

  “So maybe it can be your going-to-town dress.”

  No one wears dresses in our town, Mom reproaches in my head, but I ignore her. I follow Erika to the register, where it turns out she was right: Buying things gives me a little high. Even when I’m not paying. The glint of the track lighting and the rustle of the shiny bag are almost enough to make me forget the terror in Lily’s eyes earlier this afternoon.

  But not quite.

  I want to say I’ll get a job and pay Erika back, or something like that, but I’m starting to understand that sometimes you just have to say thank you and let it be, so that’s what I do.

  We go to the food court and have fancy coffees with whipped cream, just the way I imagined when I was on the plane. Then Erika goes to pick up a leather jacket she had cleaned, leaving me in charge of Clint, who’s been practically sleeping upright through the clothes shopping.

  When he realizes we’re alone, he wakes up with a vengeance. “Come on!” he yells, running down the high-ceilinged corridor.

  “Wait!” I dump my cup in the trash and dash after him.

  The corridor jolts me from light into greenish shadow and back. Each store beckons distractingly with its own perfume and music, its own seductive twilight, as I zigzag between groups of ladies with shopping bags.

  “Slow down!” I yell, keeping my eye on Clint’s green hoodie. I’m winded by the time I catch up with him, in front of a store with cardboard cutouts and giant screens in the window. One screen shows a disembodied hand shooting a machine gun, sending groups of Nazi soldiers flying in clouds of dirt and blood.

  A shiver slides down my spine. “You know I don’t have any money to buy you games, right?”

  Clint doesn’t spare a glance for me, his eyes glued to the moving images. “I’d never buy anything at a store. I just want to see the demo on a bigger screen.”

  Cotton-candy hair catches my eye. It’s Rory—only a few yards from us, wearing a Sbarro uniform and holding his phone up to his face tilted lengthwise
, the way you do to take a picture.

  “I need to say hi to a friend, okay?” I squeeze my brother’s shoulder.

  “Your boyfriend?”

  “No!” Rory’s still peering intently through the camera—facing me, but not aiming at me. I make my way over to him, trying to think of a way to ask him to stop playing the Glare without sounding like a bossy weirdo.

  Rory’s lips move. As I approach, he lowers the phone screen, but only a few inches. “Hey!”

  “Hey.” I take a deep breath. “I guess you heard about Emily.”

  His shoulders tighten, and his eyes flicker behind his glasses as if he’s monitoring something over my shoulder. “Yeah. At least she’s got good supervision, there in the hospital. They won’t let her hurt herself again.”

  “Right.” Rory’s still looking at me sidelong through the camera, and it makes me uneasy. I want to ask him to put it down. “Are you, uh, making a video?”

  “Nah.” Rory gives a little start. “Shit! There it is again.”

  He begins to walk briskly. Clint is still hovering by the game store window, so I snag him by his hood, ignoring his protests, and drag him along with us.

  I have an odd feeling Rory shouldn’t be alone. “What are you looking at?”

  “You wouldn’t believe it, Hedda.”

  I glance where he’s aiming the phone and see only sad potted palms, storefronts, and middle-aged women toting crinkly bags. “Rory, I need to ask you about something. Are you still playing the Glare?”

  “Ha, no. Take a look. If you can see it—you probably can’t.” He holds out the phone to me and laughs, sounding nervous and giddy at once. “This is a trip!”

  I peer over Rory’s shoulder, keeping my hold on Clint. The jewel-bright screen shows the exact same corridor, only smaller and farther away. “What am I looking for?”

  His shoulder jerks, and he backs into me, stabbing the screen. “Right there. He was just there. Did you see?”