The Glare

by Margot Harrison

  I follow Erika into the kitchen, a desperate energy making me light-headed. I need to see Mireya, to talk to Ellis. I need Rory. Friends, classes, homework, the promise of a new life—it can’t end now, just as it’s starting. “What about Clint? Where is he?”

  “He went to school with Conor’s mom. I’m going to tell him later.” Erika touches my shoulder. “He’s fine. Sit down.”

  He’s not fine. He’s probably already missing Po. I’ve ruined everything, but I can’t go back to the desert. Never. Never. But Rory will never go home or to the mall or to college or anywhere, and now I’m babbling: “I’m fine! I mean, I’m not fine, but I’m not going off-kilter. There are people I need to see at school—Rory’s friends. I need to talk to them. I need to tell them everything so they don’t just hear the rumors. So they know.”

  Anil. I need to be sure he’s stopped playing.

  I grab for my phone, but just as I touch it, it buzzes, making me go stock-still. It’s a text from an unfamiliar number—the same as last night? no idea—and it says: Did u do it, freak?

  No!!! Who are you? But I’m shaking so hard the message comes out as a jumble, and I end up deleting it.

  Who would send that? The same person who passed on the gossip yesterday? Does everyone at that school hate me now, after only three days?

  I don’t protest when Erika steers me into a chair and puts water on for tea. I just ask, “Do you have a sewing kit? Please?”

  She doesn’t ask me why, but while the tea’s brewing, she goes and gets one. We sit and drink the tea together, and the whole time she murmurs reassuringly about how I can return to school tomorrow, how I’ve just had a terrible shock, how she’s asked Dad to come home—

  “I don’t want to see him! He’ll blame me for everything, and he’ll make me go back and live with Mom because he doesn’t think I belong here.”

  The childish outburst hangs in the air. I want to reach out and stuff it back inside, because last night Dad almost seemed to understand. And what does it matter whether he thinks I belong here when I know that a single skull text could put me on the path to hurting myself or someone else?

  I’ll stop using my phone. Turn it back to silent, maybe even hide it.

  Erika just clasps my hand. “It sounds like you think you belong here,” she says. “I think so, too. Doesn’t that count for something?”

  Alone in my room, I take out my phone, my throat closing. I haven’t heard any new alerts, but—

  No new texts accusing me of killing Rory. No e-mails directing me to new posts about what a freak I am. Safe.

  As I switch the phone to Do Not Disturb mode, a cool wave of relief washes over me, though soon dread creeps back on spindly insect legs. This morning was real. But last night?

  My hands need to be busy, so I thread a needle and start sewing up Po’s stab wounds, restuffing him as I go. On the ranch, we’d spend rainy evenings mending, and each stitch helps me breathe a little easier. Clint may still notice, but it’s the least I can do.

  As I work, I keep trying to remember Rory alive—sitting cross-legged in the sand, calling to me from Mireya’s porch, running out in front of the Lexus. But there aren’t enough memories to draw on. And so I always end up seeing the interior of that car, the blood congealing in plastic grooves.

  When I’ve reduced Po’s wounds to puckered scars, I tuck him back in Clint’s messy bed, then return to my room. I don’t have Anil’s phone number, so I message one of his social feeds from the laptop: If you haven’t already, please stop playing the Glare. It hurt Rory. Please believe me. We can talk tomorrow.

  Then, though it’s probably pointless, I write back to Clelia Rosenbaum: The game is hurting people again, and it’s my fault. Do you have the server? Can you stop the texts?

  “Nobody thinks you did it, Hedda,” Mireya says. “You barely knew each other. You’re being paranoid.”

  Her eyes are red-rimmed. The floral comforter is balled in one corner of the unmade bed. Her voice has a new quality: leaden, as if every word is a wasted effort.

  “Somebody thinks I did.” But I’ve already told her about the text, and I don’t want to keep harping on it and make this about me.

  “Trolls trying to stir shit up. Tragedies bring out the worst in people.”

  “I tried to tell the detective about the Glare. I probably shouldn’t have, but—”

  Mireya stops me with a slash of her hand. “Caleigh’s mom heard from Leah’s mom that Rory’s mom recognized the knife. Because it came from her own kitchen.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I’ve been looking it up.” She doesn’t look at me as she speaks. “Self-stabbing is a rare method of suicide, most common in people who’ve been diagnosed with psychosis.”

  “Rory didn’t seem suicidal.” I remember how excited he seemed at the mall, how eager to explain.

  Mireya’s eyelids are drooping as if she’s struggling to see through a fog. “Not everybody does.”

  Don’t give up. Not now. I need you. I sink down opposite her on the bed. “Mireya. We need to find a way to make people stop playing the Glare.”

  “I told you not to obsess about that.”

  “It’s not just me! Rory was playing, and so was Emily. Anil told me. He gave it to her.”

  I relate what Anil said, then my encounter with Rory at the mall. “That was Tuesday, and he mentioned level thirteen, and he looked so weird—like he was seeing something that made him happy and scared at once.”

  “Hedda, you barely even know Rory. Knew him.”

  She keeps saying that and she’s right, but she hasn’t seen what I have. I reach for my phone. “I know what happens after level thirteen. I’m still getting the texts. I got one last night.”

  I half expect Mireya to refuse to look, but she examines the skull and says in her foggy voice, “Just like Emily’s. Have you gotten any since…?”

  She doesn’t need to finish. What I saw in the hatchback has divided my life into before and after, just like Mom when she took me away to the desert. “None since last night. But—”

  “Hedda.” Mireya drops the phone and raises her eyes to me. “Texts don’t make people hurt themselves unless there’s already something going on. Emily’s boyfriend was a jerk who was practically stalking her. And Rory… well, you didn’t know him, but he took meds for depression. He had bad periods when he’d talk about hurting himself. Maybe when he texted you and came over, it was because he liked you. Maybe he felt rejected when you didn’t text back.”

  “At four in the morning?” I slide off the bed and pace the desert-rose carpet. “No, Mireya.”

  “Sometimes a person seems fine right before…”

  “You think he stabbed himself in front of my house because I didn’t answer a text?”

  “He wasn’t being rational, obviously. But he was already being weird at the mall, and this seems likelier to me than a deadly game.”

  “It’s not ‘deadly’ necessarily. It could just… trigger things. Throw people off-kilter.”

  In a rush, I tell her everything I’ve learned—about Caroline being Mom’s intern, about her wanting to design a game that would provoke conditioned responses, about the message I received from someone who could be her. I leave out my own reactions to the skull texts, because I don’t trust Mireya not to call up Dad and Erika and tell them I need help before I end up like Rory.

  She might even be right.

  “Dad says the alerts come from a server, which means somebody’s running it,” I finish.

  “Well, obviously.” Mireya rises and grabs her tablet, looking slightly more awake. “Whoever it is, they’re using a proxy server to hide their location—that’s the point of being on the Dark Web.”

  “If it really is Caroline, and she really is in Bolinas, we could go there. We could turn the server off.”

  Mireya flicks something on her tablet. “Then what? Rory comes back to life?”

  Before I can answer, she flips the table
t to show me a screen full of jumbled letters, numbers, and symbols. “Last night, he sent me a file of code. I don’t know why or what it is. Does that sound like a stable person to you?”

  “I guess not.” Trying to convince her is a losing battle, but I can keep warning her. “You aren’t still playing the Glare, are you?”

  This time Mireya doesn’t answer right away. Her eyes rove around the room as if she’s checking for something, which makes me start doing it, too. We’re both so still now, the clock ticking in the hallway sounds like thunder.

  “I know you could last longer than me on level thirteen,” I say. “But don’t try, okay? And please, ask Anil to stop, too.”

  Mireya’s eyes flash, her old spirit coming back. “You’re the one who played to the end, Hedda. But believe me, right now, playing a game is the last thing I feel like doing.”

  The new e-mail is from Clelia Rosenbaum.

  In my last message, I asked if she was the one running the server, if she could stop the skulls. She’s written back: Not me. Never been me. If you’re who I think you are, the place in the picture is my best guess. If you’re getting the skulls, stay away from phones—all of them.

  I’m on the dark sidewalk, halfway to Ellis’s house, when I nearly walk straight into him.

  “Hey!” He grasps me by the elbows. “Were you coming to see me?”

  I came to tell him about Clelia’s message, bringing along the taped-together photograph I found behind my baseboard last night (years ago). But now there’s a lump in my throat, and I just nod.

  “Same here. I found the address of ‘Clelia’ in Bolinas. We could drive out there Saturday morning.”

  Then he looks where I’m looking, because we’re next to the spot where the hatchback stood all afternoon, surrounded by police tape, before finally being towed away. I keep seeing this morning in a flash and blur—Rory parallel parking in the predawn darkness; the cat dashing across the street; me stepping outside under the coral sky.

  Ellis’s hands rise tentatively up my bare arms, rub them in small circles. “I wasn’t sure if I should bother you, but you didn’t answer my texts. I’m so fucking sorry about Rory.”

  “I put the phone on Do Not Disturb.” I clear my throat and swallow, hard. “Do you have something to drink?”

  We end up in a pool of blackness on my deck, outside the range of the motion-detecting floodlight. Ellis hands me a flask, and a stink unfurls from it, pungent as gasoline. I force a swig down my throat, choke, and raise it again.

  Strong fingers cover mine, stopping me. Ellis is a sliver of white T-shirt and a ghost of hair as he says, “Seriously, go slow with that.”

  “I need it.” I’ve never really drunk alcohol before, and the burn of whiskey in my throat is melting into a warmth behind my breastbone. I close my eyes, the dark behind my lids vibrating in time with the insects in the grass. “Ellis, this is all my fault.”

  “How?” Surprise puts an unlikely squeak in his voice.

  Sitting beside him, precariously balanced on the deck railing, I can smell his sweat, feel the curve of his shoulder close in the dark. He’s not slurring his words, not the bad kind of drunk he was the night of the beach party, not yet.

  But I know he’s not as strong as he wants people to think. He may scale the porch roof, risk his neck on a cliff, and court detention at school, but his face falls apart when he talks about his sister, or about the Glare.

  I raise the flask again. “One more.” Ellis doesn’t stop me, just reaches for it when I’m done and takes a swig himself.

  “It’s my fault because I’m the one who found the game—again.” My mouth tastes bitter, but the words feel weightless now. “I gave it to Mireya, and we both played it, and somehow other people ended up with it—Anil. Emily. Rory.”

  “Are you saying…?”

  “Rory died thirteen times on level thirteen.”

  “Shit,” Ellis whispers. He cradles the flask in both hands as I tell him everything—almost.

  He nods and begins contributing details of his own. “You hear keening. You hear rustling. You see things that look sort of human, but—”

  “They’re made of light, and they don’t have faces. Randoms.” Cold moves down my spine as if saying the word might summon them. I haven’t told him about cutting myself as a child, seeing my own apparition in a Random, or stabbing Clint’s panda, and I don’t plan to. “Do you remember all that from playing the game? Or have you seen them, too?”

  “In real life? No. I didn’t play to level thirteen. I was too chicken, remember?”

  He believes me. It makes me want to hug him, and to cover up the impulse, I say, “I thought you were a daredevil.”

  “On my feed, sure. It’s easy to do stupid shit when you’re trashed and still be a freaking coward inside.”

  “I don’t think you’re a coward.”

  His head swivels to me, and though I can’t see his face, the scrutiny burns. “I am. When I told you I didn’t find anything in Caroline’s room, that wasn’t the absolute truth. After what happened with Emily, I checked again, and I found this in an old notebook.”

  He passes me a scrap of paper, illuminating it with his phone. I see a pencil drawing that looks at first glance like a rough rendering of a man’s face. But when I examine it closer—

  The sight of the familiar skull grips my body like a chilly wind. I teeter on the deck railing and leap down into the wet grass. There I sit, hugging my knees, smelling moist dirt and manzanita, my nerves singing a high, sustained note that echoes in the rush of my blood.

  Caroline drew the skull. I should be grateful for more proof that she designed the Glare, but I only feel cold.

  I want to be the girl I was when I was six—cocky and carefree, Heady Hedda riding the Dark Web like a pirate on the high seas, never suspecting that all her clever toys could be taken away. Who would I be if I’d never stolen the Glare from Caroline? Would Rory still be alive?

  When Ellis’s shadow falls across me, I say again, “It’s all my fault.”

  Six-year-old Hedda engineered her own downfall. She was too good at getting what she wanted, and what she wanted was for her mom and dad to think she was brilliant. She wanted their attention. She wanted to play Caroline’s special, secret game and win.

  It didn’t turn out that way. And then, when I found the Glare again, I had to try and beat it a second time like I hadn’t learned a thing. Only this time I pulled more people in with me.

  Ellis’s hand brushes my shoulder, warm and tentative. “It’s not your fault. Even if the Glare actually does kill people, you couldn’t have known.”

  “I dared you to play it. Mireya and Lily were right—I was a horrible, selfish person. I hurt you.”

  “Are you going to blame yourself for my general shittiness since you left? Because, no thanks, I don’t need you taking responsibility for me. And I doubt Rory would want you to take responsibility for him, either.”

  “Stop it.” My voice is choked up. “He’s—”

  “I know. Believe me, I’m not comparing us. But, Hedda, you were six.”

  I lean back against his hand, feeling the pulse of his breath. “Your life isn’t shitty. When I met you at the barbecue, you seemed so sure of yourself, like you owned the world.”

  Ellis makes a dry sound, not quite a laugh. “I don’t own even this moment. But if I can do one thing, I want to find my sister. I want to know what happened to her—or what she did.”

  I take out the photo with the game’s address and the tower image. “I think she’s running the game server. We need to turn it off. Check your mail—I forwarded you a new message from Clelia.”

  Ellis pulls out his phone, and the darkness goes taut between us as he reads the thread. “If this is Caroline, she says she’s not running it. You think this is the picture she meant? This place with the black tower?”

  I turn the image over. “Does this look like her handwriting?”

  Ellis peers at it. “Yeah. This is
what you stole from her?”

  “Must be. Do you recognize the place in the picture?”

  For an instant, I allow myself to hope the black tower is adjacent to some Westover wilderness cottage or summer getaway, but he shakes his head. “I’ll try a reverse-image search, but we need to go to Bolinas. If she’s there, she’ll explain.”

  Or she won’t want to explain, and she’ll be running the game server, and she’ll be violent with a shaky grasp on reality. Remembering what Dad said after the horror movie, I wonder again if running the Glare could be Caroline’s way of trying to control the thing that scares her—the screens she never managed to stop seeing. But I keep my thoughts to myself.

  “I’m not saying we’d rush in and hug it out,” Ellis says, as if sensing my misgivings. “She disappeared for a reason. Maybe it’s better if I go alone—”

  “No,” I say just as his phone vibrates on the grass between us.

  I don’t decide to pick it up. All I know is suddenly I’m holding it, and then I’m hurling it across the lawn.

  The phone lands under a Japanese maple and buzzes again, its glow turning the darkness oily with menace. It’s barely audible now, yet I can almost hear the keening. That sensation of being watched crawls over my skin.

  Ellis stares at me. “The fuck? You know I’m not getting skulls.”

  Don’t look for flashes of white. “I know, it’s just… I can’t explain. The noise.” Conditioned response. “I’m sorry. I hope it’s okay.”

  Ellis goes and retrieves the phone. It illuminates his face briefly before blinking into darkness. “It’s fine. I’m turning vibration off.”

  Stay away from phones, all of them. If anyone understands the danger, it’s Caroline. But why would she help me avoid it?

  In a room lit by a vanilla-scented candle that is being used to muffle the stink from a foot-high bong, a boy dies for the thirteenth time.

  He wasn’t going to bother finishing the game, but today in fifth period he got a text with a picture of a safety rune. Right after that, he heard the first whispers about Rory.