by Ryan Schow
“First I shoot you point blank in the face and you not only come back from the dead, you manage to look amazing doing it. Then you live through one of these knives without so much as a scar?” He’s picking up the knife that was moments ago sticking out of my face and showing it to me as Exhibit A. “What are you, Raven? Really?”
“I’m impossible, just like you.”
He shakes his head, kicks some of the ash that was a man’s head, then says, “I’m really wanting to see my mother before I leave.” He sounds like a kid right now. It’s a wonder I can even think of him as my first without hating the absolute crap out of both of us.
About that time, two more nurses leave his parent’s room, presumably part of the team who helped deliver the baby. None of us make eye contact. I’m basically trying to be invisible in front of them.
“You can’t just walk in,” I tell him once the nurses are gone.
“Watch me,” he says, more decisive. And then he does, and silly me, I follow him just to make sure he doesn’t do anything stupid.
The two people Jake says are his parents, they’re in a delivery bed holding their newborn, which is supposedly Jake. Jake looks at this child who is supposed to be himself and like a total clown, he says, “What a beautiful boy.”
Narcissistic butthole.
Before the man can speak, Jake hands me a photo of this room and these people like it’s no big thing. I look at it and gasp. It’s a photo of this room, exactly as it looks now, except the photo is old, worn. In the photo, his mother is holding him. Was this taken by his father? My head spins a bit and I grab onto something for support. Whatever hope I held out that all of this time travel blather was just a dream, or a joke, it’s erased in a second.
“Honey, who is this man?” the mother is saying, now cradling the baby protectively. The old man is speechless. “William,” she says, her face pumped with concern, “ask him to leave.”
“It’s okay,” Jake says, holding up his hands, palms out, “my friend and I are leaving. We just wanted to make sure you were safe.”
“Why wouldn’t we be?” his mother asks.
Leaving, Jake smiles, and to me he says, “Me and my mother, we never really got along.” His father is taking out his cell phone to take a picture. The picture Jake handed me.
On the way out, I catch a glimpse of the mysterious platinum blonde I met at school. The same skinny blonde girl who told me I was more beautiful that she imagined.
“Hey!” I shout.
She turns and disappears around a corner; I run after her. Racing down the hallway, my mind going crazy wanting to know why she’s following me, I turn the corner and she’s gone. I run down two more hallways and she isn’t in any of them either.
WTH?
Closing my eyes, I open a link to her psychically, but all I feel is a vast nothingness. Jake catches up to me and says, “What are you doing?”
Opening my eyes again, realizing she’s gone, I say, “Chasing ghosts, apparently.”
“What are you going to do now?” he asks, breathing a little heavy.
Looking at him, wanting to see the Dreamy McDreamer of a twenty-something I first saw when I was fat Savannah, I see only a charlatan. I shouldn’t feel like this, because if I told him I was Savannah, then Abby, and now me, he might have a hard time with me, too. Point is, we’re all just big fakers when it comes down to it.
“What I’m going to do is drop you off at Freeman,” I say, exhausted, “and then I’m going to drive the speed limit back to my dorm room, take a scalding hot bath and do my best to forget I ever knew your dumb ass, that’s how much these last two days have sucked.”
Fundamentally Loathsome
1
With a revenge plan as tidy as hers, all she could do was try not to lose her nerve. This kind of plan, it weakened the resolve of lesser individuals. Half the morning she felt like a genius; the other half she was thinking, this is so awful, and so terribly illegal. Cameron had broken half a dozen laws already just getting to this point.
“I’ve covered your tracks,” Lola said in her email, “but this thing has your signature all over it.”
She was right.
Screw it.
At lunch time, a.k.a., the point where maximum damage would occur, she pressed SEND, felt her stomach plunge, then took a breath and said to herself, “This is the end of Abby Swann.”
Practically everyone saw the video all at once. The chatter rose to thunder and everyone turned and stared at Abby and Caden. Abby opened her phone, watched the video sent to her as well. Minutes later, she walked quickly and with her head down from the cafeteria, her face so bloodless and racked with shame her tears literally rained on the dark, hardwood floor.
The next text, and she sent this to Abby the moment she ran out of the cafeteria, it read: DO THE WORLD A FAVOR AND JUST KILL YOURSELF.
The problem with the prank was, when Abby left, almost everyone in the cafeteria fell to a whisper. Warning bells sounded in her head. They were clanging so loud Cameron’s eyes all but pulsated from the pressure. For her, time slowed to a crawl.
Have I truly gone too far? she wondered.
The clammy, almost rubbery feel of her skin seemed to say a very loud, very resounding yes. Pretty soon, everyone started looking around. Their accusatory eyes eventually landed on her. She lowered her gaze, focused on her food and tried to act like everything was no big deal, that it wasn’t her who had done this.
The real question was, did she just kill her reputation?
Oh, God.
But wait a minute, she thought to herself, was it really that bad? It was a tasteful play on humor, in her mind, but when she thought about it in the eyes of someone without her sense of humor, it took on a whole new meaning.
The video began with the revised title: CADEN AND ABBY: A LOVE STORY. It opened to Caden and Abby kissing in the hallway, then it flashed to some tight shots of Abby’s diarrhea marathon and her crying in the girls’ bathroom, then to Caden jerking off with the words POO FETISH doing a little dance across the screen. It then showed Abby bouncing around topless singing horribly to Taylor Swift, then to Caden jerking it again, and finally to Abby sobbing and then passed out on the floor of her bedroom with shit in her underwear (more flashing of the words POO FETISH). If that wasn’t enough, the final shot was on Caden finally making his “O” face. And then it closed with the caption: CADEN AND ABBY: A LOVE STORY FOR THE AGES.
She both loved and hated it, it was that good.
Her worst yet.
But would it be so bad she would burn in the fallout? And if so, would she ever recover from the shame? She had to lie low, protect herself, deny everything.
2
The moment Caden saw the video, molten heat poured into his face and his hands became fists. Eyebrows pulled together and eyes roamed, looking past everyone looking at him, looking for the one set of eyes that weren’t looking back.
In every person, be it your best friend, your mother, your teacher, the benevolent priest at the church you don’t go to, the old broad at the Stop and Go, a twelve year old girl with pigtails, or a librarian with big glasses, there exists a darkness, a sickness of rage, that tipping point where you just snap.
That’s what happened to Caden: he snapped.
He popped up from the lunch table’s bench so quick it startled everyone around him. He stalked across the cafeteria, eyes with reddening blood vessels radar-beamed on Cameron. That bitch. That cavernous twat. He power-walked over to her table and stood across from her, face-to-face so he could project the full force of his hatred upon her. She refused his eyes. Everyone in the cafeteria was looking at him. Everyone but Cameron.
“You did this!” he boomed.
She finally looked up, terror in her eyes. Terror, but not denial. He needed only see it for a second before he became that person. The one who looked at a beautiful flower and just had to step on it. The one who let a crying baby fall off the bed. The one who saw two guys beating up th
e school nerd and decided to walk the other way. Behind him, at a table full of freshman, there was a plate of half-eaten food. Lightning fast, he turned, grabbed an uneaten baked potato and baseball-pitched it right at Cameron’s stupid, guilt-ridden face with everything he could muster.
The baked potato literally exploded off her nose. When it struck, the starchy white mush flew everywhere, and her stupid, stupid head snapped back, her nose instantly soaking the slush and slop of the potato with blood. The cafeteria went so quiet, that if it were possible, you could hear an ant fart. Not all ants…just one.
When Cameron managed her first breath after the vegi-hand grenade, Caden slapped his palms on the table, leaned forward like a maniac, dangerously close, and he very quietly growled these words: “If she does anything life-threatening as a result of this, I swear to Christ, I’ll have you killed.”
There were gasps of breath. Blake scooted away from him while Theresa glared at him with the same kind of hatred he was leveling on Cameron.
Without waiting for her reply, he left, heading straight for Abby’s room. Surely that was where she was. When he got there, however, Brayden was already banging on her door.
3
Janice Millworth, when she was a scraggly little nine year old with a couch cushion for a bed in a beaten trailer that was her lifelong home, she curled up under two dry towels to the old smells of cooked meat and wet dog and dreamt the most beautiful dream.
In the dream she was different, a beautiful child with friends who didn’t tease her and a mother who adored her rather than tolerated her. She didn’t live in a trailer park, in this dream. She had a house and a pink bike with a white seat and foil-colored handlebar streamers she rode on real roads made of concrete. Not crushed rock or dirt.
Then someone’s chained up mutt got into a midnight barking fit and young Janice woke from the dream, sweating, depressed, still wildly unkempt and half sliding off her bed cushion. Fast forward a few years, to where Janice got finger-banged by Robert Mullin. Janice quickly became someone’s dream girl, but the dream lasted for about two days before she got dumped and teased and went back to being nobody’s anything.
Janice was a fast learner.
Dreams, she came to realize, were just the prelude to the big letdown. So she stopped dreaming. The older, wiser Janice Millworth, she came to understand dreams as snatches of fantasy that come to an end long before they become reality.
Then she was stolen in the night, drugged and shipped to some kind of holding facility a long ways away. When she woke up transformed into Abby Swann, the nightmare then became the nightmare with a rapidly developing and surreal dream-like quality. As in, there is a gun to your head, now go enjoy the finer things in life, or else…
Actors and actresses in Hollywood, and singers, even models and athletes, they say you have to sell your soul to be someone, especially someone worth anything is this shitty, nearly communist world. Janice’s soul wasn’t sold as much as it was dragged from her sad, sad body and fisted into another body, care of kidnapping sex traffickers and the ultra creepy Dr. Enzo Holland. She loved her new face, her new body, her new life.
But this was just another dream, wasn’t it?
That’s what she told herself.
When she didn’t vanish, though, when this sumptuous dream didn’t vanish with a barking dog or a fuck wagon of a boy, she accepted that this dream was no dream at all. It was surreal; it was stranger than fiction, but it was real. It was freaking real!
But right about the time she truly embraced the death of Janice Millworth to the new and glittery life of Abby Swann, some asshole went and posted a viral video that turned an otherwise adaptable reality into something nightmarish.
The dream was ending…as all dreams must.
Sitting in the corner of the bathroom, knees pulled to her chest, arms wrapped around her shins, she sobbed and hated and hauled up every putrid memory of every jerk who ever hurt her. Then she felt sorry for herself, and eventually she mourned Abby, and Janice.
When the animosity and self-loathing turned to the question of her life, Abby wondered, was this to be my fate all along? Have I always been doomed to a life of abject misery? In her head sat the answer. It was the text someone sent her after she saw the video. It said to do the world a favor and just kill herself.
Just kill yourself, she thought. Just kill. Yourself.
Janice Millworth was dead…kidnapped, melted, changed, but just as dead as her dreams. And Abby? Her “friends” could barely tolerate her anymore. They kept marveling at how much the accident had changed her. Yeah, no shit. Then there were her enemies. Those assholes were so rotten and reprehensible, their violation of hers and Caden’s privacy felt gigantic the way you think of Mount Everest as gigantic. Abby was no solution to the Janice Millworth debacle. She was the glamourous but just as fucked version of her former self. A social scourge. The shitting, bad dancing derelict. Abby Swann was a tarnished tramp. The name alone now sounded like a social prison sentence.
Someone knocked on her door. She ignored the interruption. The knocking continued. Brayden called her name. God, that clown.
She wished he’d just go away. There was no saving her. No putting the puzzle pieces of her life back together. That video, it was the bell you couldn’t un-ring. So she kept on ignoring him. And his incessant knocking.
In between him pounding on her dorm room door, still sitting alone in the bathroom, she could not stop reflecting on her two lives. And she couldn’t stop seeing that malicious video. Or how everyone saw her pooping and sobbing. Everyone saw her. They saw her bouncing tits that were hers and no one else’s to look at. And her crapped-in white underwear, and her boyfriend beating off to…what in Jesus’ name was he beating off to anyway?
Someone gave her diarrhea. That same someone electrocuted her. And that very same someone—or someone’s—hacked into her laptop and filmed her.
A fresh round of dry heaves left her wondering if there was anything left in her guts to purge. There sure as hell wasn’t any dignity left. Or resolve to go on. What she wanted most was just to stop…feeling. The unending disappointments of life had been eating at her almost since birth. Now it had become too much. And that goddamn KNOCKING!
“Go away!” she screamed. Voices on the other side of the door only made her more mad. “GO THE HELL AWAY!” she boomed.
The strain of her voice might have torn something in her throat. She dragged herself to her bed, flopped down on it and let the lunacy of Janice Millworth wash over her Abby Swann brain.
Her eyes snapped shut, but not hard enough to erase this—the waking nightmare that was now her life. Sitting behind her eyelids like a demon in the closet, was the memory of the video. It was looped in her brain. Playing endless. God, it wasn’t stopping! Defenseless, her eyes slid back open, the warm, endless stream of tears salting away the innocence of her skin.
Now the knocking changed, got heavier. So did the voice: Caden was calling to her.
When he told her everything was going to be okay, that he needed to talk to her, that she should just open the door and let him in, she clapped her hands over her ears and refused to hear anything from either of them. Already she was thinking of the lines she would cut on her thighs, on her arms, up her sides. There was so much pain to cut loose. Too much.
Mounted to the ceiling straight above, not whirling, totally useless, was the ceiling fan. An idea assaulted her. If I’m drowning, she thought, this is my life raft. Not a pair of scissors. Not a few bloody limbs. She sat up, ripped the sheets from the bed and shoved the bed a few feet away, into the corner.
Janice then put her iPod on the docking station, put on Marilyn Manson’s Coma White too loud because she understood it. The track was a cheerless, intimate, magnificently perfect portrayal of desolation. Coma White was the way misery should sound when sung by someone with a righteous voice in the black throes of depression.
She loved Marilyn Manson. She needed him. Not because he wrote the son
g for people like her—he clearly didn’t—but because he was a beautiful musician who understood pain.
Janice Millworth, masquerading as Abby Swann—working like crazy to ignore the boys outside her door—reflected on her two lives as she twisted the bed’s top sheet into a tight, tight rope of cloth. She then got on the internet, followed a few simple instructions and fashioned the bed sheet into a hangman’s noose.
The knocking slowed, but didn’t stop.
With Coma White on replay, she dragged her desk’s chair under the ceiling fan, stood on it and tied the appropriate knot at the base of the fan. She then looped the noose end around her neck, tightened it, took one last breath and kicked the chair loose.
She dropped and her neck snapped hard, popping loudly and cranking sideways. It didn’t break. But that didn’t mean she did it wrong, it only meant hers would be a worse death than she was hoping for. A choking death.
The pressure in her head made her eyes feel squeezed so viciously they wanted to squirt clean out of her face. Janice fought the urge to grab the noose, to shove her head through it, to clear her airway and breathe. She wasn’t strong enough, though. Her panicked mind, it barfed out panicked thoughts. Like hoping the ceiling fan would drop from the ceiling and let her crash back to the floor, back into life.
But it didn’t. It tilted after a moment, but it didn’t fall.
Through the mire and tangle of second thoughts, it became clear she was going to die up here. Her feet dangled too far from the floor, toes reaching down hoping to touch ground, going tingly and becoming useless as the darkness closed in on her.
Janice Millworth was already dead. The Abby Swann body, it might as well be dead, too. She stopped swinging her legs; stopped fighting the ungodly pressure about to pop her head.
And then she let go…
Just before Abby died, her bowels loosened, piling and draining into her underwear. Just like in the video. How goddamn ironic, she thought.
