by Dan Rix
Ew. My insides recoiled at the sensation. I frantically wiped my hand on a branch and made a mad dash for the gutter, scrambled clumsily onto the roof, where I spent the next minute shaking myself out and swatting at phantom creepy-crawlies.
Finally, I straightened up, panting a little. Alrighty then. I’d made it to the roof. On hands and knees—the pads of my feet easily gripped the asphalt shingles—I crawled up the roof’s ridge line and swung myself up onto the second story, creeping toward the balcony.
It came into view, a staggering ten-foot drop from where I stood. Pulse drumming now, I lay down on my stomach and scooted to the edge, letting my legs dangle off. Feeling unnervingly exposed, I slid down to my belly button, then the bottom of my rib cage. My grip slipped and I scraped painfully the rest of the way, chafing my raw skin. I caught the edge and my toes banged into glass, and then I dropped onto the balcony with a loud thump.
I stood slowly, hurting everywhere.
From inside the bedroom, Emory’s startled face stared out at me. “Did you hear that?” said his muffled voice.
Someone else must be in the room with him.
He ambled over to the sliding glass doors and peered out into the night, blocking my view. He rested his palm on the glass. So close I could see the weariness in his eyes.
I put my palm on top of his.
“Just the wind,” he said, retreating back into the bedroom, and then I spotted her—Ashley—standing in his doorway, leaning her head against the doorframe and playing with her long blonde hair. Her eyes followed him across the room, and only when he looked back at her did she glance down. Was that weird?
“Why don’t you trust me?” she said softly—I pressed my ear to the pane to catch her muted voice.
“Ash, of course I trust you,” he said, his voice pained. “Of course I trust you. More than anyone. That’s never going to change.”
“With your life?” she said.
“With my life,” he said.
She rubbed her head against the doorframe like a cat. “Then how come you didn’t listen to me? I saw you walking with her, even after I told you about her.”
“You were at school?” he said.
“I was curious,” she said, looking down.
He stepped up to her and tilted her chin up with his finger so he could look her in the eye. “You came back . . . you came back, Ashley. You can’t imagine how grateful I am knowing my little sister’s watching my back again.”
“You’re not taking me seriously,” she said. “There’s something really wrong with her. I don’t want you hanging out with her.”
“Okay, you want her to be gone, she’s gone.” He snapped his fingers. “I’ll ditch that bitch just like that, if that’s what’ll make you happy. I don’t care about her, I care about you.”
“Liar.”
“Where’d you go, Ash?” he said.
“I’m right here,” she said.
“No, where’d you go. What happened to my sister? This isn’t like you . . . Are you going to tell me what happened?”
“Stop . . . stop, Emory!” She turned away. “You know I can’t.”
I swiveled from the window, shaking. I’d heard enough.
A tear slid down my cheek.
Chapter 8
“Salamander’s been acting weird,” said Megan, peering into her terrarium after school the next day.
“Your snake?” I tossed down my backpack and collapsed on her bed, wishing I could die. Sure enough, Emory had avoided me all day, and it really hurt. Ashley had turned him against me.
“Who else do we know named Salamander?” Megan asked.
“Not in the mood,” I moaned into her pillow.
“She’s not eating.”
“It’s probably still stuffed from all the poor mice it ambushed in my front yard.”
“Whoa, come look at this.”
Sighing my exasperation, I dragged myself off her bed and plopped down in front of the cage. Wood chips and bark flittered around at the bottom of the terrarium, as if the snake was aggravated. Crickets hopped nearby, oblivious to the menace. Poor things.
“He’s invisible,” I said.
“It’s a she,” she corrected.
“Whatever. I can’t see anything.”
“No, look.” She pointed at something beyond the glass.
Then I saw it too. A tiny green patch of skin floated in the air, out of which flicked a pink tongue. The patch widened before our eyes, growing into a disembodied head.
“Is it shedding its skin?” I said.
“Yeah, and it’s shedding the dark matter too.”
“Or dark matter’s shedding it,” I said.
The head expanded into a body, which appeared to be slithering out of a hole in the air. And then the snake was completely visible from head to tail. It continued to zigzag around the cage, clearly agitated.
It struck at the glass, making a hollow thud.
“Whoa, easy Salamander.”
It struck again, harder. Then again, leaving a tiny smear on the terrarium wall.
“What’s that for?” I asked.
“I don’t know, she’s never done that.”
The snake gave up and continued to wriggle around the cage, its movements swift and frantic.
“That’s creepy,” I said.
“I told you she’s been acting weird.”
“Yeah, like slithering into my bed.” I let out a shudder.
“I hope she’s okay,” said Megan.
“Wait,” I leaned forward, “you said it’s not eating?”
“That makes sense if she was shedding. Snakes don’t eat when they’re shedding.”
“Huh,” I said, hugging my knees to my chest.
Megan glanced at me. “Why?”
“Ashley’s not eating.”
I was slow to reach my locker after lunch on Wednesday, and by the time I got it open, the halls were mostly empty. Just a few stragglers. I preferred being late, so I wouldn’t have to talk to anybody before class. I dug around unhurriedly for my history textbook, deep in troubled thought.
Dark matter.
Was that what happened to Ashley?
A paperclip skittered loose at the back of my locker. When I picked it up, my hand came away trailing a long blonde hair, partly stained by blood. I flinched and scraped it off in a moment of panic, then watched as it drifted down on my books and vanished, heart pounding.
Her hair.
The hair I’d found in my trunk a few weeks ago, which I’d stuffed in my jeans pocket to avoid my dad’s suspicion and inevitably ended up taking to school with me—since Major Connor had only left me with one pair of jeans after decontaminating my bedroom. When I’d discovered it again the next day, I’d freaked out and slammed it inside my locker before anyone saw.
Time to get rid of the evidence for good.
I reached for the hair, but hesitated. The hair had come from my trunk, which meant it came from the girl whose corpse had rotted for three months in Rattlesnake Canyon—the girl we’d believed was Ashley Lacroix until four days ago. It had her blood on it.
If I could get one of Ashley’s hairs and compare them . . .
I glanced behind me and quickly wound the hair around the paperclip, fingers trembling. Footsteps sounded up the corridor. I flinched and dropped the paperclip, and it tumbled into the cracks between my books.
The scuff of shoes on pavement came closer.
They would know. They would ask, What are you doing with a dead girl’s hair?
I shoved books aside and pincered it between my fingernails, then extracted it, barely dangling—
My hand gave a violent shake, and the paperclip fell to the ground and bounced away
. Frantic, I chased after it, and nearly collided with a girl’s legs. The paperclip skittered to rest between her white Converses.
I stood up slowly.
And came face to face with Ashley Lacroix.
Without a word, she picked up the paperclip, still wrapped in the blonde strand, and turned it over in her fingers. The end stained with brown blood wafted up from her breath.
My mouth was suddenly dry.
This can’t be happening.
Finally she handed it to me and pushed her own hair back over one shoulder. I took the paperclip and slid it into my pocket, trying to banish from my mind the image of her lifeless body in my trunk. I swallowed hard and managed to croak, “You . . . you came to school today?”
“I know I don’t know you,” she said, “but could you stay away from my brother?”
I couldn’t look away from those icy blue eyes. “You’re . . . you’re Ashley? You’re really Ashley?”
“Yeah,” she said, her voice biting. “I’m really Ashley.”
“We’re just friends,” I said. “It’s nothing.”
“I don’t care what you are,” she said. “Bye.” She rolled her eyes and turned to leave.
“Wait, wait, wait—” I hurried to catch up, fumbling for words. “Can we . . . can we talk for a minute? I mean, this is amazing, you being . . .” I looked her up and down, “. . . alive. You’re alive. You’re alive, right?”
How the fuck are you alive?
She glared at me, and up close I noticed the dark patches under her eyes, the way her lids drooped and her cheeks sagged. She looked exhausted.
“I mean, are you alive?” I blurted.
She flashed me a cryptic look. “Maybe I should be the one asking you that,” she said. “Are you alive?”
A chill passed through me.
Out of curiosity, I reached out and touched her arm. Cool skin met my finger, before she jerked away.
She was real. Not a ghost.
What about the time I’d seen her in my bedroom? “Did you . . . uh . . . did you still want me to avenge you?”
She tilted her head, confused. “What are you talking about?”
“Never mind.” That had been my subconscious, a hallucination created by dark matter. There hadn’t actually been a girl there. “So I heard you hitchhiked to the East Coast to see some kind of healer. Really? You just left in the middle of the night and didn’t tell your family or friends or anyone? You really did that?”
“I got fixed,” she said. “Now may I go?”
“What day did you leave?”
“I don’t remember,” she said.
“Were you sleepwalking that night?”
“I don’t sleepwalk anymore!” she spat, and with that she turned on her heel and marched away.
“Wait—“ I lunged forward and caught a wisp of hair, gave it a hard yank.
“Ow!” she said, stumbling back. “Get away from me.”
But I had it. A single strand of her blonde hair, gleaming in the sunlight.
“You think they can do a DNA test?” I said, fidgeting while Megan compared the two hairs side by side on the roof of her car.
“Who’s going to do that for us?” she said, and then she mocked, “Hi officer, here’s a bloody hair from a girl we killed. Could you tell us who it is?”
“Maybe we could go to UCSB and find another grad student.”
“They’re the same color,” Megan muttered, rolling the hairs between her thumb and forefinger. “Are we really considering the possibility that these are from the same person?”
“Until we rule that out.”
“Because they look like they’re from the same person.”
I scooted in next to her. “What about the length?”
Megan pinned the two ends together and pulled the hairs taught. Both were long, but one extended a few inches past the other. “They don’t match,” she said.
“You can have different length hairs on one person’s head.”
She went back to studying the bloody hair. “You said you got this from your trunk, right?”
“Where it’s been for three months.”
“If these are from the same person,” said Megan. “If Ashley and that girl are one and the same, what would that even mean?”
“That is the question,” I said.
“We kill her, she’s dead . . . then three months later, she turns up alive, but her dead body is still right where we left it. That doesn’t sound right.”
“Oh, did you just figure that out?” I said.
“Shush. I’m just wondering if we missed anything. Maybe she had a twin.”
“It’s possible. Anything’s possible, Megan.”
“So for three months, while her body was rotting in the wilderness, she was also kicking it in South Carolina? The same person?”
“Supposedly,” I said.
“Maybe she went invisible and hid in her room the whole time.”
“That doesn’t answer anything,” I said.
“What’s in South Carolina?”
“I don’t know.” I let my backpack fall to the asphalt and leaned back against her Ford, letting fatigue close my eyes. “It’s her . . . I know it’s her. We killed Ashley that night, not someone else.”
“So she’s back from the dead?” said Megan.
“Yep. And I think I know what brought her back.”
“What?”
“Dark matter.”
She peered sideways at me. “Is that good or bad?”
I sighed. “I thought it was good at first. Now I’m starting to think it’s really bad.”
“Mom, can I borrow your phone?” I asked, leaning into her office on Friday after school.
“Sure.” Without looking up from her computer, she snatched the cordless phone off its stand and tossed it to me.
“I mean your cell phone,” I said.
She glanced up. “What’s wrong with that one?”
“I . . . I need to text someone.”
“Oh-kay,” she said wearily, handing me her cell phone.
“Thanks.” I retreated into my bedroom, suddenly breathing very fast. My parents were getting me a new phone tomorrow, so this was the last day my old phone would be on the network, wherever it was. I opened a new text message, addressed it to my own number, and typed:
Are you still there dark matter?
Before I got cold feet, I tapped send.
The screen remained blank. I waited. Nothing happened.
The phone chirped, startling me.
HI LEONA
I’M HERE LEONA
It still had my phone. I licked my dry lips and typed back:
Do you know what happened to Ashley?
A moment later, the phone pinged and displayed the reply:
I SAW YOU DO IT LEONA
The message sent a shiver down my back. I texted:
So she’s dead?
A long silence, then:
YES
I swallowed my growing unease and tapped out my next question with sweaty fingers:
Who is the girl who came back?
My eyes blurred from staring so intently at the screen, which printed the creature’s reply:
THE PARTS THAT DIDN’T TASTE GOOD
What? I stared at the words as fear settled deep inside me. Mind reeling, I tapped out another message:
What did you do to Ashley?
I hit send. Then I waited, hardly breathing. But my mom’s phone stayed blank. Instead, a buzzing came from the corner of my room, making me flinch. My head jerked toward the sound and zeroed in on a crumpled T-shirt. Something was buzzing underneath it.
I nudged the fa
bric aside.
And there was my phone. Lying on my floor. Screen lit up with a new text message from Mom: What did you do to Ashley?
Before I could react, a loud knocking came from the front door.
“Leona, would you get that?” called my mom.
Heart pounding in my throat, I kicked the shirt back over the phone and hurried into the hall—grateful for an excuse to get out of the room. I fumbled with the latch and pulled the door open.
Emory Lacroix stood on my porch, his eyes haunted. “Something’s wrong with her,” he said.
Chapter 9
“She’s not sleeping at all,” he said, pulling me behind his car. “I checked in on her last night at two a.m., and she was just sitting there, playing with her pet mouse and staring off at nothing. I checked again at four, same thing. It was like that yesterday too. Everyone else goes to bed, and she just sits in her room and plays with her mouse.”
I watched his pained face, and the lingering hurt from his snub melted away. My heart ached for him.
“Is it insomnia?” I’d told my mom it was Megan at the door so I could slip out of the house without any questions. “She looked really tired on Wednesday.”
“She’s gone six days without sleep. She needs sleep. Humans need to sleep.” He hung his head and twisted to the side, dragging his hand through his hair. “That was messed up the way I treated you on Monday. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” I said softly.
He worked his lower jaw back and forth. “Ashley told me to stay away from you, and I listened . . . I don’t know why. She was back, she was alive, and all I wanted to do was make her happy again.”
“I don’t care.” I moved in close and gave him a hug, resting my head against his neck.
He hugged me back and I felt his jaw moving against the top of my head. “I’m not going to be like that. She wouldn’t want me to be like that. It’s not like her. She adores everybody. She’s the most compassionate person you could ever meet . . .” His body tensed a little. “Was the most compassionate person you could ever meet.”
