by Lily Sparks
Rose screams, a howl that cuts through me with almost physical force, it is so deeply animal, so full of fear.
White fills the air, obliterating Rose like an overexposed photograph. Then the white narrows down to two bleached rainbows arching through the window, and Rose is gone.
In front of me are the Marilyn and Elvis figurines, grown life-size. But Elvis has white-blond hair, and Marilyn’s curls are dark brown. They’re embracing, faces smashed together, their hands moving over each other’s bodies.
A male voice, strange and slow: “Come here and I’ll give you a real kiss.”
Marilyn turns to me, her dark hair spiraling down over her shoulders, and the room goes white again, but slowly this time. As though fading into gathering mist.
Click!
The mist clears at once, and Elvis’s blank face is right next to mine, his hand splayed across my cheek. He has no eyes, no mouth, his features are just blunt shapes. His formless mouth covers mine and I taste sweet smoke.
“This is messed up,” he laughs into my ear.
“She’s completely out. Just one picture.” Marilyn’s mouth is a red streak all the way down her throat.
“How much did she drink?” Elvis says, on all fours, backing away, then he rolls himself up to standing. “What if she wakes up? Sorry I’m so late.” Elvis walks backward out the door and down the path, as Marilyn rushes over and kneels in front of me, her hand on my cheek. But she’s not Marilyn anymore. She’s Rose: whole, unbroken, alive, and I start to cry.
“Why isn’t he here? He’ll know what to do,” Rose says, her fingertips brushing at my hair. “I’ll have to tell you all about it when you wake up.”
“ROSE!” I wail. “ROSE!!!” I reach for her, but she slips away, the shed dissolving as a strong hand reaches through the wall and grabs my shoulder.
“Signal, wake up!” Nobody cries, shaking me.
The lantern next to my bed blinks on. It was just a dream. It was just a dream.
Javier stands just behind Nobody, a red Sharpie slash across his throat.
“Troy?” Kurt calls, high and panicked. “Where are you?!”
“Right here,” Troy answers. “Chill out man, you’re okay.”
“You kept calling for someone named Rose?” Nobody says in her gruff voice.
Confusion melts into the sick awareness that everyone is looking at me, all curled up, crying. “It was just a nightmare.” I sit up, scraping my hair back from my clammy face. “Sorry guys, false alarm. Everything’s fine.”
“Um, I’m not fine!” Troy announces. “I thought Dog Mask was dragging one of the girls out of the bathroom or something.”
“You okay?” Javier asks quietly, settling onto the bunk beside me.
“I’m fine, I … It just felt so real.” Javier rests a hand on my shoulder and I sag with relief at the contact, my hand flying up to cover his, and that’s when I feel them.
Javier’s knuckles are crisscrossed with raised, wormy lines of scar tissue, like beads of badly welded steel.
That’s when I see Erik, sitting on his top bunk, hair mussed but his eyes clear, staring at me through the haze of the lantern.
I hold Javier’s hand tighter.
“Wait a second, is it … is it raining?” Dennis says sleepily, and a momentary hush follows as we listen. There’s a sporadic drumming on the tin roof, and in the silence it grows steady.
The boys all groan, and Erik turns and spiders down from his bunk, then yanks down his sleeping bag. Dennis’s pillow lands on the floor beside me, thrown from above.
“What’re you guys doing?” Jada yawns.
“Last time it rained the water leaked down the inside of the walls. Everybody’s bedding got wet. We’ll be drier in the middle of the cabin.”
“On the floor?” Jada gasps. Erik throws his bedding down just a few feet from my bunk. He stretches along it, hands under his head, and peers up at me, his expression impossible to read. There’s a small rumble in the distance, and the drumming on the tin roof grows harder.
“The girls’ cabin never leaked. Why didn’t they just move us all in there?!” Jada grumbles, pulling her sheets away from the wall.
“Too close to the woods,” Nobody says darkly. “Where Dog Mask is.”
“Hey, Signal, c’mere …,” Javier says softly, and leads me over to the bathroom. He looks around furtively, making sure no one has followed us in, then leans in and says, “I managed to get these from the pantry before lights out. When Jada came back and said you’d been digging, I figured you’d need them.”
He pulls back a towel from a stack on a metal chair to reveal a family-size bag of Ruffles and a giant bag of trail mix. With M&Ms.
I turn back to him, touched. “Is it cool if we share them with everybody?”
“… They’ll go pretty quick.”
“I know, I know, it’s just everyone’s hungry and it’s my fault.”
“It’s not your fault. Not at all.” Javier’s face softens. “But if you want, sure. Let’s make it a party.”
“Hey guys?” I announce as we walk back into the cabin. Everyone is sourly staking out space on the cramped floor and looking vaguely miserable. “Who wants some snacks?”
The drumming of the rain is all I hear for a moment as six stunned faces stare up at me.
“Are you serious?” Dennis says at last.
“PUT IT IN MY MOUTH!” Troy bellows, springing to his stocking feet.
The bags are torn from our hands. Jada runs and gets brown paper towel squares from the bathroom to serve as plates. A couple of lanterns are brought to the center of the floor, and everyone pulls their bedding into a ring to better oversee the even distribution of the trail mix elements. By the time I get my sleeping bag and join the circle, the only open spot is right between Nobody and Javier and across from Erik, who’re establishing each person’s preferences for dried pineapple over M&Ms, or banana chips over yogurt raisins; it all feels so strangely normal for a moment. This is real. The nightmare was just that, a nightmare. I push it out of my head.
“It’s so weird, being up late eating snacks in our pajamas like this. It feels like a slumber party!” Jada chews on a banana chip.
“That’s what a slumber party is?” Nobody asks. “Eating in bed?”
“What, you’ve never been to one?”
Nobody shakes her head.
“Then welcome, this is now your first.” I look around the group. “Nobody’s first slumber party, who’s in?”
“I smell a MAAAKEOVER MONTAAGE!” Troy yells, with jazz fingers.
“Boys do slumber parties, right?” Jada screws up her tiny nose.
“We call them sleepovers.”
“Uh, yeah, and they’re the best. Video games all night and then everybody draws dicks on Kurt’s face when he falls asleep first, and then we dunk his thumb in warm water and he pisses himself and it’s just a great time.”
Kurt jokingly narrows his eyes at me when I laugh at this. “Oh, so it’s cool if we all draw dicks on your face, then?”
“Only if I fall asleep first. Which I won’t.” After that nightmare, I may never sleep again.
“My sisters would always play light as a feather, stiff as a board,” Dennis offers.
“We could tell scary stories!” Jada’s eyes go wide in the lamplight.
“I don’t know if that’s the best idea for Signal right now,” Javier says to her quietly.
“And that’s your business how?” Erik sits upright, his expression hidden from my view by the fall of his loose hair.
“Bro, she just woke up screaming. I don’t think it’s a great idea to scare the hell out of her.”
“I grasp your logic, Jav, but as you’re well aware, Signal has a mouth.” He lets the word hang. “She can speak for herself.”
“What’s your problem?” Javier says just a little too loud. Erik starts to answer, but before he can Nobody cuts in.
“Are fistfights part of slumber parties too?”
/> “Nope, no, not at all,” I interrupt quickly. “Javier’s right, I can’t handle ghost stories. But maybe we could tell, uh, non-scary stories? Like um, I don’t know, maybe—”
Erik pulls his pillow over his head. “Boring. If you’re all going to stay up telling each other fairy tales I’d honestly rather just sleep.”
“Who said anything about fairy tales? I’m just saying we could tell stories where people don’t, you know, die gruesomely-”
“Everyone dies,” Erik says sharply. “Any story that doesn’t deal with that is a fairy tale. Where do you think ‘and then they all lived happily ever after’ came from? The best case scenario ending is ‘and then they each died alone after the humiliating torture of old age.’”
“That’s awfully nihilistic, Erik.”
“Whoo, slow down, Kurt and I didn’t get to that part of SAT prep.” Troy munches on honey-roasted peanuts. “Nia-listic?”
“Nihilism is the rejection of moral and religious teachings in the belief that life has no meaning,” Dennis says, as though he’s reading from a flashcard.
“It’s a more official term for common sense.” Erik’s eyes flash but his tone is elaborately casual. “Now maybe Signal thinks the meaning of life is to share and care with us like Heidi of the Swiss Alps even when she’s trapped in a damn murder machine—”
“I am no kind of Heidi of the Swiss Alps.” I widen my eyes at him. “I wish you could have met me two years ago. ‘Life is meaningless’ was like, my personal motto back then!”
“And now?” Javier turns on his side and looks up at me. And I was about to try and pull my tough girl routine, but I can’t with Javier watching. Because being a flower for sure means something to him, and it means something to me. So I go with the truth instead:
“Now … I feel the opposite way about it.”
“What, that life has too much meaning?” Erik snaps.
“No,” I say. “Or … well, kind of. I mean … it’s not as simple as one meaning for everybody. Life isn’t just some math problem with one solution, right? It’s … a force. A force that gives and gives … We get a body, and a mind and time, and this huge urge to do something with all of it …”
“That’s the hardest part of prison,” Nobody says, staring down at a line of pretzels on her napkin. “Feeling like you can’t do anything with your time. Like it’s just going to waste.”
“Yeah,” Jada agrees.
“So maybe the meaning of life is what we give back when we answer that urge,” I ramble on. “We create the meaning of our lives, by finding our individual purpose. By pursuing what we love.”
I glance up at Erik, waiting for his sarcastic laugh, but it doesn’t come.
“Whoa, man. Deep, that’s deep!” Troy laughs, pulling on the rust-colored beanie he always wears to bed, then shrugs. “So the meaning of my life is to bang girls and eat candy. How about you, Kurt?”
“I don’t know. I always thought it was like what Dad always says, the most important thing in life is family. Being loyal, having their back.”
“I’m with Kurt,” Javier’s low voice rumbles close to my side. “Life is about protecting the ones you love.”
“What does it mean if some of us think the meaning of our life is to end other people’s lives, though?” Dennis asks. My smile drops.
“Yeah, how does that fit into your vision of life as a force that gives and gives?” Erik demands. “It’s almost like you’re conveniently forgetting the part where life brutally takes everything back, whether you serve your ‘purpose’ or not.”
Javier laughs. “You and Dennis are part of Team Take, that’s for sure.”
“Oh, don’t be so modest, Jav. Sure, you lost our Sharpie fight. But you’re still just as much of a murderer as I am.” Erik smiles at him coldly, and I notice he alone has an unmarked throat. “Everyone in this room is! We’re all Class As. Sounds like we’re all on Team Take to me.”
Jada’s face falls, and Nobody’s shoulders seem to slouch. Troy and Kurt avoid each other’s gaze and Dennis pulls his blanket closer.
“I know I’m a Class A. No one lets me forget it,” I grimace. “I’m sure that’s true for all of you too. The world keeps telling us we’re evil. But what if we proved the world wrong? I am what I choose to do. I am the choices I make.”
“You chose to come here to learn how to kill people,” Erik says. “That’s what this program is. We all made that choice.”
I stare at his stern face. What must it be like to be Erik, to have that insistent voice inside your head all the time, picking you apart? Something else is going on too—there’s more anger in his words than I could inspire, about what I don’t know. Because, as he pointed out, I have never asked his side. I don’t know his life or his past. Maybe he hurts as much as I do.
Maybe everyone does, all the time.
With that in mind, I try and talk to him the way I wish someone would talk to me.
“Well then, this program is not working,” I say gently. “Because if ‘Class As’ are supposed to be so terrible, no one here acts like a ‘Class A.’ You really helped me today, Erik. So did Jada. I wouldn’t be here right now without you two. And we all protected each other from that Scavenger Hunt.”
There’s a murmur of agreement around the circle.
“So what if we keep doing that? Keep protecting each other? What if we turned this camp into a place we actually want to be?”
“In that spirit …,” Kurt asks seriously, “can I have the rest of your Ruffles?”
“Absolutely not.”
“I have three pieces of pineapple.”
“Okay. For three pineapples I would trade three Ruffles.”
“Now that the speeches are over,” Jada says in a dramatically bored voice, a low growl of thunder approaching overhead. “Can we do something fun please?”
Nobody lurches upright and stares straight out the dark window. “Look.”
A bolt of lightning throws the figure outside into sharp relief: Tall, hunched shoulders, the features of his dog mask slick with rain, staring in through the window at us.
And before the next bolt of lightning flashes, he’s gone.
Chapter Thirteen
Pop Quiz
There’s a moment of silence, like one collective intake of breath before diving into deep water. And then everyone but me leaps to their feet, laughing. Like the last period bell just rang on the last day of school—that’s the kind of sudden joyful excitement that fills the air.
A masked assailant is here to kill us all, and these ruthless predators, these bloodthirsty Class As, these friends of mine couldn’t be happier.
They huddle up as I stare down at our scattered pieces of trail mix, my stomach in free fall.
“He went left. He’s gonna try to come in through the back.”
“Why wait? Let’s go out to meet him!”
“Nice try, Erik, you just want him all to yourself. Let him come in here and then we can all take turns.”
“What weapons have we got?” Javier addresses the room.
“I got a shiv.” Jada pulls a plastic toothbrush handle scraped to a sharp point from one of the pockets of her pink sweatpants. She’s had a shiv on her this whole time?!
“I got some stones in a sock,” Kurt offers.
Troy wordlessly walks over to his bottom bunk bed and pulls out a short-handled hatchet, grinning broadly at the others’ impressed surprise.
“Squirreled this away the first day when they made us clear the saplings off the soccer field. Dave never missed it.”
Nobody grabs the sleeve of my gray Mickey Mouse sweatshirt, yanking me to my feet. I’ve been frozen on the floor while they’ve been excitedly planning.
“I had a kitchen knife under my mattress.” Javier glares at Erik. “But it went missing a couple days ago.”
“Is that an accusation?” Erik snarls.
“I have it, Javier,” Nobody says, still hovering at my side, and my jaw drops. “And I’m
not giving it up. It was dull when I took it and it was hard work getting it sharp again.”
“Okay.” Javier takes my arm. “You take the knife, and I’ll guard her?” Nobody looks to me for approval, then agrees to the trade-off.
Javier reaches down for the lanterns on the floor and snaps them off: snap, snap, snap, plunging the room into blackness.
CREEEEEEAAAAK.
The rusty hinges of the back door to the bathroom are pulled open from outside.
BANG!
The back door slams against its wood frame: he wants us to know he’s coming.
Javier puts himself between me and the door to the bathroom, and walks us back between Erik’s and Kurt’s bunks, into the darkest shadow of the cabin, while everyone else gets into position. Hidden behind him I break down, choking on my own breath, fingers digging into his sweatshirt. I could bolt out the window, but what if Dog Mask saw? I’m trapped. We’re all trapped.
Javier takes my hand in his, his thumb moving slowly over the back of my hand until that’s all I can feel, the calm steady pressure, though he doesn’t look back at me. He stares straight forward, ready to take whatever comes next. I grip his hand, scars and all, and squeeze back with all my strength. Javier doesn’t even flinch.
Another bolt of lightning turns the room into a black-and-white photo: Nobody crouched by her bunk, gleaming knife in hand; Troy standing with his back to the front door, hatchet raised; Erik at his side, clutching one of the heavy halogen lanterns by its base. Jada has shot up the ladder of Erik’s bunk beside the door to the bathroom, so she can strike first from above when Dog Mask comes in.
The rain seems to hammer down faster and faster as we all watch the bathroom door. Any moment now. Why is he just standing in the unlit bathroom? What is he waiting for?
The sigh of the front door breaks the silence and a scream rips from my throat. Dog Mask bursts in behind us, catching us all by surprise, his heavy steps shaking the thin floorboards. His shoulders are level with the top bunks, his eyes flat behind his smiling mask. He’s so close I could reach out and touch the gleaming edge of his axe.
