by T. Rudacille
***
It wasn’t until the third night that Alice finally broke. She cried with her face against my chest from the time the thing appeared (this time, we had kept the shades open, trying to see how exactly it appeared, only to look up and find it staring down at us from the roof) to the time that the sun came up.
“What does it want? We have to try to talk to it. We have to figure out what it’s doing here, Quinn!” She exclaimed at me in a perfect show of misguided frustration.
We had gone two and a half days without sleep. Every time we dropped off, the thing’s horrific face would pop into our minds and we’d both immediately sit up in bed, regardless of the hour in the day.
“No. We need to ignore it. You remember that movie we saw a couple years ago? They said that with anything paranormal, if you address it, it only gets worse. If you feed into it, you give it power. We just have to ignore it.”
“Ignore it?!” She screamed at me, “How are we supposed to ignore it?!”
“It hasn’t done anything to try to hurt us…”
“Besides trying to break the window on the first night! What’s stopping it from breaking in here and… who knows, Quinn?! Do you know?!”
“How would I know, Allie? What, you think I have some sort of connection to it?”
“It’s always looking at you. It’s always looking directly at you! It’s never looked at me the way it looks at you!”
“Are you really happy about that?! Are you really happy that it wants me?! And it has totally looked at you!”
“Did not! It smiled at you night before last!”
“It was smiling at both of us because it knew that we had really thought it was gone!”
“See! You do know what it’s thinking!”
“I’m just guessing!”
“Well, maybe you should just go. Maybe you should go home, and we can see whose house it shows up at. Then we’ll know who it’s after!”
“And then what?” I asked her, bringing my voice back to normal.
She stared at me, her eyes hostile now. She didn’t answer, but I knew: If it was after me, she was saved. If it was after me, she’d be relieved. She’d rather me suffer whatever that thing had in store for us alone than for us to face it together.
I was young and idealistic, as my parents said. I would have done anything to protect her, and if that meant dying in her place, then so be it. How could that feeling have been one-sided? How could she not have wanted to reciprocate such selflessness? The short answer is that her mind was on par with her physical age; she was a self-interested teenage girl terrified to die before she could live. I will explain the long answer later.
“Fine. Face it on your own, then.” I muttered, stung by her words and what they meant for us.
I was ridiculously melodramatic in those days. I stormed out, vowing never to go back. If I had been half as smart as I thought I was, I would have stayed. For the rest of my life, I will carry the fact that what happened next was my fault.
