17 & Gone(31)

That was the first day of the new semester, and I had to get to school.

I was looking in the mirror, trying to get the comb in and the knots out, but the knots had caught themselves on the teeth of the comb, getting more tangled the more I tried to pull it through.

I’d had the dream again in the night.

Fiona Burke hadn’t been there. I didn’t see Abby, either. But there’d been someone in the smoky house with me, up a set of stairs, around a corner, a shadow that leaked out from the other shadows, reaching out one beckoning, outstretched hand.

I’d woken in my bed as if I’d spent the night clawing my way up a riverbank— drenched through my clothes, muscles sore, hair tangled in sweat—though the dream had been very dry. Dry and hot, as if somewhere the fire was still burning.

I took one last look at my tangled head in the mirror and decided to do something about it. With the comb still wedged in, I found the scissors, the good ones not made for cutting paper, and I just started chopping around the comb, snipping shorter than I meant to, and then needing to cut shorter still to make up for a crooked spot. The haircut was DIY, it was daring, and it brought out my eyes.

Someone else’s eyes.

I flinched. Something had happened to my face. The mirror was showing a second face projected over my own. Her face hovered, lit up like a round and glowing moon.

I noticed a nose shorter than my nose, thicker eyebrows than mine, and arching far higher than mine could arch, the straight line of the mouth, just like in the picture, and the eyes, mostly the eyes, pale and unsettling and absolutely recognizable from that photo I’d found of her, the one used in some of the newspaper articles. Eyes so cold, they could cut your throat.

My hand lost its grip on the scissors and then we were watching them fall into the sink, the girl and I, blades spread open, and then a mouth also opened—my mouth, hidden behind the girl’s—and a sound emerged, startling us both.

I guess I’d yelled something, because my mom came running and was soon in the doorway, one leg of her black-patterned tights on and the other dangling from her hip like a shriveled extra limb.

She wore her usual button-down work shirt to cover most of her tattoos, but the buttons were gaping open to show the bare, perfectly clear skin of her chest.

She had no tattoos there, so she seemed even more naked.

She buttoned her shirt quickly and said, “Way to give me a heart attack, Lauren! I thought you slipped in the tub.”

I shook my head and waited, waited for her to see the face in the mirror.

Natalie’s face.

All she noticed was the haircut.

“Wow,” she said. “I mean that: wow.

Wanted something different for your first day back at school, huh?”

I was still waiting.

She touched my hair and fluffed it out at one side. She clucked her tongue, cocked her head, then smiled. “I love it,”

she said. “It’s killer. I hope you don’t hate it, because it’ll take years to grow the length back. Is that why you screamed?”

She didn’t see the face.

“I saw . . .” My arm, threatening to give me up, was already pointing at the mirror. I saw, past tense, and was still seeing someone else’s face. I was wearing a mask made out of her skin and features and I couldn’t get it to come off.

“. . . nothing,” I finished. “I thought I saw something, but it was nothing.”

“You okay?” my mom asked.

I turned back to the mirror and realized she was gone. The new girl, Natalie Montesano, gone as she was in real life. The face staring back from the glass was my own face—and, because my reflection was clean, I saw the deep and shocking truth of what I looked like: I’d

given

myself

a

stupendously

unattractive haircut.

My mom had asked if I was okay and, for the first time, I answered her honestly. “I don’t know.”

Her gaze held mine in the mirror.

“What is it?” she asked my reflection, as if it would be easier to talk to than to flesh-and-blood me. And, you know, maybe it would have been. Maybe my mirror-self could have told her about the dreams, still smoking in the backmost rooms of my mind, or about the voice that sometimes sounded so much like a girl I knew a long time ago, if that could even be possible, the voice that called me names and needled at me to not tell my mom a thing. The voice that stayed hushed now, listening.

Maybe my reflection could have told her that a wriggling thought was dislodging itself in my mind as we stood in the morning-lit bathroom, and this new thought was telling me that if I opened the shower curtain and looked in the tub I’d find one of them: Fiona. Or Abby. Or Natalie. Or, worse, all three of them together, a tangle of shadowy legs and vapory arms, a huddle of heat and smoke and the dream’s deafening darkness. I’d pull open that shower curtain and show my mom and she’d be the one to scream.

Of course I wouldn’t tell my mom.

Once you tuck one secret inside yourself, digging out a little pocket to hold it, you’ll find the pocket can be stretched to fit another. And another, and another . . .

until you’ve got yourself a whole collection.

So, instead, I searched for an excuse and found a good one: “Jamie and me,” I said. “I think we’re over.”

She made a noncommittal noise in the back of her throat; I knew she liked Jamie, but all her loyalties had to be with me, since I was her daughter. “I figured,” she said. “I haven’t seen him around in a while. I knew you’d tell me when you were ready to tell me. So you’re nervous about seeing him in school today, right?”