“I’ll try.”
After I hang up, I double-check the lock on my door. Dad’s thinking of putting an alarm on it, but that might be a major hassle when I get up to pee at night. I drag my desk chair over to block the way, figuring if I bump into it that might wake me.
The rain gusts up against my window, tapping on the glass like a cat wanting in.
Before I turn out the light, I look around at the guys on my walls. Posters and photos from movies and magazines, showing a lot of skin. My dream guys: actors, musicians and models. My room is wallpapered in male flesh. Lexi says it’s an overdose of lust.
But that’s nothing compared to what’s hidden away in my closet. Okay, don’t laugh—I’m addicted to romance novels. They’re stacked floor to ceiling in there. I’m a sucker for doomed and dangerous love, reckless and crazy obsessions.
Lexi always makes fun of them. Mom looks at the covers and gets the giggles. Everybody laughs, so I hide my stash. My guilty pleasure. I’m a love junkie.
I kill the light, slip on my magic ring and get under the sheets.
Just when I’m dozing off, lying curled up on my side, I feel a little shiver down my spine. As if a draft has snuck into my room, or one of my dream guys has come in from the cold to spoon with me.
It started with my difficult birth. Mom nearly died having me. When they finally dragged me out into the world I was limp and lifeless, born without a pulse. They had to shock my tiny heart into beating.
Born dead. That set the mood for everything later.
So far I’ve survived poisoning, electrocution, a close encounter with a train and now this nail.
Don’t get me wrong. I was never trying to hurt myself. This stuff just happened.
Stuff like—
At eight years old I was digging around in the kitchen cupboards, looking for art supplies for a project. But instead of paintbrushes and glue I found a plastic bottle with a skull and crossbones on the label, just like the one on pirate flags.
Later, I told Mom I thought the skull and bones meant it was a drink for pirates. Such a liar—I knew what the warning meant.
But I couldn’t tell her the real reason why I drank the drain cleaner. Because I didn’t know why.
But as I knelt there on the floor in front of the open cupboard, looking at that bottle, something strange happened. A wave of dizziness hit me. And a horrible shudder ran through me that felt like bugs crawling all over me. I heard this buzzing inside my head, as if some angry bee was trapped in there.
Then I thought my eyes were playing tricks, because my shadow started moving without me.
I watched, perfectly still, as the shadow of my left hand reached toward the bottle. Like a puppet on a string, I felt a tug and my hand followed the shadow, grabbing the bottle and taking it out.
There was a hazy dream feel to everything, smothering my fear and confusion.
I was watching myself taking directions from my shadow hands, opening the bottle. The liquid cleaner had a sharp, chemical smell.
Looking at my shadow on the floor, I could almost sense it staring back at me, making me do this. I couldn’t help it. Lifting the bottle to my mouth, I started drinking.
It burned real bad and made my eyes tear up, but I managed to swallow half of the container and was starting to gag when Mom found me.
She screamed my name and knocked the bottle out of my hand. Then she stuck her fingers down my throat to make me throw up, and I spewed a puddle of chemical puke onto the kitchen floor.
I knelt there, breathless, dry-heaving till there was nothing left. Then we raced to the hospital.
Why? Mom kept asking me. Why did I do that?
How could I tell her it wasn’t me? Shocked and shaken, I couldn’t believe it myself.
For a long time after, I was literally scared of my own shadow. But eventually I convinced myself I’d imagined it—seeing things, like having a dream when I was awake.
Why did I do it? Who knows?
But there was nothing to be scared of. My shadow couldn’t hurt me.
Could it?
After yesterday’s hospital checkup, Dad caught me trying to break out in my sleep last night. He says I got pushy this time, shoving him out of the way before I woke up with a heart-stopping shock on the front lawn.
So I have more drama to share with my therapist after school today.
At breakfast I’m groggy and grouchy, ready to pick a fight as Mom sets a paper cup in front of me: my morning pills. I’m still on antibiotics to ward off infection, anticonvulsants in case my brain gives me a seizure, a steroid to prevent swelling and others I don’t even know what for.
“It’s like you’re feeding me the whole pharmacy.”
“Don’t be a grumpy patient,” she says. “Come on now. Down the hatch with them.”
She watches me swallow the pills.
“How’s your head feeling, Boo?” Dad asks, sipping his coffee. “Any more migraines?”
That little nail missed all the vital areas—a one-in-a-million shot, the doctors say—but it can still hurt like a bitch sometimes. “My head’s a mess. But no pain or anything for the last couple of days.”
Just looking at Dad’s face, you can tell he’s no stranger to pain. His nose has been broken so many times it’s kind of squashed, with the bridge dented in. His left eyebrow is a zigzag from where it was split and didn’t get sewn back straight. Souvenirs from his boxing days.
But all that damage is from before he met Mom. Back when he was known around town as Bulldog. Mom house-broke him a long time ago. She says now he’s only like a bulldog on the outside—inside he’s a pussycat.
She puts a plate of French toast in front of me and leans in to press the back of her hand against my forehead.
I sigh. “No fever, Mom. Quit worrying.”
She takes her hand away. “Quit worrying me, then.”
We scowl at each other. I got my looks from her, but where she’s pretty, I’m just odd. My mouth is too wide, my eyes way too big. We’re both blond, but her hair is soft and wavy, a honey shade, while mine is a frizzy, straw-colored tangle. Mom says I’ll grow into my looks, just like she says my curves will come. But when? I’m seventeen and I still can’t fake any real cleavage. And where’s my ass? Seriously, I’m sitting on bone here.
I notice Mom and Dad watching me across the table. I catch them doing that a lot lately. Like they think I’m going to vanish any second.
“Where’s your ring?” she asks.
I shrug. “I’m not gonna wear that thing all day.”
“Why not?”
“What, so you can track every step I take?”
“We’re not spying on you,” she says. “We just want to make sure you’re safe.”
“I’m safe enough,” I grumble. “Besides, I only get lost at night, when I’m asleep.”
If it was up to her I’d be under twenty-four-hour surveillance.
“Why do you have to make it into such a huge thing?” she asks.
I take an angry bite of my toast. Can’t blame her for worrying, really. But I don’t need that ring on my finger every second, reminding me what a wreck I am. How I can’t be trusted—can’t even trust myself.
Mom’s waiting for an answer. Our stare-down is broken by a car horn sounding from the driveway. Lexi saves the day.
“That’s my ride,” I say. “Gotta go. Gonna be late.”
“Hold on,” she tells me. “We’re not done here.”
“Dad?” I turn to the law. “Am I under arrest?”
The constable looks between me and Mom. “You’re free to go, I guess. For now. But just think about it, okay? And don’t leave town.”
Mom frowns at him, shaking her head.
I stuff the last of the toast into my mouth and make my escape, rushing out into the gray January drizzle.
“Perfect timing,” I tell Lexi, getting in her car.
As we pull away from the curb and head for school, she glances over. “You look wasted. Rough night?”
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“I went sleepwalking again, but my dad stopped me from escaping.”
I reach for the rearview mirror and twist it around to see myself. My hair’s snarled, a wild jungle of a mane. I try pressing it down, but it just springs back. At least it distracts from the circles under my eyes.
“I look like roadkill.”
Beside me, Lexi looks less like the Reaper’s little sister today and more like a naughty ninja. Her everyday uniform is black leather jacket over long-sleeved shirt, miniskirt, knee-high socks and chunky-heeled shoes that boost her two inches. She’s a shorty, but she’s got bite.
Her look says, You can’t handle this, get lost and dream on. I could never make that work. My look just says Help!
“Speaking of roadkill,” I say, giving up on my hair. “Has my sleepwalking gone viral? Does everybody know?”
Lexi nods. “Face it, girl. You’re notorious. They’re saying you run the streets naked after midnight, howling at the moon, feasting on human flesh.”
She gives me a half smile to show she’s half joking.
“Great,” I say. “All these years with me trying so hard to be normal, and now …”
“Well, it’s good to have you back. I was getting lonely being the only freak in class. The Creep Sisters ride again.”
That’s what they call us at school, a name that’s stuck to us since sixth grade.
Lexi says we were best friends before we even met. Like it was destiny that brought us together that first time in the school washroom.
Back then I was recovering from another close call. I had to wear gloves everywhere because my hands were still healing.
Lexi was the new girl, showing up in the middle of the school year.
She was standing at the mirrors when I came out of the washroom stall that afternoon. I tried not to stare. Nobody knew anything about her—where she was from, why she dressed all in black and went around filming weird stuff with her cell phone, like a dead seagull she found on the soccer field or some workers feeding branches into a wood chipper.
Hard not to stare at the mystery girl. I loved her hair, so silky black and straight.
I flinched when I saw she was looking back at me in the mirror.
“I’ve been watching you,” she said.
“Huh?” I felt like I’d been caught, but caught doing what, I didn’t know. Her dark eyes were locked on me.
“What’s with the gloves? You cold?”
“No.” I put my hands behind my back.
“Are you scared of germs or something?”
I shook my head.
“So why are you wearing them? What are you hiding? Can I see?”
“What? No. Why?”
The new girl was moving in fast-forward, leaving me kind of dazed. I’d come there to pee, not to get interrogated.
“Whatever it is,” she said, “I’ll bet you I got it beat.”
I glanced from her to the door, thinking of making a quick escape. But this human question mark with the silky hair had me hooked. “Beat how?”
“I got something more freaky. Let’s do a show-and-tell. Then we’ll see who wins for the weirdest.”
“Is it something gross?”
“More like bizzare.”
I shrugged. “You go first.”
“Okay.” She bent and took off her right shoe and sock, till she was standing there with one bare foot. “Check it out.”
I looked down. It was a normal foot, except for the big toe.
“It’s blue,” I said. “What happened?”
“Spider bite.”
“No way.”
She nodded. “A little wolf spider. It bit me when I stepped on it by accident. You should have seen my foot, it swelled up like a balloon. And when it shrank back down again, all the toes were blue.”
“Why?”
“They weren’t getting enough blood. So you know what the doctor did? He stuck blood-sucking leeches on my toes, to get more blood to flow into them.”
“Leeches?” I cringed.
“Yeah. Little black vampire slugs. And it worked. Now it’s just the big toe that’s blue. Still working on that one.”
She wiggled it at me. “So what do you think? I’m pretty freaky, huh?”
“Yeah,” I blurted out. “I mean no. Not you, just your toe.”
Then she laughed. It was the first time I’d seen her look anything but dead serious. So I smiled too.
“It’s your turn,” she said. “What are you hiding?”
There was no turning back now.
“It’s kind of gross,” I warned her. Then I pulled the gloves off and let her see my hands.
I waited for shock or disgust. She leaned in for a closer look.
“Cool,” she said finally. “How did you do that?”
After the close call when I hurt my hands, I became smalltown famous for a while.
It started with a wicked windstorm blasting Edgewood.
Hurricane-force gales kept me up all night, shaking the walls of our house and howling like demons. It felt as if the whole place was going to get torn up and tossed into the sky, like Dorothy’s house in The Wizard of Oz.
When the storm finally blew itself out, the geography of our neighborhood had changed. Trees uprooted, the street buried in debris. I was stunned when I stumbled out into that strange new world that morning, stepping over a twisted metal pretzel that used to be a lawn chair.
The big oak in our front yard had crashed over, taking down the power lines with it. A thick black live wire was whipping across our driveway like an angry snake.
The way it twisted, coiling and lashing out, was hypnotic. I was standing in the litter of leaves and splintered branches on the lawn, staring at it, when I felt suddenly dizzy. For a moment it seemed as if the wind was blowing right through me. There was a strong buzz in my ears, like I’d stumbled on a hive of hornets. And I felt the weirdest sensation, as if something was wriggling and writhing over my skin.
Then I caught sight of something moving down by my boots.
I was about to step away when I saw that it was just my shadow. So I stayed still.
But it didn’t.
The shadow of my left rain boot stretched out and stepped forward.
That was when my brain shut down and something else took over. My shadow was a magnet, dragging me along, leading me onto the driveway toward the power line, which was spitting sparks into the air—high-voltage venom.
But now I wasn’t scared. I watched all this play out, a spectator in my own head.
The sparks were raining down around me. I crouched, and my shadow hands reached out, my real ones following after them. The charged air lifted the hairs on my arms.
The wire snapped out blindly, as if searching for contact.
Then it struck my hands.
An explosion of cold fire blasted through me, freezing me rigid for a long second. Then I was flying, thrown back. I hit the garage door and crumpled to the ground.
My heart forgot to beat. I hurt everywhere. Every inch and atom of me.
I lay there with my cheek pressed to the pavement. My eyes were still working. Before I blacked out, I saw a pair of shadow boots standing beside me. My stare was locked straight ahead, couldn’t look up. The boots were black silhouettes cut from the bright morning air.
I could feel my legs jerking convulsively, trying to get me up and running away from this dark thing.
I thought if it touched me I’d fall through that black hole shaped like my shadow. It would swallow me.
My vision started to die off, flickering in and out. And with every fading glimpse, those boots seemed closer.
Ten thousand volts, the doctors told me. That was the shock I took when I touched the live power line. Should be dead—they didn’t say it, but I knew what they were thinking.
My fingers were burned badly, scabby and peeling for weeks. The nails turned black and fell off. I had to wear the gloves, not just to hide my hideousness but to keep my hands safe fr
om infection. My ears rang with an annoying mosquito buzz off and on for months, driving me crazy.
I told Mom and Dad I didn’t see the fallen line till it was too late. Like it snuck up on me.
Why couldn’t I tell them the real story? Because it was so impossibly crazy. I didn’t want to believe it—that my shadow could turn on me. I’d buried the memory of my earlier poisoning so deep it had the feel of a strange dream. This brought it all back.
Denial is a powerful thing. I told myself the electrocution had messed with my mind, knocking me out and making me remember things wrong. I hadn’t seen what I’d thought I was seeing.
Still, one night when Mom was tucking me in, I asked her: “Does my shadow have a life of its own?”
She laughed. “Your shadow is stitched to your feet. Can’t make a move without you.”
But what if mine had come unstitched somehow? What would it try next?
Everybody in the cafeteria is watching.
“What’s with all the staring?” I ask Lexi. “Are they expecting me to put on a show? Do a trick?”
“Get used to it, you’re a celebrity. A living, breathing magic trick. You danced with death, wrestled with the Reaper. And won.”
Makes it hard to eat when every chew, slurp and swallow is under observation. I’ve spent ten minutes trying to finish this apple.
“Watch out,” Lexi tells me. “Idiots incoming.”
Two smirking loser guys are heading toward us. I brace myself, putting on my armor inside. Making my heart bulletproof.
“Hey, Jane,” says loser number one. “Heard you got nailed. Try getting screwed next time. Might put a smile on your face.”
Number two snorts a laugh.
“Yawn,” Lexi says. “Seriously, that’s the best you and your boyfriend could come up with?” She holds up her cell phone and snaps a photo of them.
“What’s that for?” asks number one. “You need something to keep you warm and wet at night?”
“No. There’s an online support group for virgins. I’ll add your profiles. Thank me later. Bye, now.”
She gives them a little wave. They leave, muttering “bitch” and “skank” under their breath.