Chapter Four
3 Years, 25 Weeks, 6 Days
One time I had this really sweet dream where I had wings made of crystal feathers and I was slender and beautiful like an elf queen made of light and purity and also maybe I barfed rainbows but that isn’t the point—the point is it was a wonderful dream, probably the best of my life. Most importantly I am not having it right now, because right now I’m having a dream about a giant spider.
It’s chasing me through a forest of some kind, and I’m sort of peeing myself while hoping I’m not actually peeing myself in real life. It’s a weird mix of lucid dreaming and lucid terror, so I can’t get scared enough to wake myself up, but I’m awake enough to be scared.
And then all of a sudden, the dream changes.
The spider disappears, the forest disappears, and I’m suddenly in the shower of my old house at Aunt Beth’s in Florida. The tiny one, with green tiles and mold in the cracks and the wind chime hung over the bathroom window. I’m three years younger and naked and my fat is obvious to the world, hanging in great chunks off my belly, my thighs, my chin. I’m crouched in the shower, curled up in a not-so-little ball, my flesh pressing against the enamel and the water trickling down from the showerhead. It’s cold water. I don’t know how I remember that, but I do. Aunt Beth had a solar heater. I stayed in the shower that day until the water got cold.
And I’m crying.
That isn’t anything new, really. But seeing myself like this, in a third-person bizarro out-of-body experience, is a first. I know this moment. I’d know it anywhere.
The girl in the shower clutches herself—her stomach, her face. But her hand keeps wandering back to one place: her right wrist. I know what she’s feeling. That wrist burns. No amount of cold water can douse the pain coming from it. She’ll put a bandage on it later. But it takes her four hours to sit up. Five hours to stop crying with no sound. Six hours to dry off and get dressed. Seven hours to stop staring at herself in the mirror as she makes a decision.
It takes eight hours for the girl to decide to change herself.
It takes three years for his voice to stop ringing in her ears every time she walks out the door. And even then, it doesn’t fade. It still hasn’t.
Two weeks from the day in the shower, she stops eating so much. The girl loses five pounds. Then three more. A month later she’s ten pounds lighter. She puts on layers of sweatpants and sweatshirts and runs in the eighty-degree Florida summer for hours. Aunt Beth thinks she’s at Gina’s house sleeping over when in reality she’s on the side of the road behind a hibiscus bush, passed out from heat exhaustion. When the sun sets and it cools down, she wakes up and starts running again. She runs because she can’t stand the thought of who she was a step behind. One step. A new Isis. Another step. A newer Isis. She leaves herselves behind over and over because she can’t stand any of them—because she can’t stand the girl who thought the boy who destroyed her could be her everything. He was the only one in the world who looked at her like she was human, treated her like she was more than a sack of too-much skin.
She rarely eats, and if she does it’s only in front of Aunt Beth, to convince her she’s all right. But Aunt Beth is smarter than she lets on. One day, she and Isis talk, and it’s the sort of talk aunts are supposed to give—boy talk. I remember her every word as clear as day, and that reflects straight into the dream.
“You haven’t been eating much, Isis.” Aunt Beth, with her gentle smile and bright red hair held back by a head scarf, treats me every bit like her daughter. I was the kid she could never have.
“I’m not hungry,” I say lamely. And then my stomach gurgles and my charade is thrown headfirst over a cliff.
Aunt Beth sighs. “It’s about that Will kid, isn’t it?”
My stomach goes from gurgly to vomity. I flinch. But that flinch is important. It’s the first flinch I made when I heard his name. The first of hundreds.
“Did you two break up?” she asks softly. I shrug like it doesn’t matter but it does, it does, it’s the only thing that matters.
“I didn’t break up with him. He broke up with me. I sort of just broke down. You know how it goes.”
“Oh.” She puts her arm around my shoulder. “I do know how it goes.”
There’s a massive silence. The ocean laps just a half mile away from our tiny, kitschy beach shack. The sun slants through the window, throwing turquoise and emerald shadows around the kitchen as it passes through a collection of sea glass on the sill.
“Whenever someone would break up with me,” she starts, “I’d sit myself down and make a list.”
“Of what? Ways to blast yourself to another planet?”
“No. I’d make a list of traits my dream man would have. And by the end of it, I’d always feel better.”
“That sounds stupid.”
“Of course it’s stupid. That’s the point. It’s supposed to make you laugh with all its stupidity!”
I knit my lips together. Aunt Beth nudges me.
“Well? Go on. Describe your dream man.”
I mull it over for an agonizing few seconds.
“I want him to know the alphabet backward, and fast. He’ll make perfect cinnamon sugar doughnuts. He can jump rope a million times in a row. He’ll have bright green eyes and be left-handed and be a master of the obscure lost art of ocarina playing.”
“He sounds impossible.”
“That’s the point!” I insist. “He’s my dream man, right? So, if my dream man is someone who can never really exist, then he can’t hurt me. He can’t come up and make me fall in love and smash my heart.”
“Oh, Isis.” Aunt Beth pats my knee. “You don’t have to think like that. Not everyone is out to hurt you.”
“He’ll be really kind.” I smile down at my hands. “He’ll call me the prettiest girl he’s ever seen. Those things are even more impossible. So. So there. That’s him. And he doesn’t exist and he never will. So I’m safe.”
The dream shifts. The kitchen table disappears. Aunt Beth disappears. And then it’s suddenly four months later. Four months of passing out and stumbling through classes on nothing more than a piece of bread and celery. I didn’t need food. The word “ugly” reverberating through my head sustained me better than any calorie could.
I was punishing myself.
I know that now, far too late for it to help.
By the time Aunt Beth notices, everyone else is noticing.
Jealous, Gina disappears to Costa Rica for one weekend and comes back fifteen pounds lighter. But no one notices. Not when Isis Blake goes from two hundred pounds to one-twenty in the span of six months. Nameless notices. And now, instead of ignoring me, he laughs with his friends whenever I walk by. Smirks. Scoffs. He thinks I did it for him.
I didn’t.
I never get the chance to work up the courage to get angry at him. I feel it brewing in my stomach, like still-warm embers of resentment. But then my mother arrives. I walk in the house one day to see Aunt Beth and Mom drinking tea and discussing my future. I get a say, of course. And I say I want to leave. Ohio is the perfect place to start over. Anywhere no one knows me is the perfect place to start over. Anywhere that isn’t where Nameless is.
It’s my dream, but it’s more like my life. It’s not quite true to life—the colors are too bright and the faces wobble. But it’s exactly what happened.
I wake up to the whitewashed hospital room. I wake up realizing I ran away like a little coward.
I haven’t changed at all.
I’m safe. My counter is safe. Three years, twenty-five weeks, six days. I am still safe.
But I haven’t changed at all.
Isis Blake of Northplains, Ohio, is the same cowardly fourteen-year-old girl curled up in the shower. Just a little older, a little lighter, and a little stupider.
It’s dark—probably the middle of the night. I get out of the hospital bed and pull some clothes out of the bag Mom brought. Stepping outside in Ohio in the winter is like suicide without all the flashy brain bits, but I’m doing it anyway. I can’t stand this tiny room. It’s trying to suffocate me with all the beeps and smiling posters of kids getting shot up with flu vaccines. Who smiles when they see a five-inch needle? Sociopaths, that’s who.
I promised Naomi I wouldn’t use the window to sneak into the kids’ ward. But last time I checked, a hall is not a window and there is a hall that goes right by the kids’ ward. I just never use it because it’s near Sophia’s room, and that’s the one place Naomi would think to look for me if she found me missing from my bed. I pile pillows under the blankets of my cot, reach under it and grab four leftover Jell-O cups I’d been hoarding, and ease out the door. The hallways are quiet. I readjust the Jell-O cups by stuffing them into my bra. I take a moment to admire my considerable multicolored breasts and feel a single tear spring to my eye. Beautiful.
But back to business. I’ve got some gelatin to deliver to several grubs. I just need to make it around the corner, and I’ll—
I hiss and flatten myself against the wall. A group of interns passes, all carrying coffees. I quell the urge to become fleetingly radical. I want to slide across the floor behind them on my shoes like James Bond, silent and suave, but I also want to see the kids no matter what. Too much is riding on this. So like a lame normal spy I tiptoe behind them. And pirouette.
And that’s when I hear it. It sounds like a dying cat far off, but as I get closer and closer to the kids’ ward, I realize it’s a person. Someone is screaming like they’re being ripped apart. In the empty hallway it’s eerie, and I start to consider maybe my life has turned into a horror movie and a girl with long black hair will be hiking up my phone bill as she calls to tell me I’ll die in seven days, but then there’s the shuffling of feet behind me, and I duck behind a gurney. Naomi, with a few other nurses, charge toward the scream with winded urgency.
“Who forgot to up Sophia’s cc’s?” one of the nurses asks.
“No one forgot. Fenwall said to ignore the change entirely,” Naomi pants. “But someone was supposed to give her Paxtal. Trisha?”
“It wasn’t me!” Trisha insists.
The first nurse sighs. “Jesus, Trisha, not again—”
“Do you know how hard it is to get her to take them? When she’s like that?” Trisha hisses.
“Did you call him at least?”
“Of course! He’s the only one who can calm her down—”
They run past, out of my earshot. They must be talking about another Sophia. The Soapy I know always listens to nurses. She’d definitely never refuse to take her pills.
I inch closer to the door the screaming is coming from. The nurses closed it, but I can hear it through the walls.
“Why does she get to go?” the scream reverberates. “Why does she get to go and I don’t? I want to leave! Let me go! Let me go! Get your hands off me, you filthy bitch!”
I recognize that voice. Sophia. But that can’t be right. Sophia wouldn’t sound so harsh, so feral.
“I hate her, I hate you all! I fucking hate you! Get away from me! Leave me alone!”
The words are all wrong. I slowly peer around the corner and into a tiny slit of window unprotected by the curtain. I can’t see much, but I see Sophia’s legs flailing on the bed as the nurses try to restrain her. I see Naomi walk by with a syringe in her hand. Sophia fights, the bed shuddering as she beats her legs harder. And then her feet move slower. Her screaming becomes softer, hoarse shouts I can barely hear anymore through the glass.
“Please,” Sophia sobs. “Please. I want Tallie back. Please, just give me Tallie back. Just let me out of here. I want to see her. I want to see her!”
One of the nurses starts toward the door. I pull back around the corner. As much as the curiosity is burning me up inside, I can’t hang around much longer, or I’ll be in deeper shit than an elephant keeper at a circus. I take the stairs to the kids’ ward without looking back.
Sophia has tumors. I know that much. She’d never been like that with me—not that harsh or angry. I feel like I’ve seen something I wasn’t supposed to—something private and embarrassing. She’d definitely feel awful if she knew I saw it, so I can’t bring it up with her. Sophia’s endured a lot from me—from my nonstop talking to my terrible jokes and thorny defensiveness. I’ve made mistakes in front of her, and she’s never mentioned them again. The least I can do is forget what I saw, too.
The commotion Sophia made was the perfect cover—the guard isn’t even at the door. The sleeping room is lined with beds, stickers, and colorful sponge art pressed onto each headboard. Toys and books are stacked on the ground, and the gently beeping monitors glow in the darkness.
James is the first to notice I’ve come in. He sits up and whispers groggily, “Isis? Is that you?”
“Yeah,” I whisper. “Hey.”
He points at my chest, his bald head shining in the faint lights of the monitor. “Why are you jiggling?”
“I’ve always been this stacked.”
James rolls his eyes. I laugh and shove a Jell-O cup at him. He rips the top off and then slurps it down in one gulp. I inch over to Mira’s bed and carefully place her Jell-O cup on her bald forehead. She sleepily opens her eyes and groans.
“Isisssss. It’s cold.”
“Hurry up and eat it, then.”
They eagerly stuff sugar down their throats, and I clear mine, trying to find the words to say good-bye.
“Listen,” I say. “I’m getting out of here tomorrow.”
“You’re leaving?” Mira sniffs.
“Yeah. I got better.” I smile. “Just like you will.”
“I won’t.”
“You will. You will, and don’t you dare let me catch you saying you won’t.”
“Will you come back to see us?”
“Is the sky mildly blue? Duh, I will!” I give her a noogie. “Also, toys. I’m gonna bring some cool new ones for your birthday, and James’s birthday, and Martin Luther King’s birthday, and my own birthday, because frankly these dinky little hand-me-downs do not suit Your Highness.”
Mira grins. A light flashes out in the hall and I duck behind her bed.
“The guard!” I exclaim. “Shit. Take mushrooms. Shiitake mushrooms.”
“Shiitake,” James echoes. I bop his head.
“Hey! That’s a bad word.”
“But it’s a mushroom! Nothing’s wrong with mushrooms!”
“Haven’t you played Mario? Everything is wrong with mushrooms.”
“He’s coming this way to check,” Mira hisses at me. The guard’s so close I can hear the jangling of his keys.
“Okay, everyone calm down. Don’t panic. OhmygodwhatamIdoingwithmylife. Don’t panic!”
“We’re not!” they insist together.
“Right! Okay!” I breathe out my nose and charge toward the window. I always have a harder time climbing down than up, but it’s the only place in the room to hide; every piece of furniture in here is kid-sized and too small. I open the window and leap over, clinging by my fingertips on the sill. My Converse scrabble on the cement of the wall, the cold winter air nipping at my butt, which hangs fourteen feet above certain death, or at the very least a broken kneecap. The door to the ward creaks open into utter silence. The grubs are good at pretending to be asleep.
“Who left the window open?” I hear the guard murmur. My heart rockets into my throat. He strides over and I pray to whatever god is listening that he won’t see my fingers. I must be praying right for once! He doesn’t see my fingers at all! He just kindly closes the window and shoves them off the sill instead. My hands jump to the ledge on the outside, but it’s so tiny and slippery, and I fight, my hands aching—
All I can think about is how to fall elegantly so my dead body doesn’t look stupid, because I’ve seen a million crime shows and honestly existentialist panic is no reason to not try, in your last moments, to contort your body as you fall so you strike a dramatic pose. It’s your last pose ever! You have a moral obligation to make it fabulous! Or at the very least not-disgusting.
I could pose like Beyoncé, but one thing is still for certain.
I’m going to die.
Which is a whole lot of very not good.
My last fingers slip off the ledge. And then there’s weight all at once on my wrist as someone grabs it. Whiplash rocks my body and hard cement collides with my belly, scrapes my elbows. I look up into icy blue eyes shaded by wild tawny hair.
“Y-You!” I sputter.
Jack pulls me back up through the window, Mira and James on either side of him, wide-eyed and ecstatic.
“You almost died,” Mira whispers shakily.
“You were all like ‘WHOA’ and the guard was all like ‘BYE’ and Jack came in and was like ‘GRAB’!” James shrieks.
Jack straightens. I stand up on shaky legs and contemplate life and the refreshing fact that I still have a life to contemplate at all. Jack freezes when our eyes meet and then turns on his heel abruptly. I run and put myself between him and the door. He stares at me and I stare at him, some unsaid pressure bearing down on my lungs. Adrenaline sears my veins, and a twisted pain tears through my chest. I can’t look away. He’s not even that good-looking. He just looks so…sad? And that sadness is condensed in an arrow that he’s shot right into me with his dumb antarctic eyes.
“How—”
“I was walking behind you in the hall. I followed you. I have a knack for knowing when you’re about to do something stupid,” Jack answers in clipped tones.
“Why—”
“Sophia. I came to the hospital for her. Now move.”
Jack tries to maneuver around me, but I stop him at each turn.
“I’ve had years of practice being fat. We are good at blocking things. Also, floating in salt water.”
“Let me through.”
The smell of mint and honey floats toward me, that same disconcerting smell of him I found in my memories earlier today.
“See, I think I should not let you through, since you are a really bad boyfriend, and logic dictates a bad thing should not be near a good thing, so essentially, Sophia doesn’t need you around.”
He scoffs. “You have no idea what you’re talking abo—”
“You kissed me,” I say. “Sophia told me you kissed me. And I remembered it. A bit. And even if you saved me, and Mom, and pulled me up from the ledge or whatever, I can’t forgive you for hurting Sophia like that. I can’t forgive you for kissing someone you didn’t like. That probably hurt me, too. You’ve hurt a lot of people, haven’t you?”
Mira and James watch us, our words like ping-pong balls their heads inevitably follow. Jack is expressionless, wordless, like a recently wiped chalkboard. I can’t read him. But tiny wisps of incredulousness give way to shock, and then his face sets in an icy mask of irritation.
“Get out of my way,” he repeats, a deadly quality in his voice.
“No. See, I’m a good dragon. Does your small-yet-somehow-still-functioning brain know what a dragon is?”
“Scaly!” James chirps.
“Breathes fire!” Mira adds.
“I’m the dragon,” I say. “And Sophia is the princess. And it’s my job to guard her from the likes of you.”
Jack raises a brow. “Likes of me?”
“A bad prince. The kind that ruins princesses forever.”
The ice-blue splinters of his eyes darken, shading over. His eyes are easier to read than his face, but not by much. Is it anger? Guilt? Frustration? No. It’s none of those. It’s helplessness.
“You’re too late. I’ve already ruined her forever,” he says, and he pushes past me with such force I don’t have time to brace. He’s long gone when Mira decides to speak up.
“They call him sometimes. Naomi does. When Sophia gets really mad.”
“What do you mean?”
James shuffles, staring at his feet. “Sometimes…sometimes she gets weird. And mad. And when we ask about it, Naomi says it’s someone else yelling, not Sophia. But it’s her voice. And then they call Jack, and he always comes no matter what time it is and she calms down and gets quiet again.”
“How long has this been going on for?”
“A couple years, I think,” Mira says. “Since James came here. She used to be so nice to us all the time. I mean, she still is. But sometimes…sometimes she gets weird. So she stopped visiting us. And Jack started visiting her more. I think she feels guilty.”
“I think they both feel guilty.” James scoffs. “They both got the same faces my dad does when he visits me.”
I watch Jack’s figure grow smaller down the hall.
She remembers.
Isis Blake remembers me.
The world doesn’t move for me. It stopped that night in middle school. It trembled when Isis first punched me and grew to a quake with every day I fought the war against her. And then it went still for weeks. For weeks that felt longer than years.
Today the world shakes, and it shakes with her name and her set, determined face as she looked me in the eyes and told me I was a bad prince. Today it shakes because she might think I’m terrible (You are terrible. Your hands are bloody and you are terrible.), but she remembers me. A small fragment of the old Isis—the one who recognized me and despised me months ago—shone through in her eyes. She hates me. But she remembers me.
She remembers a kiss (which kiss which kiss which kiss the fake one from the beginning or the true one in Avery’s house?).
Today my world shakes. Not hard. But it moves under my feet and reminds me that yes—yes. The world can still move. I’m really still alive. I am not ice. I am not a freak or a monster. I am not something people are afraid of or avoid. I am human and I have done bad things, but the world shakes and I am human. I am not untouchable. I can be shaken.
By Isis Blake.
As I walk into the hospital room more familiar to me than home, Naomi walks out of it, her hair frazzled and her nurse scrubs wrinkled. A scratch mark mars her arm from elbow to wrist. It isn’t deep, but it’s red and angry and very noticeable.
“That bad?” I ask.
Naomi shakes her head. “I have no idea why she… She hasn’t done this for an entire month, and now—”
“Something must have triggered her,” I say, and try to push past her into the room. “Let me talk to her.”
“She’s sleeping. Trisha administered a tranq.”
The elation from knowing Isis remembers me drains away. A dark fury starts to broil over me, but Naomi backtracks.
“Jack, listen. Listen to me. It was the only thing we could do. She was threatening to hurt herself with a pair of scissors.”
“How did she get—” My own anger chokes me off. “Why did you let her have those?”
“I didn’t! You know me better than that, for Christ’s sake! I don’t know where she got them or how, but she had them and all we could do was stop her before she could do any real harm to herself.”
Dread replaces the anger, layering over it like a sickening cake. I can barely open my mouth to speak, but the words somehow escape.
“She must have been triggered. She’s gotten so much better. You know she wouldn’t do this unless someone said something that upset her.”
Naomi waves a tired hand toward the sleeping Sophia tucked under the white covers too perfectly. Too peacefully.
“You’re welcome to talk to her when she wakes up.”
I instantly spot the fine wrinkles under her eyes, the weary bags that all nurses get sometime in their long and stress-ridden careers. She’s so tired. She’s been Sophia’s best nurse, the only one she really likes and trusts.
“I’m sorry,” I mutter. “For being so caustic.”
Naomi’s eyebrows shoot up into her hairline. “Excuse me? What was that strange word I just heard?”
“Don’t make me say it twice.”
I push into the room and close the door behind me. I watch Naomi leave through the frosted glass of the room’s divider, her smirk evident even through the translucence.
The room is dim and quiet, save for the beeping of the monitors that staccato out her vital signs in too-cheery chirps. Every bouquet I’ve given her this year is still in the room—wilted and browning and not enticing in the slightest. But she keeps them all. She keeps each vase full of water and all the vases in chronological order. The room smells like molding flowers and antiseptic.
It’s then the guilt hits me like a steel maul to my chest. I haven’t visited for two weeks. There’s a two-week gap she’s carefully left in the line of flowers, two empty vases waiting for me to bring them the blooms they need to serve their purpose.
I let my guilt at not being able to save Isis override my duty to Sophia. And that’s unforgivable.
How can I be so excited about a girl remembering a kiss when the girl who needs me is suffering?
Selfish bastard.
I sit on the end of her bed gingerly. The white blankets fold like snow under my weight, and contour gently around her outline. She’s so much thinner than I remember. Her every bone sticks out like a bird’s—frail and hollow-looking. Her cheekbones are sharp and evident. There’s no trace of the rosy bloom I’d gotten so used to seeing growing up. That went away after that night long ago.
“I really am a bad prince,” I mutter.
I smooth hair away from her forehead. She mumbles softly and rolls over.
“Tallie…”
My fists clench in the sheets, and the molten spike of feverish regret bakes my insides, starting in my heart, working its way to my lungs and stomach and everything in between.
Tallie.
Our Tallie.
You’ve hurt a lot of people, haven’t you?