The noise was so much louder than in movies. I felt as if I’d been struck physically. I felt that sound in my bones and my teeth, in my heart.
Samantha’s head jerked.
Her hand fell away, limp and blood-spattered.
Blood sprayed from the hole for a moment, then slowed to an insidious, vile pulsation.
She remained seated for a terribly long time as the gun fell and the blood poured and then, at last, she fell onto her side, smeared red over the pastel floral print of her comforter, and rolled to the floor, a heap on the carpet.
The gunshot rang in my ears. On and on.
“I don’t like this dream,” I said, gritting my teeth, shaking my head, fighting the panic that rose in me.
The boy in black said nothing. He just looked and when I turned to him for explanation, I saw a grim mien, anger, disgust. Simmering rage. His pale lips trembled. A muscle in his jaw twitched.
He crossed abruptly, his first sudden movement, to the desk in the corner of the room. There was a laptop computer open to Facebook. There were school books, a notebook, a Disney World cup holding pencils, a dozen colorful erasers in various shapes, a tube of acne medicine, a Valentine’s card curled with age, a photograph of Samantha and two other girls at a beach, laughing.
There was a piece of paper, held down at the four corners by tiny glass figures of fancifully colored ponies. The paper had been torn from the notebook.
The boy in black looked down at the paper and said nothing. He looked at it for far longer than it could have taken to read the few words written there in blue ink. I knew, for I, too, read the words.
I love you all. I am so sorry.
But I can’t anymore.
—Sam
I found that I could not look up from the words. I felt that if I looked away, I must look at the dead girl, and I didn’t want to see her. She had still lived when she had written these words.
Then I realized that he was looking at me.
“Why is this happening?” I asked him.
He touched the note reverently with one finger.
“Why am I here?” I asked with sudden vehemence.
“The same reason we are all here,” the boy said. “To learn.”
But I had lost patience with cryptic answers. “Hey. Enough. If this is a dream, then I don’t have to put up with you!”
“Mara,” he said, though I had never told him my name. “This is not a dream.”
“Then what is it, huh?” My voice was ragged. I was sick through and through, sick with what I had just witnessed, sick with what I feared about myself. “What is it and what are you?”
“I am . . . ,” he began, then hesitated, considered, and again showed that slight lessening in the grim lines of his face. “I am the messenger.”
“Messenger? What’s your message, showing me this poor dead girl? I never wanted to see that. I don’t want it in my head. Is that your message? Showing me this?”
“My message?” He seemed almost surprised by the question. “My message? My message is that a price must be paid. A price paid with terror.”
I reached to grab him angrily, but he moved easily out of range. I had wanted to grab him by the throat, though I had instead reached for his arm. It was not that I blamed him for what I was now enduring, it was rather that I simply needed to hurt someone, something, because of what I had seen, and what I had felt since waking to find myself in the mist. It was like an acid inside of me, churning and burning me from the inside.
I wanted to kick something, to shout, to throw things, to scream and then to cry.
To save that poor girl.
To wipe the memory from my mind.
“You’re the messenger?” I asked in a shrill, nasty, mocking voice. “And your message is to be afraid?”
He was unmoved by my emotion. . . . No, that’s not quite right. It was more accurate to say that he was not taken aback. He was not unmoved, he was . . . pleased. Reassured?
“Yes, Mara,” he said with a sense of finality, as though now we could begin to understand each other, though I yet understood nothing. “I am the messenger. The Messenger of Fear.”
It would be a long time before I came to know him by any other name.
Calmer now, having released some of my boiling anger and worry, I turned my unwilling eyes back to Samantha Early. Her life’s blood was running out, soaking into the carpet.
“Why did she do it?” I asked.
“We will see,” Messenger said.
SAMANTHA EARLY LOOKS AT THE CLOTHES hanging in her closet. She clenches her fists. The veins on her forearms stand out. Her body seems to vibrate with tension.
I see this. It is happening. I can neither look away nor remain indifferent. Messenger has shown me the outcome, so I cannot tell myself that all I am witnessing is teen angst.
By means I can neither explain nor ignore, I know her thoughts. I know what she feels as she gazes, frightened, frightened by nothing but a closetful of clothing.
What would not draw ridicule? That is the question she asks herself. She dresses defensively: What will avoid giving anyone an excuse to ridicule? It should have been easy, getting dressed. It should have been as simple as what top goes with which jeans or shorts or skirt, no, no, not skirt.
No, not skirt. She remembers that day when she tripped in a skirt, when she’d sprawled out across the hallway, finger still stuck in the loop of her locker’s combo lock, books strewn out into the path of oncoming students, who stepped aside indifferently or made a show of it, made a thing of it and laughed.