Water Body

Category: Fiction » Mystery \

Author: Wonders of Randomness

Language: English, Rating: Rated: T

Genre: Drama/General

Published: 07-19-14, Updated: 09-18-14

Chapters: 2, Words: 2,839

Chapter 1: Chapter 1

beginning.

It was a piece of emptiness that we all drove around - the place where nothing could be built, nothing could be planted, nothing could happen that humans could have a hand in. Satellite imaging gave us all we really knew about the space that we had to skirt, every single day, just to make it to where we needed to be; that was that it was overgrown, and that the foliage was darker than that immediately surrounding. Once in a while, the image on Google Earth was refreshed, and we caught a vague glimpse of reflected sky piecemealed in brown water. It would stay there for a month or more, until they took a new picture from up high.

The first time I'd seen that happen, I'd print-screened, not knowing how else to save the image at the time. Silly, really, the icon was right there on the toolbar...but I'd just started using the application at the time, and I'd been irrationally panicked, thinking I'd lose it.

We were told a great deal more about the place. Crescent Lake wasn't much of a lake anymore; it had eutrophicated some fifty years ago, and was something akin to marshland now. It was more expensive to drain than most marshland, because it had a connection to the aquifer that sat under the town - it would take surveys, and equipment, and consultant hours, to keep from polluting the municipal water with half a century's worth of nitrogen buildup and chemical leaching. Too expensive a project if the mayor's running slogan (Safe and Green) were to be kept free from any damaging irony next election.

We were also told, on occasion, about young idiots who wandered into the expanse, and wasted taxpayer money on search parties that had started to become monotonous for the rest of us to hear about. Local news seemed to get a great deal of play out of stories that always turned out the same. Each time it happened, yet more flyers went out to paper the school walls, talks were given, and vigils were held. The red-eyed parents could be glimpsed, seated in the front row of the auditorium as people for whom press photos were opportunities proselytized their cause under cover of expressing a community's grief. Rules were tightened, penalties escalated, curfews discussed, fences went up, fence maintenance budgets were shifted, talking heads bobbled at each other about the deeper political meaning of everybody's opinions, and decisions were made or not made in closed rooms nobody knew much about. Nothing really happened. Life went on. The hole in reality fell out of the spotlight, and was not discussed. It wasn't something people wanted to dwell on.

To my life, it was essentially background noise; for all that I was one of those that counted and saw the missing faces. I woke up on time, exercised, ate a breakfast, packed a lunch, went to work and came back. I spent absurd amounts of time cooking dinner, ate it as I reviewed tomorrow's notes a final time, and went to bed reading, at ten thirty and no later.

The faces, the details, they faded into the background. I could remember any of it if I thought about it, but where was the need to?

In retrospect, it looks a great deal like I was begging for something to go wrong.

Chapter 2: Chapter 2

"You can't do this to me, Miz Evans."

I sighed, and took off my glasses to massage my tired eyes. The aspirin I'd taken with breakfast this morning hadn't yet kicked in, and it had been a struggle just to get to work on time. I did not need this first thing in the morning.

It had been ages since the last time this had happened, and I'd gotten comfortable, stopped expecting it. That put me in a bad mood as much as the idiot standing in front of me.

I hated my job sometimes.

I took a moment to look at him properly. Fresh from morning drills, his hulking, sweaty frame loomed over my desk in a way that suggested he'd been waiting longer than he'd have liked for me to come into office. I'd put down my bag, taken off my coat and scarf, switched out my sunglasses, adjusted my slacks and blouse, and sat down, all as if he hadn't tailed me into the room like a dog, and wasn't waiting near the door like a contracted demon. Call it childish, but I was hoping in my pain-riddled stupor that if I pretended he didn't exist, maybe he'd go away.

No such luck.

Well, the thing about childishness was, it didn't necessarily need results to make you feel better.

"Do what, Mr. Inokuma?"

Beautifully, magically, it made him step back. All it took was the suggestion that I didn't already know his reasons for bulling into my china shop. His ego did the rest of the work for me.

He took his moment to fume himself purple, and I took mine to cup my hands over my eyes in an attempt to make the blasted sunshine go away. In the middle of winter, it glared blue off the scattered snowbanks, straight into my ground-floor, east-facing, full-windowed office. Well, there was something else that I could do about that.

"Would you mind very much if I asked you to pull down the blinds, Mr. Inokuma? The sun isn't doing my headache any favors." And, before he could get any ideas - I could practically see the gears of his teenage mind skipping at this possible potential fantasy overture, right through my eyelids, my hands, and his bristled skull - I added, "Halfway, please."

If I could hear teeth grind from across the room, my inner ears would have been screaming at this point. Thankfully, I wasn't so cursed. Slowly - very slowly - I felt the ambient light in the room recede. I opened my eyes and watched him take the single step he needed to cross back to standing in front of my desk, framed by the blank back wall, the shadows in his eye sockets like black wounds in the dim light.

"Now. Tell me why it is you're in here. This early in the morning, I'm sure it's as inconvenient to you as it is me, so I trust you have a good reason." I massaged my temples. "if you don't mind, speak softly. Whatever you want, you're more likely to get it that way."

He was officially off-balance enough to be civil. That was good. I couldn't deal with angry sportsmen in the state I was in.

"Ma'am, you gave me a D on last week's paper. That puts me at a C- for this course. That's below the minimum requirement for me to stay on the team."

I raised an eyebrow at him. "And how well would you have to do in finals for that not to happen?"

He sighed, for all the world as if his alone to solve were the unsolvable mysteries. "An A-, minimum. I haven't scored above a B in this class yet. I don't have the time for a tutor. I need you to change this grade, Miz E."

"And if I don't?"

He blinked at me. "Then I get cut." His voice was starting to become desperate. "Look, Miz E, I'm trying my best here. I don't cut corners with my grades. But I can't get cut. That's college for me. The scouts are in next season. I could be up for a scholarship."

So brazen. He'd as good as told me he'd cheat on his final if he had to. He was right, he was a good kid; I could hear his distress just considering the idea. It wasn't his fault that it looked like his only viable option to him. It made me angry.

"Why would I want to stop you now? We can have this conversation again during your final, or after it. It wouldn't be just the season you lose then, I'd get you out for good."

He blinked at me some more, and gaped like a fish.

I sighed. This was not the time to be having this conversation, but I was so tired, and my normal diplomacy around this topic escaped me. "Look, Hiroshi, it's not you. It really isn't."

How to have this conversation without my head on the block by the end of the week? On I soldiered. "You scored B's at the beginning of this semester on work that would get you A's now. You showed potential. Week after week, I see you coming exhausted to class, turning in work that could be good, if it weren't half-done, badly sourced, not proofread. You never do the reading. You're never awake enough to even listen. This from a student I want to be writing recommendations for." I saw him going paler, but didn't stop. "You could be going to college on a scholastic scholarship, and as low as the chances are of that, it's still a better bet than the one you're making - and it leaves you with a functioning body and mind."

I paused for breath, looked at him, and sighed. I'd gone too far. Time to backtrack - but he didn't give me the chance.

"My sport is my business, Miz Evans. I know you mean well. But it's my business." His chin was up. His hands were fisted. He stood and looked at me like a soldier.

I couldn't deal with this now. There were too many reasons why, not least of which was how little anything I could do would avail. Still, despite the futility, for a moment I felt tempted to go to the mat with him. I held his gaze for a moment, then looked away and sighed.

"I'm sorry. You caught me on a bad morning. You're right, your sport is your business."

"Thank you for acknowledging that." Slowly, he relaxed.

"I'll do what I can to help, same as any student, but I can't change the grade for your paper. I was being generous not failing it." I took a deep breath, pacing myself. "If you want to find time for a tutor, I have a list of good ones. I can issue an extra credit assignment or two to pull you up. Figure out what you can do, and come back to me." No doubt he wanted to follow up then and there, protest that he didn't have time or effort to spare; but the second I was done talking I dropped my head into my hands like a collapsed puppet. "Now please give me twenty minutes for my aspirin to kick in. Be in class on time."

I heard him leave, after a long moment that I assumed he'd used to pull himself together. Then I winced as the warning bell went off, and tried to block it out with my hands.

By noon, it was all over the fucking school: Wari Evans hated football. For all that I'd expected it, I still felt like I could punch the overgrown pipsqueak's teeth in. Ridiculous as it was, some of us had jobs to think of when we chose to mouth off about those idiotic structures of the high school environment that management was incentivised to favor. He couldn't be expected to think that far ahead, sure, and he had no idea how profitable it was to his school's administrators that he ruin his life knocking helmets with his friends and rivals hundreds of times a week. For all his supposed worldliness, he had no idea how costly that advice had been for me to give.

I still wanted to kick his teeth in. I did, in my head, several times.

Then I felt bad about it when I realized the reason everyone knew was because he'd talked to his coach about cutting bsck practice hours. He'd been pressured until he gave up details.

Unfortunately, I had to find this out as I was being flecked with spittle from the wildly distended vocal orifice of said coach, again from across my desk, not five hours later.

"Who the hell do you think you are to be talking to my kids about football, you nancy?" It seemed like all his insults were taken from what coaches shouted at their players in bad PG-13s. I suppose I could have gotten him in worse trouble if he called me anything worse, or at least I could have tried. Considering how tightly wrapped up this noxious sport had the local authorities, his restraint could almost be considered grace on his part. He was sparing me the humiliation of being called a cunt on school premises and discovering nobody would do anything about it.

I was thinking this as he went on, as I watched his mouth distort horribly as if in slow motion, flapping his lips in ways that seemed impossible to associate with actual language. Maybe it was the headache, I mused, though mercifully most of the pain had been cleared up. Migraine days left me a little out of it even with aspirin in the picture.

"...and if you can't learn to keep your baseless accusations and fear-mongering out of where it's not wanted, I'm going to see to it you never teach in this state again!"

Grace, had I been thinking? Restraint? I revised, mentally, to credit him only the sort of low cunning that cats in heat displayed. He just didn't want to give me any ammo, and that was back-alley tactics, plain and simple.

I cut in. "Look, Coach Filbert, I understand your concerns."

"Oh, you understand my concerns." He turned left and right, as if to acknowledge an imaginary audience. "She understands my concerns, ladies and gentlemen."

I paused, as patient as I could manage to be, for his bit of ego appeasement to subside.

"Of course I do. I've had them in mind all along. Oh, don't tell me you actually believe all that injury lawsuit bull. Has everyone heard that stupid rumor by now?" I paused, to let that sink in, and was about ready to collapse with relief when the fool in sweats before me didn't interrupt. "Mr. Inokuma came in this morning and asked me to change his grade for his football requirement. But that was a midterm submission - it gets forwarded to the district, and his submission was terrible. I'd given it as high a score as I could already. If I marked it up more, I'd be inviting investigation - into me, him, maybe the whole team."

This time I had no doubt he'd let me go on. "An investigation into the academic integrity of the team is hardly necessary at this stage in the season, is it, Coach? Especially if they asked the entire team to change their practice hours, or worse."

"The pansy-ass board is full of South supporters." He was turning a little purple at the edges at the mere thought.

"Exactly. You know how these things are." I sighed, long-suffering and dramatic. "And Hiroshi Inokuma, well, you know his parents. If his grades start suffering too much, it's not just the season he has to lose. I'm sure we both want to avoid them getting involved."

He was eating it up, the idiot. Inokuma's parents were the most laid-back I'd ever faced in my admittedly short history of PTAs. Sometimes I thought it was a wonder he got anything done with his life. But in his mind, they were Asian Parents, with all the trappings of stereotype; and he'd never spent the time or attention on finding out otherwise.

"If I were you, I'd just give him a few hours off for the next few weeks. He'll pull his grades up, and we hear no more of this." Dangerous line. I shut up and watched him.

He chewed cud for a bit, and spat at me a little more. "Don't think I'll forget this, Evans. You may be right right now, but the kid isn't spooked because of his parents. He's spooked because of what you told him, and if that starts spreading around the locker rooms - if I start to get more kids acting up..." he trailed off, trying to be threatening. It would have been cartoonish if not for the real threat behind it. The man didn't yet know himself what he could do, but I had a vague idea. It wasn't something I wanted to deal with.

"I'm sorry he's so, so spooked, Coach. If you want me to talk to him again..." I let it hang, and he predictably returned parry with force.

"I can handle my kids, Evans. Just you keep your fingers out of this from now on." And that gave him a decent enough parting shot to bluster and harrumph his way out. Finally.

My little china shop was taking a great deal of abuse today. Thankfully, the bull parade seemed over, and it was nearly time for home. I had AP World History to ease my way out.

I thought about it a moment longer, feeling something dissonant about the idea; and groaned as I remembered.

The day wasn't over yet. I had work left, of the most unsavory sort I'd had to deal with in weeks. I'd be lucky if, at the end, I could count th day reasonably successful.

I gathered my notes, and stood to make my way to the classroom. My bones, stiff with the cold, protested the whole way there.

The memorial display on the wall in the hallway had trophies whose shine seemed targeted to glare into my eyes from every angle. I moved quickly enough to seem preoccupied and kept my gaze vague, angling to avoid seeing the photo frames.

Chapter 3: Chapter 3

In most ways, AP World History was the class of dreams. Twice a week twenty students came in, opened their books, folders, tablets, and laptops, and settled in to mowing their way through swathes of printed and online material for forty five minutes. Once a week they proved they'd read at least the minimum that I'd set them by spending the class sniping at each other in cultivated debate voices about it. I occasionally had to shut them up and lecture about it when they all missed the point - competitive and unaccustomed to agreement as they were, this happened often enough that I seemed suitably busy to students and supervisors both. Similarly, once in a while a student would call me over for a clarification during their reading, and others would join in the impromptu session if they found it relevant. They nearly never took home their homework - class time was more than enough to finish both the reading and my written assignments. I kept a running count of how many weeks ahead we were on the whiteboard. We were nearly set to finish the syllabus before Thanksgiving at the moment, which would leave December entirely for revision and project work. The class had barely changed in the past three years, and the results were invariably decent. Even the mental breakdowns - of which there were always a few in the AP courses - managed Cs at worst.

In short, minimal effort, high return, and the combined benefits of brisk and restful classroom styles.

If not for the two pairs of eyes glaring at me from the back row, it would be perfect.

There is nothing in the world so sullen as a teenager's glare. Nothing so furious, nor so potent. The eyes move like flies in molasses, vague but unshakeable. The powerlessness inherent in it, untempered by any real cynicism, sits heavy in your gut. Teenagers have a talent for making you as resentful of them as they are of you.

Nothing like a ghost's glare, which is a completely different species. It burns through you. It dares you to ignore it. It promises to cause you trouble if you don't satisfy it. In spite of the relative powerlessness of ghosts, you believe the promise, because what a ghost has that you don't is all the time in the world to figure out how to keep it. The gaze of a ghost is patient, but it sits on your skin and inflames it with fear, an itching, irritating sort of fear you can never entirely get rid of.

The teenager and the ghost sat next to each other in the back row, glaring at me. They'd been at it for twenty minutes. I'd been ignoring them steadfastly. It didn't stop them, just like it hadn't stopped them for the past three weeks. Every class since the equinox, and, for the first week, every chance they got outside of it. I'd threatened to report them - well, Cameron, at least - before they'd eased off. Since then they had restricted themselves to their present tactics, which were easy enough to deal with.

Thing was, whoever won the waiting game, I'd lose. If they stopped trying to convince me to help them, the bogeyman would remember his grudge against me. If Cameron gave up - and he likely would eventually, since it was improbable he'd get anywhere - it would end up with a grudge against the both of us. With any luck, it was the theatrical type, and would wait however many decades it took for a pair of our descendants to fall in love, so he had a poetic canvas to work with. Without luck, well, Cam or I would eventually put ourselves at enough risk for an easy opening to present itself, and the ghost would take it. Nowadays the fashion was vehicular accidents, and there was little to no way to stay acceptably safe from those in this hilly hairpin-riddled terrain. Public transport, unless it was by extremely safe means like monorail, just meant you were endangering everybody who rode with you.

Not that I had no protection against that sort of thing. Cameron didn't, that I knew of, but that was none of my concern.

I resisted the urge to reach for my charm, and turned a page. It was always better if they didn't know what you had or where you kept it.

I let myself be eased, slowly, by the subdued activity in the room. The rustle of notebook paper, the slick of glossy textbook-pages against each other, and the quiet cascades of typing clicks--

"Excuse me, Miz Evans." His hand was up, but his tone wasn't the quiet, deferential library voice that everyone used in reading classes. Twenty five heads looked up and back, expressions startled and annoyed. He didn't care. His gaze had barely wavered. The ghost hadn't even twitched.

"Yes, Cameron. Do you have a question about the reading?" Repress, make it difficult for him.

"I do have a question, ma'am."

"What page? What header?"

"It isn't about the reading. It's about last week's news." On he bulled, and china was exploding everywhere. His classmates - some of them, anyway - were interested now. Teachers didn't voice much of anything related to the disappearances.

The first time it happened, last year, had been unquestioned, an accident. The second, over the summer, had resulted in a quiet discussion of policy changes regarding late nights at the school, for practices or otherwise; but, having happened in late June, it was old news by the time the new semester began.

This time, though, none of the adults had a good excuse for their silence. We were all deer crossing highways, knowing how essentially fucked we would be by any cars that found the stretch we occupied.

Figures it had to be today, when I was already in shit; figures it had to be me who got hit first. He knew all this, for all I called him a bull; knew the risk it put me at of losing my job a month or two down the line, and the way it curtailed my freedom in a classroom from that moment forward. It didn't matter what I told them at this point, especially if I brushed them off - they'd fill in whatever blanks I'd left with their own conjectures, and call it confirmation. That was exactly what he wanted to happen.

I sighed, and dug myself deeper in. "What about it?"

With luck, he'd ask something closed, a point of information I could wrap up with a surprise and a dismissal. If he veered too challenging, I could insult him, get a little vicious with showing him his place - in the moment, that was always going to be the more interesting gossip, for all that I hated looking like I held grudges or played favorites.

My gaze shifted lazily to the ghost, and knew he wouldn't make either of those mistakes. The opening parries were too well practiced by this point. The problem was, I didn't have any other ideas. My head was still vibrating like a drum, muted by the aspirin but insistent, constant, reacting to every ripple of sound around me, distracting me when I just needed to think--

"The disappearances have been happening on full moons exclusively so far. Three constitutes a definite pattern. Do you think they have anything to do with the town's Wiccan community?"

--and I didn't need to think. I saw red, and he'd stepped into one of those beginner's pitfalls after all, he'd taken it more than a few steps too far. Soemwhere in the background of my own head, I speculated idly about whether his actual idea had been to make me so angry I lost control and made a mistake. At any rate, it would have been a miscalculation.

"Interesting of you to pick up on that, Dennel. Interesting conjecture as well, if so unspecific an assertion as 'having something to do with it' could be considered a worthwhile conjecture." My voice was light. I raised an eyebrow. "One of the things I endeavour to teach you in this classroom is to know the difference between a forecast and a horoscope. Gideon, would you care to tell us what that difference is?"

The nervous redhead by the window in the third row cleared his throat. "Specificity, Ms. Evans. You can disprove a forecast when the evidence comes in."

"Thank you. Michaela, could you tell me why a skill regarding the future is something I teach in a history classroom?"

A prim, straight-backed girl somewhere in the centre of the room answered without hesitation. "Evidence isn't temporally limited to the future, Ms. Evans. History is storytelling to explain the available information. Stories that fit any body of evidence are useless."

"Thank you. Dala, what do you think the reason is people make horoscopes, if they're as useless as that?"

And this wasn't covered, but the lush figure lounging like a cat in the back row answered without missing a beat. "They want a reaction, Miz Evans."

"Thank you. Now, Cameron. Where do you think your conjecture falls in this classification? How much evidence would it take to disprove your hypothesis?"

He was silent, jaw working.

"Would you like an example? Every incident happened to boys and girls with cell phones on a dangerous hill road. I could make a bet that they were texting and driving. Or hit by somebody who was. That's a forecast. If on the other hand I were to say it had something to do with the dangerous driving practices of modern smartphone users, that's a horoscope. What I want when I make it isn't your informed consideration. It's to tell you I think you're irresponsible fools who shouldn't be allowed near motor vehicles. I want to push your buttons."

I paused again. "Cameron, if you're done trying to push my buttons, I'd like you to take a seat."

SLowly, molasses-eyes stuck burning on my face, he sank back down. One by one, the spectators turned back to their work. I glanced at the bogeyman, and he still hadn't so much as shifted the folds of his rags. He met my gaze steadily. I leaned back and looked back down at my book. Every thirty seconds, as measured by my wristwatch, I turned a page.

They kept staring, and the remaining twenty five minutes ticked down. By the time the bell rang, I was already packed and ready to sweep out.

Except he put his hand up again. The fucker.

"Miz Evans. Can you help me understand this graph on page 270?"

"Class time's over, Cameron."

"Just one question, Miz E. About the axes. I can't find a unit on the page." He was already approaching the front, open book in hand.

He'd earmarked it already. I hadn't seen him so much as glance down for the entire class, let alone turn a page. Behind him, the bogeyman stood in place, but didn't move out of the seat it had taken. I eyed it, and it grinned wide, in what must have once been a charming expression and was now...an interpretation of it. The teeth were fused into, or carved from, a monolithic curve of almost painful whiteness and a strange chalky texture, like limestone. The canines in particular stood out and down. Black, shiny lips with a jaunty tilt to the corners framed them. The entire mouth was far too big to fit in the skull, let alone match the size of the face.

I shook my head and looked away, and once again resisted the urge to reach for my charm.

More fool me, I'd already walked past the desk, and hadn't returned in time. Cameron was right in my face now, nose barely two inches from mine, sneering.

His friend back there was far more viscerally terrifying. but he was scarier. He was the one who could actually do things, things I couldn't ward against.

The idiot barely knew to ward himself, and he was cohorts with one of them. I could dismiss even that stupidity, but he wanted to involve me.

"So, even our resident nepotist Wari Evans draws the line somewhere."

He didn't even know enough to know what he should be accusing me of - or for that matter, thnaking me for. Abruptly, I was exasperated.

"Can you please get out of my face, you miserable ingrate."

"Of course, ma'am. You just be on your way. Far be it from me to stand in the way of the Anti-Football Crusade."

I considered and discarded my potential responses one by one. It was unwise to voice my opinion of the situation he was in - I glanced back at the ghost, whose eyes hadn't left me. But there weren't many other options.

I didn't need or want to make excuses about what he saw my actions to be - and the last thing he needed was the idea that he was entitled to an explanation of my actions or opinions. Explanations about the pragmatic limitations I faced within school bureaucracy would sound like excuses without contextual details I couldn't disclose - and I'd have been more comfortable disclosing them anyway if I wasn't sure much about getting my ass hauled up next week when he used whatever I told him to snark at somebody else. But giving him nothing wasn't going to get him - or it, still leering from the back row - off my back.

He was the more dangerous one, I reminded myself. But it was stupid to provoke his companion to the point where he used the weak point against me in the moment. I'd have to soften it, or be oblique.

Against every instinct a lifetime had taught me, I went for it.

"I care about living people, kid. As much as I care about anything. I might bother with you if you were to get your head out of dead arse, but Tall Dark and Pajamas over there can go fuck himself."

...and there it went, what shreds of the Dead's unconcern for me I'd been desperately preserving for my entire life.

I gripped the corner of my book hard enough to mark the jacket with my nails, and struggled to keep my gaze focused and on the kid in front of me, my expression smooth. I couldn't help another glance back.

From the look of Pajamas, there was no chance it hadn't heard, and less that it didn't care. It wasn't a lesser spirit - strong enough to hold humanoid shape, a semblance of living memory, personality...

I'd have to get a protective tattoo, at least. Even that wouldn't be enough for long. The kit was at home - in my bag I had materials for wards that would last until then. I was working on a timer now - about eight hours until the slow-moving spirit thoughts coalesced into a will that would ensnare me irrevocably.

I was breaking rules I'd set for myself decades ago, rules followed by children that I'd sheltered behind until now, trying to shut out a world I wanted no part of. The idiot in front of me didn't even know enough to be grateful.

But it was going to happen sooner or later, once he'd latched on to me as a solution to his problem. This was a war of attrition - if I only deterred them well enough, soon enough, they'd leave me alone with only as little exposure as I could manage.

I'd have to tighten my rules and strictures, and use some of the lesser rituals. Sleep on a perfect schedule, eat to a clock, make hair-wick beeswax candles, get backup tattoo kits and give myself half-signs once a month...the steps ran through my head so I could familiarize myself, and quell the panic that set my gut roiling. Incidental details flitted between them, as though I was considering next week's shopping. I'd have to practice the tattoos to keep them small. I'd have to buy light shirts with full coverage soon, body canvases being what they were. The wick-braiding would be such a pain, but it was better to braid them all at once, because it preserved the essence for longer...would I need to make mordant? The neighbours would complain about the smell. I had nowhere for bonfires...

I stared down the blond teenager inches from my face as if he hadn't just pushed me one step deeper into the river I'd spent most of my life trying not to drown in.

But under the fear, I felt awoken, in a way that felt familiar but that I had to memory to tie to. It felt good enough for me to find a smile for him. It came out a little vicious, but that was a good thing; he looked taken aback enough that I had an opening to make my exit.

"I know you didn't know better, so I'll forgive you trying to drag me into this. Keep helping Pajamas, or he'll kill you - it's too late for you by now. When you fail, he'll probably kill you anyway. But that's not my concern."