Push

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

THE EXPRESSION ON MRS. CONNER’S FACE SENDS DARTS OF terror straight to my heart. If it wasn’t for Jackson coming up behind me and grabbing my elbows to hold me up, I might collapse.

“Miki,” Carly’s mom says. “Did she call you?”

I can’t talk. I can only shake my head.

“I thought we were done with this.” She sighs. “It’s been years since she had one of these fits. Maybe you can get through to her.” She throws her hands up. “I’m all out of ideas.”

I try to align my thoughts and expectations with Mrs. Conner’s attitude. She isn’t grief stricken. She isn’t in a panic. She’s upset, yeah, but she seems more . . . annoyed than anything else. Then her words filter through my fear.

“Carly’s . . . okay?” I ask.

She shrugs. “As okay as she ever is when she locks herself in the bathroom for an hour, sobbing her guts out, refusing to talk to me or unlock the door.”

My relief is so acute that my knees give out completely. Jackson presses against my back, keeping me upright.

“She’s not—” Dead.

Carly’s not dead. She’s locked in the bathroom. Whatever’s wrong with her, we can fix this.

Mrs. Connor narrows her eyes at Jackson and Luka, who stand behind me. “Is this because of one of you? Did you break her heart?”

Embarrassing mom question. I feel an acute pang of longing, a wish my mom were here to ask every embarrassing question under the sun.

“No,” I say. “This has nothing to do with either of them. Maybe she’s upset about her costume. Did she say anything? Anything at all?”

Mrs. Connor shakes her head. “Other than ‘go away’? No. She’s been in there for over an hour. She won’t come out. Won’t talk to me. I could hear her crying. I threatened to get one of her brothers to break down the door, but she just told me not to come in, no matter what. And now they’ve all gone out and it’s just her and me, and she hasn’t made a peep in about twenty minutes.” She sighs. “Not that I’ve been standing outside the door listening. Just checking on her here and then.”

“I—” The word comes out as a croak. I wet my lips and try again. “Let me talk to her,” I say.

Pulling the door wide, Mrs. Conner motions us inside. “Give it your best shot, Miki.”

I toe off my boots. Jackson and Luka do the same and the three of us head up to the bathroom, Mrs. Conner watching us warily. Okay, this is weird. Me and Jackson and Luka hunting Carly down in the toilet.

I knock on the door. “Carly?”

No answer.

“Carly? Open up. I’m here with Jackson and Luka. We’re worried about you.” I just need to see her. I need to know she’s okay. “And Kelley and Dee want you at the dance. Ketchup and relish aren’t quite the same without mustard.”

No answer.

Luka reaches over and rattles the doorknob. Locked.

We exchange so-what-do-we-do-now looks. I glance over my shoulder at Jackson to see if he has any ideas, but he’s not there. He’s standing at the top of the stairs, talking quietly to Carly’s mom.

I turn back to the door and tap on it. “Carly? Listen, you don’t need to open the door if you don’t want. Just answer me. Tell me you’re okay. Otherwise . . .” I try to think of a threat. Again, I glance at Jackson. He’s standing there, watching me, arms crossed over his chest. Mrs. Conner has left us alone, so no help there. I sigh and turn back to the locked door. “Otherwise, your mom said she’s going to call 911. She’s really worried. We all are.”

I press my ear to the door. Not a sound. I try to decide what to say next, minutes crawling past, my exhausted brain coming up blank.

“Let me,” Jackson says.

I turn to see that Mrs. Conner is back. She hands something to Jackson. I can’t imagine that Carly will be any more responsive to him than she was to her mom or me. But I step aside, hoping I’m wrong.

Of course, Jackson takes a completely different tack. He uncoils the paper clip he must have gotten from Mrs. Conner, squats down to eye level with the doorknob, and slips the end of the paper clip into the hole at the bottom. He wiggles it for about three seconds, and then turns the knob. The door opens a crack.

Jackson gets to his feet and steps back. As Luka reaches for the doorknob, Jackson catches his wrist. “Maybe let Miki,” he says.

I glance at Mrs. Conner, who’s standing by the top of the stairs again. Her arms are folded over her chest, her brows drawn in a frown. For all that she was trying to come off as annoyed, she really is worried.

I offer what I hope is a reassuring smile, slip into the bathroom, and close the door behind me. It’s dark, just a sliver of ambient light leaking through the edge of the blind that’s pulled down over the window.

“Carly?” I say as I flip on the light, which also happens to turn on the overhead fan. They’re wired together to a single switch. Carly and I have a running joke that the fan’s louder than a jet, so we can always tell if one of her brothers is in the can.

As it roars to life and the sudden light hits her, Carly lets out a squeak and throws her forearm across her eyes. She’s curled up on the floor in a corner of the bathroom, dressed in her yellow bodysuit. The yellow wig’s nowhere in sight and her mustard label isn’t tacked on.

I hunker down beside her and lean over, trying to give her a hug. In this position, it’s more like a pro-wrestling cross-body block.

She squirms and says, “What are you doing?” The words are muffled in my shoulder.

“Me? What are you doing? You scared the shit out of us.”

“What?” She sort of curls to a sitting position and pushes away from me, then scuttles back until her back’s pressed to the wall, her legs straight out in front of her. Her eyes are puffy and red, swollen almost completely shut, her cheeks tear stained.

She looks around, then drops her face into her hands. “Oh my God. Did I cry myself to sleep on the bathroom floor? Could I be any more pathetic?”

I settle on the floor next to her, remembering times when she was twelve and going through major mood swings and she’d lock herself in the bathroom for hours on end and just cry. Sometimes she’d let me in. Sometimes she wouldn’t. But she’s not twelve anymore and this is something else entirely.

“Did you . . . um . . . drink something?” I ask.

“No.”

“Smoke something?”

“No!”

“Get your period?”

She shoves my shoulder. “Shut up.”

We sit like that, shoulder-to-shoulder, my back to the wall, my legs stretched out next to hers. Mine in black. Hers in yellow. Like a bumblebee. Finally, she says, “I had the worst nightmare. It was so real.”

“Do you . . . want to tell me about it?”

“I died.”

My stomach knots and I wait for her to continue, a million questions on the tip of my tongue. I don’t want to push her, but I need to know. The game is spilling into real life and now that I know Carly’s okay, that she made it through, I need to think strategically. Any info she can give me might help us against the Drau.

My head’s clearer now, and the implications sparkle deadly bright. The Drau were at the dance at my high school. They almost killed Carly. Next time, there might not be any almost in that sentence. And the number of victims might not be in the single digits. The number of dead could number in the hundreds . . . thousands . . .

“I thought you’re not supposed to die on your dreams,” Carly says just as I’m about to fire off a question or two, “cuz if you die in a dream you die for real.”

“I think that’s a myth. Tell me about the dream.”

She takes her hands from her face and stares at the floor, pulling on alternating strands of the fluffy blue bath mat. “I was at the dance. We were doing ‘The Time Warp.’ There were these lights flashing, really bright, right in the middle of everything. Lights in the shape of people. I thought someone came up with a really cool costume. Then there were a bunch of little lights, like falling stars, and when they landed, they burned holes through people’s skin. Everyone started screaming. Running. It was crazy.”

She pulls at a strand of carpet, lets it go, pulls at another. “You were there. You and Luka and Jackson. Someone pulled the fire alarm. You ran down toward the gym instead of running out. I was scared you’d get hurt. Get killed.”

She shrugs, still staring at the carpet, pulling and pulling at the threads. “I knew I had to follow you, save you. It was like there was something driving me to follow. You went to the basement and I knew that if I didn’t go down after you, something terrible was going to happen to you.” She pauses. “It was so real. Not like any dream I’ve had before.”

I put my hand over hers and squeeze. She stops pulling at the rug, just sits there, tense and rigid.

“I found you,” she says. “I was telling you to get out. And then I died.”

My fingers tighten on hers.

She looks down and spreads her free hand over her abdomen. “It didn’t hurt. It was just sort of dull. Numb. But there was a lot of blood.” She takes a deep, shuddering breath. “Like, a lot of blood.”

She lets her hand fall away. She tips her head back against the wall, eyes closed. “You know I hate the sight of blood.”

I wait for her to keep going, and I’m about to push when she starts speaking again.

“Then Jackson was there, bending over me, looking in my eyes. But he was a girl. And then this laser beam went right through my eyes into my brain. It hurt so bad. Like my eyes were exploding. A gray laser, silvery, really freaky. It was—”

She tips her head forward and starts picking at the carpet again.

I don’t know what to think, what to say. She remembers everything that happened in the game. But she doesn’t know she remembers. She thinks it was a dream, a really bad dream.

I want to tell her everything. The Drau. The Committee.

I want to tell her nothing.

I hope she keeps thinking it was just a nightmare, and actually, from her description it sounds like a blend of nightmare and memory.

Finally, I say, “Sounds pretty crazy. Jackson was a girl?” I laugh because I’m wound so tight that if I don’t laugh, I’ll crack. And because the thought of Jackson as a girl is pretty funny. But mostly I laugh in pure relief, because Carly’s okay. Somehow, she’s okay and I’m so damn grateful for that.

I lace my fingers with hers. “Come on. Come out of the bathroom. Your mom’s worried. Luka and Jackson are worried. Dee and Kelley must be freaking by now. Come on.”

I tug lightly on her hand, but she doesn’t move. She just sits there on the bathroom floor staring at the carpet.

“The nightmare was bad enough. But you know what’s worse?” she asks.

I stop tugging. She isn’t ready to budge; there’s more to the story. Unease slithers across my skin, raising goose bumps. “Tell me.”

“When I looked in the mirror . . .” She pulls her hand from mine. “When I looked in the mirror, the nightmare was still there. My eyes—”

I gasp. I can’t help it. I know what she’s going to say even before she says it.

“My eyes were like theirs.” She shudders. “Gray and scary. With slitted pupils instead of round ones. Not human. Like theirs.”

My turn to shudder.

Carly’s describing the Drau’s slitted pupils, but she never saw the Drau that killed her. It hit her from behind. She saw Jackson’s eyes when he did his Drau trick, but his pupils are human; they’re round.

My thoughts shift while I try to rearrange the pieces of the puzzle. I stare at the top of her bowed head, more than a little freaked out, trying to make sense of everything she’s saying.

She said she cried herself to sleep on the bathroom floor. . . . “Wait, when did you have the nightmare? Here, on the floor? After you locked yourself in the bathroom?”

She shakes her head. “I fell asleep on my bed. It was so weird.” She’s picking at the carpet again. Faster. Rougher. A thread pulls free and she throws it down, then pulls out another and another. “One second I was getting ready for the dance.” She pauses, her whole body motionless; then she starts pulling out threads again, even faster. “Then I was waking up on my bed. I don’t even remember lying down on the bed. I came in here. Washed my face. Looked in the mirror, and—”

I need to see her eyes.

“Look at me,” I order. And when she doesn’t, my unease ramps to full-on fear.

What if this isn’t Carly? My Carly. What if this is a different Carly, a shell?

No. That’s not possible.

Could they even have cloned her and made a shell so quickly?

Or maybe it wasn’t quick. Maybe the whole time-jump thing worked in their favor. Time passes differently inside the game and out.

But she’s acting like Carly acts when she’s upset. Would the Drau know that? Would they be able to program it into a clone?

Adrenaline spikes, sensitizing my skin, making my pulse gallop, my breathing harsh.

She balls her hand into a fist and presses it against her stomach, like she’s feeling sick.

That’s my opening. Only one way to be sure.

“Feeling queasy?” I ask, laying my hand just below hers.

I need to know if Carly’s a shell.

I curl my fingers a little, searching for proof. My index finger finds her navel.

She slaps at my hand. “What are you doing poking in my belly button?”

“Sorry,” I mutter, grinning like a Cheshire cat because the spandex clings to her and I can still see the indent. Shells don’t have umbilical cords, so they don’t have navels. One question answered.

“Freak,” Carly says without venom. She nods and sniffs, then scrubs her nose with the back of her hand. I unroll a few squares of toilet paper and hand them to her.

“I’m scared to look at my eyes,” she says.

Yeah . . . I might have a harder time explaining that away. I need to see them. See how bad they are. I don’t even want to begin trying to figure out how or why her eyes are Drau gray.

Is it because Jackson healed her? Fixed her? And now she has some connection?

But then why didn’t my eyes go gray when I healed him?

Because the flow of energy was in the opposite direction?

And if Jackson healed her, why hasn’t the Committee pulled him to face the repercussions of that?

My brain’s hurting from trying to figure this out.

One thing at a time.

“That’s why you locked yourself in? You didn’t want your mom to see your eyes?”

She gives a harsh laugh. “You’re giving me credit for actually thinking of a reason. I didn’t. I just freaked out and hid in here.”

“Show me,” I say.

“I’m scared,” she says, sounding young and lost and forlorn.

“I know. Let me see.” I cup her cheeks, tipping her face up so I can see exactly what she saw.

Carly’s hazel-green eyes look back at me, mascara streaking her cheeks in lurid black stripes.

Relief is like a hydrogen-filled balloon, floating up, up, up. “You’re nuts, you know that, right?” I ask.

“What?”

Laughing, I bound to my feet, grab her makeup mirror off the shelf, and hold it up so she can see.

“There’s nothing wrong with your eyes. It was just part of the nightmare.”

“Oh.” She moves closer to the mirror and stares at herself. Then she smiles. “Oh!”

I put the mirror down and hold my hand out to her. “You freaked yourself out for no reason.”

She huffs a short laugh. “I swear I’m never going to eat a giant Hershey bar in one sitting again. Ever.”

She grabs my hand and I yank her to her feet.

And for a millisecond, I swear her eyes flash Drau gray.