Messenger of Fear
Page 18

This in itself was not enough to elicit more than a few obligatory Eeeewwws.
“Oh, my God,” Kayla said in mock disbelief at their cluelessness. “Don’t you know who Mason Crain’s mother is?”
Publishing, I thought. His mother is in publishing. That fact must have come the same way so much came to me now, but for a moment I frowned, concentrating, trying to scroll back through my earlier encounter with Samantha’s world, and I did not recall the moment at which I had heard that name.
Blank stares from Kayla’s sycophants. Kayla waited for the suspense to build. “Mason Crain’s mother is Amber Crain. She’s a big deal, an editor or whatever they call them, at a big publisher.”
The dots were still not connecting. So Kayla laid the last piece out in front of them, speaking slowly, as if to little children. “That’s how she got her book published. Duh. Spazmantha sucked her way to success.”
And now every eye turned back again to Samantha, and to Mason, but returning to Samantha. And from her seat Samantha must have felt the eyes on her. She looked up and saw six eager, malicious, titillated sets of eyes.
They made eye contact, six on one, and there was a burst of giggling, unmistakably directed at Samantha. Samantha blushed, baffled by why exactly—why this time—she was being laughed at.
We moved again, in that seamless way that Messenger had of simply appearing where he wished to appear, and now we were with Samantha as she left school at the end of the day. She pulled out her cell phone and saw that her Twitter feed had lit up.
Twenty-nine tweets talking about her.
Some of them had a photo taken of her and Mason at lunch.
Samantha rocked back and for a moment looked as if she might faint. She leaned against her locker and scrolled again and again over the list of tweets, reading each of them, seeing new ones pop up. A thirtieth. A fortieth. In minutes the entire school would know a lie, a lie she could deny but never destroy.
Samantha gasped for breath. Her eyes darted to the exit, and she made a little jerking motion in that direction but couldn’t seem to move. She was frozen in panic. Tears were filling her eyes.
I reached for her without thinking because her knees had started to buckle, but of course I could not touch her, I could not help her. Yet she needed help. Maybe there were people who could laugh off a rapidly spreading lie, but Samantha was not that person.
Kayla was coming down the hall with two of her followers, her primed-for-cruelty followers, her toadies, her co-conspirators. Not Kayla’s fault alone, I thought, not just her, them, too! Them, too! They were laughing but not looking at Samantha, not making eye contact, avoiding eye contact, just laughing, loudly, with the hard-edged falseness that spoke of sadism and not humor.
Samantha looked almost pleadingly at Kayla. Not angrily, pleadingly, desperately. She looked like a cow going to slaughter who smells death ahead and knows with sickening dread that there is no escape.
“I don’t want to watch this,” I said. Minutes before I had been an unwelcome spy in Emma’s and Liam’s minds. Now I was a helpless witness to bullying. And I knew already where the bullying would lead.
It is a terrible thing to watch evil unfolding. It’s a terrible thing to see doom coming to an innocent girl. I felt like throwing up. I felt sick of everything that had happened to me in the time since I had woken up beneath that unwholesome yellow mist. I crossed my arms, digging fingernails into my forearms, a protective pose, a fearful pose. A pose that in a small way transmitted reflected pain.
“How long?” I asked Messenger through gritted teeth. “How long have I been here?”
He did not answer.
“I can’t do this,” I said. I felt as if I couldn’t breathe. As if my heart was too large an organ to fit my narrow chest. “You don’t understand, I’m not like you. I’m not . . . I can’t . . . I can’t just watch this happen and not try to stop it.”
“It’s easier if you believe that all of this has already happened, Mara,” Messenger said. There was something almost human in his voice. But I did not fail to notice his careful word choice.
Easier if I believe.
Had it already happened? It must have; I’d seen the final act of Samantha’s tragic story. But what meaning did past and present and future have when you could dip in and out of a person’s life, a minute here, an hour there?
It was impossible to accept as reality. But no, no, that wasn’t quite true. In fact, I had accepted it. In a very short time I had adjusted in some ways at least to the notion that I could simply move through time and space. This new reality should not have been as easy to accept as a change in the weather.
I had a sudden realization.
“You closed off my memory to make it easier for me to adapt.”
Messenger’s face remained impassive. But something came through anyway, some sense that he was pleased. Pleased with me for understanding.
To my shame I swelled with pride. Then instantly I pushed that emotion away. Was I some lonely puppy, bouncing and groveling because Messenger had given me a pat on the head?
I called up the images I had seen when Messenger had touched me, images of terror and pain and utter despair. I could call him Messenger, but his full title was Messenger of Fear.
Fear. And I was to be his apprentice until such time as I was ready to become the dread messenger myself.
I imagined escaping from him. I could run out the door of this school and find a phone to call my parents. No, my mother. Just my mother. I had forgotten again that my father was dead.