And if she did? She had revealed bits of herself in the story. One of the characters would be blindingly obvious as herself, as a prettier, cooler Samantha, an aspirational Samantha. She would make herself even more of a target, she would have painted a bullseye on herself . . . No, a targeting map, like the military used. Strike here and here and here to inflict maximum damage.
“I’ll see you guys later,” Samantha said, and fled, touching her bump. Touching it. Touching it again. Relief.
I looked at Kayla rather than Samantha now.
“Is she doing it on purpose? Does she know she’s being cruel?”
“Is that important?” Messenger asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“Listen to her thoughts,” Messenger said.
And I heard them. Kayla’s thoughts. As clearly as if she was speaking. In fact, when I looked, I saw her lips moving. She was speaking but not to the others around her. It was more as if I’d given her a truth serum that caused her to explain herself honestly.
“I don’t like Samantha. She’s very smart, but so am I. And I’m prettier by a mile and also much more popular. I pick on her because she’s weak. It’s that simple. She’s obviously got problems, so anything I say can make her freak out.”
It was bizarre the way Kayla spoke, unsettling even by dream standards. She wasn’t looking at me—she wasn’t looking at anyone—she was just voicing her thoughts, like I’d thrown a switch just by wondering about her. She was Richard the Third in Shakespeare’s play, pausing for a moment to enlighten the audience as to motive and malice.
“Why shouldn’t I pick on Samantha? It’s fun for me and entertaining for my friends. It reminds my friends to be a little afraid of me, and that’s useful. It reminds them that they could be next if they disappoint me. Besides, I can’t stand that she—”
She stopped just like that, in mid-thought.
I laughed. Not because it was funny but because it had the ring of truth and I had not often heard truth spoken so bluntly and so utterly without self-justification.
I turned my laughing face to Messenger, who was watching me, waiting for my reaction. Judging me, I thought.
“If this is a dream, why aren’t we at my school?” I asked him. “I should dream about places I know. This place probably isn’t real.”
He must have heard the uncertainty in my voice. I did.
“Okay, that’s enough,” I said sharply. “I want answers. I want to know what this is.” The panic came quick and strong, all at once, catching me by surprise. “This is real, isn’t it? This is real. Oh, God, this is real. This is real!”
“Bravo! Well done. She’s not nearly as thick as you were, Messenger.” A female voice. Not Kayla. Not Samantha, who was all the way down the hall now and entering a classroom.
Kayla’s little group broke up as the bell rang with startling urgency, and, just like it was at my school when the bell rang, the hallway emptied out fast, the last stragglers rushing away with backpacks swinging.
The girl who had spoken, well, maybe she was a girl physically and chronologically but surely not psychologically. No girl could have carried herself this way. A woman, then. A young woman to look at but with no hint of youthful innocence.
She was as pale as Messenger and, like him, dressed in black. But this girl/woman had a great deal less clothing in total. She wore a thing that was a cross between a bustier and a leather jacket. Cutouts revealed her shoulders, the neckline plunged to her breastbone, and the whole garment was cut to a severe point in front, forming a V that hid her navel but left the sides of her waist and her lower back bare. She wore black tights that seemed more liquid than fabric and swirled with black-on-black patterns that shifted and changed. Her boots went to her knees and were notably strange for suggesting that her feet were unnaturally small.
That detail bothered me, held my attention for a moment, as I could not see how she could stand on such tiny feet, particularly given the height of the heels.
If Kayla was the blond sun, this . . . this person . . . was midnight. Her eyes were black and large, as if the pupils had expanded to consume all the iris. She had extravagant lashes and black hair, but it was her lips that drew my fascinated gaze. They were green. Not tinged with green, not a sickly green, but a flamboyant, defiant green. The green of jade. They matched a pendant around her neck that was an ornate object of jade and onyx, green and black, suggesting a face, a lewd, leering face.
There were other touches of green and black—earrings, a snake-pattern bracelet around her left wrist, fasteners down the front of her boots. And a ring on her left hand whose intricate design I could not make out.
Had Kayla seen this creature striding down the halls of her school, she would have curled into a little ball. For while Kayla was beautiful, and I liked to believe that I was at least pretty, this female creature had the beauty of cold, distant stars and silvery moonlight.
She was hypnotizing. Merely by existing, she redefined my ideas of beauty, for this was not mere physical perfection, this was seduction; this was the primordial, essential, eternal avatar of female sensuality walking nonchalantly down the empty hallway of a suburban high school.
She made me feel shrunken and small and ugly.
Her name was . . .
“Oriax,” Messenger said.
“Messenger,” Oriax said. She spoke with a voice full of silk, secrets, and slithering snakes. Like Messenger’s, her voice was too near, too intimate, but it thrilled me. I whimpered. I couldn’t help it. I had forgotten my panic, forgotten for the moment that I should not be in this place at all, that I had lost my memory, that I feared I was dead. All of that was submerged the moment I saw her. I wanted to worship her. I wanted to listen to any word that she cared to speak. I wanted to be her, to be a tiny fraction of her.
Oriax.
“Well, hello there . . .” she said to me, and then after a longish pause added, “you.”
I grunted. Like a farm animal. I could not make a more complex sound.
“She’s not bad-looking, really, eh, Messenger? Daniel has done well for you. He must be feeling sorry for you, poor, pining, lovelorn Messenger.”
Part of me was hearing her words, but a larger part of me was asking why Messenger hadn’t already thrown himself at her feet. Messenger was a beautiful boy, but this . . . Oriax . . .
“Let her go, Oriax.”
Oriax winked at me. “He wants me to let you go.” She moved close to me, so close I could feel the heat of her body, so close I could smell a perfume that . . . and then, she walked around behind me and I was paralyzed with something that was both fear and desperate, unfamiliar desire.
I felt her hair brush the nape of my neck. I felt her breath on my skin. Her lips brushed the side of my neck, and my eyes rolled up in my head, and the blood left my limbs and my knees gave way.
“Susceptible little thing, isn’t she?” Oriax said.
Messenger caught me as I fell. He put a hand under my back, and another hand reached for my shoulder but missed and instead slid over the fabric of my shirt to touch my arm.
For only a moment his skin and mine made contact.
And then I knew why I was not to touch Messenger, for in the few seconds of