The sun rose on a new world while Esther walked to her dorm. Monsters. She trudged up the stairs in a daze (she didn’t trust the elevator with its ominous creaks and habit of jamming between floors). Parasitic spirits. A not-entirely-human girl. Knowing they existed made this new world more terrifying than the one Esther had lived in the day before, and all the days before that.
And yet…
Something childlike stirred in the darkest, most neglected region of Esther’s mind. She had stowed her faith there years ago, along with her belief in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and any other constructs that could not be measured or quantified. The night’s events had cracked the wall and now color was leaking out, spreading over the black-and-white landscape of her convictions.
Mackenzie tackled her the moment she walked into her dorm room.
“OHMYGODESTHER!” It came out in a high-pitched yelp.
Esther tried to untangle herself from the tornado of crimson flannel that was her roommate. “What?”
Mackenzie’s eyes were platter-wide. “What do you mean ‘what?’ You never came back last night! I thought you’d been killed! I was on my way out to get the RA. What’s that bump on your head?”
“It’s nothing,” Esther said. It did smart, though. The rest of her was sore, too. She realized it when she peeled off her coat.
“I tried to call you, like, ten times!” Mackenzie said. “It kept going straight to voicemail.”
Esther had forgotten about her phone. It was most likely a melted lump of plastic now, seeing as how it had been in the floorboard of Chris’s Jeep. “Crap—” then, to Mackenzie’s bewildered stare, “I lost it. My phone, I mean.”
Mackenzie gasped. “Cheese and fries, Esther! What happened last night? Did your date do that?”
“This?” Esther tapped her head lightly and then sucked in a quick, painful breath. “Car wreck.”
Mackenzie squeaked and clapped her hands over her mouth.
“Yeah,” Esther said, thinking fast. She decided to sprinkle the necessary lies with as much truth as possible. “The guy was a total ass. He got trashed at the show and then insisted on driving me back. He kept trying to get into my pants (more like into my ribcage, she couldn’t help but think), so I used the pepper spray on him and we crashed.”
Mackenzie lowered her hands. “You sprayed him while he was driving? Not too bright there, Candy Corn.”
Esther shrugged. “I was a little messed up, too. But I’m okay now. I just need to rest.”
“And the guy?” Mackenzie’s wide-eyed astonishment had morphed into a look of bloodlust.
“Banged up pretty bad,” Esther said. “He won’t be bothering me anymore.”
Mackenzie grinned. “I hope the wreck broke his dick.”
“You know, I think it might have.”
“I’m just glad you’re okay,” Mackenzie said, giving Esther a squeeze around the shoulders. Esther winced. “I thought for sure you’d been abducted or killed or something and I just felt awful because, like, I don’t even know what your favorite song is or if you have any brothers or sisters or pets or—”
“Mackenzie…” Esther’s head throbbed.
“All I’m saying is we need to hang out and have some girl time, you know? Get to know each other better?”
“Sure,” Esther said. “Fantastic. We’ll do it sometime soon, I promise. Don’t you have crossfit this morning?”
“Shoot! I’m gonna be late!”
Once Mackenzie was gone, Esther lay in her lumpy bunk and tried to sort herself out. More than anything, she wanted to call her mom. Doing so would require a walk down the hall to the communal floor phone or a drive to the electronics superstore to replace her cell. She wasn’t up for either, so she tried instead to comfort herself with happy thoughts.
I’m alive. I didn’t get eaten. I’m mostly in one piece. I should make the most of it. Try sushi. Go to India. Get a tattoo. Climb a mountain.
Esther kept adding items to her bucket list until she dozed off, only to be wakened mid-morning by a rumble and the jiggling of her bed frame. She sat up, expecting Zed to announce the tremor’s location and magnitude. To her disappointment, only the chilly dorm room greeted her. Mackenzie must have come back at some point because her workout clothes were piled by her bed and her backpack was gone.
Esther forced herself to shower and contemplated all the possible non-geological causes for the quakes.
“Mole people,” she mumbled while she combed her hair after her shower. “A dragon. Aliens mining for gold.”
One of her suitemates walked into the shared bathroom. She gave Esther a funny look.
“Giant bees,” Esther said.
The funny look intensified.
“The quakes?” Esther said. “There could be giant bugs down there, like this massive underground hive, you know?”
The suitemate backed slowly out of the bathroom.
Esther shrugged and then glared at herself in the mirror. Every time she looked at her hair, she could hear Chris’s voice and see his salacious grin. I love candy corn.
The thought of it made her cold all over. She went in search of scissors. Mackenzie had left a pair out on her desk, along with glue and feathers. Sequins littered the floor.
Esther twisted her hair into a long ponytail and started cutting. Bleached strands fell among the sequins.
The end result was a hairdresser’s nightmare, but Esther felt lighter. She could look at her reflection and not cringe. The girl staring back at her was alert and curious. Esther made her a promise.
“Nobody like Chris is ever going to hurt you again.”
She remembered how vulnerable she’d felt in the bookstore; how stupid and ineffective and scared. If it hadn’t been for Lydia…
The full impact of the night’s events overcame her. A cry rose up her throat and she clapped a hand over her mouth to suppress it.
I’m alive. It had been her mantra all morning. Now it gave rise to a new one: repay Lydia Crow.
She knew Lydia didn’t expect anything from her; certainly her haste to return Esther to campus hinted at the opposite of obligation. She’d fallen into Esther’s life abruptly, and it seemed she was determined to leave it the same way. That just wouldn’t do. As far as Esther was concerned, the life Lydia had saved should be spent helping her, whatever that entailed.
Killing monsters? Esther thought of Chris again. She wondered how many more like him were out there—or if there were things far worse.
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