Damage (6 page)

“Jesse, please. Just let me go back to the bus. I’m sure the police—”

“The police can’t help. They might not even be able to … ”

I watch him, watch his throat work as he swallows, and wonder what has made this big, bad boy so afraid. “Might not be able to what?” I ask.

“Nothing. You’ll … think I’m crazy.” His eyes are icy blue, but burning from the inside out. My arm that’s still around his neck flexes, responding to the need to hold him without my conscious permission. “You probably think I’m crazy already.”

I should, but I don’t. He isn’t crazy, he’s just … scared. Scared half to death, the way I’ve been scared for most of my life. There’s something about being afraid of a monster no one else believes in, that no one else can even
see
, that pushes fear into the realm of mind-blowing terror. That kind of terror destroys things inside you, things necessary to leading a normal life.

But how can you ever be normal when you know that the terrors under the bed are real, that they want your blood on their “imaginary” hands?

The thought has barely whispered through my mind when I see the flash of shining brown hair and sparkling blue eyes in the bare tree limbs above my head.

Rachel. She’s back.

Dani

“Run! We have to run!” My fingers claw into Jesse’s neck and my legs thrash. I know it’s pointless to run when my feet aren’t even on the ground, but I can’t seem to stop. I’m not in control, not thinking straight. I can’t think of anything but Rachel and her mean little eyes and the gaping red hole when she smiles.

Blood oozes from her mouth, dripping down onto the speckled bark of the tree limb beneath her. The branch is thick and ancient, making Rachel seem even more petite by comparison, a doll lost in the woods.

I’ve grown up, but Rachel hasn’t. She’s still a kid, no more than eight or nine, still wearing that brown dress with the white bow and the matching white leather shoes. Now—from my vantage point far below—I can see she even wears ruffled white panties beneath her dress, the kind my mother bought me when I was four. She’s all innocence and little girl frills.

Except for that mouth. That horror of a mouth that spills death into the air.

A drop of red falls from the tree, passing inches from my face, landing on the back of Jesse’s hand, making me scream. And scream and scream and scream. It’s really there. I can see the blood smearing through the brown hairs, already starting to dry a darker crimson.

Rachel is here. She’s real. She’s back, and she’s going to prove that all my nightmares weren’t bad dreams, but prophecies. She’s going to kill me. Finally, finally, finally, just when I was stupid enough to think I was safe.

“What’s wrong?” Jesse has to yell to be heard over the screams. The screams I can’t seem to stop, no matter how hard I try. “Dani? What’s—”

The tree splinters, louder than Jesse’s words, louder than my screams. Thank God, Jesse hears it too. His head snaps up, spotting the massive limb just as it begins to fall. He dives forward, throwing me onto the riverbed. I land with a groan. Rocks dig into my hips and knees as I roll to a stop, but there isn’t any real damage done.

Jesse isn’t so lucky.

The tree lands on his leg, pinning him to the ground. He cries out, an animal sound that rattles me more than my tumble across the rocks. Rachel’s attack has hit a mark. Maybe not the mark she intended, but I have a feeling Rachel doesn’t care about collateral damage. The only good news is that she’s gone, vanished into thin air the way she often did in the past after an especially intense attempt on my life.

Still, she could be back any second. We aren’t safe here; we have to get to a more populated area. Rachel never came for me when other people were around. It was always when I was alone, late at night when everyone who was supposed to be watching me was too tired to bother.

But she came now. In the middle of the morning, with Jesse standing right there.

I shove the thought aside. I can’t think about that now, I can’t let myself believe there is no safe place. “Jesse! Are you okay?” I stand on wobbly legs and hurry to his side.

I would like to think I would have gone back to him even if Rachel were still dancing on the bloodied bark she left behind, but I can’t know for sure. The fear is still too fresh, swelling inside me, filling every empty place with blind, heart-pounding terror.

Rachel. Rachel is back. She’s back, and not playing by the rules.

“I’m fine. Just a little bruised.” Jesse’s deep voice is deeper than usual, a pain-filled rumble that makes me more afraid.

Rachel has hurt a boy twice my size. The second my guard is down, she’s going to take me out without breaking a sweat. My chin jerks up, scanning the rest of the trees near the river, heart racing as I search for a spot of red amid the gray and brown. She’s up there somewhere; I can feel her, I can smell the scent of peppermint and salt and medicine that clings to her hair, I can—

“Dani. I need help.” Something in Jesse’s tone tells me this isn’t the first time he’s asked. “I need to get this thing off my leg before it breaks something.”

My eyes snap back to his. “Right. Right.” I nod until I realize I’ve nodded too long and stop myself with a clench of my jaw. Hold it together. I can hold it together. My trembling hands find the scratchy bark of the tree and push. Nothing. I gather my strength and push again, but the limb doesn’t move an inch. “It’s too heavy. I can’t move it.”

“Shit,” he whispers. I turn to see his forehead pressed to the back of one hand, his eyes squeezed shut in pain or terror or a mixture of both. “I can’t stay like this. It’s not safe. I can’t defend myself.”

I sway a little on my feet. It almost sounds like he … like he saw …

“Did you see something? Up in the tree?” I slide down to sit by his trapped leg, clawing my fingers into the cold sand while I wait for his answer.

He’s silent for a moment before turning to look at me over his shoulder. “No. I didn’t see anything in the tree.” It’s the truth, but not the whole truth; the haunted look in his eyes assures me he knows that limb didn’t fall on its own. “I didn’t look up in time. What did you see?”

“I … ” What can I say? What can I say that won’t make me sound as nuts as he worried I’d find him? “No-nothing.”

“Nothing made you scream like that?”

“No. I … sometimes … when my sugar is low … ”

When my sugar is low
.

That’s it! Rachel isn’t really back; I’m just starting to hallucinate. That’s all this is. As soon as I get a Coke or a box of juice into my body, Rachel will vanish. She’ll be walled back inside her prison in my mind and life will go back to normal.

Pretty lies, pretty lies, always with the pretty lies.

I whirl to search the tree limbs. I twist first to one side and then the other, scouring the riverbed for that brown dress. The voice I heard in my head wasn’t mine. It was hers, Rachel’s, that sing-song little girl’s voice that once made me laugh. Now it makes me want to start screaming again. Instead, I bite my lip, afraid if I get going I’ll never stop, that I’ll scream until my brain turns to liquid and runs out my nose in a rush of red.

Red mouth, bloody lips. I should see them. She has to be close. But where is she? Why isn’t she showing herself? How long do we have before the next attack?

“Dani? Can you hear me?” Jesse asks.

“Yes.” But my voice is too soft, too far away from my ears. I have to get out of here. I have to get Jesse out of here. But how am I supposed to do that when I can barely lift the twelve-pound weights in gym class, let alone a couple hundred pounds of tree?

My fingers clench and suddenly I’m fisting two handfuls of sand. I look down, taking longer than I should to connect the dots. Sand. Hands. Freedom. “I can dig you out.”

Jesse nods, relief in his eyes. “I’ll help.” He twists as much as he’s able with one leg pinned, his big hand reaching down to join mine. Together we claw at the damp sand until our skin is coated with grit and our fingers cramped with cold, but finally—just as the faint echo of sirens pierce the air—we manage to create enough space for Jesse to tug his leg free.

I gasp when I see it. His khaki pants are shredded and bloody and a thick shard of glass protrudes from the pale skin of his calf. I reach for it without thinking and tug it free. Jesse flinches, and then flinches again when I press my fingers over the wound to stop the rush of blood.

“Thanks,” he says. “That’s better … I think.”

“You’re welcome,” I whisper, staring at the glass on the ground, marveling that he was able to walk. My gaze slides back to my hands. The dark, nearly black hair on Jesse’s legs is strangely intriguing, so springy and coarse under my fingers.

I’ve never seen a boy’s bare leg so up-close-and-personal before. My father is the only man in our house and he wears a suit to work. Or scrubs if they’re planning a messy batch of experiments. At home, he wears expensive pajama pants that my stepmom buys him on her trips to Europe and jeans on his days off, even in the summer. My father doesn’t believe in showing his legs. I can’t remember seeing them, not ever. I’ve certainly never touched them.

Not that touching my father would be at all similar to touching Jesse.

Touching
Jesse … My hand twitches against his skin.
I
am touching Jesse. Through the fear and anxiety and the certainty that Rachel will return at any moment, the peculiarity of this sudden intimacy pierces my muddied thoughts. I blush, then blush harder as his hand reaches out to cover mine. Somehow, even after our dig through the freezing ground, his skin is still warm.

“Dani?” Now Jesse is touching
me
. I curl my fingers around his hand, feeling both safer and more anxious than I did a moment before. Thankfully, the blood has already stopped seeping from Jesse’s wound. The skin has pulled tight, torn edges mending together like magic. I blink. Maybe I hadn’t seen it clearly before. Maybe the damage wasn’t as bad as I’d thought.

“We should go.” He pulls me to my feet. I manage to stand without swaying. “Can you walk?”

“I … Yes.” And I can. I can walk. I can talk. Aside from being on the verge of a mental breakdown, I’m faring better than I should be. It’s almost like when I was a kid, when for a few short weeks I didn’t need insulin shots at all. My body responded to the new medication so positively, my doctors dared to think that my dad and the other chemists at North Corp might have found the cure for juvenile diabetes.

But then my body turned on me. First my immune system, then my mind. Rachel came to me not long after, and life was never the same.

“Come on, it’s not far and we should get inside.” Jesse pulls me forward. I follow, rushing faster when the sirens get louder, feeling as if I’m somehow responsible for the crash that killed my friend and classmates.

And who knows … maybe I am. Jesse limps along beside me, the leg Rachel crushed clearly causing him pain, bringing home the fact, with every step he takes, that my “imaginary friend” has hurt another person.

Imaginary friend
. My parents and the doctors and the nurses with their pitying faces—all of them were wrong.

Rachel isn’t imaginary, and she’s no one’s friend.

Jesse

Just past another overpass—this one black with age and covered with creeping vines—we climb up the side of the ravine. We hurry past rotting trash, shattered beer bottles, the remains of a camp fire, and a couple of used condoms that would make me uncomfortable at any other time. Nasty rubbers aren’t the kind of thing you want to step over when you’re holding a girl’s hand.

But I’m beyond any weird feelings about Dani’s fingers being wrapped in mine. When we finally reach the street and she leans against me, I don’t hesitate to wrap my arm around her shoulders. Sometime in the past half hour, being close to Dani has become natural, necessary. The world’s flipped upside down and we’re the only thing either of us has left to hold onto, the last defense against the monster trying to kill us.

Did you see it? Did you see a dragon in that tree? Did you?

The question slams around in my mind, begging to be asked, but I don’t dare. Not yet. We have to get Dani something to eat or drink first. She seems to be doing okay, but the last thing I want is for her to pass out again. I need her eyes open, helping me watch out for danger, assuring me I’m not completely out of my mind.