12
For the next few days, I stayed lying on the plywood bench, staring up at the harsh buzzing fluorescent light, tentatively poking and prodding the time stream.
It was less of a stream and more of a river, the raging kind.
I hovered at the edge of it, feeling the rush and eddies, sometimes fast, sometimes slow and swirling, but always going in one direction.
Now that I was aware of it, it was a hard thing to ignore.
I wasn’t able to slow or stop time half as well as I had before.
A hammer, as it turned out, was a hell of a motivator.
But if I pushed myself deep into the stream, I could disrupt the flow, breaking the rush of the current and reducing time to a crawl.
I could also redirect the more stagnant parts, pushing them forward faster.
Both actions left me strung out and weak, but it was another tool in my belt, another weapon in my arsenal. More than that, it was a sliver of control, and after everything, that felt like finding a raft after days of bobbing around in the ocean.
During the exhausted haze between experiments, I thought about Grandma, Cookie, Auntie Dawn, .
. . and Nicola. I didn’t blame her for trying to smash me with the hammer.
I still don’t. I get it. I probably would’ve done the same thing if I were in her position.
But I was a little worried that she hadn’t hung that hammer back up in its spot on the wall.
It was still on the floor, where it had fallen.
That felt dangerous.
A promise, just waiting to be fulfilled.
Perhaps she’d come back, pick the hammer up, and finish the job she’d started. I wasn’t sure how long I could avoid blows, rolling around the workbench without legs or arms. Probably not long.
But she’d logged on to my Insta. Surely she knew that meant I wasn’t a hallucination. Surely that was good news. It meant she wasn’t having a mental breakdown. Or maybe she was, but I wasn’t part of it.
In the days that followed, I tried to come up with something to say to her.
Thank you was a solid option. I’m sorry for being a bitch in the store was another.
But when the door of the tin shed finally crashed open and Nicola stomped in, hair sticking up at every angle, still in her red Trash N’ Treasure T-shirt, the first thing I said wasn’t anything kind, thoughtful, or profound.
It was another piece of proof, just in case she was still unsure.
What kind of dog does Willy Wonka have?
She stared at me.
That’s the joke you told me at Ginger’s party, I reminded her. I didn’t laugh properly, because I wasn’t Willy Wonka, I was the Hatter. But it was a good joke.
She kept staring. She stared long enough that I probed the stream uncertainly to make sure we weren’t in a slow patch. Everything was flowing by, steady and stable.
Do you remember? I asked uncertainly. The answer was a choco—
“Chocolate lab,” Nicola muttered. “I remember.” There were shadows under her eyes and a box under her arm.
Unease trickled through my stitches. You’re not going to put me in that box, are you?
“I phoned my audiologist,” she said. “And then a priest.”
I didn’t know you were religious.
“Neither did I. But, you know, extraordinary circumstances and all that.”
Did he tell you to bless me? Dip me in holy water? Bury me in a church graveyard?
“He told me to go to the hospital.”
Did you?
“No.”
What about the audiologist? What did they say?
“To check my Bluetooth settings,” she answered, bending down to pick the hammer up off the floor.
I twitched and wriggled.
She watched me, eyes keen, as she slowly hung the hammer back up in its outline on the wall.
Then, still slowly, like she was approaching a skittish animal, she walked over to the bench and set the box down.
I watched as she opened it, pulling out Bubble Wrap, a small instruction booklet, and finally a small plastic gun with a bright-orange trigger.
It took me a moment to register what I was seeing.
A glue gun.
“Will this hurt?” she asked. “If I glue your bits back together? Sorry, I don’t have anything fancier than this.”
I don’t feel pain anymore, I said.
She nodded, plugged the glue gun into a socket in the wall, and fed a stick of glue into the back of it, twisting a dial on the side until a small red light came on.
“So . . . eh . . . I’m sorry about . . . the other night.”
It’s cool, I said, a knee-jerk response.
“Is it? I mean. I know you’re already . . . um . . .”
Dead? I said.
“I was going to say ‘passed on.’”
Please just say dead. ‘Passed on’ makes me feel like a kidney stone.
“Right. OK. You’re already dead, but I did try to kill you, again, which was kinda shitty of me.”
I get it. I’m spooky. It’s fine.
“I read your Instagram messages.”
Pretty sure that’s a violation of privacy.
“Pretty sure you deserved it after the shit you said to me at my job.”
I couldn’t argue with that.
“But yes, I’m sorry about that too. I just . . . I needed to know it was real and not . . . I dunno.”
It’s fine, I said. No one DMs me on Insta anyway.
“Actually, you have hundreds of new messages.”
Really?
“Yeah. I guess that happens when you go missing for years.”
Years. That word bounced around my head. I knew it had to have been years. Nothing else made sense. But still, to have it confirmed . . .
Anything good? I asked.
“It was pretty much just everyone telling you to come home and that they hope you’re OK. Some were recent. Krissy sent an ‘I miss you’ only the other week.”
Krissy. It shamed me how little I’d thought about her since this whole thing began. She was my best friend . . . and Kyle’s twin sister. Those thoughts collided inside me, smashing together and twisting, a cacophony of confusion and devastation, like cars in a head-on collision.
Did you reply?
“No. I’m not that fucked up.”
What about Auntie Dawn? Were there any messages from her?
“I don’t know. I didn’t read everything. I don’t think I saw any messages from a Dawn.”
The light on the glue gun turned from red to green. Nicola didn’t seem to notice. She was looking at me. Actually, no. She was looking at the table just beside me, like she didn’t want to meet my one-eyed glass stare.
What is it? I asked, because I knew it was something.
“I . . . I was just . . .”
What?
She took a breath. “Can you . . . um . . . can you tell me what Kyle did?”
For some reason, that was the last thing I expected her to say. I floundered, trying to think of an answer. I didn’t have the words. Not for what he did to me. Not for what happened afterward. Not for any of it. It was all still a mess in my head. Pain. Rage. Confusion.
Why did Kyle do that to me?
Why couldn’t I stop him?
What’s going to happen now?
He killed me, I said.
She waited for a moment. When I didn’t elaborate, she looked down and nodded. “OK. Um. Right. OK. That’s OK.”
No it isn’t, I spat, anger causing my limp body to twitch and shudder. He’s going to pay for what he did. I’m going to kill him. He doesn’t get to get away with what he did to me. He’s going to hell, and I’m taking him there myself, kicking and screaming, preferably.
She watched me, frowning slightly, gun held aloft. “How?” she said. “How will you do it? How will you kill him?”
I’m still figuring out the details, I admitted. And then, because the grief and pain inside me were twisting and sharpening, growing teeth, I changed the subject, desperate to avoid being swallowed whole by that darkness. Have you ever used one of those before?
Nicola looked at the gun in her hand. “No. But it says ages eight and up on the box. How hard could it be?”
A coil of uncertainty wound down my stitches. Are you sure you don’t want to practice a little bit first? Maybe smash a mug and glue it together to start off with?
“I’m not breaking one of my mugs,” she said, squeezing the trigger and watching the hot resin ooze out. “It’ll be fine. This is cheap glue. I can scrape it off if I make a mistake. Besides, it’s not like you could get much worse.”
She had a point.
Even so, I watched closely as she began to assemble my pieces on the table, matching the larger, obvious ones together first. A foot with a calf, a hand with a forearm, and various bits of head, some with sad little ringlets still clinging to them.
Those were the bits she started with, slotting the shards of porcelain cranium back together and drenching them in glue.
It came out globby and gross. I was never going to be pretty again, but after a minute or two of watching I became satisfied that I would be structurally sound. That was the only thing that mattered.
Still, it was unsettling seeing all the broken bits of me start to be sealed back together. I imagined that this was what it must feel like to have an out-of-body experience during surgery, witnessing yourself being carefully, tenderly eviscerated, then reassembled.
Nicola sucked at her bottom lip as she worked, wincing and cursing whenever glue dripped onto her fingers, but not stopping.
Slowly, bit by bit, pieces of me reformed. A leg, an arm, the top half of my head.
“Can I touch you?” Nicola asked when it became obvious she couldn’t just keep working on the other bits. “Is that OK?”
Yeah. Sure.
“And pump hot glue onto you? That’s OK too, right?”
Yes.
“Including onto your face?”
What else are we doing here?
“Just checking.”
I was glad she’d checked, because when her hand pressed down over me, holding me still, a whole bunch of stuff started bubbling up inside me. Being trapped in a box, being pinned down by a sheet of tatty floral lace, being forced down onto the floor, throat collapsing, lungs burning . . .
I was shaking; I couldn’t help it. Not shivering like a human would, but jerking and juddering as my anger, fear, and uncertainty fought for control.
“Martin Freeman or Jude Law?” Nicola asked as she maneuvered a leg onto the broken stump of my thigh.
What?
“Your shitty Insta password. Watson11. That’s a Sherlock reference, right? Dr. Watson? I figured it had to be.”
She was trying to distract me. I let myself get distracted.
I liked the books. That’s why the number eleven, obviously.
“Ah. Yes. Obviously. Eleven. A number famous for . . . what exactly?”
It’s the number of times Dr. Watson ejaculates at Sherlock in the books.
Nicola fixed me with a flat look. “What.”
Dr. Watson ejaculates eleven times in the books. It’s an old-school way of saying “shouted.” It made me laugh, so . . .
“God you’re weird.”
I was fifteen when I made the account. Don’t judge me.
“It proves you’re real, at least. You have to be. There’s no way my brain would come up with something that cringe.”
That sounds like you’re judging m— I jerked as I felt hot glue run down my thigh.
Had I wet myself when Kyle killed me? I couldn’t remember. I only remembered the world splintering, narrowing, my fingers clawing at his forearms, my vision spiraling over his shoulder toward the four dolls propped on Grandma’s shelf.
Sorry, I said to Nicola. I’ll hold still. I . . .
“We can do this later if you want?”
I considered that. I also considered hitting fast-forward. Objectively, that felt like the best move. The elite gamer strat. Dive into the time stream, zoom through all the grossness, and emerge on the other side, repaired and ready to go, like ripping off a Band-Aid.
But even if it was the smartest choice, I still recoiled from it.
I didn’t have precise control over time, I rationalized.
Days might slip by. Weeks. And when I emerged, I’d be exhausted.
What would Nicola do then? Would she think she’d killed me?
Would she drop me in the trash? Would she assume it was all a delusion after all and pick up that hammer?
I knew she wouldn’t. Deep down, I knew it was all just excuses. But the idea of losing control, of fading out, while someone else pinned me down . . .
No, I replied. I want to do this now.
“OK,” she said. “Just don’t ejaculate at me if you move and I end up sticking an arm where the sun don’t shine, OK?”
Strangely, that made some of the tension in my stitches ease. No promises, I said.