Chapter 6
James stands in the bushes below Nelle’s bedroom window, the forest buzzing at his back, his heart slamming against his chest. Again, he half expects to see Quill’s face split the lacy white curtains.
You came back, he tells himself. Don’t give up now, baby.
He sucks in a breath, then softly raps his knuckle against the window, ready to bolt at the first sign of Quill.
With a groan, a pop, the window lifts.
Relief.
“Hey, there.” Nelle’s aroma melds with the night. Sweet vanilla, like a bakery in the morning, tainted by a tinge of ink and colored with pine needles. James rests his chin on his arms, folded on the windowsill.
“Can I come inside?”
She pulls her vanity stool up to the window. “Too risky.”
Cold water dumps into his bloodstream as he remembers that the subject of his fear is only a few walls away, possibly within earshot.
James scans the forest, the perfect place to hide.
“Why don’t you come out, then? We can go to a diner or just ride around.”
Nelle focuses on a noise behind her and picks at her nails, clearly frustrated, and James wonders whether her bedroom is locked or if Quill could barge in at any moment.
“I can’t,” she insists. “We’ll have to talk here.”
James wants to ask about the letter, but first . . .
“I’m happy to see you again,” he says.
Nelle blinks, as if processing the words.
Too forward? he wonders.
Cautiously, she says, “I’m happy to see you, too, James.”
“You, uh, had a chance to read my letter?”
“I did.” She disappears into the room and comes back with the ripped envelope. She passes it through the window. “I need to tell you something. You don’t have to believe me, but it’ll be easier for both of us if you do.”
He hates to imagine Quill hurting her, in any way, but all he has witnessed pushes his thoughts in that direction. He itches to know, yet he dreads the truth.
Nelle braces herself against the windowsill. “You’re going to think I’m lying.”
“Try me.”
She sucks in a deep breath. “It might be easier to comprehend if I . . . show you.”
Every idea James had evaporates. “Okay?”
“Do you have anything sharp on you? A pocketknife or—”
James jangles his keys. “This work?”
Nelle’s arm, pale like an eel, reaches through the window.
He pauses before handing over the keys. “What are you going to do?”
“Just trust me for a minute. Don’t make any loud noises, and don’t try to stop me.”
An uneasiness crawls into his stomach. “Nelle, if you’re going to hurt yourself—”
“Give me the damn keys,” she snaps.
James drops them into her outstretched hand. Her palm shocks his fingertips, like touching an electrical outlet. The warmth lingers. Nelle doesn’t seem to notice. She pinches the house key, levels it over her palm, and digs it into her flesh.
“Stop!” He lurches toward the window. But she keeps digging the key in until—
Blood flows. She flips her hand on top of James’s. Her blood falls steadily, filling the grooves of his hand like little rivers. Hot and black as drip coffee.
“Smell it,” she says.
Horrified, he lifts his hand to his nose, and his nostrils burn at the smell. Ink. Ink.
“Good one.” He shakes off his hand and wipes the ink residue on the grass, though his skin is stained a purplish color now. He laughs. “You got me.”
“I told you that you wouldn’t believe me.” Nelle’s jaw tightens like a windup toy. She shows him the spot on her palm where she supposedly cut herself. Her skin is unblemished, no incision. “This isn’t a joke.”
“You can let up now, it’s funny.”
“James, I bleed ink.”
“No, you don’t.” He laughs again. “That’s impossible.”
“Go into the woods.” She points to the tree line, branches and leaves lost to the shadows. “There’s an old glass beer bottle over there. Break it and bring me back a piece.”
James runs a hand through his hair. “You’ve got to be kidding—”
Nelle’s expression is dead serious.
James decides to go along with whatever this is, this prank, this diversion from her real problem with Quill. When she’s ready to talk about her issues, he will be here to listen. To help. Until then . . .
Pine straw crunches underfoot as he crosses into the trees.
He swings his phone flashlight side to side until it illuminates a green glass bottle half hidden beneath a thornbush.
He grabs it by the neck and swings it hard against a tree trunk.
It doesn’t break on the first blow, but on the second it hits a hard knot and shatters across the foliage.
Sorry for littering, James thinks absently as he carries a shard back to Nelle’s window.
“Got it.” He sets the emerald fragment on her windowsill.
Nelle picks it up.
“Look at my hand,” she says. “And don’t stop looking at my hand.”
Exiled to the world outside Nelle’s bedroom, James stares at her hand. But she doesn’t do some drastic trick with the shard, doesn’t move at all as she clamps her fist around the glass. She just whimpers, and her other hand lifts to her mouth, biting down to stop the noise.
“Nelle,” he whispers. “Nelle, stop, what are you—”
“No, look,” she exhales, opening her hand.
The glass drops onto James’s shoe, but he is too captivated to notice the ink splattered across his white sneaker.
His vision tunnels as the jagged gash across her palm leaks a pungent black liquid.
She holds out her hand, and James takes it to study, the blood warm.
When he pulls away, his fingers are smudged with fresh ink.
Ink. Not blood.
His brain spins. The world spins. He stumbles against the side of the house, painting the clapboard siding with her blood.
Presses a hand to his heart—a black print on his white tee—to soothe the confused hummingbird in his chest. He remembers how the ink glistened inside her cut, and his nausea tidal waves.
“Okay,” he manages to say, his mouth full of saliva. “I’m going to ask you one more time, and please be serious. How are you doing that?”
“Watch.”
Reluctantly, he does.
Nelle’s skin knits itself back together over the open gash.
James runs a hand through his sweaty hair, bracing himself against the wall. A firefly bobs near the trees. Another follows it. They float and blink, on and off.
“What . . . are you?” he asks. Oddly enough, he is not scared of her. Close to vomiting, yes, but no less enthralled. If anything, more so.
Nelle runs a fingertip along the windowsill. “I’m not a human.”
“Oh,” he says. “That’s not what I thought you’d say.”
“I’m an idea. A figment of someone’s imagination.”
James shakes his head. “You lost me. I don’t imagine people.”
“I didn’t say I’m a product of your imagination.”
She sounds real. She smells real. She is real. James has always had a wild imagination, but never enough to manifest entire human beings. He didn’t even have an imaginary friend as a child.
“It started with Quill.” Nelle glances over her shoulder, as if listening for a noise behind her.
“Twenty-one years ago, he started writing about a little girl. A baby. And one day he woke up, and she was there, with him. A flesh-and-blood incarnation of the character he’d created.
Living in his house. Screaming in the same crib his daughter had left empty a year before.
It was iron, so it didn’t burn with the first house. ”
James’s head is a tornado. “I don’t understand.”
“I am that character. I’m Quill’s daughter because he made me his daughter.”
“So you’re not real?” James asks. This has to be a prank. A twisted joke.
“I am real. I can think, I can breathe, I shit and sing and cry. I have a heartbeat and organs. And a mind that thinks on its own. A mouth that speaks what it wants to speak.”
“How is that possible?” James asks. “I . . . I don’t understand.”
“It just is.” Nelle hands him back his keys.
He studies her smooth palm. Impossible.
“It’s easier if you accept it.”
His shirt is drenched in sweat, and not from the humidity. “Am I going insane?”
“No.”
“Well, in that case, I have so many more questions. Are you sure you can’t come out with me for a bit? We can drive around and talk. Quill will never know you left.”
She shakes her head, dirty-blond hair framing her cheeks. “I can’t leave. I think what I want and do what I want, but I can’t go where I want. I can only go where he writes me to go. And if he writes a specific command for me, then I have to do that, too. My body just . . . reacts that way.”
“Seriously?” James asks, even as the pieces start clicking in place. “That’s why you had to run home the other night. You could only be out for a certain amount of time.”
Nelle nods. “And since he found out that I talked to you, he’s decided that I’m never allowed to leave the house again. I haven’t left my room since the day you came by, except to hide from the police. He’s got me caged in here.”
“Sorry for that, by the way.” James glances at the trees, the grass, the pine straw. The broken glass littering the ground. Reminders of the real world.
“Sorry for what?”
He laughs until his gut hurts. Something about the hilarity of the absolute insanity he’s found himself in. When he regains control, he says, “For calling the police.”
“You already apologized in your letter.”
“But again, in person, I want to say I’m sorry. I’m sure Quill didn’t appreciate the visit.”
“No.” She curls her knees to her chest. “He didn’t.”
James hears the words she keeps inside, that her punishment for his poor decision was worse than his imagination could conjure.
“So you really can’t leave?”
Nelle’s fingers tighten on the windowsill. “No.”
“We can always hang out like this, I guess.”
“I’m just trying to be honest with you. I’ve never really talked to anyone but Father before,” she says. “I’m not trying to scare you off.”
“I’m not scared,” James lies. He is fucking terrified. But when he looks at Nelle, he doesn’t see a monster or a demon, only curiosity, excitement, and, further, sadness and anger. “I do believe you. I think.”
Believing her makes him want to throw up the gas-station coffee he chugged an hour ago. His mom always called his stomach a beehive, reactive to every little poke.
Nelle drums her fingers on the sill. “In your letter you said you find me intriguing.”
James’s cheeks go hot.
“I find you intriguing, too,” she says.
The moon emerges from behind splitting clouds. Nelle’s freckles glow like stars on her cheeks and nose, her brown eyes are like melted chocolate, her lips so full he could write a poem about them.
“Do you want to come back tomorrow night?” Nelle asks.
James hesitates. Of course he wants to, but whether or not he should is a different decision.
“If you’d rather pretend you never met me, you can do that, too. I’ll understand.”
His lungs fill with summer air. How much longer can he survive doing what he should and never what he wants?
“Tomorrow,” he says, unsure if his echoing is an agreement to return or merely an attempt to process what she said. Everything she said. The ink, the glass, the secret about Quill. The question itself: Do you want to come back tomorrow night?
Nelle glances over her shoulder again. “I think I hear him. Good night, James. Tomorrow.”
Before he can respond, she lifts her healed hand and pulls the window shut.
Driving home, the trees feel foreign. The town square smaller. The shadows in his neighbor’s windows scarier. Under his too-hot comforter, as James falls asleep to the hum of cicadas and frogs, he wonders if his life has been irrevocably derailed.