CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

It’s nearing the end of the movie when the air around me starts to shift and swirl for the second time today. The moment I notice it, my very being yanks back so hard that I pull out of my body, watching overhead as I have many time before. Even from this distance, I can feel my heart beating in my chest, can feel the shock and fear running through my veins and drowning in my blood-stream. I don’t want to go through any more pain today and I’m scared by the fact that I have to.

But even though I want to get as far away as I can from the scorching heat that’s about to explode inside of me, and even though I’m filled with a fear so strong I can feel myself shaking, I have only one overwhelming urge: to get back inside my body. Because I can’t have a heat attack in a quiet cinema. And I certainly can’t put Sarah through that.

Suddenly, I’m doing something I’ve never done before: forcing myself to re-enter the place I didn’t mean to leave. And despite the fact that I have absolutely no idea how to do that, when I follow my instincts and float over to my body, I can feel a small tug, gently pulling me towards my physical self. Before I know it, I’m melting back into my skin and abruptly, I’m back. I waste no time, hastily jumping to my feet and dashing out of the cinema before Sarah can utter a word, all the while thankful that I took the aisle seat.

People shoot me quizzical looks as I burst out of the cinema doors and head quickly for the entrance leading to the dull outside world. The swirling air gushes after me, unable to reach my body and sink into my skin, and it’s as I’m rushing outside that I’m hit by the most ridiculous thought: if I just kept running, I could avoid it forever.

But a small voice reminds, if you swap back, you won’t have to avoid it. And suddenly my original thought holds no value. It’s not about avoiding the inevitable – it’s about pursuing the possible. And swapping back is a possibility. Albeit, an unlikely one, but there’s always a chance, and I plan to make the most of it.

Gratefulness fills me when I stumble across a small, deserted alleyway. I turn into it, but keep running until I find a second, even smaller path that leads behind the cinema. I stop, and sink to the ground with my back up against the rough brick wall. And then the heat finds my chest and I let it overtake me.

I’m still crying for a while after the pain has faded away, letting my tears flow out in warm rivers down my cheeks. But I’m not crying because of sadness, I’m crying because of fear – because the chance of surviving the next few months are so slim and it seems that the very air I breathe is against me.

I look up then, opening my ears and my eyes to the world around me. But there’s no one around and it’s dead silent. So silent that I honestly feel as if I’m the last person alive, condemned to live a lonely and painful last month, or however much longer I have left.

Where is Sarah? Why hasn’t she come for me yet? I can’t help but ask myself these questions, questions that are unanswerable and a waste of time. If I want to see her that bad, I shouldn’t wait for her to find me, I should try to find her. But I feel drained of energy, and instead, I find myself sinking further into the floor and closing my eyes, allowing the peaceful sound of the wind in the trees to lull me into a state of unbreakable calm.  

A short while later, I hear someone shout my name, accompanied by the sound of rapidly approaching footsteps. Before I know it, there’s a hand on my shoulder and I can sense someone by my side.

“What happened?” asks a voice. Sarah’s voice.

“I had a heat attack,” I say quietly, my eyes focused on the part of the horizon I can see.

The confusion is evident in her voice as she says, “But you already had one today.”

It’s a few minutes before I reply, but when I do, I turn my head to look at her kneeling beside me, and say, “I know.”

We just stare at each other for a moment, allowing our matching emotions to flow between us. She’s afraid, I’m afraid. She’s sad and I’m sad. She’s feeling hopeless.

So am I.

She remains quiet and I look back out at the sky and horizon. A minute later, I see her move out the corner of my eye, adopting the same position I’m in, and we sit, watching the turbulent sky slowly darken with the fading of the light.

-:-:-:-:-

I don’t know how to explain the feeling that comes over me the next morning. It’s as if the world has decided to crank the depression-meter up a notch, creating an atmosphere that seems to generate its own sadness – a sadness that robs the world of colour and pollutes my body every time I swallow, every time I breathe.

I push myself out of bed and force on my uniform, not completely understanding how it is I’m gonna make it through a day of school. I honestly don’t know why I bother with school anymore. Don’t people who are about to die do something fun before their time runs out? Why am I wasting my last days or weeks or months stuck in a classroom full of people who will be glad to see me gone?

But habits die hard, and it seems I’ll be taking mine to the grave – that is, my habit of trying to be normal, which includes: dressing in a semi-current fashion; owning a phone and a laptop; attending school; and making friends. No one likes a loner who dresses like a slob and doesn’t own anything from the twenty-first century. They like well-dressed, popular, tech-savvy teenagers who don’t skip school for no apparent reason. And, even though you wouldn’t think it, I don’t particularly like being alone, or ill-dressed, or even disconnected from the vast ocean of social media. But I suppose that’s just what happens when you’re pretending to be normal and not actually being normal.

Caden drives us to school, and the ride is silent the entire way. It’s not an uncomfortable silence, just a sad one, and I don’t really know why. The soft radio, mixing with the sound of the heavy rain, seems to nudge me closer and closer to sleep, and I feel my body relax, sinking into the suddenly very comfy chair.

Outside the window, the world passes by, and I watch it pass with the sort of detachment you get when you’re really thinking about something, only there’s nothing on my mind. I’m unseeing and blank and tired, and for some reason, I find it’s the perfect combination for relaxing – for just letting everything go.

Sarah’s there when we arrive at school, and the moment she smiles, I know that she too has noticed the depressing nature that this day has adopted. Because the smile isn’t really a smile – it’s a confirmation that she’s still alive and breathing, one that wobbles at the edges because neither of us are really alive. We’re unbearably close, but we aren’t fully there, and I think that’s what sucks the most: the fact that my chance at life is standing mere metres from me, but the gap between us is larger than any canyon on earth. The bell rings.

The bell today takes on the form of a screaming ghost that echoes in the school, but no one except Sarah, Caden and I seem to notice the screams. To everyone else, the bell is still a bell, and the thing it announces is still only class. So I leave Sarah and Caden behind as I head to a class that I share with neither of the two, and step into almost two hours of solitude.

During my first class, I rest with my chin on the palm of my hand as I stare at the board, only pretending to be listening and watching and thinking. At one point, we have to write something down, and I scrawl meaningless words into a book I’ll never study, knowing full well that I’m never going to actually read them or even bother understanding them. Because today, even my own handwriting is an unreadable jumble of letters – I can’t even know for sure that the words I’m writing down are actually words.

My next class is science, and I sit down in the exact same spot I sat in when I saw a ghost out the window and unknowingly shattered the glass. It feels like that was years ago now, but it can’t have been more than a few weeks. It doesn’t make any sense. I mean, how is it even possible for a life to change so drastically in such a short amount of time? Surely, if there were a God, he would stop that sort of thing? Surely it would go against the laws of the world?

But it’s happened, and what that says about the state of our world and the existence of our God, I don’t know. I don’t really know anything right now.

And that’s when I see him. After nearly half an hour of staring at my book or at the board or at the annoyingly joyful teacher, I finally turn my head to the window. A sense of Déjà vu washes over me as I spy the man on the street, watching me. But the moment my emotions morph into something that’s closer to panic than it is to sadness, the world’s atmosphere seems to suck them away, until all I can do is stare back at the sole man on the sidewalk, who is both extremely close and incredibly far away.

Go on, do something, my mind challenges. But he just continues to watch me watch him until the moment he must get bored and finally looks away, walking off.

I watch his retreating figure and find that I don’t know what to think anymore. Isn’t his job to ensure I end up dead?

And that’s when I realise: they’re not trying to kill me, they’re just waiting for me to die. They’re standing by just in case, that on some off-chance, I actually manage to survive this thing. And then they’ll kill me.

Geez, I really can’t win, can I?

At recess, I sit with Caden and Sarah in the corner of the school hall. It’s too wet and cold for anyone to be outside today apparently, so instead, the whole school has been squashed into a large shiny floored hall that was designed to hold sport and games, not food and chatting. The result: an impossibly loud room with food smeared and squashed into the once squeaky clean floor.

And, as it would seem, Caden’s done playing ‘normal’ and has traded in his group of annoying teenage boys for a couple of silent and depressed girls. I don’t know whether to be thankful that he’s finally sitting with us or irritated that I have to use the word ‘finally’ in that sentence. He should have always sat with us. He shouldn’t have been so selfish.

But I don’t hate him for it. I can’t hate him for it. Because today, he is the only person, or even thing, that can stimulate an emotion within me that isn’t sadness and that isn’t being stolen by the depressing atmosphere of the world. When I look at him, I’m more than a vessel for sorrow – I’m someone who can feel, who is alive.

And I know I must be alive when I look at him, because my heart beats so fast that it may as well be powering an entire city and not just one hopeless teenage girl.

For a while, none of us says anything. But then Sarah opens her mouth and out come words: “I saw a man outside the window this morning.” She says it sadly, as if she’s already accepted her most likely future, and I can’t find it in me to tell her otherwise because I’m as lost and disheartened as she is.

“In science?” Caden asks.

She nods.

“Me too,” he says. “He was blonde-haired, right?”

She shakes her head. “No, he had brown hair. And really pale skin.”

“So that means there’s two of them watching us then.”

“Three,” I say. “I saw a man too, and he didn’t look like either of the people you just described.”

Caden sighs. “Great. So a minimum of three.” And then, in a softer voice: “I never thought I’d not want school to end.”

We don’t say anything more, and when that same ghostly scream echoes around the hall again, we all head off to class.

My next two classes pass in a blur. Everything feels dull and flat and forgettable, and I let all the details and happenings fade away until by the time the two classes are done, I can only remember two things: a teacher telling me to wake up when I wasn’t sleeping, and a lone flower out the window, managing to bloom when all others could not.

Everything else is just a massive blob of events that I can’t sort through. I can’t remember where I sat in my first class, can’t remember how I got from English to Mathematics. I can’t even remember sitting next to Caden. How could I not remember that?

But one thing that does manage to lodge itself in my mind is the woman watching me from the sidewalk when I’m on my way to my locker, much like the man did this morning. I shiver and continue walking, albeit, a bit quickly, suddenly desperate to meet up with my friends, to feel some sort of safety.

I cross paths with Sarah when I’m heading to the hall, and she smiles as a way of greeting. I smile in return, but the sad thing is, neither of our smiles are actually smiles. They’re just habitual movements of the muscles around our mouth, things we’ve done so many time before that they come on instinct, no longer holding any real value.

We’re halfway to where Caden is sitting in the hall when I hear someone calling mine and Sarah’s names. We turn to see Lauren approaching us, side-stepping all the groups of people on the floor.

“Hey,” she says when she gets close enough for us to be able to hear her over the din made by the hundreds of students already in the hall. “I know this is a little late, but my friend is throwing a party at her place tonight and I was wondering if you guys wanted to come.”

“You want me there?” I ask. “Are you sure?”

“Of course,” she says. “I want all my friends to be there. It’s never any fun when people miss out.”

There’s a moment of silence before Sarah asks, “Which one of your friends is throwing the party?”

“Kira,” Lauren replies. “She has this massive house and her parents are totally cool with her throwing parties. We go to hers all the time.”

I nod, not really knowing what to think. Thankfully, Sarah does the speaking for me. “Thanks for the invitation, but I don’t think we’ll be able to go.” She smiles apologetically.

“Oh,” Lauren says. “What have you got on tonight?”

Sarah looks at me for help and I say, “Our families are pretty close and they’re meeting up for a dinner tonight. We’re expected to be there.”

“Oh, okay. Well if you somehow manage to get out of it, let me know.” She sort of half-smiles before walking off, and I can tell she’s disappointed. But there’s nothing I can do. Me and parties don’t mix, especially not when we’ve just seen three or four or however many people there are lingering outside the school, watching us. And even though I had thought that they’re just waiting for me to die, now I’m not so sure. I mean, who requires four adults to watch over her and ensure she dies? Does it honestly look like I have any way of getting out of this?

The moment Sarah and I sit down, Caden says, “I saw another one.” He doesn’t have to explain further – we all know what he’s talking about, even though I wish I didn’t.

I sigh. “Me too. A woman.”

“The person watching me was a man, dark haired,” he says.

“I think that might be the same one I saw this morning,” I reply.

Caden lets out a breath. “Okay, so that’s four, as of now.”

I look down at my hands and close my eyes. Four. Four people just outside the school gates, waiting. What if they’re waiting for us to leave? I have to force the thought out of my brain.

During my last two classes, I once again see someone out the window, but I can’t be bothered to work out if he’s someone we’ve already seen or someone we haven’t. What difference is one more person gonna make anyway? We’re dead either way.

The bell that signals the end of school goes and I slip out of class, quickly grabbing my stuff from my locker before meeting Caden and Sarah out the front of the office, which lies only ten or so metres from the main entrance and exit to the school. For a moment, we just stand there, until I say, “Alright, let’s go.”

We start walking, blending into the mass of other students who are all desperate to get out of school. But when we’re halfway to the gates, I see the same woman from earlier standing out the front of the school and it make my blood run cold. Because she’s not watching me, or even Sarah or Caden.

She’s watching Lauren.