The Dead House

CONFESSIONALGRL: I’m weird?




Ari558: Exceedingly.




CONFESSIONALGRL: WEIRD???




Ari558: I’m going to fix that.




CONFESSIONALGRL: Like the doctor in Star Trek? Like with a dermal regenerator, only for my personality?




Ari558: Wow.




Ari558: A Star Trek reference. I guess, kind of like that, but cooler.




CONFESSIONALGRL: If you’re not a Trekkie, we cannot be friends.




Ari558: Fine, but if you’re a ST: Voyager girl, I quit you here and now.




CONFESSIONALGRL: Sad, lonely LITTLE individual!





9


144 days until the incident




Diary of Kaitlyn Johnson


Saturday, 11 September 2004, 9:00 pm

Dorm

It’s the pills. Nothing more. It’s in my mind—not real, not real, NOT REAL.

I left Carly a Post-it on the mirror—“stop taking the pills!” If Lansing wants her to remember what happened to our parents, then I’ll do it for her.


It’s useless. No matter how hard I try, no matter how many synapses I burst looking for the memory, it isn’t there. In the blink of an eye, Mum and Dad went from living to dead.

I don’t know how they died.



Later

Some people say that night blooms. I’ve always said that it cuts. Like a guillotine. I guess the sun heals the wound?

Before my parents died left went away, night was full. I made it that way. I went out. I partied. I drank. I met men. I stole borrowed. But since we went to Claydon Hell and now Elmbridge, I haven’t been who I was before. That destruction is still there, I think—that urge to break myself open so I can peek inside. I still climb onto the roof and wonder why I don’t just jump fly away—even if my body cracks on the pavement below. I still break into forbidden areas.

But I don’t go out to nightclubs anymore, where they sell drinks and drugs—the kind you never heard of, let alone imagined. I don’t dress in masquerade, a mask behind a mask, and dance with men who touch me and then vanish without even a kiss. I don’t break into bookshops, and I don’t steal. I don’t leave messages in weird places for people to find. Except in the back of people’s diaries sometimes…

Ari reminds me of what I lost when I lost the Viking… John. You know, he used to bring me seeds and call me his bird—his pesky falcon hawk…

Distract yourself. Distract me, Dee.

I miss him. John. I don’t want to talk about him. He’s the proof that I can’t have friends. He’s the proof that getting close is dangerous—it just ends up hurting.

It hurts.

But I do…

Be honest. Be honest.

I miss the Viking. I could really use one of his wisecracks. It’s been a while since I’ve seen him—not since Carly and I were dragged to Claydon. I’ve looked for him—an email address, anything. I sent a letter to his house, but I guess they moved.

He was responsible for all these changes. He’s the reason I got out of the habit of practicing my suicide note—which I left for strangers to find. At bus stops, late-night cafés, pubs, clubs. Everywhere. Anywhere. Nowhere.

I remember it line for line: “Tell the living that I was never one of you. When you find this note, my throat will be a bloody red smile.”

You can say it. I have a flair for melodrama. But it really was a cry for help. It still is. I’m just too scared to reach out even that much anymore. Thank you, Lansing.

I met the Viking at one of these masquerade clubs—Masqued, I think it was. It was all blackness with strobes, green, white, and blue. The music made the glass shiver and the floor beneath our feet hammer as if attempting to get us to quit stomping on it.

He towered over everyone and looked as if he was with everyone, but he was alone, like me. His mask concealed a face I instinctively knew would be a mask in itself. He was veneers upon veneers upon hidden secrets. I think I recognized myself there, and I wanted him to be my secret. Something only mine. Something real.

Suddenly he was beside me, his Viking helmet glinting under the strobes.

We started to dance, and he didn’t touch me. Not once. We lost ourselves in the music, in the obscurity it gave us, where no words could survive, making them even more unnecessary. I took off my mask. He took off his. And we both saw, for one fleeting moment, the true self beneath before we shuttered down the iron layers we had grown over our skin.

We left without a word. He with a girl from the bar, me alone.

The following night, he was there again, same mask, just like mine. We danced, and I didn’t feel or see the other masked figures gyrating around me, only him. It wasn’t sexual. It wasn’t anything except a small connection to another human, and even that I was skeptical of.

He left his mask down as he said, “Will we exchange names?” These words did survive.

“True or fake?” I asked.

“True.”

“Dark Half.”

“Barbarian.”