Take deep breaths.
The world narrowed, became something looked at through the wrong end of a telescope.
Please, I told the voice silently. Please, leave me alone.
Dad was standing outside the car, opening the door for me. I hadn’t even noticed him getting out.
“Inside,” he said. He took my arm and led me to the house. “Jesus, I thought I’d die with worry,” he said as we crossed the porch. His fingers were biting into my forearm, bone deep. “You know there’s someone killing women in this town, or did that not occur to you? Seriously, Cass. Never ****** do that to me again. And clean your ******* room.”
I told you: 0–60 anger in four seconds flat, my dad.
IMPORTANT CAPS-LOCK SPOILER:
THE VOICE DID NOT LEAVE ME ALONE.
But I did clean my room.
Next day was a school day. Sunlight woke me, slanting through the venetian blinds in my bedroom. I lay there, thinking I must have imagined what happened the previous day. Not the foot—that was undeniable. But the voice.
I got up, pulled on Levi’s and leather motorcycle boots. I don’t have a motorcycle, but I liked the boots when I saw them in a magazine someone had left at the library, so I saved up and got them on eBay. Vintage. In the photos in the magazine they went well with jeans and a loose, plain white T-shirt, which is what I put on next, yanking it over my head.
Of course, when I looked in the mirror it didn’t quite work on me. The T-shirt wasn’t fitting right, and it was creased. The boots and jeans, which had looked so good on the model, somehow didn’t click, somehow made me seem less like a fashionista slumming it and more like white trash on a break from busing tables in a late-night dive.
This is what always happens: I try to put clothes together and something is invariably missing, I get some detail wrong, I don’t know how. Even when I buy the exact same things that I see on TV or in a mag or whatever. Even when I put on the same eyeliner, the same bracelets. Something about me, some combination of my face and body, ruins it.
“You get a job as a day laborer?” said the voice as I regarded myself in the mirror.
I felt a tight, cold sensation in my chest. So the voice was still there. Fear twisted inside me, coiling around anger.
“Shut up,” I replied. I left the room, with a backward glance in the mirror at my terrible ensemble, and went downstairs.
Dad grunted at me when I reached the kitchen. He was holding a mug of coffee and eating a bagel. I waved to him. “See you after school,” I said.
He looked up. “You okay?”
“Sure.”
He nodded. “Take the bus. Safer.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said.
That was it. The extent of our conversation.
Of course I had no intention of taking the bus, even if there was a murderer in town. I mean, I didn’t fit the victim profile. So far, the killer had targeted what the media called “sex workers.” Prostitutes, a girl from a massage parlor, a stripper. And it was morning—not really a time of day conducive to serial killings.
I grabbed a bagel and went out the front door. It was still early—in the east, out over the ocean, bundles of pink clouds were gathered, achingly beautiful against the blue sky. I barely noticed.
Jagging right and then left onto Fourth, I headed toward school. I started eating the bagel and imagined I was on an interstellar transport and it was a space-age snack, designed to fuel my body and provide all my nutrients, the old-fashioned mess of a meal crammed into something convenient and tasteless.
I walked through layer three, the long strip of suburban houses between the boardwalk and the empty lots, the faceless wide streets of malls. I passed a couple of people getting little kids into cars, someone pulling a suitcase on wheels, just back from a business trip maybe. I wasn’t really concentrating, but then something made every detail snap into focus, and I was standing by an orange Chevy Camaro, on the back a Calvin-pissing-on-a-Ford logo.
The something was the voice, and it said:
“I’m dead, and you didn’t do anything to stop it. It’s all your fault.”
It goes without saying by this point that there was no one around me. Just another fake-clapboard house, that orange Chevy, a bike lying on its side in a brown yard. I wish I could describe what the voice sounded like. A real person, but not someone I knew. About forty, maybe? It’s also impossible to convey the tone. When you write words down there are gaps between them, spaces, but spoken they run like liquid, merge together. It was a middle-aged woman with a New Jersey accent, that’s pretty much all I can tell you.
One thing though: the voice was angry. Very, very angry.
I didn’t think; I was tired. I just talked back. I don’t know why.