14

I woke just after midnight with my head on Tyler’s shoulder. My neck was pinched at an angle, my bladder urgently swollen. I stretched off some of the sleep, then made my way to the bathroom. The hospital was darker and quieter than it had been earlier in the evening. No lights came on in the bathroom, so I peed in the dark, my eyes still drooping shut as I rested my elbows on my knees and cradled my chin in my hands. The scar at my throat was crawling again, begging to be scratched. I pressed my fingertip to the familiar ridge of scar tissue—and felt something move beneath my skin.

“Jesus, fuck,” I spat, lurching off the toilet seat, sending droplets of piss down my thighs, over the floor.

You imagined it, you imagined it.

I sat back down and finished peeing and cleaned myself up, my heart whipping an angry beat inside my chest. My whole body was fizzing.

You imagined it, you imagined it. Don’t touch it again.

I flushed and went to wash my hands with my head down, too afraid to look up at the mirror. What would I see at the base of my neck? The pale-fleshed bud of a carrion flower about to burst through my skin? Or something worse?

I looked up. The room was too dark to make out anything but the vague outline of my body, so I turned my phone flashlight on and rested it on a soap dispenser, the beam of light pointed in my direction. The light wasn’t kind to my features. It scrubbed the color from my complexion, carved any softness from my bones. I was a demon in this light. A monster. I couldn’t look myself in the eyes without feeling a snap of fear.

Don’t look. Don’t look. Don’t look at her.

I leaned in. I looked. There was a small pustule erupting at one end of my scar, its head hard and shiny black. As I watched it, it moved again, the flicker of something beetle-dark and spindly beneath my skin.

A tear slipped down my cheek. What the fuck was happening to me?

I pressed the sharp edge of my fingernail into the lump, enough to break the skin and tear the head away, then waited and watched to see what was beneath.

Something unfurled. Tiny legs. A black body.

An ant.

It crawled out of the wound and made its way across my collarbone, tickling my skin. A second followed it, popping from the tiny bore hole in my flesh, and then a third, until the pustule was empty. Thoughts of Grey’s abandoned apartment filled my head. The line of ants and something dead and gruesome hidden beneath the wallpaper. I leaned in closer to the mirror, closer to the light, and gritted my teeth as I took out Grey’s knife and used the tip to open the wound wider. The hot pain made more tears skim down my cheeks. A bead of blood slipped between my breasts. I blotted it away with a paper towel.

There was something there, beneath my skin. Something smooth and pale.

“What the hell?” I whispered.

It was skin, I realized as I leaned in for a better look. More skin. A second layer of it beneath my own, just as there had been a second layer of wallpaper beneath the one we’d peeled away.

My phone slipped from the soap dispenser then and clattered to the floor, sending the bathroom strobing. The phone landed at my feet with a glassy clack and shot a beam of light at my face from below. For a second, it was not myself I saw in my reflection, but someone else. Something else.

I grabbed my phone and clambered back into the waiting room, madly swatting the ants from my body as I went. I thought I might vomit. I wanted to find one of the nurses, get them to rinse out my wound with alcohol and tell me I was imagining things, but there was no one around. Vivi was sprawled out on the floor, her head resting on her rolled-up jacket, her backpack tucked under one arm. Tyler slept sitting up. Apart from that, we were alone.

I hurried to the nurses’ station, where the medics who’d cared for us all afternoon and evening were nowhere to be found.

“Hello?” I said. A sandwich sat unwrapped and half-eaten on a stack of paperwork. A can of Coke had been knocked over and left to drip into a puddle on the floor.

I went from the waiting room to the corridor where Grey’s room was. The lights above me flickered. A clot of darkness swelled at the end of the hall where the ceiling lights had already been choked out. To my right, a doctor and a nurse squatted in an alcove, their bodies pressed together like soft fruit. Each took quiet, shallow breaths. They were holding hands, shaking, their eyes wide and wet. I looked down the corridor toward my sister’s room, then back at them. The nurse shook his head. Don’t go.

I went. I pushed into the stuttering dark, down the long corridor. Grey’s room was easy to identify. It was the one with a chair out in front. Except the chair was toppled on its side, and the police officer who was supposed to be guarding my sister was sprawled facedown on the ground. There was blood. Not a pool of it, but slashes.

Grey’s door was locked. I jiggled the handle, then pressed my face against the glass to see inside. It was soaked in shadow. The curtain was drawn around her bed. There was no movement.

Just as I was about to bang on the door, to try and wake her, a bloody hand closed hard over my mouth and yanked me back. I tried to scream, tried to thrash against my captor as they dragged me into the room opposite Grey’s, but they were stronger than me.

“Stop,” ordered a low voice as they pushed me roughly against a wall. “Stop. It’s me.”

Grey lifted her hand from my lips and pressed a blood-slick finger to her own.

My sister was a caricature of a madwoman in a red-spattered hospital gown. Her eyes and hair were wild, her lower jaw shaking. In her bloody hands she held a scalpel. What remained of her restraints hung loose and tattered at her wrists. A spark of déjà vu: Grey with a blade in her hand, and then gone, the familiar image there and then already fading from my mind like white spots left after a flash.

“What’s going on?” I whispered, horrified.

“He’s coming here,” she said. “To take me.”

“Grey,” I whispered. I spat onto my sleeve and scrubbed the blood from my lips, then took my sister’s face in my hands and tried to get her to look at me. She was skinnier now than when I’d last seen her, her collarbones pushing through her skin, and her hair had been lopped off above her shoulders. “Grey, look at me.”