Then she rinses.
And that’s one.
I watch as Samantha begins the process all over again. The Messenger stands behind her. Samantha sees neither of us. This isn’t happening, this has already happened. The Samantha movie is in a flashback.
“Can she hear us?” I ask, but the answer is obvious: Samantha can neither see nor hear us. She is washing her hands, has already washed her hands, done all this already. I’m seeing it, here, in my present, but it’s in the past.
I can smell the soap. I feel the steam rising from the too-hot water. When I step to one side, I can see myself and Messenger in the mirror.
He’s taller than I am. He’s white, I’m Asian. He’s . . . beautiful? I’m . . . pretty? Maybe that, maybe pretty, but not beautiful. I’m not sure many girls could call themselves beautiful while sharing a mirror with Messenger.
There’s something about him that seems unnatural. He’s a marble statue brought to life, unreal. Isn’t he? He can’t be real, not really real, if for no other reason than no one dresses that way. And yet there is a weight to him, like a distortion of gravity, a bending of light, as if he was made of the stuff of collapsed stars.
I force my gaze from him and back to a more distressing vision: Samantha Early begins a third round of washing. Her hands are obviously spotless—she could perform open heart surgery without wearing gloves—yet, caught in the compulsion, she washes her hands a fourth time. The backs of her hands are bright-pink now, like sliced ham, with fingertips so raw that the cuticles are tearing away in tiny shreds. She wields the brush with a ferocity that is necessary to her, energy that she must expend, pain that she must endure.
On the fifth washing little drops of blood ooze from the cuticle of her ring finger.
“Can’t she stop?” I ask.
“If she fails to wash her hands seven times, her family will die,” Messenger says.
“What?” I snap. “That’s crazy.”
“Compulsion is very like insanity,” Messenger says.
He is not indifferent, that’s the thing. His too-near voice that seems always to be whispering in my ear is held to a standard of cool detachment, but his eyes and his mouth and his forehead and the way he swallows all speak of reflected pain.
He understands. He feels. I’m convinced of that at least. There’s a humanity to him. He’s not entirely cold and beautiful and strange—there’s something of flesh and blood there as well. That reassures me. He may be only a figment of a dream I’ll forget upon waking, but still I am relieved.
It is still a dream. What else could it be? I wake in a field with a mist covering me, and then, all of this?
Wait, had I fallen asleep? I try to recall, I strain to dredge some memory out of my foggy brain. But again it is as if all I can see of my waking life is a sort of clip-art version, a stock photo version with generic people acting generically, none of it possessing the detail and grain of reality.
Samantha begins her sixth round.
“Is this why—”
“Many things are why,” Messenger says. “But this is for our deeper understanding.”
Why do we need to understand? I want to ask him that, I want to demand an answer to that, because there has to be some very good reason why my subconscious mind would lay these sad images before me like a fortune teller laying out her tarot cards. But all of Messenger’s answers were vague, and after all, was there a point in asking why within a dream? Eventually I would wake up, and then I could consider the meaning of it all. Calmly, coolly, with the sick sadness of it all pushed aside and relabeled as nothing more than random imagery conjured from an overtired mind.
We were no longer in Samantha’s bathroom. We were at a school. But not my high school; of that I was sure. Almost.
A banner on the wall of the corridor read CARLSBAD HIGH SCHOOL—GO SPARTANS. The colors were maroon and gold. The colors at my school were . . .
What were they? I was sure I was in high school, and sure that this was not it. Why couldn’t I remember my school colors?
Dreamland was a strange world where cause and effect could be reversed, where one could move effortlessly from place to place. Where gaunt, beautiful boys with intimate voices and eerily blue eyes could wear skulls for buttons. Yes to all of that, but if this was a dream, shouldn’t I be able to recall my school colors? Or my name?
Mara? Mara what? I felt the knife’s edge of panic again. If I stopped believing this was a very lucid dream, if I started for even a moment to believe this was real, I would have to be afraid, and I feared that moment when I might be forced to cross the line into a more personal terror.
Samantha’s hands were pink and torn, but they were very clean as she walked down the hallway, thinking to herself that there was more to life than this place, that she would be out of this place soon.
“I know what she’s thinking,” I said, walking behind Samantha with Messenger just a pace behind me.
“Yes,” Messenger said, and that voice carried notes of warning coiled within the single syllable.
Samantha had spotted someone in the crowd ahead of her. I knew the name: Kayla. Kayla McKenna. K-Mack, some people called her, and it was like a brand name. It meant more than this one tall, willowy blond girl alone; K-Mack meant a group. K-Mack meant a power within the school. A force.
Kayla was more than pretty. Kayla had large brown eyes framed by absurdly long lashes. She had perfect cheekbones. Her every movement was graceful and assured. She was dressed impeccably. Her hair tumbled, liquid, like honey, like something out of a shampoo commercial. Her skin was flawless, untouched by blemish.
Samantha instinctively put a hand to her face, traced her finger over the bump that had begun to emerge just beside her nose, a zit in the making.
Having touched it once, Samantha had to touch it twice more. Three times touch. Or something awful would happen, something unspeakable.
Kayla was surrounded by people. Three girls and two boys. Certainty and smugness oozed from them all, but they were planets circling Kayla’s sun.
“Stop touching it, Samantha,” Kayla said. She had an interesting way of inflecting, Kayla did. The “touch” part of “touching” was punched with a humorous uplift. Like the word itself was funny.
Samantha’s hand froze in place. Kayla had disrupted the count, and now she would have to do it again. Three times.
“It’s just a zit,” Samantha said, and touched it.
“Yeah, I didn’t think it was a unicorn,” Kayla said.
The emphasis on “didn’t”, with the same comical uplift.
“Oh, my God, you’re touching it again. Stop touching it!
You’re making me sick, honestly. No offense.”
The way she spoke was an invitation to a conspiracy—it invited all to see the humor, all to see that she was just joking, just having fun. Her eyes mocked, but was there anything to point to as proof that she was aware of the effect on Samantha?
“No offense,” Samantha echoed, and smiled a sickly smile and strained with all her will to keep her hands at her sides, not to touch.
All of them were looking at her now, the K-Mack crowd, staring at her, expectant, waiting on the signal to laugh at her.
“How’s your . . . um . . . book coming?” Kayla asked. The word “book” got the uplift this time, in a way that clearly cast doubt on the possibility that there was such a book.
“Okay, I guess. I have to get to class.”
“Aren’t you done writing it? You said in Mr. Briede’s class you were done.”
Samantha