Cara Shultz: The Dark World

Dottie shimmered back into existence, her face twisted in worry.

“What is going on, Paige?” she asked, frantic. Her brown eyes wildly whirled around the bathroom. I tilted my chin toward the girl now braiding her hair at the sink, and she instantly understood.

“Why do you look upset? Did something happen?” Dottie asked, and I merely nodded. I didn’t need everyone in the school to bear witness to my one-sided conversations, after all. Not that I thought I could form a coherent sentence—I was trembling, my mind racing as I tried to make sense of what had just happened.

What had just happened?

“Did someone come in?” she asked, and again, I gave her a quick nod, wiping the sweat from my forehead with the cuff of my uniform shirt. The first bell rang, and I felt my stomach twist into knots. My first thought was to ditch class—but what if Blaise followed me home? What would she do to my parents? She swore she’d find me. I ran my fingers through my slightly sweaty hair, trying to figure out what I should do.

“What happened to your wrist? Did someone attack you?” Dottie gaped, and I nodded as I studied the tender, pink impressions that curled around my wrist. That had to prove that I’d just been threatened by the new girl—who may or may not be a girl. That nightmarish, gaping maw, full of sharp teeth, couldn’t have been a hallucination, right?

I decided to go to the nurse’s office. Maybe I could feign sickness and get sent home—I sure felt like I had a temperature. And I’d go somewhere public—a store, a library, somewhere until I was sure Blaise hadn’t followed me.

I picked my bag off the floor with shaking fingers. And that’s when I saw it—the charred, black tiles which marked the spot where Blaise had stood.

Dottie saw it, too, staring at the spot in the middle of the white tile floor in confusion. The second bell rang, so I ran straight to the nurse’s office, Dottie in tow. She pelted me with questions I couldn’t answer as ancient Nurse Esposito inspected my wrist with eyeglasses so thick, they were probably bulletproof. The nurse was sympathetic until she checked the computer at her desk—and then she berated me for trying to get out of detention.

“If you went home sick, you’d just have to make up detention on Monday,” she scolded, peering at me over her wide tortoiseshell frames before begrudgingly handing me my excuse slip for my next class. Even though the halls were empty, I kept my voice low, telling Dottie what had happened with Blaise as my best friend walked me to English. Dottie—usually a slowpoke—kept up with my brisk pace. I needed to be around people. I needed witnesses.

“All I know is that when she was in the room with you, I couldn’t stay here,” Dottie whispered when we arrived at my class, even though she didn’t have to keep her voice muted. “There’s an energy around you that guides me to cross over. You’re this beacon—kind of like a lighthouse in the darkness. But I can’t keep a hold on it when she’s there.”

My English teacher saw me hovering by the open doorway and gestured for me to come in, which earned a few snickers from some classmates.

“What was she doing just staring off like that in the hall?” Scott Young whispered, shaking his head and giving me a bemused stare as I handed Mrs. Doyle my excuse slip from the nurse.

“She’s one of those idiotic savant people,” Andie Ward hissed back. “Good grades, but a psycho.”

Normally, I would have corrected Andie, but I had bigger, scarier and deadlier things on my mind. I stayed slouched low in my seat, not even hearing my English teacher drone on and on as I searched my memory for anything I might have read that explained what Blaise was.

When I’d first discovered that my hallucinations were ghosts, I researched the paranormal. I’d gone to any website that looked halfway legitimate. I’d even trekked to the library and checked out every old, dusty book on the supernatural that I could find, secretly hoping to stumble upon some hidden chamber, filled with books unlocking the mysteries of the supernatural world and managed by some kindly old witch who’d take me under her magical wing.

But instead, I’d read textbooks about witches and warlocks and ghosts at communal tables under buzzing fluorescent lights. I’d even taken photos of Dottie, but apart from a few orbs and streaks of light, the pictures just showed the brown bathroom stalls and green-to-blue paint job I’d ruined. Nothing gave me any answers. As a last resort, I’d tried speaking to a few tarot card readers and psychics whose storefronts lined the streets in the East Village. I figured if I was able to talk to Dottie, then I couldn’t be the only one, right? But everyone I’d spoken to was a low-rent charlatan angling for my allowance, so I’d eventually assumed I was alone. Until now.

I repeated my slouched-low-in-my-seat routine in Spanish and silently prayed that there would be multiple students with me in detention. Maybe I could walk out of the school with Miller. Maybe I could ditch detention. Maybe I could come up with some sort of plan, if Logan would stop distracting me by trying to get my attention.

“Where’s your bracelet?” he mouthed, and I pulled it out of my pocket to show it to him. His eyes widened, and I could have sworn he looked horrified before Travis Moore leaned forward to whisper to someone, blocking my view.

I stared at my bracelet, as it sat coiled in my palm. A hundred thoughts rattled around in my head, until one thought—one loud thought that silenced all the others—echoed in my brain.

What if I really am crazy? What if I blacked out and only thought I’d lost my bracelet? What if I hallucinated a student transforming into some kind of monster in front of me, attacking me and bleeding plumes of smoke when my nails punctured her skin? What if I burned my own wrist to make the hallucination seem real? I didn’t feel crazy—but I’m pretty sure crazy people don’t realize they’re nuts.

I put my bracelet back in my shirt pocket and rubbed my eyes with the heels of my hands, exhaling deeply.

Calm down, Paige. Get yourself together. Get through today. Take a cab home so Blaise can’t follow you and hurt Mom or Dad or Mercer. Maybe it’s time for another therapist. Or time to sleep with a baseball bat at the ready.

I looked down at my notebook and shivered: I’d filled the last two pages with horrifying, cartoonish images of Blaise, with her mouth gaping and her eyes glittering with hunger and hate—the kind of sketches that would have had Therapist Number Three calling for a straitjacket. The bell rang, and I yelped, slamming my notebook shut in an effort to force the sight out of my mind. I bolted from class to grab my stuff from my locker—I could have sworn I heard someone call my name as I sped through the halls, but I just chalked it up to more of my neurons misfiring. Now you’re hearing voices.

I could make it. Just one more hour and a half, and I could make sense of all this. I could go home, curl up with Mercer, and somehow things would make sense again.

They had to make sense again.

When I slid into the fourth-floor classroom used for detention, I was comforted to see that there was at least one other student trapped in after-hours hell with me. Travis Moore sat by the window, not-so-surreptitiously checking sports scores on the phone in his lap. He was perpetually late to school, coming in from Pelham Bay in the North Bronx every morning—so he was a regular in detention. He was practically the detention mascot, much to Dottie’s delight. She mooned over Travis every day after school, gushing to me that he was “the most.” The most late student, but whatever. She thought he was, and I quote, “choice.”