Ilsa Bick: White Space

Well, just muscle through it . Gripping the wheel harder, she squinted through tears. The world beyond the windshield was shimmery and nearly colorless, that relentless curtain of snow going to gray, about to fade to black as the day died. But what she saw around the edges of that purple maw was wrong: craggy mountains on the right, the drop-off of a valley on the left.

What? Her eyebrows pulled into a frown. That wasn’t right. Sure, Wisconsin has plenty of valleys, but the mountains were pimples. They were zits. Nice zits but still zits.

God, where are we? Her eyes slid to her driver’s side window, frosted with a rime of thin ice. And right then she had the strangest, weirdest impulse: to press her hand to the glass, feel the burn as the ice bled. One push, where the barrier’s thinnest. That’s all it would take . Push hard enough and the glass would open to swallow her up and then she would fall …

Another crash of lightning broke the spell, made her heart flop in her chest. Beside her, Lily let out a yelp and clutched the dash. “How can it do that in snow? Come on, Emma, you’re the science brain. Is it supposed to do that?”

“Sure, if cold air passes over warm water,” she said, relieved her voice didn’t shake. Temples throbbing, she forced her eyes forward again. The metal plate above her nose seemed to be burning its way through the bony vault of her skull. What had that been about? Bleeding ice? Pushing through melting glass, a thinning barrier, to some other world? You nut, who do you think you are—Neo? Stop this. Come on, get a grip . “It just means we’ve got to be close to Lake Superior. That’s why the thunder’s so loud. If we were further away …” She bit off the rest. Lily probably didn’t need a lecture on acoustic suppression and the reflective properties of ice crystals—and she did know Lily, right? Sure, they were both juniors at Holten Prep; Lily was in her … her … What class was it? English? History? Basket-weaving for the mentally deranged?

What’s wrong with me? Her tongue skimmed her lips, tasting fear and salt. Coming back from the blink this time was much worse than ever before, her mind pulling itself together like molten chewing gum pried from the underside of an old shoe. But why? Usually, it was blink-blink and, whoa, when had she decided to take up skydiving? All right, the fugues—pockets of time for which she had no memory—weren’t quite as bad as that, but if she ever needed a go- to for why eighteen pairs of shoes suddenly appeared in her closet, she was set.

Don’t freak. That just makes everything worse. Come on, you know who you are. You’re Emma Lindsay and she’s Lily … Lily … She swallowed around a sudden knot of panic. Lily who?

“Maybe we should turn back,” Lily said.

No, I don’t think we can. I don’t think the storm will let us . But those were crazy thoughts. A storm couldn’t think. Ice didn’t bleed. You couldn’t tumble through glass to fall into forever and all times like some kind of crazy Alice. Of course, a purple mouth shouldn’t make Swiss cheese of the world, but that didn’t stop her addled brain from conjuring one out of thin air. Understanding why didn’t make what she saw any less scary.

Then a real memory—what a weird way to think about it—floated from the fog of her thoughts. “If we go back, won’t your parents make you do that dogsled thing for wannabe warrior-women?” Emma asked.

“Yeah, but compared to this?” Lily grunted. “Dog shit looks pretty good.”

2

WHEN EMMA WOKEup yesterday morning, life had still been pretty normal. Well, as normal as it got for a kid with a head full of metal, killer headaches, visions that appeared more or less at random, chunks of lost time, and nowhere to go over Christmas break.

Heading north hadn’t been the plan. The stroke over a year ago turned Jasper into a zucchini—on June 9, to be exact: her birthday, and Jasper’s, too. They always had two cakes: ginger cake with buttercream frosting for him, dark chocolate with velvety chocolate ganache for her. She’d been jamming candles into Jasper’s cake—try fitting fifty-eight candles so you didn’t get a bonfire—when, all of a sudden, something right over her head banged so hard the cottage’s windows rattled. Racing upstairs, she’d found Jasper, out cold, sprawled in a loose-limbed jumble like a broken, discarded doll. These days, Jasper languished in a dark room, his head turned to a white sliver of window hemmed by coal-black shutters. He wore diapers. He was mute. The entire left side of his face looked artificial, like a waxen mask melting under too much heat. His left lower eyelid drooped, the eye itself the color of milky glass, and his mouth hung so wide she could see the ruin of his teeth and the bloated dead worm of his tongue. The last time Emma ventured in to read aloud—she and Jasper used to make a game of trying to finish Edwin Drood —Sal, the lizard-eyed, pipe-puffing live-in, shooed her away. When Jasper had been boss, Sal behaved. Now, with the old bat out of the attic, Emma felt about as welcome as a case of head lice.

Best to stay in Madison. The Holten folks had paired Emma, on full scholarship (which translated to smart and weird but poor ), with Mariane, a Jewish exchange student from London who was big into decorative art. Seeing as how Emma worked glass, that was all good. So she and Mariane would eat Chinese and see a movie, which, apparently, Jewish people all over the world did on Christmas. Maybe chill with a couple Beta boys at the university, drink beer, eat Christmas brats. Binge on X-Files and Lost and watch the Badgers get slaughtered in the Rose Bowl. All-American, Wisconsin stuff like that.

She could use the time to throttle back, too. Head over to the hot shop and work a pendant design she’d mulled over for months: a galaxy sculpted in miniature from glass, encased in glass, yet small and light enough to wear around her neck. When she mentioned her idea, the gaffer cracked, Maybe we’ll start calling you Orion, like that cat . She’d laughed along with him and the other glassblowers, but Men in Black and that cat’s amulet had given her the idea in the first place. Not everything had to stay make-believe.

So that was the plan, anyway—until that asshole Kramer called her to his office, shut the door, and said, “ Ms. Lindsay, we need to

3

HAVE A LITTLEchat about that last assignment.”

“Okay,” Emma says. She watches Kramer withdraw a mug of steaming Mighty Leaf green tea from his microwave. A little alarm is ding-ding-dinging in her head. He hasn’t offered her any. Not that she minds: green tea tastes like old gym socks, and the Mighty Mouse brand, no matter how swank, probably does, too. For him not to offer, though, she must be in deep doo-doo. “Is something wrong, Professor Kramer?”

“Is … something … wrong ?” Kramer gives his tea bag a vicious squish between his fingers. He sets, he chucks; Mighty Mouse goes ker-splat against the far wall. On a corner of Kramer’s desk, a radio mutters about the continuing investigation into a young girl’s gruesome discovery of eight …

“ ’Orrible murders and ghastly crimes,” Kramer grates in an angry, exaggerated cockney, and stabs the radio to silence. “These screaming twenty-four-hour news cycles are as bad as Victorian tabloids.” He fires a glare through prissy Lennon specs. “Well, yes, you might say there’s something wrong , Ms. Lindsay. I’m trying to decide if I should merely flunk you out of this course, or get you booted out of Holten, despite your circumstances. Just what kind of game do you think you’re playing?”