My own face hurt. Suddenly fearful, I tried to bring up my hands to touch it, but found my left arm was in a makeshift splint. I frantically ran my right hand over my forehead, eyelids, cheeks, nose, and chin. While parts felt scraped and bruised, my features seemed whole.
“I’m Jenny,” she said as I pawed at my face. “And you’re Savannah, right?”
Hearing my name come out of a stranger’s mouth sent another zap of adrenaline through me. “How do you know my name?”
“Sorry. I went through the wallet in your backpack.” Jenny’s straight dark hair fell past her shoulders. Under a gray cardigan, she was wearing skinny jeans and a tight red sweater with a deep V-neck. She leaned closer. “He took me, too.” Her whisper was as light as a breath.
“We have to get out of here.” But where was here? My best guess was some tiny shack in the woods, but that still didn’t seem quite right.
Jenny shook her head. “You need to rest. You’re hurt.”
For an answer, I threw back the covers and pushed myself up with my good hand. I swung my legs over the edge of the bed, ignoring how the room tilted. When I steadied myself on the ivory-colored wall, it felt cool and oddly slick. The wall was made of plastic.
I went to the window, with Jenny trailing behind me. But when I pushed aside the curtain, all I saw was flat silver. At first I thought it was paint, but then I realized the window had been covered from the outside with a shiny plastic tarp.
Increasingly light-headed, I made for the doorway, ignoring Jenny telling me to stop, to come back.
I staggered down the short hall. When the elbow of my bad arm banged against the wall, pain turned the edges of my vision white. I passed a tiny bathroom with a half-open folding door. This wasn’t a shack, I realized. It was a motor home.
As the space opened out into a carpeted living area, Jenny grabbed my shoulder. With a twist, I shook her hand loose and made for the door in the far wall. Its window was also covered. I grabbed the handle.
“Don’t open that!” Jenny said urgently behind me.
I turned the handle and pushed. It started to open, revealing a sliver of light. Cold air rushed in through the crack. Metal rattled. I was already moving my foot to step outside when the door’s movement abruptly stopped. The gap was only about three inches wide. In frustration, I bashed the door with my shoulder, ignoring how it set off echoes of pain. But the door refused to budge.
Putting my eye to the gap, I caught a glimpse of a heavy metal chain that was preventing it from opening all the way. Below it was dark, muddy ground. “Help! Help us!” I shouted through the gap.
Suddenly the door vibrated under my palm when something scrabbled and scratched at the metal. And in the gap I saw a dark and terrible eye, a monster’s eye with no white at all.
It tried to thrust its head in farther, just below my face. A growl filled the room. With a shriek, I pulled back. The dog’s mouth snapped open and closed, black-rimmed lips stretched over long white teeth. Silvery threads of saliva bound together the top and bottom canines.
Jenny pushed me away with one hand while she wrenched the door closed with the other. Outside, the dog began to bark, angry and urgent.
“I told you not to do that!” She brought her hands to her stitched-together face. Her nails were ragged, bitten to the quick. “Did Rex bite you?”
The adrenaline and fear that had propelled me this far suddenly disappeared. I fell more than sat on the small couch. “No.”
She scurried to the window, bent down, and pressed one eye to it. There was the tiniest of gaps at the bottom where the tarp had slipped. “If Sir hears Rex, he’ll come back, and he’ll be so mad. He hates noise.”
“We have to get out of here.”
“Even if we got out of here, we won’t get past Rex. I already tried to escape, months ago.” Turning back to me, she gestured at her ruined face. “And you can see how far that got me.”
“You said that guy took you, too. When was that?”
“Back in February.”
But this was December. Jenny had been here for months and months. Nearly a year. The feeling of the room closing in, of the edges of my vision dimming, crashed back over me like a sneaker wave.
BLAKE DOWD
“Two weeks until Christmas break,” IAN said as he handed me a red Solo cup. “I cannot wait.”
I nodded as I took the beer. School was mostly torture, because it meant staying still, and I was terrible at that. But being home would not be any better. I headed to the back of the basement and leaned against the wall, on the edge of the party but not really part of it.
Thanksgiving had been bad enough, but at least that had been only four days. Lately my mom was either at work or sitting silently on the couch, a glass of wine in her hand, staring at nothing. My dad hadn’t lived with us since the summer, when they argued about him buying presents for Jenny’s birthday. And whenever I was at home, I was hyperaware of Jenny’s room lying empty, like a rotting cavity hidden deep in a mouth.
I was the one that lived. Did my parents ever regret that? Jenny had always been the easy one. Pretty. Obedient. Smart.
Now Jenny was gone. And not gone.
My mom was sure she was dead. My dad was sure she was alive. And me? I felt like Jenny was stuck. Both living and dead, like Schrödinger’s cat.
My friend Ian, who was way smarter than me, had told me about this physicist, this Schrödinger guy, who had created something that was called a thought experiment. It imagined that you put a cat, a Geiger counter, a bottle of hydrochloric acid, and a tiny bit of radioactive material into a steel box.
Geiger counters detect radioactive emissions, and the second this imaginary Geiger counter detected even a single atom decaying, it was set to trip a hammer that would shatter the bottle of poison, which would kill the cat.
So sooner or later, in the thought experiment, the cat would die. You just didn’t know when. Some physicists believed that after a while, the cat would be simultaneously alive and dead—at least until someone opened the steel box to look. Of course once you looked, the cat could only be alive or dead, not both.
Jenny was the cat, but she was still inside the box. Unobserved. So she was both dead and alive.
All around me, kids were laughing and talking. A few people were dancing, and a few more were making out. Ian was walking around with a sprig of mistletoe over his head, trying to get girls to kiss him.
Just like Schrödinger’s cat, just like Jenny, I was here and not here.
Christmas Day would probably be a repeat of Thanksgiving, only worse, because it was Christmas. My grandma was again insisting that the whole family get together. She would make food that no one in my immediate family would do more than push around their plates. My uncle would “share” Bible verses about God’s plans and the afterlife, while my aunt laid her hand on his arm and whispered at him to stop. Their little girls would run around, high on sugar cookies, while my mom watched them, her face a mask. Looking like if you touched it, it would crack and then crumble into dust.
If we followed the pattern laid down by Thanksgiving, my dad, allowed home only for the holiday, would talk too much and drink even more than that. Then he and my mom would end up in Jenny’s room, shouting at each other before he stormed out.