Isobel started forward, keeping her sights on the still-visible line of his angular shoulders. Sleek and jaggedly cut, his jet hair caught a gleam from the fluorescent light fixtures as he passed beneath them. That detail, so minute, so real, prompted her to second-guess herself.
Sparing a quick glance at the walls, she checked for the hallway clock that would confirm what she already knew—that she had to be asleep.
That there wasn’t one at all gave her the last shred of evidence she no longer needed.
When her eyes found him again, however, she saw that he’d traveled twice as far down the corridor as before, as if time had skipped while her gaze had been diverted.
A jolt of terror spurred Isobel to stumble after him on shaky legs. Then her mind caught up to her actions, commanding her to stop, to slip into the crowd so he wouldn’t see her.
Wake up, wake up, wake up, she told herself, even while her feet kept moving, following the thrumming command of her heart.
A deep ache pulsed inside of her, urging her to yell out to him. To repeat the words she’d written that morning, and make him hear what he’d already proven he couldn’t.
But then he vanished around the next corner, into the stairwell.
Isobel stopped, her chest constricting with a debilitating mixture of sorrow and fear. Sorrow that he’d once again evaporated. That this glimpse of him had happened within the realm of her imagination, and not in that midregion where she knew he truly dwelled.
The sensation of fear welled higher. It consumed her longing and warned her not to let him discover her here—in his world.
Wake up, she told herself again, before he finds you.
Her body didn’t want to listen, though, and her soul, the part of her that dreamed, moved forward again.
She wove her way between tall basketball players, dodging their book bags. She sidled past girls with rose bouquets who threw their arms around their boyfriends’ necks, past teachers collecting papers. The bodies began to squeeze in tighter, closer and closer with every step until she felt herself getting crowded out. Blocked. Shoved back.
Then the bell rang, shrill as a scream, and still more students poured out of classroom doors. Kids carrying books and holding hands bumped into her from every angle, knocking her from side to side.
Isobel squeezed between one of the kissing couples, forcing them apart.
The boy rounded on her with a glare. “What are you staring at?” he asked. But neither he nor the girl had any eyes. Just peeling, burned-out holes, as if their faces were made of paper.
Isobel shrank from the couple and collided with one of the teachers, who thrust a stack of blank pages at her.
“You forgot to sign our name,” said a girl’s voice.
Looking up, Isobel found herself staring into her twin’s expectant gaze, the likeness between them complete, right down to the slanted scar on her cheek.
Again, Isobel scrambled backward, bumping into yet another version of herself, this one almost doll-like in her pink party dress from the Grim Facade.
“I found you,” the double whispered, words she’d once uttered to Varen.
A hush fell over the hallway.
Isobel spun—and saw that her classmates had all disappeared. In their stead, a dozen of her own faces watched her with unblinking stares.
She saw herself dressed in the ebony version of the party dress, her features shell-shocked. A stream of crimson ran down the duplicate’s arm to soak the satin ribbon tied to her wrist.
Another replica had on her blue-and-gold cheer uniform. Yet another wore a pink robe and pajama pants—the same haphazard outfit she’d worn the night she’d climbed onto the ledge outside her window to meet with . . .
The truth, more disquieting than the clones themselves, struck her with stomach-twisting alarm. The versions of herself before her represented each different way Varen had seen her. Each way he remembered her.
“Go away,” she ordered. “All of you. Now.”
The face of the Isobel who held the stack of papers crumpled first, collapsing inward. The double’s arm fell as it disintegrated, and the white leaflets slipped free, spilling across the floor. Then the edges of the duplicate’s body curled in, collapsing like the remains of a burnt offering.
Pink Party Dress Isobel went next, bursting to cinders. One at a time, the others followed suit, and her legion of look-alikes dissipated to dust. Ash floated to the floor, coating the spotless linoleum and powdering the lockers in the leftover gray-white grime of whatever essence had allowed them to exist in the first place.
Freed from their stares, Isobel turned in a circle—wondering, as the sun-filled windows dimmed, if being alone wasn’t a thousand times worse.
