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“It’s about a group of high school girls who use supernatural powers to bully kids they don’t like,” I said.
“That’s the story. Is it the real purpose of the book?”
I shook my head. “No. No, it’s really about Samantha. She is Jessica. And the nightmare clique is Kayla and her friends.”
Messenger nodded. “Shall we look at the happiest day in Samantha’s life?”
I was not so naive that I didn’t realize there was a danger in this. Seeing Samantha happy would only emphasize the awful tragedy of her death. But Messenger didn’t wait for an answer. Without any sense of movement we were suddenly in a different place. We were at Yolo’s, and Samantha was loading a large Styrofoam dish of frozen yogurt with Reese’s Pieces and Butterfinger crumbles. She paid at the register and glanced around, nervous that someone from school would see her piling on calories.
As soon as she sat down, she ate a big spoonful and while she crunched the cold candies, she checked her email on her phone. I saw the email, and in some way I could not yet hope to explain, I saw it more fully in Samantha’s mind.
It was from a literary agent.
I am very pleased to tell you that I would love to represent The Nightmare Clique. I think there is an excellent chance of selling it to a major publisher, and if you will sign the attached document, I will get to work immediately.
“She thinks she’s going to publish it!” I said. I was excited. There have been times when I thought of becoming a writer, but I would never have had the courage to actually submit a manuscript at my age. Samantha and I were the same age, and she had been brave enough to risk rejection.
I had pitied her. Now I admired her.
“Twenty-seven days from this moment, HarperCollins will agree to publish Samantha’s book,” Messenger said. “Samantha will read that letter seven times, will have no choice but to read it seven times. She will be frustrated by her compulsion, but she will also be elated. She will tell herself that now, at last, everything will change for the better.”
“But that’s not the way it works out,” I said.
“No,” Messenger said, and we were back in Samantha’s room, and her body was on the floor of her bedroom, stiffening, growing cold as it awaited her mother’s horrifying discovery that her daughter was gone.
I shook my head. “I can’t do this, okay? I can’t. You have to let me go. I don’t want to see this. I don’t want to feel this, Messenger, whoever you are, whatever you are, I don’t . . .” I was crying. It should have been humiliating, crying in front of him.
“No one prefers this path,” he said. His voice was flat and devoid of emotion. But I saw something like nausea reflected in his expression. “No one would choose to feel another’s pain. But this is my . . . This is your fate, Mara.”
“No,” I said sharply. “This is all some kind of creepy trick!”
He didn’t deign to reply to that. He waited, silent, as the truth, or at least a part of it, began to sink in.
“I’m being punished,” I said.
Again, he said nothing. I wondered if I could find a way to feel what he was feeling, to know his mind as I had so easily penetrated the mind of Samantha Early, but when I turned my thoughts that way, I felt his mind retreat and fend me off.
It was like the door handle. I could see him, but I was not allowed to touch him. Not physically, not mentally. I was an open book to him, and he was closed to me.
I am not to be touched.
“Not all my . . . our . . . duties are quite so grim,” he said at last. “This terrible matter will hold for a while. And I think you could do with a change of scenery.”
6
THE CHANGE OF SCENERY WAS SUDDEN AND extreme. One moment we were standing over Samantha Early’s body, and the next we were in the backseat of a car. The transfer was carried out by no usual earthly means and was testament to the fact that I never felt even the slightest acceleration, though we had gone in a flash from stationary to sixty-four miles an hour.
A boy and a girl were in the front seat. The girl was driving. The boy was clowning, doing a duck-face rendition of a Rihanna song. The girl laughed.
“What is this?” I asked in a whisper. It was a natural human instinct to whisper, though I had slowly begun to realize that nothing I did would be seen, and nothing I said would be heard by the people we watched.
“This is Emma and Liam,” Messenger said.
Liam was a ginger, so Irish-looking he could have been the poster boy for an Irish tourism ad campaign. Emma was very nearly his opposite. She was Latina, with extraordinarily voluminous brown hair, dark eyes, and smooth skin that I admired.
“Is that the place?” Liam asked as they drove past a narrow, rutted driveway marked by a mailbox that had not seen a delivery in a very long time. He was rubbing Emma’s neck and she was enjoying it.
You can sense when a couple is a couple, when they are so close that silence is as good as talking, and when talking is a series of sentences left dangling because you know the other person knows what you mean. A couple is close when most of what passes between them is tacit, unvoiced, not for display, not for signaling to outsiders. I had the vague feeling that perhaps my parents had been like that once. I had the definite feeling that I had never known that kind of relationship.
