I dart toward a VC wall panel and I’m about to push a red button that reads EMERGENCY. Well, until I peer beyond the shelves at a seven-yard-wide square of concrete: the loading area for delivered goods. It’s usually a blank space at night, but right now it’s sparkling.
I spot familiar metallic sticker dots. Someone has strewn hundreds of them on the concrete to create constellations of stars. In the center of it all, an electric fan—the rotating kind—has been covered in more shiny dots and turned into a mirror ball.
Amid the sparkles, Kyle Kuan spins around on a pair of roller skates, her hands, arms, and skates themselves covered in a few more dots, showering diamond lights everywhere. Her yellow hair cascades over her closed eyes. On and on she spins, shimmering, until she skids over the fan’s electrical cord.
Kyle stumbles but gets up to stare at her Kevlar vest lying nearby. There’s a fresh stain on it—Ollie’s blood—and she shivers. When she turns away, her eyes line up with me.
Kyle startles.
I call out, “Sorry, I didn’t mean to . . .”
Kyle rolls away, and soon, she’s sitting in a corner and taking off her skates. I think of leaving her be, but she’s taking a long time to undo the skate straps, her eyes focused on the floor. I think she’s . . . waiting. Waiting for me—or anyone—to go over and ask if she’s okay after what we saw up close today.
I move nearer. I try to fix my hair and instantly feel shitty. Ollie was mauled, and all I can think about is trying to impress a girl.
Kyle doesn’t react as I sit cross-legged beside her.
“You okay?” I ask quietly.
She doesn’t look at me but shrugs, mumbles, “Yeah.”
“You sure?”
The silence hangs heavy.
My attention settles on an upside-down heart-shaped scar on the side of her neck. Finally, her head turns slightly toward me, but she cannot bring her gaze higher than my hands clasped in my lap.
“Why did you want to talk about our school?” she asks quietly.
So she does remember me from school. Booyah.
Now I’m also staring at my hands. “Dunno. Guess I just want to remember who I was back then. So . . . I could just, maybe, stop feeling like such a nobody all the time.”
I dare to look up, and I see her finally looking at me.
Would she have known Shadow Girl?
“Uh. So. There was this girl who used to be in my life.” At least, I think she used to be. “But these days it’s like she never existed. Did you remember her?”
Kyle stiffens and gives me a look that seems to say, What makes you think I’d know about that? And I wonder if we ever shared more than a few words in school. So I pivot and ask, “Whatever. . . . Anyway, how was your shitty day?”
She looks away but takes a while before she mumbles, “Pretty shitty.”
My mind blanks, until eventually I admit, “My day was— Well, I found a pair of dentures under an aisle today.”
She shrugs. “Gross.”
I too roll my shoulders. “Things could always be worse. Last week someone left a Starbucks cup on a shelf. Some dude had peed in it—right up to the brim. Some of it spilled onto my shoes.”
Kyle cocks a brow. “Are you forgetting last Thursday’s penis monster, the one with the acid urine?”
“Oh, I didn’t see any of that stuff. I was too busy dealing with a shopper dude who wanted to use one discount coupon on a hundred rolls of toilet paper—I mean, come on, it’s one coupon per item, buddy!”
We study each other, then break into soft chuckles. In my head, I can practically hear a laugh track. It’s like we’re starring in a comedy about Hell Zone workers, where all the violence is only ever PG-13 and the heaviest thing we’ll face is some Will they or won’t they? drama. I can see the title card: P·O·R·T·A·L·S.
Kyle clams up. Shit, I’ve been staring.
“Yeah, our lives are truly awesome,” she mutters.
“Then why do you always linger around here when you’re off duty?” I ask.
“You noticed that?” Kyle asks with a strange, fixed look. She pulls her legs up to her chest, rests her chin on a knee, and her hair curtains over her eyes. I can barely hear her as she mumbles: “This place is fuckin’ awful. But . . .” A long pause. “During my shifts, I have no space to think about problems, fears, or anything. I’m in the zone, and it’s . . . almost like a drug.” She looks away and snorts. “I dunno. Whatever. . . .”
But I do know what she means. “Does this mean that your after-hours time is the comedown? A crash that you gotta try to ride out?”
Kyle is staring at the sticker dots on her hands, and I realize there’s something underneath the bits of silver—flecks of paper, from when she was peeling stamp material off Gutierrez’s face. It seems she couldn’t remove all the paper, so she covered what remains.
Her expression flattens, as though she’s gone far, far beyond the chill comedown and straight into numbness. And it terrifies me.
I notice a random collection of roller skates strewn about—Kyle must have tried them all on for size—and I spot one set that could be my fit. I grab them and put them on. All the while, I hope I know how to skate. It feels like I do, like I just need to shake off the cobwebs and wake up some muscle memory.
Kyle raises a brow, but I reach into my pocket for my phone and cue up a song from Lara’s “Plushie Partyyyyy!!!” playlist—SG Lewis’s “Chemicals.” I stick my phone in my pocket, get to my feet as beats stream out, and I quickly realize that gravity works differently when you have wheels. I zoom right into a concrete wall. I’m barely able to get my hands out in time to stop my head from getting crushed in.
I can feel Kyle’s gaze as I find my balance. Quickly I realize that standing still might be harder than moving. So I start rolling toward the DIY dance floor as I find my center. Kyle’s wheels rattle up alongside me, and suddenly I couldn’t stop skating even if I wanted to.
I manage to get to the loading zone without kissing the concrete. Kyle positions her skates in a V to halt, and I do the same. We’re now so close that I can feel her breath on my collarbones. Her eyes squint, as though she’s about to say something she can’t take back, but then she just looks away and shrugs to herself.
A few sticker dots are tangled in her hair. The light above us is flickering slowly, causing Kyle to go from starlight dancer to shadow girl, over and over—and I realize, she’s becoming a mental stand-in for a girlfriend who probably never existed. I don’t know whether to pull away or move closer, but she spins aside to fan into a figure eight.
I try to follow but end up figure 0-ing before tumbling down onto the concrete. I get back up, quickly but gracelessly. Kyle takes a turn to spin out a complex string of shapes—figure eights, nines, whole damn alphabets—that spell out something only she can read. When it’s my turn next, I barely make a full circle before sprawling on the floor again.
Kyle moves closer, ready to help me up, but something makes her waver.
“I’m okay, don’t mind me,” I croak.
That causes her to snort softly and my heart races.
“You’re too worried about getting hurt,” she whispers. “Forget about the danger and just move. It’s all you can do here . . . or anywhere.”
She utters those words like a grand secret of the universe.
Kyle zooms off to the back room’s shelves. I follow after her, and we weave in and out, scratching lines in the dirty floor, round and round till we might as well be flying—and man, this ain’t a comedown but a whole new drug fizzling inside me.
Then Kyle rolls over a power block. Tumbles. I zip over to her side, halt my skates, then reach down to grab her hand. I shiver. In my remembered life, this is the first time I’ve ever held hands with a girl. And whatever I’m on, this is the contact high.
Almost instantly Kyle tries to pull away. But I manage to help her to her feet without letting go of her hand, and for a second, we get into a weird little tug-of-war. In doing so, we end up picking up speed and slamming into Kyle’s locker on the far wall.
Her hand slips out of mine.
“Kyle. I . . . sorry, I—”
I get up and notice that her locker popped open. Atop her stuff is an open notebook with a pen sketch of something startling: four wraiths standing in front of a bright red portal.
This is an echo of my dreams! An echo of that postcard!
I spin around to find Kyle shivering, her eyes wide. She grabs her notebook and shoves it into her backpack.
“Kyle—” I barely get out both syllables before she’s slammed her locker shut and is skating toward the distant exit.
“Kyle!”
I return to my apartment after dark and slump against the closed door. Lara is curled up, watching a cooking show on TV.
“Hey, dude, how was your day?” she asks, without averting her gaze from one of her crushes, master-chef David Chang.
“Uh, the usual,” I murmur. “I found a pair of dentures under the racks, forgot to get breakfast cereal again, and oh, by the way, I think I’m able to see the future.”
“Cool, cool,” she murmurs.
I block her view of the TV, and before she can complain, I say, “You know my nightmares of four monsters emerging to cause an . . . apoc—” That word jams in my throat, and Lara shivers. “Kyle Kuan has also seen them.”
Lara turns off the TV. “What . . . ?”
I tell her all about Kyle’s notebook. “Kyle is seeing the same specific shit as me. That can’t be a random coincidence, right? That has to mean something.” My thoughts go to the nightmares themselves. “I’ve told you about how those dreams often feel real? Well . . . what if Kyle and I are both seeing the same future . . . with a full-blown apocalypse?”
“No, no, no, no,” Lara interrupts, holding her paws over her ears, and I don’t know if she’s trying to argue with my logic or the very idea of a pending doomsday.
“Lara! Talk to me. You’re a demon. You have to know shit. Are we heading for the full-on end of the world?”
She goes motionless as though she’s pretending to be a mere plush toy.
“Lara!” I yell, shaking her. “Are we going to be invaded by hell?”
Lara hops out of my grip and lands on the ground beside me. “I don’t want to talk about it. . . .” Before I can say anything, she looks around and says, “I know what we should do! We should move. There must be a nicer place out there, in a better part of the city—or even out to the burbs. Somewhere you could find some peace.”
“Lara—”
The cat scampers to my laptop and uses her voice to trigger a Google search for rentals we can afford. I try to get her attention, but she’s intent on changing the subject. I get up and pace, struggling to think of how to get her to focus.
“Lara, seriously, we could be facing the end of the world.”
Just saying those four words fills me with a familiar dull ache. But now I realize I’ve been mislabeling this feeling for months: it’s not tiredness, but hopelessness.
Suddenly all I want is to shake off this feeling. I head to my bedroom and pull out that photo of the burning dumpster. I stare at the Shadow Girl and whisper, “I wish you were here. . . . Wish you could tell me about my past . . . or how to deal with all the invisible fires everywhere. . . .”
I shut my eyes as my thoughts circle around the idea of her. Soon my head tingles, then zings, as I try to make my way above the high wall of my amnesia. But before long, I have to stop and open my eyes as I’m crushed by yet another migraine.
Burning pain flares up in my skull. But as the room swirls around me, I get another glimpse of that dumpster photo, and all I can think of is That was real. I know it happened. That—
My vision goes red, then white, then black, before I lose consciousness.