Okay, what Prince said helped a little—it’s not too late, not yet—but that doesn’t mean I have time to waste. I break away from him, from his shine and the visions he sends blinking through my eyes, and run like hell the rest of the way home. That movie that I saw before, that moment where Lexi was about to kiss Kezzer and then coax her away from me: is it happening? The image snapped. I can’t see it anymore, I can’t tell. Kezzer, please, you should know by now who really loves you!
There’s the yellow burst of our house with its weird dark upstairs windows glaring into what should be our dreamy afternoon, Kezzer’s and mine. I pound up the walk and fling back the door, then practically throw myself into the living room. That’s where they were before, that’s where I saw them. My mouth is open to start screaming.
But, um, no. Nobody’s here. Which could mean the absolute worst has happened and Lexi has already snatched her away, but didn’t Prince promise I would find her? “Kezzer?”
Something bangs at the kitchen window. I rush to see what it is.
There’s a ladder back there, one of the jointed aluminum kind. Which is crazy. Why?
So I dart out again, and around the back of the house, and then I see her. Kezzer, I mean, but it’s so different from everything I was supposed to see, from that movie that bombarded my brain with its pictures, from Lexi’s dark hand in Kezzer’s pale hair. I’m having a hard time catching up to what’s actually in front of me. At first I’m too startled to call up to her, and I just stand there trying to take it all in.
That horrible upstairs addition, those rooms that built themselves right in front of us out of a million broken little Kezzers—it has a window in back too. How come I never noticed that before? Or did it just appear today? It’s wide open and full of jet-black darkness that the brightest sunlight can’t seem to penetrate, just like the windows in front.
Kezzer is wobbling around on what must be the tallest ladder she could find, and she’s trying to climb into our new upper story through that window. The stairs won’t let her up, so okay, she’s trying something different. Which instantly bugs me, once I understand it, because why did she wait until I was out?
Lexi. I get this nauseating feeling that that’s it, that Lexi is in there, that Kezzer heard her calling. What I saw wasn’t quite right, but close enough—oh, and maybe this isn’t the first time, maybe whenever I’m away Kezzer runs for the ladder and crawls up to Lexi, and she’s lurking up there all the time, just waiting, even when I’m cooking Kezzer dinner or resting with my face on her shoulder.
But as I watch—my new theory doesn’t hold water either. Because Kezzer can’t get in.
She lunges forward, up on the second-highest rung, and grabs for the sill—it’s the way she’s jerking around that’s been knocking the ladder against the kitchen window. So she must have tried this a few times, already? But when she reaches out, the windowsill ruptures under her hands. I know the addition is made out of those mini Kezzer creatures, but normally they disguise themselves as walls and stairs so well that you can’t see them at all. Not individually.
But now as Kezzer grabs they all come bursting out, and tiny flat fists pop out by the dozen and pummel her back, and little scissory mouths snap at her. Where there was what looked like yellow vinyl siding and a window, suddenly there’s a freaking mob of squeaking, flailing cardboard Kezzers. So many of them that I can’t make out the real Kezzer from the waist up, though I can tell she’s thrashing as she tries to beat them off her.
“Damn you!” Kezzer yells at them. “You know me. So why? Why are you keeping me out? I just need to see—”
I almost think it’s funny, and I almost think she deserves it, except that the way the ladder is pitching is starting to make me nervous. It almost looks like the addition is caving in on her, except instead of boards and plaster crashing on her head there are those jackknifing copies of her, slamming her in the throat with their bony knees. She can’t hold on much longer and I leap forward, because even if I still have that cold, hard lump in my chest—Kezzer betrayed me, even if what I saw wasn’t true she still betrayed me by whispering secrets to someone I obviously can’t trust—I don’t want her to get hurt for real.
Sure enough, she’s falling. Before I can get close enough to catch her, I see Kezzer sort of dangling in space. The swarm has her by the ankles and they’re just letting her twitch around, head downward and struggling, with a rosebush scraping at her scalp. One of them slithers down her body and literally folds itself around her head.
“No!” it jabbers. Right in her ear, but still loud enough that I can hear it too, and it wallops me that I’ve never heard identifiable words from those things before. “No, no, no!”
“Why the hell not?” Kezzer asks. The mini-Kezzer is bent across her eyes and she still hasn’t noticed me. “If you’re part of me, why aren’t you on my side? Unless I’m just the bullshit copy?”
“Try,” the thing babbles.
“What do you mean?” Kezzer barks at it. “How am I not trying?”
“Harder!” it squeals, so sharply that her eardrum must quiver, and then they drop her, all her little ziggity copies drop her. But pretty softly, and they’re careful to chuck her free of the rosebush. She lands on her back in the grass, and it probably didn’t do anything worse than knock the air out of her. Which—I wouldn’t want to say this out loud, naturally—but I’m an eensy smidge disappointed that they didn’t teach her more of a lesson.
Because really, if she wanted to try climbing in there, why didn’t she tell me? There’s been a little too much of Kezzer going behind my back recently.
She lies on the grass and gasps with her arms flung over her face while all the cardboard half-hers go clattering back up and patch the dark scribbly hole they just made in our house. They slap themselves into place and go back to being vinyl siding. Good as new.
“Kezzer?” I say. It sounds pretty cold. “You okay?”
She pushes up onto her elbows, slowly, and looks at me in a way I don’t like much, anxious and super-focused and—intrusive, like she’s trying to read the future in my entrails. Just because she’s a miracle, it doesn’t mean she never gets on my nerves.
“You were talking with Prince,” she says. “I can tell.”
“Which is your problem why?” I snap. “Kezzer, just stop worrying.”
She sits up and her gray eyes keep hanging on to my face. “They’re really getting to you, baby. Every time you’re with them, you come back—less yourself. You think I can’t see that?” Her voices pitches up. Like, it turns into this mosquito sound, when it should be a low, fuzzy rasp.
“What about what I saw?” I say. “Just now? Why do you keep sneaking around and doing stuff I don’t know about?”
From the way her stare gets even sharper, I know she knows the rest of what I mean. She just plain lied to me to help Lexi get away, and it’s not reasonable for her to expect me to forget that.
Kezzer gets to her feet, moving kind of stiffly, so maybe she’s at least bruised. For an instant her face is so hard I almost step back. “I thought I heard something. Upstairs.”
“You—” Okay, I guess that changes things. As long as she’s telling the truth, which I can never count on. “You heard what?”
She hesitates, and brushes herself off in this half-assed way, not actually caring about the dirt and grass all over her. She hasn’t even been washing her hair much.
“Footsteps.” I guess my mouth falls open at that, because Kezzer half smiles. “Actually, I know I heard them. Somebody was walking right overhead. Maybe you can see why I’d want to investigate?”
A stranger, just bumbling around in our house, spitting on the floor and putting their feet up in those rooms we can’t even get to ourselves—it’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard. Total and complete outrage. And if it’s not a stranger?
That’s double-worse. Lexi, it’s Lexi, says the buzz in my head, but if Kezzer hasn’t already figured that out I’m sure as hell not going to be the one to tell her. Lexi’s found some way in that I don’t know about, and she’s here to steal Kezzer from me. I know Lexi didn’t agree with everything I did, but still, we were close for years. I trusted her. And now it’s like I see what was there all along, all the distortion and smudging and sweet-voiced teasing is torn away, and I get it. I was a fool to think Lexi is my friend.
She’s the enemy.
It’s never too late for revenge, Prince said. Right, right, right. Hey, maybe there’s even time for preemptive revenge, before Lexi manages to destroy everything I’ve fought so hard to create?
“Just because we can’t get upstairs,” Kezzer says, and it’s really hard for me to dial back in and hear her over all the ruckus my thoughts are making, “that doesn’t prove they can’t come down. Like, while we’re asleep? It’s creepy as shit.”
Right. “So what did you do? I mean—whoever it is—did they try to talk to you?”
She shakes her head. “I yelled up. Nobody answered.”
If she’s telling the truth for once, then I can deal with this as an explanation—but, God, she’s lied to me before. Because if Lexi saw her chance to get Kezzer alone, why wouldn’t she take it? All at once words are bubbling up into my mouth, jumping up and smacking on my teeth, and I’m not even trying to hold back. My heart is spewing lava.
“That’s what you want me to think!” I yell. Because I’m seeing it; the glitter and the specks are swarming into pictures, and I’m watching Lexi hiding up there, waiting in the dark, and Kezzer sneaking up the stairs to her whenever my back is turned. “You—I bet you’re lying. I bet you know exactly who it is, hiding in our house!”
I guess I can see how, to Kezzer, it might seem like all of this is coming out of nowhere. She looks so bewildered that for the sharpest little blurt of a moment I almost feel like I’m the one being an asshole. But then I get over it.
“Josh? I’m trying to tell you that we have a problem. You are not helping.”
“Well, what am I supposed to think? You already totally betrayed me by saying whatever you said to Lexi, and now—oh, Kezzer, how am I supposed to know you won’t do something even worse next time? I just want to be able to trust you!”
Maybe nothing I’m saying is true, maybe it’s all some crazy noise that slipped into me when I was with Prince, maybe I’m the one who’s being cruel—but I believe all of it, I see it, it’s all over my vision and my heart is beating out Lexi’s voice, and I can taste Lexi kissing Kezzer, like the kiss is jumping around in my spit. I’m trying really hard not to cry.
“Josh!” Kezzer says. And oh, that’s like it should be. If Kezzer sees I’m upset, she comes to me, always and forever, and she does now. She comes and wraps her arms around me and tries to squeeze the shaking out, and it helps, but not enough. “Okay, so I shouldn’t have lied to you. I’ll admit that part. Lexi—she has a real life out there. Don’t you see? She has the kind of family we never had. I couldn’t stand—but I’m sorry I wasn’t honest about it, baby, okay? Are we good now?”
No. “You let her climb the stairs. They’re you, Kezzer. Those stairs are made of who you are, and we both know that! The whole floor upstairs is you. And Lexi just started walking right up, and you have never let me in that way.”
Kezzer strokes my hair, and I nuzzle close. “You—try not to take this the wrong way, baby, please? But you’ve just been talking to Prince, and he messes with your head. It keeps getting worse.”
Is she actually trying to say the most infuriating thing imaginable? “Why do you keep making this be about Prince?” And then I’m shoving her away and screaming, and I didn’t plan to do it. I’m full of words and sounds and impulses that came from I don’t know where, but they still boil out. “It’s got nothing to do with him! You’re the one who fucked up, Kezzer, and you’re the one who has to take responsibility, and stop trying to pretend—that you can blame everything on—that Prince has got some kind of remote control he can use to jerk me around! It’s totally crazy!”
Tittering, musical and harsh. We have an audience. I don’t even look around, I’m so used to it by now, but I think Prince’s people are up in the trees, watching us and laughing. I can tell by the hike of Kezzer’s shoulders that she’s just noticed too.
“It’s got nothing to do with him?” Kezzer asks—flat and hard, but she’s raising her voice, obviously for their benefit. She has to know they’d hear her even if she whispered, but I guess she’s making some kind of point. “Yeah, except that I was trying to save Lexi from becoming one of his damned toys in this shithole.”
I’m so shocked I can barely speak. “Kezzer, you’re talking about our home.”
She actually hisses through her teeth. “We’re nowhere, Josh. It’s the void with some houses slapped on top of it. We’re so pathetic that we can’t even function in the same world as other people.”
“We don’t live in the same world as other people, Kezzer,” I say, and I’m really making an intense effort to stay calm, “because those are the same people who kept trying to crush us.” People like Lexi. I never used to think of her that way: as one of the bland, empty, evil ones, one of the people who use boring normalcy as a cover for how vicious they are inside, but now I see the reality I missed back then. “I got you out of there so they couldn’t keep hurting you.”
Kezzer stares at me, breathing hard, and then she shrugs. “I don’t think it matters where I am. You talk about wanting to trust me, but the real Ksenia—probably she’s what Lexi saw die. So what’s to trust? But just because I’m disposable, it doesn’t mean Lexi is.”
“Kezzer!” I say, but she’s turning on her heel—she’s turning her back on me—and stalking away over the shiny green lawn. And the giggling trills all around us, like some garbled mixture of a sitcom laugh track and a thousand manic birds.