The rest of the week is a flurry of possession and punishment. While I’m tasked with getting my hands on Grady’s supply, Wes takes care of dosing our marks. When I ask my new boyfriend-slash-accomplice how he intends to slip our victims the Dexid, he darkly jokes that the only thing he learned from those tony boarding school jerks was how to slip a girl a roofie undetected. Then he tells me not to worry about it and distracts me with inappropriate touching, which is fine by me. Truth is, though I should care how he does it, I don’t. For the first time in ages, I’m all in with a full house, and I want to win.
The little tease of spring weather has been replaced by yet another cold front and gray skies. I jog in place to keep warm as I wait for Grady outside his sixth period gym class. Ever since I’ve known him, the genius with zero athletic ability has found a way to avoid any sort of P. E. participation. Rumor is he’s got a deal with a kid in the attendance office that, in exchange for some hard-to-trace substances, Grady only needs to be present for roll call at the start of class and then he can go on his merry way. It sounds like an urban legend, but the more deeply I entrench myself in shady doings and unbelievable truths, the easier it is to believe anything about anybody.
Three minutes after the bell rings, Grady exits the athletic center and walks in my direction. “Where’s Heathcliff?” he asks as he approaches. “Trolling the moors?”
“Wes is not that moody,” I say with a chuckle. “We were having an off day when you saw us. Sorry I was a little intense about the Dexid and Josh.”
Grady shrugs. “Eh, you’re usually pretty okay.”
“Thanks,” I say. “But I think you might be in the minority with that opinion.”
Grady raises his eyebrows. “I don’t judge friends, Sarah,” he says.
And I feel like a royal schmuck. While I don’t know Grady super well, he was around a lot when I was dating Jamie, as we often hung out at Meat’s house. Unlike every other male jock at IHS—including Meat—Jamie has always been nice to Grady. So by association, I guess I’m okay in his book too. And while I’ve certainly never been mean to him, neither have I done enough by half to deserve his kindness. I kiss him on the cheek and smile as his skin flushes orange to match his hair.
He pulls a small vial with about a dozen little gold pills in it from his pocket. But as I reach for it, he snatches it back. “Before I hand this over, are you really sure you want it? I’ve told you I don’t know the full range of side effects. And what I’ve personally experienced wasn’t so nice.”
“Trust me,” I say. “I know what I’m doing.”
He grimaces. “If I had a nickel for every time I heard someone say that…”
“You still wouldn’t have as much money as you do from selling drugs,” I say. I slap a wad of cash into his empty hand and take the bottle of pills from the other. “I appreciate the concern, Grady. I truly do. But I promise I’ll be fine.”
He stuffs the money into his pocket and adjusts his taped glasses. “Make your boyfriend take it first, okay? So you’ll know not to if he drops dead.”
I laugh. “That’s friendly.”
Grady shrugs. “I don’t really care what happens to him. See you around, Sarah.” Then he turns and walks away. For all my glossing over Grady’s drug dealing, there’s a darkness to it that I never really considered. Grady sells drugs because he honestly doesn’t care about the people who take them. And why would he when they’ve done way worse to him over the years than not give a crap?
I curl my fingers around the bottle of Dexid. Things are going to get better for kids like Grady, I tell myself. I leave the athletic center feeling as though Wes and I truly are doing a public service.
I’ve scored ten pills off Grady. That night, we use five: two for Wes and two for me to add to the pill we get at the clinic. The last one is for Kiara.
I review our plan, treat it like a play from a playbook, repeat it until I know it by heart. The set up: drug Kiara, dose ourselves with extra pills to get even better control, find Kiara in Grand Central, follow her into her dream. Then for the main event: jump into her commuter body in the dream and wake up in her actual, flesh-and-blood body in real life. Control her, make her do what I want. And when I’m finished with her, exit her sleeping carcass and return to the train station.
Whether it’s the anticipation of a perfectly planned attack or the addition of yet another pill, I can’t say, but my body feels electric as I lie on the cot at the clinic, waiting for the Dexid to kick in.
Heat emanates from my skin.
Static crackles at my fingertips.
Electricity pulses beneath my eyelids as
they…
slide…
shut.
• • •
I come to in the station. Wes is already waiting for me, a smile that’s more dopey than dangerous plastered on his face. It matches mine. We come together behind a tottering Kiara and, hand in hand, we follow her into her dream.
It’s a gothic rave where thumping music meets weeping angels and gargoyled cathedral spires. Though I know her as a party girl and bully, Kiara’s super religious and overachieving tiger mom and professor dad have always seen their little straight-A student in the unblemished white that she wore at her first communion.
“I think this girl has some serious issues to work out,” I say as Wes leads me through the sweaty crowds to a pulpit where Kiara is dancing seductively with a priest.
“Ready?” he asks.
I nod, and he pulls me to him for one final intoxicating kiss. Then he shoves me backward
and I free-fall
into Kiara’s body.
<gasp>
That first gulp of air after you’ve become someone else is frantic. By the time you acknowledge that your whole being has just contracted into what seems like an infinitesimally tiny ball, it is already expanding again, birthing into the unfamiliar shape of someone other than you. In an instant, you must learn to see through their eyes, touch with their skin, and breathe with their lungs. I can only imagine that this breath is akin to that of a newborn baby, trying out this oxygen thing for the first time. It is desperate, painful, confusing, and, above all, terrifying, because what if it doesn’t work?
But then it does.
My gasps turn to even breathing, and it’s time to get down to business. I throw off Kiara’s covers and go straight for the bottle of Jack I remember she used to boast she kept in a shoebox at the back of her closet. The plan is to expose her for the heathen that she is. To get her so plastered that, when her parents find her in a less than saintly position, they send her away for conversion therapy or an exorcism. If I can find a diary that exposes some of her less-than-Christian acts, all the better. But as I rummage around for her stash, I come across something way more damning.
Hidden beneath a pile of Bible camp T-shirts is a legal-size metal box secured by a tiny diary lock. I grab a nail file from Kiara’s dresser and jimmy the lock open in no time. It strikes me that a girl on track to being named salutatorian should be smarter than to use such a flimsy lock, but when I see what’s inside, all other thoughts flee.
If there’s one place Kiara Taylor’s parents want their daughter to get into more than heaven, it’s Harvard. I never questioned Kiara’s good grades or Ivy League ambitions. Almost all the girls on my team are fierce competitors in sports and academics. But as I sit in her body on the floor of her closet and sort through paper after paper of stolen answer keys and essays written by other people, I realize what a long con she’s been playing.
There’s pre-calc homework forged by the mathletes, civics papers from the valedictorian. There’s even a poetry assignment written by the sophomore who kick-started our new lit magazine. And a sheet of paper I can only describe as a ledger matching every IHS student Kiara’s bullied into letting her cheat off them to the work they’ve done on her behalf. When did she graduate from taking kid’s lunch money to shaking them down for their smarts?
Instinctively, I grab her phone and hold it above the trove of incriminating evidence. But as my finger hovers over the camera icon, I pause. Judging from her ledger, Kiara’s been using our classmates for years. If I expose her, won’t I be damning them too?
The clock on her phone advances another minute. I have to make a decision. So I do as Kiara would.
I snap pictures of every bit of evidence there is. Then I upload everything that doesn’t specifically mention her accomplice-victims by name to her Instagram account under the post, “Let the punishment fit the crime.” Everything else, including the ledger, I e-mail to Wes, being sure to delete the sent e-mail so she can’t track his involvement. Then I write Kiara an e-mail from her own account to herself: Bring anyone else down with you, and we’ll post the rest.
I hit send and toss her phone onto her bed. I gather up all the papers and stuff them back in the metal box, careful to return it to its hiding place at the back of her closet. As I return to the open space of her bedroom, I catch sight of us in a mirror. Defiantly, I look directly at the gorgon whose head I’ve just lopped off.
I sit back on Kiara’s bed and wait to leave her body and return to her dream.
I wait.
And wait.
There’s no twinge of a seizure, no hint of an exit. I start to panic. Is it the extra Dexid that’s keeping me here, tethered to Kiara’s reality when I just want to get out? I get up and pace the room. What if her parents come in? What if I get stuck inside Kiara and can never escape? Would I have to be her forever? I kick myself for ignoring Grady’s warning, for my hubris in thinking I had everything figured out. I doubled down on a drug that I know absolutely nothing about. Scratch that. I know plenty about it, and none of it is good. How could I be so stupid as to take the drug that makes me conscious in unconsciousness, that allows me to body-snatch my classmates and ask for more, please? I have offended the gods, and my punishment is to be trapped in the body of a bully-hypocrite-cheater for the rest of my life.
My jaw locks, and my chest constricts. I try to calm myself with deep breaths, but my breathing is simply too erratic to get a lock on. Think, Sarah, think. Was there something that brought on the seizure when I was in Grady’s body? Anything I saw when Wes sent Gigi into an epileptic fit? Fear? Distress? Check to both, but I am still here. What about Gigi? What was I feeling when I began to shake out of her—
I stop pacing. I didn’t exit Gigi’s body the same way I left Grady’s. In Gigi’s dream-walk, I was mad. I fought my way out.
I turn and walk to the far end of Kiara’s room, gearing up for the self-inflicted violent act that will separate me from my host. Then, in one utterly graceless move, I hurl her figure at the wall, tripping on my way and knocking myself out of her body as her head crashes into the blush-colored sheetrock.
Whoosh.
Pop.
I am back in Kiara’s dream. Wes is hovering near me, keeping a solid distance between himself and the two Burners that are lurking on the dance floor. Grabbing his hand, we run from them, through the crowd and out of the church-cum-club into the street-lamped twilight of an eroding metropolis.
As it was in Gigi’s dream, the more distance we put between us and the dreamer, the less the Burners seem inclined to follow. When we are far enough away, I pull Wes down a deserted alley and shove him against a damp concrete wall. The rush of revenge—and getting away with it—turns me into a predator. Wes has no complaints.
We kiss and pant and fumble and grunt until waking separates us.