“I told you, I’m not upset about Clint. Honestly. I’ve just got a really bad headache right now. I don’t know why.”
“I think I’ve got some aspirin in my locker. I can get you some after school if you want.”
Anna nodded with her head still on the table. “That’d be great, thanks. What time is it?”
Jaime glanced back at the oversized clock above the library’s main desk. “Not quite a quarter past.”
Anna groaned and then sat up with her arms draped over her head as she arched her back over the edge of the seat. “This day’s dragging on forever.”
Jaime tapped her pencil on her book and looked like she was about to say something, but then decided not to. She set her chin on her hand and stared off at nothing.
“What?” asked Anna. Jaime looked surprised, as if she didn’t know what Anna was asking about. “You were about to say something. What was it?”
“It’s just that, well, I guess I just want to know why you do it. Why do you keep making the same mistake over and over again? You and Cunt, I mean Clit, I mean Clint,” She smirked at her own joke. “You guys are a bad match.”
“I guess I just hope he’ll change; that the next time it’ll be different.”
“You know what the definition of insanity is, right? Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting something to change.”
“Then call me crazy, I guess,” said Anna. “Maybe I’ll just take up drinking to calm me down.”
Jaime rolled her eyes. “Alcohol’s not the solution.”
“Chemically speaking, any alcoholic beverage is a solution since the alcohol is mixed up with other stuff.”
“Well shit,” said Jaime as she started to scribble numbers onto her book’s cover. “Break out the Boone’s Farm then. Time to get the party started.” They both laughed before Jaime mocked her friend. “You’re such a nerd, ‘Chemically speaking, blah, blah, blah.’”
“It’s true,” said Anna. “What are you writing?” She leaned over the table to look at Jaime’s book.
Jaime looked down at her scrawling.
3.141592653
“Is that pi?”
“Yeah. We were supposed to memorize ten digits of it for Mr. Trager for pi day.”
Anna settled back in her chair and snickered. “Sure, for the test this morning. Why are you still writing it?”
Jaime paused for just a moment. “I don’t know. There’s something calming about it. Is that crazy?”
“A little bit, yeah.”
Anna watched Jaime write the sequence over and over, oddly transfixed. Then Jaime wrote the final digit as a 4 instead of a 3 in one line. “You got that one wrong.”
Jaime didn’t stop writing and didn’t look up. “There’s no such thing as a perfect circle. There’s chaos in all of it.” Jaime looked up at the ceiling and then at the window before she asked, “Do you hear that?”
“What?” Anna thought her friend’s statement carried an undercurrent of malice. Then she looked down at her own book and saw that she was continuing to draw spirals in the spot where Clint’s initials used to be. Her marking had worn well past the paper cover and was digging into the book itself. She dropped the pen and it spun in a circle on the table as if the tip was tied down, with the other end rolling awkwardly around.
Anna heard the chatter of teeth and put her hand over her lower jaw. The noise seemed to be coming from her own head, as if she were shivering but didn’t know it. Her jaw wasn’t moving, but the chatter continued.
“It’s time,” said Jaime. “It’s starting over again.”
“I know.” Anna stood up and walked to the window that looked out onto the field. She put her right hand on the glass, her fingers splayed wide, and savored the cold sensation. Dogs howled in the distance and Anna took her hand away, letting her fingertips linger for a moment.
The chatter continued.
“How many times have we done this?” asked Jaime.
Anna knew exactly what she meant, but understood none of it at the same time. It was as if she had wandered into a dream where she was certain everything made sense, but could never have explained it if asked to. She watched Clint on the field and wondered if he would die immediately, or if they would let him live this time.
“Too many to count,” said Anna. She looked at the large white clock on the wall above the center desk in the library.
3:14
Her hands were shaking.
The chatter stopped.
“What’s going on?” Jaime stood up, and her pencil stayed upright as if a ghost were holding it in place. They both stared at it and the pencil slowly tilted. It finally set down as if time around them was moving at a different pace than they were.
“Anna?” said Jaime as she stared out the window. A thick fog was descending over the field, rolling across their view as if a wave of water had broken free and was about to wash away the students. It sparkled with green light and billowed over the lush grass. It was beautiful to watch as the puffs of fog spread across the horizon. The bright blue sky was eaten away, like vestiges of white paper succumbing to flame. “We’re lost.”
Anna looked at her friend and nodded. “I know why.”
Jaime rushed around the table to stand beside her. Anna felt dizzy and confused. “Why?” asked Jaime. “Tell me what you know.”
“I forgot all of it, but now I understand.” Anna looked out the window and watched as the gym students were enveloped in the thick fog. “It’s like I heard him, or understood him, just for a minute.”
“Heard who?”
“The one the kids call The Skeleton Man. He hates the name. He thinks giving something a name is the first attempt to control it.”
“What the fuck is going on? Why do I feel like I’ve done this before? What’s happening?” asked Jaime.
“He thinks we’re too old.” She put her hand back on the window and looked across the field at the Middle School that was quickly disappearing amid the haze. “He wants the children. He thinks we already know how to hate, and he only wants the innocent ones.”
“Anna, you’re scaring me.”
Anna watched the shapes in the fog advance. The silhouettes of children ran across the field from their school, and the barking of dogs grew louder. Soon, the soccer players were attacked and chaos erupted in the library. Teachers and students rushed to the window and time returned to normal as everyone panicked.
Jaime moved closer to Anna and ignored the massacre outside. “Why are we doing it again? Why do I know what’s going to happen? I’ve never felt this way before.”
“He checked on us this time,” said Anna.
“What do you mean?”
The librarian yelled for everyone to get away from the window after an explosion of green light shook the walls. One of the students, a sophomore boy whose name Anna never learned, was stuck inside of the window and couldn’t move away. His face had been pressed against the glass when the explosion occurred, and now his head was hanging halfway outside. The glass wasn’t broken, but the boy’s head was on the other side of it, as if he’d passed through a pane of water instead of glass. Anna saw the boy’s eyes search frantically around him before he tried to jerk back. The movement caused his skin, which was fused to the glass, to rip. Blood coursed down the window on both sides as the other students screamed.
Jaime and Anna ignored the bloody scene; they’d seen it countless times before. Jaime pulled Anna between two book shelves, away from the screaming mass, to speak in private. “What do you mean he checked on us?”
“I don’t know, I can’t explain how I know. I’m not sure what’s going on. I just, for a minute, I could hear him in my head. I knew his thoughts. He’s looking for a girl he lost. She was an innocent, and he needs her to help him stop this from happening again.”