"This is the surprise, right?" The boy was about to faint from excitement.
Mommy nodded. A thin, almost unnoticeable, hint of a smile curved on her lips.
There was one last standing player in the field. Player number fourteen. The player seemed paralyzed by fear. He bent down and picked up the thing that had been bouncing inside the ball. Holding it, he had to stare at it for a while. He craned his head back and forth, inspecting what he was really looking at. It didn't make sense to him why such a thing was stuffed inside a ball. Who would do such a horrible thing?
The cameraman, although scared, approached the player slowly, trying to broadcast this terrible incident that would cling to the memory of the world later. Player number fourteen held up the thing to the camera.
"It's a..." the player said.
Whatever it was, it was trickling fresh blood.
The chubby boy in the crowd couldn’t hear what the player said. His mother handed him a binocular. The boy focused the binoculars at the player with the horrible thing in his hands.
Finally, he saw it. He saw what was in the ball.
A head.
A human head which had been stuffed inside the ball a few minutes ago.
"It's a kid's head!" the boy hailed.
Some of the crowd began to faint. The rest ran away like ducks, stepping on each other toward the exit door.
"Good boy." His mother patted him as she stood fixed in her place. It seemed as if people avoided them while they panicked and ran around them. "Now be an even goody-dooder and tell the crowd what's written on the head's forehead," she instructed her boy.
Shifting his angle, the boy saw the player, now shivering with his hands glued to the ball, showing it to the camera, eyes shaded with terror.
At this moment, the panic had reached an apocalyptic level, where the crowd stepped over each other out of fear and need to escape the stadium. Still, the player held the ball with trembling hands, showing the world on camera the written words on the head.
The boy smiled from ear to ear as he read it. To him, the scene was all beauty, and he was glad. After witnessing the dead girl with a grin in Oxford University last week, this was starting to become exciting. The boy's eyes glittered as they met his mother's nodding glasses. He hurled the binocular away, licked the lollipop one last time, and screamed from the top his fatty lungs, "You want to know what’s written on the forehead of the dead kid’s head?” he shouted while everyone was already escaping the place. “'Off with their heads!'”
Chapter 1
Alice's cell, Radcliffe Lunatic Asylum, Oxford
It's been six days since I last saw Professor Pillar. Six days since Fabiola, the White Queen, visited me in my cell and showed me that Jack Diamonds was actually Adam J. Dixon. Six days since the Cheshire Cat, possessing Ogier's soul, visited me in my cell and then pranced away, whistling a mad song about me.
Six impossible days of isolation, pretending none of last week's events ever happened.
When Waltraud asks me about Wonderland, I raise an eyebrow and tell her I don't know what she is talking about. When she mentions I wanted to save lives in the world outside, I reply, "How can I save lives when my own life needs saving?"
I don't need to wake up with amnesia to pretend I am insane. I don't need evidence to know that the Pillar, Cheshire, White Queen, the Duchess, and the whole Wonderland War are figments of a lonely girl's imagination. After the Cheshire's visit, the sanest thing to do is to admit insanity and give in to its consequences.
Even if I am not insane, and all of this did happen, I am better off believing it didn't. At least I am not giving Waltraud excuses to send me back to the torturous Mush Room anymore. Believe me, life without shock therapy is less painful.
I've marked each of the six days on the wall, among the dried blood of whoever suffered in this cell before me. Six perpendicular strokes, carved with my short nails as if I am the female version of Count of Monte Cristo, feeling clueless, betrayed, and imprisoned in a dungeon in a faraway island.
A shattered laugh escapes my lips when I stare at the tattoo on my arms:
I can't go back to yesterday because I was someone else then.
It leaves me wondering which yesterday the tattoo is talking about: me before my hallucinations of Pillar with a hookah in a VIP cell, or me before I killed my friends in a bus accident?
Occasionally, I run the tips of my fingers upon the tattoo. I do it gently and with care. I am afraid if I rub it too hard, a Wonderland Monster would answer my call.
I don't think you know what a Wonderland Monster can do to you. With all my pretending that none of last week's madness ever happened, one thing persists to feel so real to me; one thing never fails to scare me and give me nightmares.
The Cheshire Cat.
With no distinguishable face or identity, he frightens the very essence of me. I fear him so much that I need to pinch myself to make sure I am not possessed by him every once in a while. Had I not been scared of mirrors, I would have used them each morning to confirm the absence of his evil grin on my lips.
"You're insane, Alice," my Tiger Lily whispers behind me. She, who is supposed to be my one and only friend, has been mean to me lately. I wonder if they have done something to her when she was in Dr. Truckle's custody.
"Eye. En. Es. Aay. En. Eee." She snickers like an old toothless lady behind my back. "The Cheshire isn't real." Her tone gives me goose bumps. "You made him up, Alice. He is just an excuse for you to avoid facing the world outside. That's why you see the Cheshire's face in almost everyone you meet. You're simply afraid of people, Alice. Any psychologist knows that."
I don't turn around to face her. Usually, when she talks to me, it means I am in my highest moments of insanity. I bend my knees against my chest and I bury my head between them, hugging myself with my own arms. I close my eyes and decide to clap my hands over my ears until she stops talking.
"Nothing is real." Tiger Lily refuses to shut up. "Even Jack isn't real."
My hands stop halfway and my eyes spring open. A single sticky tear rolls down my cheek. I tremble as it glides down slowly. Then I catch it before it hits the ground. I stare at it wobbling in the palm of my hand. My tears are terrified of uh he unknown, the same way I am.
"I mean Adam," Lily teases. "If you killed Adam, then who is Jack but a figment of your imagination?"
Provoked, I turn back, only to find a harmless orange flower in pot near the crack in the wall. I am not even sure she was talking to me. Mentioning Jack triggered a bittersweet knot of pain inside of me. If there is anything I am certain of, it's that Jack Diamonds—true or imagination—is the only thing I wish is real.
Now that I was shown he was my boyfriend, I understand my previously unexplained strong feelings toward him. I don't want to resist my feelings because, in a world as mad as mine, they shine on me with rays of sanity. I don't even have these kinds of strong feelings toward my helpless mother or my two mocking sisters. Jack seems to be my only chance for family.
Lily is right, though. If Jack is Adam, the boyfriend I killed, he must be dead too.
A sudden pounding on my cell's door relieves me from the burden of thinking about Jack.