Sunday morning marked the end of our lovers’ tryst. His parents would be home by noon, but it was my sister who arrived first, breathless and fresh from a predawn flight across the desert. We were forced to leave our cocoon of sheets and limbs and flesh just to silence her insistent pounding at the door.
“Mom’s looking for you,” Olivia announced, without preamble. “She’s so freaked she wants to call the police. And Dad says this time you’re going to juvenile hall.”
Regretfully, I turned to Ben. “I have to go.”
He sighed sleepily, smelling like me. “Will you get in trouble?”
I smiled. “It was worth it.”
“Come on! I am not going to juvi with you,” Olivia said, then shuddered delicately. “They make you wear paper shoes.”
We fled as fast as our limbs would carry us, into the abyss of darkness, across the swath of hard desert earth I knew as intimately as the vein at my wrist…or Ben’s. Olivia was younger than me, and at the time quicker too. I can still see her flying through the night, golden hair lit by the moon’s eye, streaming behind her like ribbons cutting wind. Even at thirteen she’d been beautiful, the woman inside her already outgrowing the child. I, though older, still looked like a girl.
The man came from nowhere, hurtling from the darkness like a dust devil, catching Olivia from the side. She didn’t even have time to scream before she struck the boulders and tumbleweeds of the desert floor, pinned helplessly beneath the weight of her stronger adversary. Then there were only sounds of struggle. Clothing torn. Flesh beaten. Anguished cries for mercy.
A voice, twisted and irrational, snaked up from my subconscious. You deserved what happened that night.
Even as I groaned in my sleep, shaking my head, I knew I did. Olivia was only there because of me. Those meaty fists rained down on her body and face, knuckles reporting like shots as they made contact with her soft flesh, pummeling fragile bone. And because it was my fault, I reacted the same way again.
“Run!” I screamed, latching onto the man from behind. I didn’t have the skills then that I did now. I didn’t have the strength to overpower a man of any size, and nothing to enable me to stand up to a human predator. Olivia ran, and even after I’d lost sight of her I could still hear her feet crunching over gravel and rock, her sobs streaming, like her hair, behind her. Then I heard nothing at all.
But that was then.
“I should’ve killed you the first time,” said the man I now knew as Joaquin. I felt my eyes open—eyes like Rena’s, there but not—and I stared into a face as cruel as I remembered. Thin lips wrapped around a full set of evenly spaced teeth; a smile for me, I realized, as the smell of rancid honey spilled out of his mouth. A five o’clock shadow, too perfect and precise to have been by accident, studded his cheeks and chin, and despite his position, looming over me, not a hair on his head was out of place. It was slicked back, tight and sleek, the individual lines from the teeth of his comb clear in the meager moonlight.
“No,” I managed, before his fingertips dug into my windpipe, strangling me again. His other hand ricocheted across my face, whipping it to the right. On the returning backhand, I felt my nose collapse. How had I ever forgotten that sound?
“Oh, yes,” he replied, arching into me, mimicking orgasm, writhing above me like a rattler. “Yes, yes, yes.”
I head-butted him, causing him to jerk back, his face registering surprise as blood began to seep from his nose. I hadn’t done that the first time. He slapped me again, but it was too late. A new thought had already burrowed into my mind.
“I don’t have to be this again. I don’t have to do this again.” And I shifted my hips, forcing space between us, and managed to free a leg long enough to ram a knee into his ribs.
“Oh, but you do,” he said, and he planted himself widely over me, like a Greco-Roman wrestler, doubling his weight on top of mine.
I almost gave in. I felt my lungs creaking with need for air, felt his hands fumbling between my legs, but my training and my will kept me struggling. “No…I’m not that girl anymore. I’m the Archer.”
“Yes,” he snarled, face leering into mine, “I could tell by your stiletto.”
I blinked, then felt a smile spread over my broken face. “I’m the Archer…and this is my dream.”
“But we can reach you in your dreams,” he said, grinding into me again. “I can fuck you in your dreams.”
“No,” I said, struggling. “I don’t want this.”
“Fight all you want, but you can’t change who you are…who I’ve helped you become.”
“I’m not like him!”
“Oh, look in the mirror, dear girl,” he said, giving me a sly smile. “You’re exactly like him.”
There was a rustling from behind us, and Joaquin looked behind him, then jerked his head back to look at me. “Fuck,” he said, and disappeared.
And feeling lighter, the weight of both his body and sleep being yanked from me, I really opened my eyes.
The blankets were tangled around my feet, sheets soaked in the outline of my body, and as I sat up I immediately saw the one thing that hadn’t been in the room before; the item that had called me from my sleeping state. A newspaper had been slipped under my door, the sound somehow sneaking through the web of my not-dream. I rose, left it lying on the floor, and opened the door to peer into the hallway. No one was there.
Running a hand through my hair I noted my nose felt tender, though not broken, and my throat was raw, and probably red. But I bent to retrieve the paper, silently thanking whoever had used it to chase away my demons…until I saw the lead article.
“Oh, my God,” I said, and the words from my dream raced again through my head. You’re exactly like him. Slowly, I sank to the side of the bed. Oh, my God, I thought again. Maybe he was right. Maybe they all were right.
The article was brief, a dispassionate assemblage of facts and figures; time of death, the age of the victim—God, only seventeen—what officials thought had happened. I read over it half a dozen times, trying to reconcile the memory of my confrontation with Ajax with the words appearing on the page. A meaningless and random attack, it reported, by what was, most likely, a gang of teens. One of whom had a blade. The statement from the girl’s mother was no more than a single sentence, but it summed up the only real known fact: “My daughter is gone, and my life will never be the same.”
So maybe they were right.
I knew this was what whomever had slid the newspaper under the door wanted me to feel. It was spiteful and obvious, yet it still made me want to bury my head in my hands and never look up. I had failed this girl. I’d put her in danger, just like Olivia, and they’d both paid the price with their lives. So maybe they were right. I was exactly like him.
I was about to toss the paper aside when another column caught my eye. I was holding the whole of the Metro section, the bulk of the day’s bad news in my hands, and today it featured a story of an early morning shooting, a love triangle gone wrong. A woman named Karen was shot by her husband as she tried to leave their apartment. Moments later one Mark Davis had turned the gun on himself.
I closed my eyes, and for a moment I didn’t even breathe. I just sat there, chaos swirling inside me like some nauseating psychedelic drug. The store clerk had been an accident, an innocent I’d never meant to injure. But this. Ajax had nothing to do with the dissolution of this marriage, these lives. This was all me. I had fired up my new powers and blasted through the walls of Karen and Mark Davis’s lives.
I managed to stumble into the bathroom, and splashed cold water onto my face over and over, until I gasped, and realized I was crying. Leaning heavily on the sink, I lifted my head to face the mirror. Olivia’s lovely face, with my haunted eyes.