7 Souls (18 page)

This morning
, she thought again, incredulously. It was beyond real—the overcast sky, the crowds of students in front of the school, the cell-phone calls and blaring headphones and endless screeching of the younger children; Mary took it all in, through the haze of pain.

Scott Sanders was not in shape—that much was obvious to anyone—but Mary had never stopped to realize how much
it hurt
when he tried to exert himself. Back in eighth grade when Scott had just barely missed the school bus that was leaving for Chadwick’s famous year-end day trip, all the students had laughed, pointing out the windows at his diminishing figure as he tried, and failed, to catch up. Mary had laughed just as loudly as the rest of them. She remembered it vividly, staring through the bus’s safety glass window at Super-Dork Scott running pathetically after them, finally collapsing against a parked SUV and—for the grand comic finale that Scott always managed to orchestrate back then—setting off its car alarm, which made the entire eighth-grade Chadwick class applaud in unison. The bus drove away and left Scott on the sidewalk, his anguished red face vanishing into the streetscape behind them. Mary had thought it was hilarious.

Now, with her lungs burning like twin blowtorches, she didn’t see what was so funny.

Trick …?

Her own voice, in the back of her head. Unusually vivid; it didn’t sound like a memory at all. Mary didn’t know what had made Trick’s name pop into her head, but—

“Come on.”

Trick’s voice, Mary realized instantly. It was hard to hear; difficult to pick out in the crowd. “Let’s walk.”

“Walk?”

Mary’s own voice again—also distant.

I’m not remembering
, she realized suddenly.
I’m
hearing
that
.

That’s really me
.

Mary craned her—Scott’s—neck, squinting as she strained to see. It wasn’t easy. Scott’s short body was getting battered around by the thickening crowd of Chadwick students as Mary pressed forward, trying to catch a glimpse of herself. She’d seen Trick’s golden curls, just for a second, but then her view was blocked again.

She hadn’t intended to scream—not at first. But the moment she saw herself—saw freshly showered Mary Shayne in her darling little FCUK T-shirt and her billowing trench coat and her blown-out hair—she was overcome with a frenzied need to protect herself from everything that was coming.

“Mary!”
she screamed.

A clump of first graders in front of her turned toward her, their mouths and eyes wide open, like alarmed cartoon characters. As soon as she got her breath back, she screamed again.
“Mary! Mary!”

The crowd was moving now, surging closer. Somebody’s hand slapped Mary in the face as another student pin-wheeled around, startled. The view through the crowd on the sidewalk was wide and deep, flickering with movement. She realized she was moving again, feeling Scott’s muffin-top fat rolling up and down as she stumbled forward. She couldn’t see Patrick or herself through the rest of the crowd, when—

There. Eye contact—Mary Shayne’s bright blue eyes, looking right at her.

“Mary,
look out!”
she screamed.
“Look out, you’re in danger!”

Scott’s glasses tumbled from his face, dropping to the pavement—she heard their gold frames clattering and scraping against the cement. Blinded, she kept running through the blur.

But that’s me!
she thought desperately.
It’s still morning—I don’t have to do
any
of it! I’ve got time to get away
.

“Mary, for Christ’s sake
—” she screamed again. Her voice—Scott’s voice—was rasping so painfully that she had to start over.
“Mary, you’ve got to listen—you’re in serious danger—”

It was like slamming into a tollbooth gate at high speed. The pain was incredible as Mary’s chest—Scott’s chest—slammed into some kind of horizontal immovable object, like a padded bar of cement.

“Hey, assface!”

Pete Schocken’s voice, from right up close. Mary couldn’t see a thing, but she suddenly smelled spearmint gum.

“What the hell, man?”

Definitely Pete. Mary was astonished. For years, Mary had thought of Pete as a buzz risk—a boy not to be around when he’d had a couple too many trips to the keg, because a drunk Pete Schocken would always manage to make the World’s Most Inept Pass at one of the girls (okay, at her) before the evening was over. He was basically harmless and he never remembered any of it by Monday morning, but pushing his hands away while trying not to spill a plastic cup of Belvedere vodka onto someone’s kitchen floor was not how Mary liked to spend her time when she went out.

But Pete’s so nice
, she marveled. He had never seemed to have a mean bone in his body, as far back as she could remember. He was a teddy bear, a sweetheart, a boy who would always buy you another drink or call you a cab. Hearing him call anyone an assface—let alone her—was as shocking as hearing a nun say it.

“Mary,
please listen
,” she tried again, panting as she shouted some more and her throat burned. The football players were surrounding her, pressing in, and she couldn’t see a thing. She had to assume that Real Mary was still within earshot.
“You’ve got to get out of—
”

It was like getting struck by lightning—her vision flashed white and her ears popped as she was smacked, powerfully, in the face. Her eyes were stinging; she was now truly blind—the pain spread across the skin of her cheeks like flame through paper.

“Chill
out
, you goddamned freak!”

That’s Silly Billy
, she recognized distantly. Billy Nelson—another boy she’d never imagine raising a hand to hurt anybody—calling Scott Sanders a “goddamned freak,” his voice booming down like God yelling the Ten Commandments.

“Mary, run!” Mary screamed again.
“Please listen—you’ve got to—Ow!”

A fist collided with her collarbone, hard. She’d never stopped to think about how
hard
a boy could hit you if he was really trying, if there was nothing to hold him back. She lost her balance, tipping over backward as she kicked with Scott’s short legs and felt her feet slip. Real Mary still hadn’t responded—she seemed to be getting further away. Scott’s book bag slipped from her rounded shoulders and thumped to the ground, its contents spilling out. She landed against somebody’s crumpling legs, and the sidewalk was pressed against her cheek, rough and cold. Between somebody’s running socks, she could just make out the diminishing figures of Patrick and Real Mary, walking farther down Eighty-second Street.

“Mary, run!”
she screamed one final time. Real Mary didn’t pay any attention at all—she just kept walking away.

No, no
, Mary thought weakly as she rolled painfully up from the ground, trying to pick out individual voices from the yelling and laughing all around her.
Please, no more … I can’t take anymore
.

Her face was swimming in a sea of red—
Scott’s book bag
, she realized, wiping tears and dirt from her eyes and face, staring at the red fabric as she gasped for breath. They had stopped hitting her; that was the important part. It meant she could—

Mary froze in place, on all fours on the crowded sidewalk, staring down at the contents of Scott’s bag, which had corkscrewed out along the sidewalk. Shama’s physics test, and an iPod, and a stack of notebooks—

—and a roll of silver gaffer’s tape.

The spool of tape rolled lazily across the cement, circling like a dropped coin. Mary stared at it, mesmerized—in her memory, Joon squealed and twisted and panicked in the slashing, freezing rain, the silver tape over her anguished mouth, blocking her screams.

Inside the book bag, Mary finally saw what she’d been carrying, why the bag had felt so heavy. Coils of thick white nylon rope—yards and yards of it—were stuffed inside, nearly filling the bag.

It was Scott
, Mary thought dazedly.
Oh my God—it was Scott!

Was that even possible? Could Scott have killed her?

The stampede of students had somehow missed what had happened; they kept moving, legs and hands colliding with her as she stared into the bag. There was something else in there, something she didn’t recognize at all—a folded sheet of silver cloth. She had no idea what it was, or why Scott had it.

Was sweet little Scott Sanders a
murderer?

Another, even stranger possibility occurred to her right then—a new thought that made her feel a deep, arctic chill.

Have I come back as my own killer?

Was there some cult or religion in which that happened? The murder victim comes back as her own murderer? Mary didn’t know anything about cults or religions. It sounded more like
The Twilight Zone
than any kind of—what did you call it?—theology.

But I’m here
, she told herself, staring at the tape. She was still sitting on the sidewalk.
I’m here, and I’m Scott—and it looks like he killed me
.

The woozy feeling was coming over her in earnest. Bright lights, bright sky—it was all very bright.
Scott killed me
, she thought again, but somehow the idea seemed harmless, meaningless—she was drifting, she realized, losing her bearings, returning to whatever strange white void she’d first encountered ninety minutes ago, when she woke up in Scott’s bedroom.

“You okay, Sanders?” A distant voice—she couldn’t recognize it. It was a voice from another planet, coming from far, far away.

Is this it?
Mary wondered as the brightness from the chrome reflections and flecks of mica and the dazzling sky grew brighter and brighter. The whiteness engulfed her like the whitecaps of a coastal tide flooding a beach, like snow engulfing a landscape, covering all detail, blotting out all shapes and colors, washing the world away into an endlessly bright field of white.

2
JOON

B
LINDING WHITENESS, A FLASH
of lightning, silent and bright, like platinum fire; the roar of heavy rain and the freezing sting of cold water on her face. Mary blinked at the pain of the bright light, the afterimages fading as she shook the water from her eyes.

Oh my God, it
hurts—

She had been lying on the sidewalk, nursing the pain of her—Scott’s—bruised backside and thighs, and then, with all the smoothness of a particularly good DJ mix, she was somewhere else, with incredible pain running through her arms.

It was difficult to breathe; something was covering her face. She didn’t know what it was.

What the hell—?
Where am I?

Her eyes finally cleared and she looked around, gritting her teeth at the incredible agony in her arms. She was suspended, she finally realized; her arms were pulled straight upward, with the entire weight of her body hanging straight down. She struggled, wriggling in place, and felt herself swinging like a pendulum, which made the pain in her arms even worse.

Lightning flared again, a silent fire like a photographer’s flashgun, and Mary saw where she was.

She was outdoors, at night, in the middle of a rainstorm, surrounded by primeval forest, suspended from high above by ropes that cut into her wrists like barbed wire. Straining to tilt her head upward, black hair falling in her eyes, Mary saw the thick ropes stretching far overhead, converging in the blackness above.

Tipping her head downward, she felt a horrifying wave of vertigo and nausea come over her. She was high up in the air, suspended over a vast drop.

Far below, a wide, rushing stream was raging like a river, casting foaming spray around jagged rocks, running down a steep incline toward a tremendous black culvert beneath a spillway of moss-covered boulders. She got all that in one flash of lightning—just the bare outlines, lit up like an X-ray—but it was enough. The vertigo was overpowering; it reminded her of the feeling she’d gotten once, years ago, when she made the mistake of leaning as far as she could over the edge of the Brooklyn Bridge guardrail.

Straight ahead, she could just discern a pale haze of yellow light, and in front of it, a wide black mass.

Mary tried to scream—and couldn’t. Her mouth was sealed shut.

She heard herself making a desperate, high-pitched wail, like the crying of a wounded, trapped animal.

And suddenly, Mary realized where she was.

It’s changed
, she realized.
I’m somewhere else—I’m someone else
.

She had spent an hour—if that—as Scott Sanders at the beginning of that same Friday, the day she died. Just long enough to get to Chadwick and try to warn herself to
run
from all the horrible events to come.

But it hadn’t worked.

And, just as she’d discovered what Scott had in his book bag—something that barely began to explain the mystery of what had happened to her—she’d gone somewhere else. She’d become someone else.

And she knew where she was, of course. The slipping headband and the glitter of the sequined dress she was wearing only confirmed it.

I’m Joon
, she thought, incredulously.
I’m Joon, hanging from the tree. I’m about to die—I’m about to fall to my death
.

The black mass in front of her—the enormous shape looming like the evil witch’s gingerbread house in the fairy tale—was the deserted house; the farmhouse she’d driven to, with Amy, after panicking that Joon had been abducted at her surprise birthday party.

The glow behind the house was coming from the headlights of Patrick’s Mercedes.
Amy never turned the lights off
, Mary remembered.

She barely managed to avoid vomiting, realizing it would be fatal—there was nowhere for the vomit to
go
, with the wide piece of gaffer’s tape that was plastered over her mouth—as she felt the ropes vibrate and shake, and, a few feet above her, begin to fray and snap.

No, no, no—

Mary remembered vividly what had happened to Joon.

The raging stream far below was bubbling and roaring, miniature white-water rapids splashing the jagged, mossy rocks that were scattered between its banks.

I don’t understand
, Mary thought miserably. Her suffering seemed to go on endlessly, without any rhyme or reason. She moaned again and struggled with the ropes, and her movement made her begin to pivot in place, to twirl like a yo-yo on a string, to spin in circles—

(spinning in circles)

And, again, something jogged her memory; a sudden wave of déjà vu tickled against the extreme edge of her perception, maddeningly out of sight.

(
spinning in circles)

J
OON WAS SPINNING IN
circles—slow, dizzying and painful. She was twisting in the wind like a creaky weather vane, pirouetting clumsily on her ice skates in the middle of the Rockefeller Center ice rink. This was what it had come to: dangling herself out there for him like a shiny red ornament hanging off the eighty-foot Christmas tree.

It was her last resort, really: the scratch spin—the only skating move she’d ever done halfway decently despite six years of lessons forced on her by her father in the hopes that she’d become Korea’s answer to Kristi Yamaguchi. Her form was an absolute wreck, but she didn’t care. She didn’t even care if all the spinning made her puke, just as long as it got Trick’s attention away from Mary.

Her old, neglected skates were cutting off the circulation in her ankles. Sleet was pricking her nose and eyelids and soaking her red Prada coat, which she’d only worn to look Christmas-perfect for him. Her shivers were coming in thick, crashing waves now, but her skating coach had taught her to put on a stiff, sparkling smile no matter how cold, no matter how much it hurt. She could ignore it all—the ice on her eyelashes and the sharp pains in her feet. None of it mattered if Trick was watching her twirl like he’d promised.

But as she fell awkwardly out of the spin, she couldn’t find his face anywhere in the crowd. He had disappeared from the railing.

“Patrick?” she called out, sliding involuntarily forward. The next thing she knew, she’d fallen flat on her ass like a slapstick tramp in a choppy silent movie.

Hundreds of tourists watched her splatter on the ice in a pool of Prada, and they laughed with Christmas glee. It wasn’t even derisive laughter; watching people’s pratfalls was one of the joys of Rockefeller Center. Joon knew they were all laughing with her, but she couldn’t find the humor in anything right now. There was nothing funny about the massive group of guffawing middle-schoolers pointing at her as they waited for their turn to skate, or the pairs of giggling lovers in flowing white scarves and wool hats, gliding past her in the silver shimmer of the rink’s bright spotlights. Even the gilded statue of Prometheus that watched over the rink seemed to be laughing at her with his fiery Grecian eyes.
You’re humiliating yourself, Joon
, he seemed to be saying.
Just let the guy go. You’ve already lost him
.

But a deeper instinct took over: some strange little piece of Joon’s heart that apparently had no shame. She climbed back onto her skates, dusted the ice shavings off her black tights, sped off the ice and clomped her way onto the hard rubber of the waiting area, making a beeline for the locker room, every wobbly step on her three-inch stilts stinging her ankles. She knocked a tall hot chocolate onto a beefy frat boy’s yellow ski jacket as she elbowed her way through.

“Patrick? Trick? Are you in here?”

She stumbled past rows of benches and lockers, and scads of barefoot Chadwickites who’d just arrived for the traditional Christmas skate. It wasn’t even nine o’clock yet, so there was no way Trick had already abandoned her for another party (something he’d been doing more and more in the past few weeks). She peered over as many heads as she could manage, searching for his golden curls, and she finally spotted him, sitting on one of the benches, putting on his pristine Timberland work boots.

“Hey,” she called.

Trick flinched ever so slightly when he heard her voice. No one else would have noticed it, but Joon knew every one of his gestures almost as well as she knew her own. She knew what his tiny half-smile meant (he wants to fool around), and what his devastating grin meant (he hates your guts), and what that slight flinch in his shoulders meant. She’d seen it when she found him using in the bathroom of Chez Bernard after he’d promised to stay straight for their six-month anniversary dinner. He only flinched when he’d been caught.

“Hey,” he said, standing up and brushing the specks of snow off his tailored coat and hoodie.

“Where are you going?” Joon asked, trying not to sound like a lost, orphaned child.

“I feel like crap,” he said. “All that going around in circles—it’s just not something you do with a hangover.” He quickly pulled his BlackBerry and TAG Heuer out of the locker and snapped the watch on—the BlackBerry gave a notification beep, and he glanced at it before dropping it in his coat pocket. “I think I’m going to head home and sleep it off.”

Joon’s eyes followed the BlackBerry into his pocket, and then she watched him avoid her eyes as he slammed the locker shut.

“You’re lying,” she said.

“What?” He laughed. “What are you talking about?”

“You’re lying,” she repeated. “Where are you really going?”

“Oh, Joonie, not again. Please.” He gave her that pitiful
Girl, Interrupted
look, like she belonged in a mental ward with Angelina and Winona. “I thought we were past this shit.”

“What shit?”

“The paranoia shit. You promised you’d stop.”

“I’m
not
being paranoid,” she snapped. She knew it only made her sound crazier, but she couldn’t help it. She couldn’t.

Patrick threw up his hands like he was being mugged by a raving psychopath. “O-
kay
. Jesus. You’re not being paranoid. Cool. I just need to get home and get some sleep, okay? I’ve got a car outside, so I’m going to run, all right?”

“Let me see your phone.”

Trick raised his eyebrows. “Excuse me?”

“Your phone. You just got a text. Who texted you?”

“My
driver
. I just told you, he’s waiting for me outside. Jesus, Joonie, just call your shrink, all right? Seriously, I’m begging you.” He squeezed her shoulders and gave her a peck on the forehead.
“Bye.”

“Where’s Mary, Trick?”

His shoulders flinched again. She was absolutely sure of it. “Mary who?” he said. “Mary Shayne?”

Joon shook her head, disgusted by his ridiculous answer. “Yes.” She laughed bitterly. “Mary
Shayne
. My
good friend
Mary Shayne. The one you’ve been tending to every
fifteen
minutes tonight to make sure she doesn’t die of the
adorable sniffles! That
Mary Shayne!”

“Stop.” Trick brought his voice down to a whisper as tourists began to stare. “What the hell is the matter with you? I was trying to be nice to your friend. She’s got a cold, and I was trying to be nice.”

“Nice is
one time
, Trick! ‘Hey, you look a little under the weather, Mary. You feeling okay?’
That’s
nice. You were
waiting
on her hand and foot! Every time you were supposed to be skating with me, you were buying her another freaking hot chocolate!”

“I gave her the
rest
of my hot chocolate.
Half
of one
already-purchased
hot chocolate. She looked like she was dying from the freaking cold.”

“Well, what if
I
was dying from the cold, Trick? What if
I
was dying out there too? Which one of us would you save? Who would you rescue with your precious half a hot chocolate?”

“God, will you stop with that ridiculous game already? I’d save you, Joon, okay? You get the hot chocolate, one hundred percent.”

“You’re such a goddamned
liar!
You’re a
liar
and you know it!”

The locker room went silent. Trick looked altogether mortified, and Joon didn’t care in the least.

“Joonie,” he said quietly. “You just need to take your meds, all right? Just take your meds.”

He gave her one last kiss on the cheek and then rushed toward the exit. She called out to him again.

“Patrick—!”

“What?” He stopped briefly at the doorway.

“Did you even see my scratch spin?”

“Your what?”

“My spin … on the ice … you said you’d watch. Did you even see it?”

“Of course I did,” he said. “It was perfect, Joonie. Really. Nine point five from the German judges.”

He raised his hand for a pathetic wave goodbye, and then he disappeared into the crowd like he was running from a ticking time bomb. Joon fell back against the lockers, staring down helplessly at the gray sludge on the floor. She suddenly felt exhausted. Her head was throbbing and so were her ankles.

Only a few seconds passed before Amy came clomping into the locker room, towering awkwardly on her rented white skates and panting desperately.

“Have you seen Mary?” she asked, trying in vain to catch her breath. Her eyes darted around the room.

“No,” Joon said. “Isn’t she out there skating?”

“I
thought
she was,” Amy heaved. She slapped her hands on her sides.
“Damn
it. She promised she’d skate with me. She
promised
. Jen Morris said she just saw her leave.”

“What?” Joon felt the acid in her stomach rising up to her throat.

“Mary told Jen she was feeling sick,” Amy said, “so she left. Just now. Can you believe that? She just walked out. Why did she tell Jen, why didn’t she tell
me?
She didn’t even tell you, did she? God, do you think she bothered to tell
anyone
else she was leaving?”

Joon’s mouth went dry. Her heart began to race uncomfortably like a scampering bug in her chest. She was sure Mary had told someone else she was leaving. And she knew exactly who that person was.