Past Lives

“We cannot give into fear!” 

In the aftermath of Sydney’s disappearance, controversy erupted. Parents were looking for someone to blame, but the school was not going to be the scapegoat. The administration dug their heels in— they’d done everything by the book, trying to prevent this. In order to demonstrate such inalienable truths, they did what all schools do in the face of unspeakable horror— they called an assembly.

“The best we can do,” Principal Dorsey said, “is continue to live our lives. These monsters want us to be terrified, to cower in the corners. We will not give them the satisfaction.”

She pumped her fist. Clearly, she was expecting a reaction, but the gym was silent. Kids stared at her, slouching across the bleachers.

The principal cleared her throat and continued, “That being said, we will be instituting additional safety measures before our annual Snowflake Dance. . .”

The day before Christmas break, our teacher wheeled the TV into the classroom and put on a colorized edition of It’s a Wonderful Life. It scored the background of our little party. The tables were decorated with green tablecloths, store-bought cupcakes and Play-Doh textured cookies. I spent the day not in assembly at my desk, pulling one to pieces in my hand. I wasn’t hungry. 

Outside of school, Sydney’s face watched me from lampposts, bulletin boards, inside Dunkin’ Donuts and the hairdresser. Have You Seen Me? — as if I’d been seeing anything but her, smiling from School Picture Day in her ugly teal blouse. 

“This. . . senseless tragedy. . .” The principal’s voice began to waver towards the end of her speech. “It is our most difficult task as Christians, to grapple with a world that is touched by God’s grace while the innocent suffer. But, my children. . . this violence has no root. Wherever your friend has gone, you cannot blame yourselves. The past does not branch like a river. It is a staircase straight to God’s domain. All we can do is move forward and pray. Please, with me—”

Several hundred young voices rose in a quavering monotone.

“God, grant me the Serenity

to accept the things I cannot change. . .

Courage to change the things I can,

and Wisdom to know the difference.”

It was a beautiful moment, and a shame that I couldn’t share in it. Because I knew where the missing girl had gone, and it was all my fault. 

Sydney was dead, and I had touched the body— her bony shoulder rolling under my hand, Eris behind me, giggling cold puffs of air down my neck. 

“You just couldn’t wait to see me again, could you?”

Awareness came rushing to me, and I stumbled backwards, ass first on the sheet rock. Gravity brought Sydney’s face straight down, smacked against the hard ground. Her pale blue fingers flopped over the rocks.

The river smelled rank– of stagnant vegetation and leftover body odor. Before the industrial gray water was its shriveled banks, frosty loads of old driftwood, swampy run-off now silver. 

Eris circled Sydney’s corpse, kicking away an empty Arizona can. It skittered down to the water, scoring the note of annoyance that appeared on her face. She was dressed plainly, by Eris standards, in black jeans and a thick sweatshirt, hood pulled up. She was dressed like me. 

Behind her was the cattails and blown-over hay, brittle yellow the same color as Sydney’s hair. Eris toed the corpse with her boot and looked at me. 

The sharp rocks were cutting into my palms. Plastic bags crinkled, caught on the swishy branches. I swallowed, pulled painfully like a puppet up to my feet.

“They always break right at the end. . .” Eris murmured, though the humor was gone from her face. She scooped Sydney up with both arms, for a moment unbearably tender. The body left behind a trail of blood, an acidic smell that must’ve been urine. I stared at the puddle she left behind because I couldn’t bear to look into her dead eyes.

Eris readjusted her grip, slung Sydney over her shoulder and stepped straight over the downed wire fence towards the water.

I turned away and stared at the train tracks instead. On the graffitied No Trespassing sign, two crows landed, flapping their black wings. The wind had paused; even the roaring river seemed muted. Thin flakes were spat from the sky, freezing on my cheeks.

I winced when I heard the splash, but I didn’t turn to look. Rocks clinked against one another under Eris’s heels. The birds flew off. 

I asked, “What are you?” 

“Whatever do you mean?”

“You’re not human,” I said. “What are you?”

I could hear Eris grin, the sticky sound of lips pulled back from teeth. “It took you long enough, my love.”

I know.

“But I can spell it out.” She came closer and closer, humming an improvised rhythm. “I’m a V, and an A, and an M-P-I-R—”

She hooked her arm over my shoulders.

I said, “Oh.”

“Well, I never loved you for your big brain.” She kissed my cheek.

Something wet smeared against my face, and when I pulled my fingers back they were red. 

“Wh— wa-wait—” I whirled around. 

Eris was licking the back of her hand, her black lips slick with blood. “What?”

“How did you get Sydney to come here? To get everyone to say those things?”

“I hypnotized them. Duh.” She grinned and finally I could see her teeth unfurled, those long thin canines. 

“Ah.”

My hands were shaking, though I tried to stop them. Eris rushed forward and laid soft hands on my shoulders.

“You mustn’t worry, my night sky. I would never do such a thing to you.”

“Why me?” I couldn’t help it— the words flew from my lips, the question that had weighed on my mind for so long.

“Oh, my love.” Eris reached out, pressed my forehead with the tip of her thumb. “I’ll show you.” 

Pain lanced out from her touch, ice water leaking from my brain down to my toes. Behind Eris, the trees bloomed in doubles, triples, swaying like the moon in parallax. Eris herself, though, remained one. 

When I looked down, it was like looking through a cracked mirror. Half a dozen ghostly arms framed mine like a string of paper dolls— some identical, but most not. When I moved, they followed in seconds out of sync. Some folded in and out of each other, crossing strands. My multiple bodies returned to staring forward, into Eris’s sparkling eyes. 

Panic began to bloom inside of us, but we were kept from fleeing through the power of Eris’s cold, paralyzing touch. She was grinning, but the corner of her eyes drooped in unparalleled fondness. 

“I’ve followed you through centuries, dear Ophelia,” she said. “Do you remember me now?”

“No,” we said. Our voices were delayed, too, like stones skipping a lake’s surface. No, no, nie. . .

“Then, I’ll tell you,” Eris said. “We were lovers in your first life. You were a poor farmer’s daughter, and I was the only child of a dead witch.”

Our eyes flickered away from her, distracted by a vision. Slipping through the brush was a young lady— me, us. Her soft leather shoes left no dents in the frozen cattail stalks. Her red dress swept the swamp, but broke no ice. Even in the stormy light, the white veil shone like light off a prism. When she fell to the ground, our side throbbed.

“One night, I snuck into a noble’s palace, pretending to be a lady of high stature. But I was found out. The so-called holy men— they looked the other way, let me be raped and murdered. But I did not die.”

Ophelia pulled herself up. Sharp nettles bit into her hands, hands calloused from years and years of work, and her face was contorted— in fear? In pain?

“I became a revenant, and sought my revenge. You were the only one who didn’t forsake me. So we swore under the light of the moon. I would make you like me, and we would be together forever.”

To the side, Ophelia was speaking to something long gone, her hands held up to the empty air. Looking at her. . . our round face, apple cheeks, her tall and strange adult body that we never had. She was nothing like us.

“But we were found out, betrayed. The men— they took my dear Ophelia far away from me. They crept in the daylight, stabbed me in my bed. I was almost dead. When at last I regained my strength and returned to her. . .”

Ophelia lifted her skirts and headed towards the river. Reeds brushed our bare legs. She stepped into the cold water, undid her veil so that honey-brown hair flowed unfettered down her back. Numbness went up to our ankles, then our thighs. She skimmed the water with her fingertips.

“. . . she’d already made her decision.”

We gasped, brackish water swirling up our throat. Only when Eris lifted her hand could I react. I hit the ground on my knees, thumping my chest, but the water had receded with the vision. 

“Eris . . .”

“Hush now.” She knelt down next to me, laid a hand on my quivering back. “Death wasn’t such a difficult obstacle. Your soul was incomplete without me, so you always came back.”

“O. . . kay. . .” My voice shook. “Then, why aren’t we . . . already vampires together?”

“It’s been a long hard road, Ophelia,” Eris said. “Though I’ve been pursuing you for so long, you’re always making the same mistake.”

“What do you mean?” I raised my face.

Eris flicked my forehead.

Knocked back, we were bombarded with a blooming flower of pain— of blade, of rope, of water. Eris leaned over us on a canopy bed, crying with hands around our open neck. Slipping down, bubbling. The ground, growing closer. A hayloft covered in blood. 

It was too much; we screamed, falling back, clawing at our eyes. 

“Before I could fulfill my promise,” Eris said, her voice hard, “you kept on killing yourself.”

“S-sorry. . .”

Eris wrapped a hand around my arm. With a tug, we were standing. She hugged me to her, tight enough that I was forced to stop shaking. I let out a chilly breath. Her chest was soft against my cheek. She smelled like dryer sheets and blood. 

“I will never leave you alone,” Eris said. “I do not care what form you may take. No matter how ugly, how small and sad. This time, I’ve started early. By the solstice, our spirits will be permanently intertwined.” 

I returned the hug. My fingers weaved together against her back. “What’ll happen to me?”

Underneath us, the snow was starting to stick. Thick flakes clung to the black rocks.

“To most,” Eris said, “it’ll be as if you died.” 

My imagination could conjure the thought easily. I saw my funeral; my scrawny coffin borne by a procession of aunts and uncles. I saw the purple flowers, the canopy they would put up to block out the snow. My gaping, frozen grave. A row of distant family, of teachers I’d barely spoken to, of classmates who’d ignored me. And Dad. . . Dad standing off to the side in his ill-fitting suit, tissues raining down at his feet. 

“But after that first night, I would set you free. We’d feed together. And then, we can do whatever we want. We can have the world.”

The obituary would certainly go with a photo from before I dyed my hair, and it would say shit like: another angel has entered heaven today. I would be like Eleanor, the pretty dead girl in tulle. They’d put me in red lipstick and heels and stuff me in a box, where they wouldn’t have to see me ever again.

But at some point, Dad would have to clean my room. Beneath the piles of dirty laundry, the sticky ice cream cartons, the stacks of notebooks written in angry red Sharpie, he would find the razors, the notes I’d penned as practice— reading them there in his dead daughter’s room, his dead daughter who never had a chance. Who never had a choice in her whole life. 

In the soft silence the snowfall left behind, Eris leaned forward. I opened my mouth, let the gates fall, so that she could kiss me. But in my head, I was already gone, watching dominoes fall beyond the scope of my tiny life.

I saw a sea of candles across the Circle, like I was someone loved like Chelsea or Sydney. I saw lines of old ladies praying for my soul, rosary beads clacking. I saw free donuts after the memorial, a swarm of small children with no clue, gnashing teeth red and sticky, parents petting their hair, sighing in relief that the dead kid wasn’t theirs.

But I would not be dead. I could never be so lucky.

When Eris pulled back, my lips now slick in a way I didn’t want to consider, I told her, “I want to go home.”

Her eyes were pinned to my face. They were so close I could see the little flecks of darker color within them, the way her pupils swelled when she stared at me. She reached up, pinned my lower lip between her fingers. My gums stretched with the pressure.

“I’m still hungry,” she said. 

I couldn’t speak, couldn’t do anything but lower my eyes. I was so light-headed, for a moment I thought the world was glowing. But it was just the snow.

“I can walk.”

Eris scoffed. “Go then,” she said. “I’ll see you tonight.”

I was being ungrateful. She’d done everything, all of this, for me. But I couldn’t feel glad. All I wanted was to disappear.

Later, the movie at the Christmas party would tell me that I shouldn’t want to go. That everyone’s lives made the world worthwhile, and my disappearance would leave a gaping hole in the fabric of an angel’s wings— or something. I hadn’t exactly been paying attention. 

But on the walk home, all I thought of was dying, over and over again. It was like the snow clinging to the streets. Inch by inch, it grew in power, weighing down tree branches until they snapped, freezing critical power lines, blocking all escape routes. Doors were shut good, waiting out the worst of it as night coated the streets. Buried in Eris’s hoodie, my feet didn’t take me home.

The tree was lit in front of City Hall, a great blur of gold in my foggy eyes. The storefronts were decorated in soggy garlands, flashing neon sale signs over Santa posters. What a waste, I thought. Dad had already gone through so much scrimping to get me presents but I wasn’t even going to make it to Christmas.

There was a pamphlet on the sidewalk, under a streetlight wrapped in garland, that I smeared with my foot. It urged me to get right with G-d soon, because Judgment Day was the 21st— and I realized that maybe none of us would.

I stopped behind the dog park, craning my head over a familiar picket fence. The sky was solid blue-gray, and the trees over it looked like cuts from dark paper. Glimmering in the snow crystals was the halo of light from Diana’s room. My heart ached, and for a moment the cold suddenly struck me— blood rushing to my head, damp sinking down in my shoulders, the itch across my collarbone. 

I stood in my dark hoodie and dour demeanor, gawking, wondering what I could possibly want from her. 

I sat underneath the curly slide, my spine bowed into a crescent moon. The snow couldn’t reach me there, but outside it grew to be feet deep, luminescent in the darkness. The world looked strange and alien, untouched by humanity. The peaks of houses and fire hydrants shivered underneath their new blankets. The snow itself was the heavy kind, only good for weighing down shovels.

The wood chips were frozen, and so was the dirt underneath. I didn’t care. I curled my fingers into claws and plunged straight down. It sunk under my fingernails as I dug and dug, my hole pathetically small. I dug for what felt like hours, thinking about Diana. Always Diana.

“When you scream. . .” I looked up at the street beyond the wire fence. I remembered what she’d told me before, our promise to each other on the edge of my lips. My breath bloomed a wintry cloud, swiped away by the wind. “I’ll come running.”

I was such an idiot. When it was all laid out for me, when I was given a love aged through endless cycles to become burning bright, more powerful than my soul– when the world handed that to me on a silver platter, no effort required, all I did was go crawling back to the girl whose lap I’d vomited in at age seven.

Oh, what had I done? What had I lost? Diana, Diana– like the moon rising at night, she was just there. And I hadn’t realized it, but I missed her more than anything. I was alone, I was forgetting my own name, losing my face, losing my life, and I had to believe that she would come back like she was supposed to. 

Even though she had no reason to– even though I had screamed at her, left her crying alone, let my anger get the better of me when it did not matter. How could it matter, after all we’d been through? All the dance rehearsals and trips to the zoo, all the screaming tantrums and the ER visits? The birthday parties where no one else showed, the tetanus shots, the sleepovers spent without sleeping– I had lived a thousand lifetimes with her alone.

And I’d pushed her away. For nothing.

I remembered something– sitting under the slide, our small heads bowed under the oppressive sun. Diana crying and crying in a way that made it feel as if my heart was split in two. My hands gripping her shoulders. My mouth pressing against her cheek, tasting her tears, a tangle of hearts and noses and wet eyelashes. She’d smelled sweet, and our faces were sticky.

“Is the Barbie still there?”

Diana stood in the park entrance, both hands in the pockets of her puffer coat. The light from the snow washed her out, like a disposable camera photo. The bottom of her skirt brushed the ground. Beneath the brim of her knit hat, her eyes looked black.

I said, “It was just the leg.” 

My lips were cracked. Opening them was like moving dirt in the desert, and the taste of blood filled my mouth. I tried to stand, to walk over to her, but I couldn’t. My body was failing me. She stayed where she was, so I crawled.

Diana regarded me with suspicion, her eyes pinned to my bare white hands. Only then did the pain begin to bother me. I was so cold that my entire body was sore down to the bone. It was agonizing. She was agonizing. 

She said, “Why did you text me?”

“Because you were right.” I buried my face in the snow. “About everything.” 

Diana was silent. She was silent in a way that forced me to hear the pulse of the city— the constant background whoosh of generators and cars— smell the caustic air, feel my labored breathing as the snow sunk between the folds of my eyelids. 

“She’s going to kill me,” I said.

I was red and raw, splattered on the snow. I felt like a newborn baby. In keeping, I began to cry. 

“I’m sorry for being a terrible friend,” I said. “I’m sorry for picking on you and breaking your things and say— saying those awful things on Halloween.”

I was on my knees. I was grabbing the bottom of her coat. The tears on my face froze faster than they could renew, my cheeks coated in a salty layer.

“Diana. . .” I looked up at her. “I don’t want to die that way.”

My hands were shaking so bad they looked blurry. Still pulling, I buried my face into her thigh and squeezed my eyes shut.

I saw with crystal clarity how this was going to end— with a roll of pencils plunged straight into the back of my neck. I was too far gone, obviously. It was what I deserved. Everything important in my life had started with Diana, and now it would end with her, too.

So, I waited with held breath as she cupped a hand at the base of my skull. The snow crunched— she got on her knees, too. I couldn’t breathe, no matter how desperately I wanted to say good-bye.

Her other arm drew across my shoulder. Next I knew, my face was against her shoulder and we were rocking back and forth.

Drops of water landed on my hood.

“D—Di—”

“Shhh. . .”

“I thought—” My throat was clogged with phlegm. What did I think? Everything was already overturned. It had seemed obvious just moments before that Diana hated me, and would forever. 

Diana’s fingers curled further, pressing into my arms. I closed my eyes, pulled my legs in tighter. In my ear, softer than the snowfall, Diana began to hum Black Parade.