Strange, I think, looking at the pile of clothes. All I see on the ground is the SunCloak. No sign of her other clothes: shoes, socks, pants. Just the SunCloak. Maybe she was naked underneath the way Beefy was? I head over and kick at the cloak, expecting it to be sodden and sticky with yellow fluid and melted skin. But there’s nothing at all. No sign of any yellow fluid. Then it hits me.
She’s in the library. Somehow she was able to escape inside in time.
But when I spin around towards the library, I see something that—
My mouth drops. My eyes widen.
The rays of the descending sun saturate the outside of the library – the walls, the shutters, the brick pathway – in a sea of purple and orange. And standing in the midst of this colour is Ashley June. Colour radiates off her pale skin, mixing with the orange of her hair, the green of her eyes. Her mouth is slightly parted, full and whole. And she is not screaming, not disintegrating.
We stare at each other, speechless, my eyes helplessly agog.
She reaches into her mouth, tilts back her head, pulls something out.
A set of fake fangs.
She holds them out to me like a peace offering.
The first thing she asks for when we walk in is water.
“Of course,” I tell her, remembering how parched I was a couple of days ago. “You’ve gone this whole time without water?”
She doesn’t answer but downs a whole bottle of water. That’s answer enough.
“That’s why I collapsed outside,” she says, eyeing my other bottle of water.
“You want more?”
“Yes, but not to drink.” She grabs the bottle. “In case you haven’t noticed – the others certainly have – I’m beginning to smell. Really bad.”
“You should wash up inside. Sun’ll give you a sunburn, your skin’s so fair.”
She shoots me a look as if to say, Really? I haven’t survived seventeen years by accident, buddy.
“In the back,” I say quickly. “There’s a place with a drain in the floor.” She walks around the circulation desk and disappears. Leaving me with my tangled, bewildered, searching thoughts.
When she comes back ten minutes later, I haven’t moved. Her hair is slick wet and her face freshly scrubbed. She looks paler and drained, but her eyes are brighter. “I hope you don’t mind,” she says timidly.
“What?”
“I said I hope you don’t mind. I had to put on your clothes. My own stuff is . . . there’s too much of a smell in them.”
“No,” I say, eyes looking down, “it’s OK. All that stuff they gave me are a few sizes too small. I’ve never worn that outfit before, it’s yours now.”
We stand at a slant, looking at everything but each other.
“I’m sorry for using up two bottles of water.”
“It’s OK. We still have a half bottle left.”
As soon as I say the word we, it’s as though something breaks in her. Her head turns to mine; when I meet her eyes, they’ve welled up. She snaps her eyelids shut, and when she opens them again, her eyes have dried. She’s good, she’s practised; just like me.
“Have you lived alone?” I ask her.
She pauses. “Yes,” she answers gently, sadly. “For almost as long as I can remember.”
Her story, told to me after we sit down, is not unlike mine.
She remembers a family: parents, an older brother. Cheerful conversation at home, laughter, feelings of safety once the shutters came down at dawn and the world was locked outside, meals around a table, warm bodies asleep around her. Then she remembers the day. She was bedridden with a fever and stayed home while her parents and brother hiked to get some fruit. They left ten minutes after dawn. She never saw them again.
One day in a family, the next day alone. Solitude and loneliness her constant companions, their presence so enervating and cold, like two damp socks worn on a winter day.
That was ten years ago. She was only seven. At first it was incredibly hard. To live. Not an hour went by that she did not consider giving herself up at school. It would be so easy. To succumb. Stand in the middle of the soccer field during recess, prick her finger, let a droplet of blood seep. Watch them come flying at her. The end would be brutal but swift. Death would be an escape from this unbearable loneliness.
But her parents had taught her two things. Ingrained them in her. The first was survival: not just the basics, but the nuances, the minutiae, every conceivable situation she might find herself in. The second was life, the importance of it, the preciousness of it, the duty to persevere and never let it end prematurely. She hated how clinically they indoctrinated her: by the time they were gone, she had become a reluctant expert at survival.
Her beauty was a curse, especially as she – and classmates around her – hit puberty. Attention, something she was repeatedly told by her parents to avoid, came her way with the force of a testosterone-filled tidal wave. Boys would write letters to her, stare at her, converse with her awkwardly, throw spitballs at her, join the same clubs she did. Girls, seeing the social advantages of befriending her, flocked around her. Nothing she did to minimise her beauty helped. Clunky, self-cut hair; an abrasive, caustic personality; aloofness; feigning disinterest in boys; even outright stupidity. But none of these helped. The attention kept coming.
One day, she realised her approach was all wrong. Her defence was too . . . defensive. It didn’t fit her, and this kind of faux defensive life would eventually be her undoing. She saw that. And she decided the best defence was offence.
Instead of tamping down her beauty, she played it up. She threw off the meek, stupid persona and instead exuded confidence and poise. It was an easy act mostly because it didn’t feel like one. More than anything, it gave her power. She controlled the pieces, and instead of being pushed about by the horses and knights and queens about her, she turned them all into pawns. She grew her hair long and in a way that complimented her svelte figure. She’d stare down the boys who gazed at her, grab the social knives meant to backstab her and use them to cut down her competition. She was ruthless until she was needed.
Eventually, it became clear she had to get a boyfriend. As long as she was unattached, the boys would continue clamouring after her like magnet maggots. And too many questions about her would arise if she didn’t.
So she plucked the varsity quarterback, an obnoxious and surprisingly insecure senior who played it cool when with her in public but in private boiled like lava. Killing him turned out to be easier than she’d thought. For their one-month anniversary (teens can be so sappy), she suggested a picnic at a secluded spot a few hours away from the city limits. He was all over the idea. They brought wine and blankets. Once there, he drank too much – she kept pouring – until he passed out. She tied him to a tree that was, in the late autumn, stripped of leaves and would provide no shade once the sun rose. She left him passed out and walked home.
She never saw him again. When she went back to the tree the next day, there was only a pile of clothes hanging off limp lines of rope, slightly bleached by the toxicity of melted flesh. She took the clothes and rope and burned them.
As with most “disappearances”, the subject was taboo and spoken of only in hushed whispers. A perfunctory search was conducted and then abandoned after only twelve hours; the matter was filed away as a DBS (disappearance by sunlight). She pretended to be devastated by this tragedy, her heart cracked by the loss of her “soul mate”. At his funeral, she professed her undying devotion and love to him, promising that her soul was forever bonded with his.
It achieved everything she hoped it would. Boys largely left her alone; girls sympathised with her tragic loss, and her stock rose even higher. Nobody questioned her lack of a dating life even as the other girls in the Desirables necked, armpitted, and otherwise hooked up at parties. She was the tragic figure in need of time and space. Give her a few years, she’d eventually come around, her friends thought.
She continued to build the deception. She jo
ined the HiSS (Heper Search Society), a group that operated under the theory that hepers were still at large and had infiltrated society. The members of the HiSS sought to flush out these heper infiltrators.
“Why put yourself in the midst of the very people most keen to sniff you out?” I ask.
Because, she answers, the HiSS was the one place no one would ever suspect you. Membership in that club was the eye of the storm, where neither suspicion nor accusation would blow your way. And there was an added benefit: she would be the first to know about another suspected heper. Her plan was simple: first confirm that that person was a heper, then snuff out the suspicion as baseless.
“Then what?”
She turns to look at me, her mouth fashioning words and then stopping. “Establish contact,” she finally says. She sits on one end of the sofa, a leg bent under her, half turned towards me.
“You were good,” I say. “I never suspected. Not for a second.”
“You weren’t so good.”
“What?”
“You slipped a few times. I’d see emotions breaking out on your face. Or falling asleep in class. Granted, it was only for a split second – but the slight head nod of sleep was unmistakable.” Her eyes light up, remembering something. “I saved your butt more than once. Like in trig class a few nights ago, when you couldn’t read the board. Even last night, here in the library with the Director. Your hands started to tremble.”
“I remember that.” Then something occurs to me. “Why didn’t you ever approach me? At school. And here. When you had me all figured out? Just tell me you knew what I was.”
“Because it could have all been a ruse. You might have just been trying to bait other hepers into coming out. It was a real possibility. So I just kept watching you. Even snooped around your house during the day.”
“So there was someone outside!”
Her shoulders slumped forward. “You should have come out. I was hoping you would. I stood waiting, hoping you’d open the door, step out into the sunshine. See me, standing right there in the sun with you. All mystery gone, everything out in the open, just like that.” She pauses. “Just think how things would be so different. If that really did happen back then instead of just now.”
I pick up the bottle at my feet, uncap it, and hand it to her. She nods her thanks. I watch her mouth as she tilts the bottle towards her, her upper lip pressing into the opening as her lips slowly part. Water pours out; a thin trail snakes down her neck and gathers behind her collarbone.
“Well,” she says, recapping the bottle, “here we are.”