Everlost (Skinjacker 1)

As breathless as someone who did not breathe could be, Allie said, “You’re a monster. You’re no better than the Haunter! You’re telling me that you’re going to do NOTHING? That Nick and Lief are ‘acceptable losses.’”

“No loss is acceptable,” Mary said. “But sometimes we have to accept it anyway.”

“I won’t!”

“If I can accept it, then so can you,” she said. “If you want to stay here with us, you’ll learn to live with it.”

And all at once Allie knew what was going on here.

Mary was getting rid of her. She was hurling Allie out of the fold, but doing it in such a way that she could remain blameless. If Allie wanted to stay, then she had to accept the loss of her friends, and not even try to rescue Nick and Lief. Allie would never stay under those conditions, and Mary knew it. Maybe that’s why Mary became calm, and in control again.

“I’m truly sorry this happened,” Mary said. “I know what you must be going through right now.”

What made it worse was that Mary’s voice had genuine compassion in it. She honestly did care. Mary’s caring, however, came with too high a price.

Allie swung her hand with all the strength she could muster, and slapped Mary across the face with such force that Mary stumbled backward. Vari caught her and in an instant a dozen other kids were all over Allie holding her back, pulling her down, tearing at her as if they could tear her apart.

“Leave her alone!” yelled Mary, and almost instantly the kids let her go.

“I wish you could feel pain,” Allie said. “I wish you could feel the sting of that slap.”

Then she turned, marched into an elevator, and took it down alone. She didn’t know where she was going, only that she had publicly renounced Mary Queen of Snots, and was not coming back.

Mary stared at Allie’s elevator door long after it had closed. Allie may not have known it, but Mary had felt the sting of the slap. Not on her face, but in her soul, where it hurt all the more. Even so, Mary had done the right thing.

She had turned the other cheek.

“Go back to what you were doing,” Mary told all the kids around her.

“Everything’s fine.”

The crowd began to split up, and soon it was only her and Vari on the desolate floor.

“Why did you let her go?” Vari said. “She should be punished.”

“Being alone in the living world is punishment enough,” Mary said, and although Vari didn’t seem satisfied with her response, he would accept it. They all would. Mary wondered if Allie had any idea how hard it was to allow Nick and Lief to be sacrificed for the sake of the other children. But the Haunter had powers that Mary did not. Just as it was foolish for them to go there in the first place, it would be doubly foolish to attempt a rescue. Foolish, and pointless. And now Nick was gone. Before she could really get to know him he was gone, and there was nothing she could do about it. For a moment grief threatened to overwhelm her. A gasp of remorse escaped her throat, but she fought it down, just as she fought down her tears. For the sake of all her children.

“You did the right thing,” Vari told her.

She leaned over to kiss him on the head, but stopped, knelt down, and kissed him on the cheek instead. “Thank you, Vari. Thank you for being so loyal.”

Vari beamed.

As Allies elevator went down, theirs went up. Mary’s grief was heavy, but she would find a way to get past it. The turmoil that Allie had brought them would soon be gone. Soon there would be happy children playing ball and jumping rope, which was as it should be, and as it would be day after day, forever and ever.

In her book Everything Mary Says Is Wrong, Allie the Outcast writes: “There are mysteries in Everlost. Some of them are wonderful, and others are scary. They should all be explored, though — perhaps that’s why we’re here; to experience the good and the bad that Everlost has to offer. I really don’t know why we didn’t get where we were going, but I do know this much: being trapped doing the same thing over and over again for all time is no way to spend eternity—and anyone who tells you so is wrong.”

Chapter 12

Learning to Surf The sense of isolation Allie felt after leaving Mary’s domain was as overwhelming and complete as if she had been sealed into a barrel herself. Being out in the living world left her infinitely lonely. Mary could act like the living world didn’t matter anymore, but for Allie it was an ever-present reminder that she could witness, but not participate, in life. For days she tried to work out a plan for rescuing her friends from the clutches of the Haunter, and as she schemed, she walked, because she had to. She was like a shark, always having to stay in motion—and although she had found many dead-spots in the city where she could rest, she never lingered long. Then one day, she had a moment of clarity, and she realized that she had been drawn into her own endless loop. She had been walking the exact same streets in the exact same pattern, and she had been doing it not for days, but for weeks. She had thought she was immune to getting trapped in a ghostly pattern, but she was wrong. The sense of helplessness of it—the sense of inevitability—almost made her spirit cave in, and give in to the pattern. She almost continued in her repetitive weave of the streets, because it was easier than fighting it. It had grown comfortable. Familiar. It was the thought of Lief and Nick, still trapped in those barrels, that broke her out of it, because if she stayed in this rut, she would never find a way to free them.

The first step was the hardest. She turned left instead of right on Twenty-first Street, and an immediate sense of panic set in. She wanted to take back her step, and return to her old pattern — but she resisted, and took one more step, and another, and another. Soon the panic settled to mere terror, and the terror settled to normal fear. It only took one city block for her fear to fade into mild foreboding—the type of thing anyone felt when faced with the unknown.

Careful not to begin retracing her steps again, she forced herself to go places she had avoided. New York was a crowded city, but there were areas that were less traveled. These were the places Allie had stuck to, for she couldn’t handle the crowds that would pass through her as if she wasn’t there.

Now she forced herself to go to the crowded places. It was as she passed through midtown Manhattan during lunchtime that she discovered something Mary had probably never written about in her various volumes.

The streets were crowded. More than just crowded, they were packed. The midtown towers flushed out thousands of people during the lunch-hour rush, and of course, they all barreled through Allie as if she wasn’t even there. It was terribly unpleasant to feel them pass through her — much worse than when something inanimate, like a car or a bus passed through, because a living person had a strange organic commotion about it. The instant a person passed through her she could feel the rush of blood, the beating of a heart, the rumble of intestines still digesting whatever they had eaten for breakfast. It was, to say the least, profoundly icky.