Things were going smoothly, so far.

So far consisted of a time frame of a little less than an hour, but that at least showed that Rutabaga was amenable to behaving itself. It had allowed her to return to class, to move through the hallways to get to the locker room, and to get changed without even the suggestion of an ominous wiggle. It did not seem to have the need to amuse itself, but Laylee had no better terminology at hand to describe how it aimlessly slithered across the high ceiling of the gymnasium. It moved in a slow spiral, tracing its way around, occasionally shlorping up one the overhead lights and momentarily tinting a section of the gym a pinkish hue. Laylee found the color combination actually quite complimentary with the rest of the room. The pink light reflected nicely off the heavily varnished yellow of the basketball court, and, really, any color was a relief from the school’s insistence on thematically covering everything in black and light grey. Go Silverbacks.

The shifts in the room lighting did slightly distract Laylee, but no more or less so than the kids playing dodgeball or the ones racing laps around the room. Coach Molina had designated today a “free day,” as she had already done numerous times in the mere couple of weeks since school started. Laylee hadn’t understood the purpose of the “free day,” but Amelia helpfully explained that, ostensibly, this was so students could perform athletic activities at their own pace and comfort level. More truthfully, it was because Coach Molina didn’t want to be here, either. 

Laylee’s current athletic comfort level consisted of sitting in the bleachers and getting all of her homework done. She had her binders, books, and papers stacked in tidy little piles on the metal bench at knee-height in front of her, with her Geometry binder balanced in her lap. If she could get through this worksheet before Mother came to pick her up, she’d have one less reason to think about the last few hours for a couple more days.

That plan, unfortunately, got derailed as Amelia trounced up the steps to sit beside her. Amelia had been part of the group of students running around the gym, and seemingly the first among them to get too tired to continue. 

“Didn’t feel like exercising today?” she asked through gasps for air, picking up the collar of her shirt to use it to absorb the copious sweat running from her hairline.

“Never do.” Laylee closed her binder. As much as she would rather work than have this conversation, she couldn’t be rude. Amelia was, after all, the only friend she had in this class.

“You’re not worried about Coach getting onto you for not doing anything? I thought that’d be the kind of thing you’d get nervous about.”

Laylee turned her head slightly, gesturing with her pencil at a boy sitting a few bleachers behind them who was playing on one of those Game Boys with the flip-up tops. “I assume he’ll be getting in trouble before I do. Besides, Coach isn’t even here right now.”

Amelia looked around to confirm that Coach Molina had, indeed, gone back into her office in one of the adjoining rooms. She shuffled around in her seat a bit and removed the tie from her ponytail, allowing her dark, curled, and very sweaty hair to hang loose. Her slow, heavy breathing came as no surprise. The air conditioning in the gym could not fully fight back against the oppressive early-September heat, and while Amelia wasn’t exactly heavyset in the same way as Wash, it always seemed that moving the moderate weight of her body took Amelia considerable effort. Privately, Laylee speculated Amelia may have cardiovascular difficulties, though she acknowledged that she probably only thought that because she’d recently been reading about arrhythmia. 

“So…” Amelia started, but trailed off as she took another heavy breath. “What answer did you get for question three?”

Laylee turned her head in confusion. Typically, when one of the girls asked her that, they also had their copy of the homework out in front of them. While giving each other answers was explicitly forbidden, comparing answers on finished worksheets was, if anything, encouraged by Mrs. Bailey. That way, students could learn by teaching each other and clearing up misunderstandings among themselves. Simply asking for the answer sounded like cheating. Laylee at least thought better of Amelia than that.

“I’m kidding,” Amelia said, with a smile, a wave of her hand, and a tone of voice that indicated she might not have been kidding. “You don’t have to worry.”

That was the second time in this brief conversation alone that Amelia implied that she considered Laylee prone to worry. That didn’t make much sense at all. Laylee thought she was being rather calm and collected, under the circumstances.

“Did, umm…” Amelia tapped her fingers against her knees. “Are you doing okay? Like, with what happened with Mrs. Bailey?”

“You mean with her coughing fit?” Laylee replied. “Yeah. She seemed to be doing okay by the end of class.”

“Okay.” Amelia nodded. “‘Cause, like, you stormed out of the class really quickly while that was going on.”

“Hey, I waited until it stopped seeming like she was about to die.” Laylee let her voice get really quiet. “I mean, I couldn’t exactly stop her in the middle of choking to death to tell her that I really needed to pee.”

“Ah. Okay. Yeah.” She leaned back further, her head now resting against the metal bench behind them. Her breathing began to soften, and she stared with closed eyes up at the overhead lights. 

Laylee, unsure if she should expect the conversation to continue, reopened her binder. She read over the questions she had yet to answer, not willing to give any particularly deep thoughts towards any of them, lest she be interrupted. Her caution proved wise when Amelia, who had yet to move, spoke up. “Sorry, I think I got the wrong idea. Feeling kinda stupid now for checking in on you.”

 Laylee resisted the urge to wriggle in discomfort. Somehow, earlier, with a woman dying in front of her, Amelia had paid enough attention to Laylee to notice her distress. Laylee supposed that Amelia was simply like that — observant, scrutinizing, and close enough in social proximity to be an active danger. Amelia saw her. That meant, with enough looking, she might even see Rutabaga. That simply could not be allowed to happen.

Thankfully, whatever awkwardness and tension could have continued building between them was soon dispelled by the distant words “Hey, Lia! Think fast!” which echoed across the gym mere picoseconds before a large, blue ball absolutely nailed Amelia in the face.

Amelia had to grab at the bleacher behind her to avoid being knocked off her seat. A chorus of ooohs and a single oh, shit emerged from the crowd on the basketball court below. Amelia, now steadying herself by grasping the bleachers, put her other hand up to her cheek. A single girl, one of the juniors, judging from the crowd from which she emerged, ran over to the bleachers, after first diverting her path to scoop up the ball before it could bounce all the way across the court.

Laylee recognized the girl, but did not know her. Both this girl and Amelia had heritage from the sort of broad region around India — an area that Laylee did not know well in either specifics or broad strokes, as the adults in her life never seemed to pay much mind to any part of Asia besides China and the Middle East. Laylee had seen the two girls talking, either during or after PE, though they never seemed to be around each other for very long. This older girl’s hair was done in a high, tight ponytail, and she wore the dark shorts and gray shirt that Laylee recognized as the volleyball team’s uniform. As this girl bounced up the bleacher steps, annoyingly closer to Laylee than Amelia, Laylee could see that she wore heavier makeup than she’d typically expect of an athlete. Her nose sat slightly misaligned in a way that suggested a previous breakage, and she had a tight-lipped smile that made it clear she wasn’t sorry at all.

“Shit, sorry, Lia.” The girl laughed as she spoke.

“What the fuck, Nikki?” Amelia whined, both hands now covering her face.

Sandwiched between where Amelia was sitting and Nikki was standing, Laylee began to consolidate space by gathering up her binders and placing them in her backpack. Amelia, sensing either the motion or the atmosphere, removed her hands and began her introductions. “Laylee, this is my sister, Nicole. As you can see, she’s a huge bitch.”

Nicole snort-laughed, like whatever thought had just popped in her head was the funniest joke in the world, and the only thing keeping her speech clear was the need to share that joke with others. With a wave of her hand, horrifyingly in Laylee’s direction, she said, “Yeah, I may be a bitch, but at least I’m not being stalked by the ghost from The Ring.”

Laylee stopped putting her things away. Fear ran through her like an electric shock.

A hand was held within biting range of Laylee’s face. Four fingers and a thumb, pointed outward in a crude facsimile of a mouth. With a faux ventriloquism, Nicole hissed, “Seven days.”

And, like that, Laylee was gone. Gone in the way she had often been gone — her body present, her mind seemingly nowhere, her soul in the clutches of something vile. 

Amelia leaned over Laylee’s body to give her sister a gentle shove. “Hey, back off, Laylee’s nice.”

That sentence registered a bit. Laylee was not supposed to be scary. Laylee was nice.

“Fine, fine.” Nicole conceded. She gestured to one of her friends to go long before throwing the dodgeball down to them.

“Did you seriously just come up here to be a fucking sitcom bully to me and my friend?”

That question made the smirk drop from Nicole’s face. “No, actually. I came up here to apologize, ‘cause I genuinely didn’t mean to hit you that hard.”

Nicole took a step closer, her knees butting against Laylee’s as she leaned over to get in Amelia’s face. “But since we’re not playing nice right now, I’m just gonna come out and say that if I catch you talking to Cody again I’m gonna throw your smart ass down these fucking steps.”

Amelia’s glare met Nicole’s, but she was the first to look away. Nicole slowly rose back up, her intense eyes unwaveringly fixed on her sister. Amelia kept her head down.

With a deep sigh, Nicole relaxed her shoulders. “So, I also got a text from Mom earlier. It looks like they’re not going to be home until late. I’m gonna get us a pizza. You want anything specific?”

Amelia softly shook her head.

“Gotcha.” Nicole turned and started heading back down the steps. “I’ll make it a stuffed crust. Least I can do.”

“Thanks,” Amelia half-whispered.

Amelia watched Nicole as she descended the steps and returned to her friends. When her sister was out of earshot, she turned to Laylee. “You’re, uh, an only child, right?”

Laylee, still scarcely feeling present, nodded.

“Heh. Lucky.” Amelia spoke the words with a complete lack of confidence, evidently searching for some appropriate platitude and unsure if she’d hit the mark.

“Do…” Laylee felt herself returning, bringing with her a heart-pounding panic, overwhelm, and irresponsible honesty. “Do people see me as a ghost?”

“No,” Amelia replied instantly, but when she looked at Laylee, her voice became more declarative. “No. Like I said, Nikki’s just being mean.”

“But she doesn’t even know me.”

“It’s not about knowing you.” Amelia moved closer on the bench, arms outstretched. Laylee didn’t immediately register that Amelia was offering a hug. Before Laylee had time to consider it, Amelia gently rescinded the offer by placing her hands on her knees. “She’s just making fun of your hair.”

“My hair?”

“Yeah.” Amelia replied. “The, like, long, black, kinda-in-front-of-your-eyes thing? Have you actually seen the Ring? Or any of the trailers?”

Laylee found it within herself to resist the strong urge to brush her hair out of her eyes. “I’ve heard people talking about it. I know it’s a scary movie, with phone calls and VHS tapes and ghosts.”

“Well, you know, the ghost girl just has a similar hairstyle to yours. That’s all.”

Laylee was pretty certain that Amelia had just lied to her. Laylee was wrong somehow, in a way that led strangers to draw comparisons to a specter. There was some unknown aspect of her, something creepy, something that she needed to change.

Just then, from the corner of her eye, Rutabaga fell from the ceiling.

Her head did not immediately turn to follow it. She only looked over when she heard a deep, wet cough. 

The force of Rutabaga’s descent seemed to have knocked Nicole to the floor. She lay curled on her side, scarcely visible through the daemon enveloping her. The students around her jumped back as she fell, but now huddled closer, grabbing each other and asking frantic questions among themselves about what action to take. One of the boys ran to get Coach. Amelia sat up straighter, a panicked energy rising through her until it became palpable in the air, staring as her sister causelessly drowned.

“Oh my god,” Amelia whispered. Her breath was as labored as it had been directly after her run.

Laylee didn’t quite know what had Amelia so worked up. The daemon may have been suffocating Nicole, but Laylee thought that she and Amelia had reached a consensus that Nicole was, in fact, a huge bitch.

Amelia bolted from her seat, racing down the bleachers. Nicole rolled over, flat on her back, thrashing through the blood. The force of her spasming arms occasionally splashed Rutabaga, both its blood and bones, along a length of the polished floor. The gym had fallen silent, save for Nicole’s desperate gagging for air and the cracking of her knuckles against the ground. When Amelia reached her sister, she effortlessly fell through the body of the daemon and grabbed Nicole’s wrists.

A familiar distortion began to form around Nicole, as though the air was filled with powdered glass. The light around Nicole bent and warped, refracted and diffracted, changing in colors and apparent distance until the floor of the gym became a rainbow of visual noise. The two girls remained in the center of the mess, soaked in living gore, wrestling, drowning, and weeping. That last action cut through the unreality of it all. At some point Amelia had started crying. Her sobs stayed visible through the distance, through the odd angle where Laylee sat, above and behind her friend, and through the building haze of death.

This aura — constructed as it was not of particles but of bends and tricks of the light — nevertheless began to coalesce into thin strands. Thousands of them, crystalline by appearance and scarcely thicker than a hair, spiderwebbed out from the center of Nicole’s chest. They passed through whatever they came into contact with as if it were simply not there. The strands constructed themselves through Amelia, through Rutabaga and Laylee, through the students and bleachers and the roof and the Earth, stretching out to infinity. As they grew longer, they built themselves thicker at their origin, strands combining into stronger ones.

Laylee had seen this before, and knew what it meant. It took until this moment for her to register that her perception made it her responsibility.

Rutabaga, cut it out.

The swirl of the daemon’s self-gravity shifted in its orbital direction. Slowly, it began to slither its way off the girl it was killing. It left its trail of disgust behind, stuck clinging to Amelia’s arms and the ends of her hair, and still totally covering Nicole, though now in only a thin layer. Nicole sat up, her lungs heaving, over and over, vomiting out a bloody mucus that Laylee was only half-sure was Rutabaga’s and not Nicole’s own. When she finally sucked in air, she fell back to the ground. The crystal strands of death halted their construction.

It was at this moment that Coach Molina flung open the door of her office. She was a younger, quite muscular woman, whose strength was evident with how effortlessly she sprinted to Nicole’s side. As she reached the crowd of students, she pointed to one of the other girls wearing the volleyball team’s uniform, and shouted, “Ezinne, I know you have a cell phone. Call a fucking ambulance!”

This girl, evidently Ezinne, turned away from the scene before her, pulled her phone out of her pocket, and flipped it open.

“What the fuck is going on?” Amelia asked through her tears, but Coach was not listening. She picked Amelia up by her shirt, shoving her off her sister before moving to occupy the same space. Molina felt for Nicole’s pulse along her neck with one hand, and steadied the other on her sternum, measuring the rate of the rise and fall of her diaphragm. Nicole did not move, but the death aura surrounding her weakened.

Laylee watched Rutabaga slither along the length of the basketball court. Eventually it ran into a corner, which in no way impeded its progress, as it began climbing up the wall without any change in pace. Laylee wanted to find shame in the creature, to see it with a guilty look, like a dog caught rummaging through the trash. But it held no shame, nor eyes to express it. Perhaps, even, it was proud of its helpfulness. Only three minutes ago, judging from the clock on the electronic scoreboard, Laylee had sat there wondering what about her was so fundamentally wrong. Rutabaga had now provided her with a theory.

Is this the reason things like you keep happening to me? Because I don’t think to care enough soon enough?

Rutabaga did not care to gesture an answer, and Laylee didn’t press.

When Laylee looked back towards the crime scene, she saw Amelia looking up to her, her face still distorted from the now-decaying aura around her sister. She couldn’t see Amelia’s expression, let alone decipher it. Perhaps she’d found the appropriate target for blame — Laylee, complicit in the attempted homicide by proximity and inaction. Laylee supposed she should head down the steps to check on her.

Coach Molina, however, had other plans. She spoke first to Amelia, though loud enough for everyone in the gym to hear. “Sorry. You’re her sister, right?”

Amelia answered with a single quick nod.

“You can stay. Everyone else I want sitting on the bleachers now! I want you out of the way of the EMTs, I want you sitting on your hands, and I want your mouths shut! Anyone I have to tell to shut up a second time will immediately receive In-School Suspension. You are not to move or say a word until I dismiss you. Am I clear?”

There were a few mutterings of “yes, Coach” and various grumblings as the other students began to move to the bleachers. Ezinne stayed beside Coach and Nicole, cupping the speaker of cellphone as she spoke to the 911 dispatcher. She started relaying the conversation to Coach, but Molina motioned for Ezinne to simply hand her the phone. 

With her classmates now gathering in the bleachers around her, Laylee mouthed the words I’m so sorry at Amelia. She couldn’t tell if Amelia saw them.

 

-----------------------------------

 

Laylee walked to where she saw Mother’s little blue car, not so much parked as sufficiently stuck in the line that wrapped across the entire parking lot and a length of the road beside. Traffic as school let out was always terrible, but especially so today. The red and blue lights flashing behind Laylee made her aware that the ambulance hadn’t yet left campus. Rutabaga remained a bit of a way behind her, far enough that Laylee was able to hop into the passenger seat and shut it out of the car. The little criminal would, inevitably, catch up, and its proximity to Mother would test if it was even possible to get away with avoiding the whole exorcism ordeal. However, if a daemon was going to ruin her life, again, Laylee wanted to at least not have it happen where other people could see.

As she settled into the seat, Mother leaned over and kissed Laylee’s forehead. “Hey, sweetie. What on earth is going on out there?”

“It was crazy, a girl in my PE class had a really bad asthma attack,” Laylee lied in the way she’d mentally rehearsed during her time waiting in the bleachers. 

“Oh dear.” Mother placed a manicured hand over the small, golden cross that hung on her breast. “Do you know if she’s going to be alright?”

“I think so. She was conscious by the time the EMTs got there and Coach let us leave.”

“Oh my goodness, she lost consciousness? Sweetie, that must have been so scary.” Mother, as best she could in the cramped space, outstretched her arms.

“It was.” As Laylee leaned into her mother’s embrace, she hoped as hard as she could that Mother couldn’t feel the daemon inside her.

They stayed holding each other, elbows awkwardly positioning around the center-seat parking brake. Mother was wearing a fruity, sweet perfume — a distinctly pink scent, like a book of Barbie-branded scratch-and-sniff stickers Laylee once had. Otherwise, Mother looked especially professional today. She wore one of her long, navy blue dresses, of the kind that Laylee never saw her wear before she took her job with the church. She’d removed her cute pair of blocky heels so she could drive, and they now rested beside the brake pedal. Mother had also recently gotten her hair styled, it now falling in gentle waves to barely brush against her shoulders. Mother seemed tired, and had always been tired, but it was a put-together exhaustion.

A pink shift in the hue of the red and blue lights informed Laylee that Rutabaga had made it right outside the car. Mother, more likely sensing Laylee’s tension rather than the daemon, gently broke away from the hug. She took hold of the steering wheel, twisting it hand over hand to turn the car out of the traffic lane and in the complete opposite direction. “Let’s pray for your friend over dinner tonight.”

“Yeah,” Laylee agreed. “We should.”

They drove away from Rutabaga and this awful second half of a day of school. An empty can of Red Bull rolled against Laylee’s shoe, and she set her foot on it, idly crushing it underneath the weight of her leg and Rutabaga’s clinging residues.

“Mom, do you think I can get a haircut soon?” Laylee asked.

Mother furrowed her brow. “You’ve always hated getting haircuts, what brought this on?”

“I just want it to look nice.”

Mother responded with a grin. “Is this about a boy?”

“No,” Laylee said, with an emphasis that she realized too late would confirm for her mother that this was about a boy, even though it was factually not. “It’s just, Valerie has really nice hair. I know I’m not supposed to be envious, but I want to take care of myself better.”
Mother politely nodded. “It’s okay for you to be a little envious, sweetie. It’s expected. Christ will forgive you.”

“Do you think we could do it this weekend?” Laylee asked, eager to move the conversation forward.

“This weekend may be a little soon to get a booking. How about next weekend, after I get paid?” 

Laylee silently agreed, but Mother couldn’t help but add, “Your new boyfriend better be okay with waiting to be impressed.”

“Mom.” Laylee huffed and folded her arms, half performing but also feeling quite genuinely miffed. What a rude assumption for her to make. Laylee knew, with everything else going so horribly, there was absolutely, positively no way a boy could ever fit in her life.