“How do you know her?” Ralee had closed the distance between us and nearly pinned me against a wall. A renewed vigor burned in her eyes as I had invoked her girlfriend’s name. Alright, let’s evaluate; on a scale of one to leaving my job in a straitjacket, how batshit crazy was the reality of the situation? Yeah, I thought so.

 

“She’s… my… cousin?” My answer was drawn out, hesitant, and sounded more like a question than a confident declaration. The young woman, straight out of the pages of my fiction, rolled her eyes and sighed at me. Yeah, I wouldn’t have bought that either. “Look, there is a very good explanation for everything that’s going to sound like the ravings of a stark raving madman. Do you mind if we talk after I get out of here?” I liked to believe that I had fooled my coworkers into thinking I was a relatively well-adjusted individual. I wasn’t willing to shatter that fragile illusion quite yet.

 

Ralee stared at me for a few seconds before backing off and walking out into the night. I double-timed it through my remaining closing responsibilities and the second I was off the hook, I was out the door.

 

The night was humid and the air still smelled like the rain that had fallen earlier. My feet splashed through small puddles as I walked out into the empty parking lot checking for any signs of life. Had she left without her answers? Was she ever even really here? Honestly, it would have made a lot more sense if I had just imagined the whole encounter. Forlorn and immensely disappointed, I walked to my car. As always, I had to forcefully jimmy the lock open since my key didn’t quite do the trick on its own. The high pitched whine of my clunker’s door caused dogs across the street to bark and growl. Such was the life of a broke ass server.

 

I settled into the driver's seat and just stared blankly at the dashboard trying to process my night. Of course she hadn’t been real. That would have made absolutely no sense. Hell, that could have been the plot for my next mediocre foray into storytelling. All of these thoughts raged inside my head but were immediately silenced as I heard something shift in the backseat.

 

Now, a fact a lot of people didn’t know about me was that I was a sucker for a good scary story. I loved any tale that promised to chill me to the bone and have me checking my closet at the age of twenty-six. The whole “someone was in the backseat of the car” trope, was something I was intimately familiar with. That said, when a shadowy figure sat up behind me I screamed bloody murder in the most high-pitched, tea-kettle boiling over, smoke alarm in the dead of night, opera soprano in high C fashion anybody had ever heard.

 

“Holy crap, that’s a mighty scream you’ve got there. I’m surprised the windows didn’t shatter.” Ralee laughed at the success of her own practical joke. Note to self, no more mischievous characters. 

 

I twisted my body to face Ralee in the backseat, not satisfied with holding up a conversation through the rearview mirror. “How did you get into my car? Wait… how’d you know this was my car in the first place?”

 

Settling down from her own self-provided amusement, Ralee pulled out a sparse keyring. A recognizable key dangled from the metal hoop that she swung idly on her fingertip. “I used the key, of course… and this ain’t your car, it’s Leona’s. Now, tell me where she is.”

 

Leona’s car? I mean, I did model the car used in my story after the one I had in real life. I had only ever driven around this hunk of junk and figured I could use the unique experience of a rough ride to add some color to my work. So picturing Ralee clearly had defined who she was but having a vague inspiration for the vehicle had made it default to its original source. Good to know.

 

Looking at the woman in the backseat, I was truly taken aback by how perfectly she represented the Ralee I had seen in my head. Every detail I hadn’t even included in the text was present from the beauty mark beneath her left eye to the small scar above her right elbow. “Well, you gonna answer the question or just keep staring?” Crap, I was busted. 

 

Yes, it was rude to stare but it was incredible! She really was a character I had written about. How often would I get the chance to meet someone from a story of mine? I wanted to milk the situation, to take my time to talk with her. I wanted to hang out, to learn all about the facets of her life I hadn’t even bothered to consider while making her up… but it wouldn’t have been fair to her. She was determined to find Leona, and the sharp glare she laid on me was a constant reminder that all she was concerned about was being reunited with the person she loved.

 

Alright, think, this whole situation was caused because of Leona’s disappearance in the story. Now, what I was planning on writing was Leona’s tale; the marvelous adventure she would embark on in order to get home. I hadn’t even considered things from Ralee’s perspective. I needed to know everything that happened up to this point. “I’m sorry, I know it’s rude to answer a question with a question, but if I’m going to help I need to know a couple of things myself.”

 

Ralee shifted forward, poking her head between the two front seats. “What do you need?”

 

I knew my version of Leona’s disappearance… at least, the version that had been lost to the aether due to technical failures. What I needed to know was what actually happened. “I’m going to say something that might sound crazy, especially if I’m mistaken. When Leona vanished, was she being electrocuted by a giant silver box?” The way Ralee’s face twisted at the mention of the device let me know that life had in fact imitated art for her.

 

“Yes,” she spat out the word, face twisting into a pained scowl. “That fucking thing took her from me.” One of Ralee’s fists slammed into the pleather upholstery of the backseat with a bang. “I couldn’t do a damn thing about it.”

 

I nodded in understanding, truly sympathetic to her ordeal. “I thought so. Now, what did you do after the fact? How did you get here?”

 

***

 

After Leona had completely vanished, the machine went dormant. Ralee was left in an empty room with nothing but a slew of destroyed lab equipment and the silver box. Seeing her love disintegrated before her eyes sent Ralee into a frenzy. She grabbed one of the stools present and started to whack the machine repeatedly. She went on a rampage, not minding that her skin was ripping from the force of each hit as she dented the metal stool without making so much as a scratch on the box. She threw away her makeshift weapon and desperately threw the lever on the box again and again, forwards and back. Nothing happened.

 

“Give her back!” She screamed, voice already gravely from the yelling she had done earlier. She echoed her demand repeatedly. She kept screaming at the box, expecting it to somehow hear her. When she finally ran out of steam, she collapsed onto the machine, crying on top of it in a desperate plea.

 

The next morning, Ralee was woken up by a procession of strange men in suits who removed her from her perch atop the box and attempted to move the device. Despite their best efforts, the box refused to move even an inch. Ralee wasn’t so lucky. She had been escorted from the premises and warned not to return. For the next three months, Ralee disregarded the warning of the g-men and skulked around the now closed off building of the university. She overheard men in lab coats speaking about wormholes and teleportation and the ramifications the device could have for the future of mankind. These tidbits only meant one thing to Ralee, Leona wasn’t gone… she was just somewhere else.

 

Towards the end of the fifth month following Leona’s disappearance, a thunderstorm blew into town. Despite the pouring rain and devastating chorus of crashes from the heavens, she stood outside of the building as always. Her persistence was rewarded, as the lights of the building began to flicker and shatter. A strange glow emanated from the window Ralee knew led to the machine’s room. She bolted into the closed building, dodging the unprepared guards stationed at the entrance. It didn’t matter if they caught her, nothing they could do to punish her could come close to the pain of losing this chance. She climbed the emergency stairs, three at a time, and reached her destination. The room was covered in lightning as it had been on that fateful day, and Ralee’s pulse pounded in her ears. She could hear the commotion of people chasing after her and knew there was no time for hesitation. She braved the barrage of bolts, pulled the lever Leona had, and suffered the same painful fate.

 

When she came to, she was outside in the rain. She was behind an apartment building that was obviously suffering from a blackout. She couldn’t see anything, she didn’t know where she was, and her phone wasn’t working. The young woman found a dry nook underneath a building awning and waited out the night, unable to find any meaningful rest.

 

When morning broke, Ralee decided to explore where the box had brought her. She walked around the building and found a highway just beyond a chain-link fence. Whether fate, or destiny, or providence, Ralee saw a familiar car fly past her down the highway. Leona was here, and if she could find that car, she would find the love she had lost.

 

***

 

“And that’s about it… I walked along the side of the highway until I saw Leona’s car parked here. I walked inside expecting her but found you instead.” This disappointment was palpable in her voice. It was understandable given the situation but still stung a bit. “So, that jog anything for ya?” Honestly, no. All I had gleaned from her experience was that this silver box I had arbitrarily come up with as a plot-moving device somehow made Ralee real… and if she was real, Leona could be too. Whatever the case may have been, I needed to reread the story I had written. When I began writing, I had no concrete plans for where this story was going, what kind of world Leona would end up in, or even how the fairy-tail ending would be achieved. I usually just kind of winged it when it came to these things.

 

Pulling out my phone, I opened my browser and went straight for my profile page on Scrawlcenter. Why the hell did I have so many notifications? I checked my messages and found new comments on chapters seven and eight of my story. “What the fuck!?” I couldn’t contain my crass exclamation as I realized I’d been hacked. Without the chapter I lost last night, my story had six entries posted. What the hell were the other two?

 

“Something wrong?” Ralee asked, trying to snake her neck around to peak at my phone. Nope, not happening lady. The last thing I needed was to have to explain why her life story was posted on the internet for anybody to see.

 

I twisted the device away from her to hide the screen. “Don’t worry about it, my friend sent me a picture of a mango that’s shaped like a dick… it’s kind of his thing.” Unfortunately, the second half of that statement wasn’t a lie. Yeah, Drew was a special kind of someone.

 

“Psh, sounds like Drew,” Ralee nonchalantly remarked as she lost interest in my screen. Wait, that was nothing to be nonchalant about. She should have been VERY chalant about knowing Drew… was chalant a word?

 

“You know Drew?” I asked, interest piqued. Ralee nodded as I grew more and more confused by the second. “And this guy, Drew, he sends you pictures of food that look like dicks?” I was sure there were many people out there named Drew and that more than a few of them would never have graduated past penis humor, but the coincidence was still uncanny.

 

In the back, Ralee relaxed and sunk further into the aged seat as she reminisced. “He didn’t send them to me. He was Leona’s friend and anytime he saw something in the grocery store that remotely looked like nuts and a knob he would snap a pic and send it to everyone he knew. Lea used to say he had a real--”

 

“Oral fixation.” I finished Leona’s joke that I had never actually written for her. I had been saying that for years now, ever since Drew picked up his off-beat hobby.

 

Immediately realizing that something was off, Ralee climbed between the front seats and took the shotgun position. “Wait a minute… you’re from this world, right? How the hell do you know Drew?” A fair and valid question.

 

I shrugged, figuring that this was a question I could answer with little repercussion. “Drew’s been a friend of mine since middle school. We used to hang out all the time and play video games together.” Without so much as a warning, Ralee’s hand gripped my chin like a crab claw as she wrenched my head in every direction. She stared at me from each angle before looking right into my eyes.

 

“Damn,” she muttered as she let me go and looked out at the night through the windshield. Why did she keep staring at me like that?

 

Whatever. She was now preoccupied with her own thoughts which gave me a chance to check the new chapters. Chapter seven was the chapter I had written last night, fully edited and embellished. Hell, it was better than I had originally written it which kind of pissed me off. After skimming through seven I headed straight into chapter eight. Leona had arrived in her new world, one that wasn’t all too different from her own. When she had come to, she was outside of a large outdoor mall. She wandered around for a while before coming to a stage with palm trees and waves carved into the pillars that surrounded it.

 

I knew that mall… hell, I knew that stage! Starting the engine, and throwing the car in gear, I peeled out of my parking spot. “What-- Where do you think you’re taking me?” Ralee seemed more confused than frightened by my sudden haste. Them's the breaks, sister, you broke into my car, now you had to deal with my god awful driving.

 

“I know where Leona is!” I confidently declared, as my car recklessly ducked and dodged through traffic. “We’re going to the Sea Path Mall.”

 

***

 

We pulled into the mall’s empty parking lot five minutes later, a new personal record! Ralee opened the door and collapsed out of her side, wobbling on her feet as she struggled to stay upright. “You are NEVER driving us again! You’re even worse at that than Lea.” I smiled smugly, still the reigning champ of terrible driving. “Now, where is she exactly?”

 

Jogging from the lot into the heart of the open mall, Ralee and I made it to a large courtyard area with a mosaic tiled floor and a series of intricately carved pillars. This area fed directly into a barely elevated stage where various performers would come and go throughout the day, all vying for the attention of the shoppers just passing through. It had been years since I came down here. Once I had discovered the magic of online shopping, the crowds and commotion of the mall lost most of its spark.

 

Stopping in the center of the courtyard I started looking all around. The open layout of the courtyard made it so that people on all three levels of the mall could look over the balcony to see the stage below. My eyes darted up and down the multiple levels of darkened storefronts that were visible from our position. “Leona!” Ralee called through cupped hands. Her voice echoed around the empty shopping center and I shook my head and held a finger to my mouth. We obviously weren’t supposed to be here and I didn’t feel like having to outrun a security guard after working a double. “Are you sure she’s here?” Ralee asked in a loud whisper. With every passing second, it became apparent that if Leona ever had been here, she sure as hell hadn’t stuck around.

 

I pulled out my phone to read the rest of the chapter. Leona had been at the stage and seen a performance during the day. According to the chapter I hadn’t written, there had been a group of dancers performing that Leona had watched before she continued on her way to destinations unknown. Damnit, I had jumped the gun in coming here and gotten Ralee’s hopes up. “It looks like she left. She was here though, I can guarantee that.” My now literal partner in crime didn’t seem too convinced.

 

“Sure,” she said flatly. “Look, thanks for trying to help, but I think I’ll be better off looking for her myself. I know what she likes and where she’d be likely to go… even in a new world.” Normally, she’d be right. I’m sure she knew Leona as a person more than I’d ever know her as a character. However, I had a tangible connection to her in the form of my self-updating story. “See ya around.”

 

While she walked away, I wrestled with the idea of stopping her again. As far as she was concerned, she and Leona were both one hundred percent real. To her, their world was genuine. Was it my place to show her the story and have her question everything she thought she knew? The sound of an engine turning over echoed through the halls and into the courtyard where I was standing. Engine… Why did I feel like that was a problem? WAIT!

 

I took off in a full sprint, managing to reach the parking lot just as my car left without me. Unbe-fucking-lievable! I had just gotten carjacked by my own character! Oh, I was SO writing food poisoning into the next chapter, so help me god!

 

After much cursing and swearing terrible vengeance, I texted Cathy in the hopes that she would be willing to pick me up. She was usually at her second job around this time and I figured waiting here for a few hours would beat walking the dozen or so miles home. After she agreed to give me a ride, I trudged back into the courtyard to sit on one of the benches until she arrived.

 

It was weird being in a place that was simultaneously familiar and forgotten to yourself. When I was younger, my parents would always take me to this mall to go window shopping and eat at the food court. It was good cheap fun for a family familiar with the struggle. The stores around the area had changed. Bookstores had become boutiques, the old tea shop had become a Burger Barn, the memories I thought I could trust failed me with the changes time had brought. The one part of this area that was still the same was the wooden stage with the dark blue curtains.

 

A long time ago, after enjoying our lunchtime delicacies at the food court, my parents were leading me past this courtyard and to the CD and record store they both loved. I remembered seeing the curtain open to a lineup of women dressed in strange sparkly outfits. The announcer over the PA system called for everyone to direct their attention to the stage as a traveling troupe of dancers made their local debut. From the moment they started moving, I was mesmerized. My parents both realized that I had been captivated and stopped trying to pull me along, content to kill some time watching the show. They flipped and tossed one another as a fast-paced instrumental played behind them. Their limbs flowed like water as they cascaded among one another in time with the rhythm, throwing fancy tricks in here and there to punctuate their art. After about fifteen minutes, the dancers waved at the audience as the curtain closed.

 

For the rest of the day, dad kept making fun of me for having a crush on the dancers while mom jokingly criticized their revealing attire. Even though I was only ten, I couldn’t deny that I thought they were beautiful. Each of them had looked so perfect up there as they dazzled the few onlookers they could distract from shopping. All of them looked so at peace, with huge smiles on their faces as they did things I didn’t think were possible outside of the movies. My dad wasn’t entirely right, as he ribbed me for stopping to ogle the pretty ladies. Yes the entire performance had been a delight to watch, but some small part of me wondered what it would have been like to be up there… to be one of them. It was nothing but the idle fantasy of a kid that didn’t know any better. A fantasy I hadn’t thought of in years.