on my head. I walked slowly down the hall, taking small, even steps.
“I’m going to bed,” I said when I’d made it to the Chapel. “We’ll talk
about this tomorrow.”
Dad was at his desk, holding a phone in his left hand. “We’ll talk
about it now,” he said. “I told Shawn what you said. He is coming.”
—I CONSIDERED MAKING A run for it. Could I get to my car before Shawn
made it to the house? Where were the keys? I need my laptop, I
thought, with my research. Leave it, the girl from the mirror said.
Dad told me to sit and I did. I don’t know how long I waited,
paralyzed with indecision, but I was still wondering if there was time to
escape when the French doors opened and Shawn walked in. Suddenly
the vast room felt tiny. I looked at my hands. I couldn’t raise my eyes.
I heard footsteps. Shawn had crossed the room and was now sitting
next to me on the sofa. He waited for me to look at him, and when I
didn’t he reached out and took my hand. Gently, as if he were
unfolding the petals of a rose, he peeled open my fingers and dropped
something into them. I felt the cold of the blade before I saw it, and
sensed the blood even before I glimpsed the red streak staining my
palm.
The knife was small, only five or six inches long and very thin. The
blade glowed crimson. I rubbed my thumb and index finger together,
then brought them to my nose and inhaled. Metallic. It was definitely
blood. Not mine—he’d merely handed me the knife—but whose?
“If you’re smart, Siddle Lister,” Shawn said, “you’ll use this on
yourself. Because it will be better than what I’ll do to you if you don’t.”
“That’s uncalled for,” Mother said.
I gaped at Mother, then at Shawn. I must have seemed like an idiot
to them, but I couldn’t grasp what was happening well enough to
respond to it. I half-wondered if I should return to the bathroom and
climb through the mirror, then send out the other girl, the one who
was sixteen. She could handle this, I thought. She would not be afraid,
like I was. She would not be hurt, like I was. She was a thing of stone,
with no fleshy tenderness. I did not yet understand that it was this fact
of being tender—of having lived some years of a life that allowed