Sitting in the car, I looked down at my hands in my lap. I still felt off, weird. Cece looked over at me as we begin to drive out of the neighborhood. The clock on her dashboard said 5:39. She shook her head, "We're going to have to punch it if we're going to beat your mom home."

I shudder at the thought of what Cece considered really punching it. Her normal driving scared me.

“Wanna talk about it?” Cece asked, turning to look at me and blowing a stop sign.

"I don't really feel like it," I said. That was true, and I was worried if I distracted her while she was “punching it” we’d crash and die.

Cece shrugged and stepped on the gas, motoring out of the neighborhood.

I wasn't sure what Jemima had shared with Cece in their quiet conversation. Maybe she had warned Cece that I was evil, or at least that apparently I was going to grow up to be evil. How was I supposed to process that? How was I supposed to fight with my future evil self? I probably should have asked more questions, but I wasn't feeling good. Ever since that finger prick, all I wanted to do was go home, lie down, and go to sleep.

Cece drove, not saying anything, allowing me room to process. How are you supposed to handle learning that you grew up to be evil? I didn't feel like the sort of person who would grow up to be evil.

I looked out the window, watching the neighborhood pass by. As we drove by a dark house, I caught a glimpse of Cece reflected in the window. She was bent over with her head in her hands instead of her hand on the wheel. She was shaking her head back and forth, and I heard her saying, "No, no, no, no."

Startled, I whipped around and looked at her. But upon turning, when I looked, she was sitting up straight. Hand draped over the wheel as usual. I blinked.

She looked over at me, drawn by my sudden movement. She raised an eyebrow and I shook my head, turning back to the window. We’d passed by the dark house. Without a dark background, I could no longer see a reflection.

I glanced at Cece again, just to be sure, but she appeared normal. My pounding heart began to slow down just in time to get on the freeway. I tried not to watch the speedometer. I didn’t want to know.

As the road noise increased and the car was pushed past the point where it began to shake, I tried to keep myself and my mind off things by staring out the window. As we pulled around and passed a semi-truck with a dark paneled side, I could once more see Cece reflected in my window. She was curled up in the driver's seat, head in her hands, shaking her head back and forth.

This time I could hear her clearly, which was weird because of the excessive road noise. She was saying, "no, no, no, no." Except, while I was watching the words leave her lips, the voice she was using wasn’t hers. It was a gravelly, hard-used voice. A man's voice.

I turned slowly this time so as not to distract the driver— or maybe to try and sneak up on whatever it was I was seeing— and looked at Cece.

She looked normal. Sitting up, leaning back, one hand draped over the steering wheel, one hand on the shifter, she caught me looking again, glanced over, she smiled and winked. She turned back to the road, weaving between cars.

I turned back to the window to try and catch another glimpse of Phantom Cece, or whatever it was I was seeing, but I could no longer see a reflection. I had been ready and willing to write it off as my mind playing tricks on me the first time. But twice? Plus, I still felt weird. Something was going on.

I began to lean backwards and forwards, trying to get something dark in my line of vision so that I could catch a glimpse of Cece reflection again. Sitting really low in my seat, I was able to use the passing trees to catch glimpses of Cece's reflection.

Every time I caught a glimpse, the voice would come in, like turning on a radio or television. Reflected Cece, whom I began thinking of in my mind as “Not Cece”, still had her head in her hands, shaking her head back and forth. I caught snatches of what she was saying: "I knew kids were stupid, but I didn't know they were that stupid. How stupid was I when I was twelve?"

There was a break as there were no trees, and I squirmed around, trying to find a new angle where I could again see and hear what Not Cece was saying. I had no idea what was going on. Real Cece looked over at me from where she was driving and said, "Are you okay, Freak?" I guess I must have looked very strange, wiggling down into my seat the way I was.

I sat up more. "I'm fine," I said.

I don't know why, but I didn't want to tell her about it. Maybe because it was her reflection doing the talking. Maybe because I was beginning to feel like this actually crossed some line where there was no way she would believe me. And I really wanted to keep her as a friend.

We passed a dark van, and I caught another glimpse. "Tricky, tricky, tricky, that little backwater crone."

There was a space, and then we passed a black Escalade. "What does she do? Cons him out of our luck. I can't believe this. We need that."

There was another space, then I caught a glimpse as we passed a dark Ford truck. "Calling me evil? You're the one stealing luck from children, you old crone."

At this point, it clicked what I was hearing. I leaned closer to the window as we shifted lanes once more and began to pass another dark semi-truck. "Unbelievable. And she actually had the stones to call me evil. I don't go around taking luck from children."

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

Leaning close to the window, I said, "Are you my future self?" Real Cece shouldn't be able to hear me over the horrible vibration inside the car.

Not Cece's head snapped up, and I realized something was wrong. Her eyes wrong. They were not fully in their sockets, hanging out the front, one partially deflated. Her skin was tattered, hanging off her face in fleshy flaps. It looked like she was a couple weeks dead and decayed. The eyes themselves, though they appeared to be about to fall out, held a burning intensity that I had never seen before.

"You can hear me now? Is that what she did?" Not Cece moved in the most horrifyingly unnatural way I had ever seen. Bending and twisting out from underneath the steering wheel and the seatbelt without bothering to unbuckle it. She scrambled across the middle console and across my seat to slam against the window right in front of me, giving me a first-hand view of her gory visage. Flecks of blood spattered the window as bits of her skin were knocked off with the impact. She screamed at me in that Not Cece voice, "You get your ass back to that house and get that coin before we're royally fucked!”

I screamed. I'm not ashamed to admit it. I screamed the most terrified scream I had ever screamed, recoiling from the window, falling backward over myself, ripping my buckle off in blind panic. I collided with Cece, who turned towards me and my gibbering, mad terror, looking out my window for what had terrified me so.

"What is going on?" Cece yelled over the road noise. We finished passing by the dark surface, and I could no longer see the horrible face or hear the horrible voice. I stammered and pointed, attempting to articulate what it was that I had just seen. My heart was beating in my throat. Having difficulty taking a breath, I turned to look at Cece, and as I did, I saw out the front windshield. The line of traffic in front of us had come to an abrupt stop.

Shifting my focus entirely, I pointed out the front window and did my best to scream, "Look out!" Except my voice cracked and it came out broken and wrong. Cece looked up and recoiled. But I was on the shifter, and she attempted to throw me off and step on the brakes just as we caught up with the tail end of a semi-trailer. The lower metal bumper of the truck was spaced just right to go over our hood and enter the window at 75 miles an hour.

***

I screamed. It was the only thing I could think to do. Open my mouth and scream.

As I screamed, I felt a hard impact on my shoulder, and I was shoved backwards.

I stumbled, and then I sat down, my backpack having overbalanced me. I looked up and processed what was in front of me for the first time, blinking twice, trying to make sense of what had happened.

A large, blonde teenager had looked up from his phone long enough to shove me. "Freak," he said, and walked around me, looking back down at his phone. I opened my mouth to reply, couldn't think of anything, so I shut it.

The human tide of teenagers flowed around me, most of them on their phones. No one stopped to offer a hand. Sighing, I sat in the middle of the hall for a moment, teenagers shuffled around me and bumped into me. Getting tired of being bumped into, I shrugged out of my backpack, stood, and then picked it up, heaving it up and over my shoulder.

I started to make my way to my locker before I thought about what I was doing. I slowed to a complete stop and stood there, trying to process what had happened.

We had died.

That was a bad traffic accident. I hadn't even thought to slow time. And that face…

What was I doing? I abandoned the hike to my locker, turning and shouldering my way through the crowd towards the bathroom. It took me three tries to remember which direction it was in. I felt so disoriented.

At last, I made my way in and hesitated before stepping in front of the mirror. I dropped my heavy backpack on the floor, tired of the burden. Then slowly stepped forward, bracing myself, ready to see Not-Cece’s horrible, rotting visage leering at me once more.

Blessedly, she was not there. The mirror was blank. I stepped closer, puzzled. I stepped to the side, trying to catch sight of my reflection. Stepping further to the side, I put one of the stalls in my line of vision through the mirror. I could see a pair of sneakers underneath the door.

I didn’t notice anyone was in here when I came in. I turned and looked at the stall to only then realize that I hadn't been able to see my own reflection. Facing the stalls now, the door that I had seen closed with the sneakers peeking out from underneath was now sitting open. No sneakers, no person, nothing out of place or unusual in front of me.

With my back to the mirror and the awareness of what I might see when I turned back around, it took considerable force of will to turn back towards it. After several deep breaths, I made myself do it.

Facing the mirror once more, there was no bogeyman inches from the glass ready for his next jump scare. Instead, the sneakers sat underneath the stall again, and I could hear the same rasping, dirty, gravelly voice that I had heard coming out of Cece's mouth in the car window reflection. The voice echoed around the bathroom, sounding like it was really coming from behind me. From inside of the closed bathroom stall, as the the mirror portrayed.

"You've really done it now," the voice said. "This is…This is something special. You… Fucked us. Like screwed the pooch. But you had to take it out back, kill it, and let it set in the sun for a week before screwing it. Oh, I don't think it could have been possible to screw that up worse. You have no idea what you've done. You fucked us. It's all over."

Looking at the sneakers in the reflection in the mirror, I had a realization and looked down at what I had on my own feet. They were exactly the same. Those were my shoes that I was seeing sitting in that stall in the reflection in the mirror. As soon as I looked away from the mirror, the voice stopped, cut off mid-word and mid-bathroom echo as abruptly as shutting off a tv. Reluctant, but needing answers, I looked back into the mirror.

He was gone. I mean, I was gone. I mean, Not-me was not there. The stall was open, the door sitting at the exact angle as the real stall behind me.

Caught up with the surreal nature of standing close to a mirror and not being able to see myself, I reached out and touched the glass. There was no trace of my hand. Stepping to the side, I looked for Not-me. The bathroom was empty. I didn't see him.

I stepped out of line of sight of the mirror and leaned against the wall. My heart was beating hard, and a knot was forming in my stomach as I looked for Not me in the mirror. I leaned over and reached for the faucet to splash cold water on my face, careful to stay out from the line of sight of the mirror.

As I leaned over the side of the sink, I caught a distorted reflection of my own face in the chrome faucet handle, and the voice was back full force in the bathroom.

"I didn't know it was possible to screw up this bad in such a short amount of time, but you did it. You managed it. First I have to go and fucking break my leg coming back, and then once I'm here, well, guess what? Then some dumbass kid's put in charge. I don't know who you are, but you're not me. I don't remember being this stupid. I was not this stupid before I was born. One hundred and nineteen years I've been alive and you’re the stupidest person I’ve ever encountered.

I needed to make it past one-twenty. There's a hard limit on life, you see. I've been trying to find a workaround. And I do. I finally find one. I gotta die to make it happen, but it's okay. I can relive the time I've already lived, so I don't have to spend it wasting my life on the things that I've already discovered. You know, I dedicated my life to the paranormal. I found it. All of it. Well, almost. I didn't find enough of it, clearly.

Breaking my goddamn leg, coming all the goddamn way back here, just so a kid gets to be in charge of my entire damn life and the first thing he does is he goes and he fucks us."

He continued to ramble this way. The face in the handle, Not me, was distorted, hard to make out. The mouth moved in time with the sounds I heard echoing around the room. I stepped back from the faucet, letting the water run, and the rambling cut off abruptly. Just then, the bathroom door slammed open.

I had dropped my backpack right in front of the door, and the abrupt motion caused the bag to spill across the room, its contents ripping out all over the floor. Billy George stood in the bathroom door, staring at the mess on the floor.

"How am I supposed to use the bathroom with this mess, nerd?" he shouted. "Get this trash out of my way."

And he proceeded to wade into the room, kicking my papers and books and school things aside. I protested on reflex.

"Hey," I said, stepping towards him.

Billy, acting upon what was apparently his first reflex for any problem, jabbed me straight in the nose. I fell back against the sink behind me and turned to try and catch myself before I fell on the floor, my hand grabbing the edge of the sink, my face coming level with the faucet, the rambling voice coming back.

"And then you had to go and give it away. You have no idea what you've done. You fucked us. Oh, you fucked us. We are so fucked."

I pulled myself up and turned away from the voice in time to catch another blow from Billy, this time in my gut. I doubled over and fell on the floor. It was too much. The gut punch, the day, the car accident, Jemima, the lack of reflection. I began to vomit on the bathroom floor.

“What is going on in there?” Someone outside the bathroom shouted.

I heard movement near the door and a familiar voice barked, "Thomason! George! My office! Now!"

***