Chapter Twenty Six

Rewrites

Veda

An idea started to form in the forefront of my mind like a white mist. I should try to find my clothes. When a patient checked into a hospital, the nurses took their clothes and put them in a bag while the patient wore the hospital gown. I was not wearing a normal hospital gown. I was wearing something I had constructed for myself. It was purple to help the reader remember that what they were experiencing was not real life, but only something I wrote. Thus, I knew that none of my own clothes were anywhere in the hospital. Why would I try to find something I already knew wasn't there?

Again, I thought I should change my clothes, and that I should look inside a particular cupboard for my bag.

I got up and checked it. Surprisingly, I found a white plastic bag containing clothes. Not the purple clothes of my make-believe story, but black clothes. They were ones I owned in real life.

I dropped the bag.

I hadn't written about those. Something had changed and someone had started writing additional text to my story.

All my fears were realized as I turned around and saw that Salinger's hair was no longer black, but a light brown. With his back to me, he sat up, cracked his neck, and took a deep breath. Orange vapor poured from his nostrils and hung in the air around him.

I didn't dare move. Somehow Antony had entered the story as the doctor. He sat with his back to me and I didn't know what to do. Part of me wanted to beat him senseless and another part wanted to hide behind the other bed.

I watched, paralyzed with indecision, as he reached into his lab coat. He gasped as he yanked the syringe out of his leg. When he withdrew it from his pocket, it was completely empty. The cylinder magically refilled itself with fluorescent yellow liquid. No one could escape from my book without using the syringe, so the poison would always magically reappear no matter how many times you disposed of it. I cursed myself.

What was more confusing was why Antony was there at all. How had he been able to enter the book when Salinger had been the one reading it? I tried to think of something that explained the switch in readers, but before I could formulate a theory, Antony stood up.

There was no way out. There was nothing to this world, except the inside of the hospital. No way out. No way out.

I shook my head. Why was I thinking in such a pessimistic way? I had been planning on killing myself, but I wasn’t doing it because I was helpless, but because I was strong and I could do whatever I wanted—including kill myself. Why was I being such a baby now?

Was I only thinking that way because he told me to?

I peered over the bed. His mouth was moving, and he was saying. “No way out.”

‘I love you,’ Salinger had said. The memory was still strong. I had to hang onto his voice and what it sounded like, so I could push out Antony’s commands.

He spotted me.

“Beautiful girl,” he said, in a voice that was all his. “How are you feeling?”

I crossed my arms in a defiant gesture. “I'm fine. Give me the syringe.”

“Why?”

“Because I'm not playing doctor with you. I'm not pretending to be your patient. You have been taking my discarded books and using them to learn about me. You think you know everything, but you only know about the side of me that I've been trying to throw away.”

“Is that so?”

“How does it feel, Antony, eating my waste?”

He chuckled. “You are such a lady! You can't even say shit, can you?”

I glared at him. “And you're proud of your language? I wonder what you said to Pearl that made her like you. You certainly never said it to me.”

His expression lost its joviality. He knew why. It was because she was easier than me. I was hard as nails and following some paradoxical logic, my recent experience with Salinger had made me even harder.

“Give me the syringe,” I prompted.

“You can't destroy it.”

“I know. I wrote the book on the syringe, back in the days when I was too afraid to face death by myself and I wanted someone to ease my passage to my mother. Those days are gone and if I want to die, I'll do it myself. Give me the syringe. Yours is not the last face I want to see.”

He glared at me. “You can be such a bitch!”

“It's all part of my charm. That's why I am better than the other cousins. It's actually why you want me. Getting Pearl's approval is easy, isn't it? It didn't matter what you said. Everything sounded like magic to her. She's two years younger than us and easily impressed. I bet you felt like a real man picking her up for a date in your car. I bet her cheeks were flushed and you felt sensational because that was what your reflection in her eyes showed you. You could fall right into that fantasy, except for that one thing. Breathe orange again. Does her dragon's breath taste like mine?”

His face contorted in discomfort.

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

I ignored him and continued, “Because if you were going through my trash on a regular basis, you would have found my attempts. That's why you get her to make it for you, isn't it? Because you liked mine?”

He spat on the floor. It was nothing like mine. “Why did you make it? Even once?” he snarled.

It wasn't the time to hide my daggers, and I laughed condescendingly, to make him feel like a smudge on the floor. “I didn’t spend all my time arranging my cousins' lives and working out my death. Another part wanted something very different. You see, there was this tiny little part of me that wanted to fall in love. You know, I wanted to find a man who was a blue to my pink, a diamond to my onyx, a sun to my moon. Otherwise, why wear ruffles? If I was merely going to grow into an adult and then kill myself, why cast a spell every single day to make my hair beautiful? Why learn to dance, when truly, dogs have better coordination than me.”

Antony stared at me like what I said was impossible.

I didn’t acknowledge him and continued. “How I look proves how much I want to meet a partner who I can see myself in, and who I can give a part of myself to. Dragon's breath isn't much more than incense if it's not made for the right person.” I let my shoulders fall. “It was never you, and no one has had more of a chance to grow into what I want than you. You can never be what I want.”

Antony did not respond. He stood still, warring with himself over which words he would use next and I let him gather himself. Allowing him a chance to ask me questions was the perfect way to stall him. Salinger might break my spell or the cousins might heal me at any moment and when they did, I would only leave a version of myself he could kill behind.

Finally, he growled, “I don't know what you see in Salinger.”

“Don't you? Care for an explanation?”

He inclined his head bitterly.

“Start by thinking of everything he has done for Pearl and ask yourself if you would have thought to do any of it without him.”

“Okay,” Antony said after a moment's thought. “I agree that Salinger is an okay guy, nice even, but how does that match up with you? You're such a bitch!”

I slapped my hands together in front of me. “Let's review my behavior in the past few months. Did I do one thing to retaliate against the cousins when they were cross with me? Did I say even one unkind word about them? I didn't build up a camp and go to war. I could have talked to June and the other witches who work at the school to rally support, but I didn't. We could have had a family feud on our hands if I had fought back. Instead, I did nothing. No one got cursed. The only thing I have been guilty of has been saying—on repeat—that I don't want to be with you. That doesn't make me a bad person. Give me the syringe.”

He ground his teeth together and refused.

“If you bind my spirit to you, it won't be what you want. I'll never love you the way you want,” I persisted.

He took a few steps away from me and licked his lips. “I’m trying to give you a chance here. I’ve been trying to tell you that I added an extra chapter to this book. I got your black clothes into the story. They’re here so you can get rid of the purple clothes marker. Instead of reminding the reader that you’re fake, they’ll remind you that you’re real. I added more to the setting too. We can leave this story, go past the hospital door and into a part of the book that I wrote.” He was rambling, as he rifled around the room. He pocketed the syringe and picked something off the floor. It was a rope.

I put my hand on my hip. “What are you going to use that for?”

“We can’t stay here and I know you won’t come with me willingly. But before we go,” he said slowly, sliding the rope between his fingers, “I want to know why it can’t be me.”

I was getting nervous. “Didn't I already say? Didn't I already say quite a few reasons?”

He stood there, tying the rope into a menacing loop.

“Antony,” I said slowly, trying a different tactic. “Do you remember Fair Isle?”

“What about her?”

“She read Salinger's book and it made her fall in love with him. Do you think something similar happened to you when you read my books? The book is magic and it makes you feel like I'm something special, when really, in real life, I'm not special at all. You come face to face with me, and I'm a...” it was hard to say the word, “bitch, but when you read my book, I'm amazing. In this book especially, I look up at you with my big please-save-me eyes and you want to save me, but the book is set up so you can never really save me. A lot of my discarded stories are like that. You want to save me in real life too, but I don’t want to be saved. The only way to satisfy me is to help me die, but if I die, I'll be gone. You don't want me to be gone, so you found a spell that will keep me with you.”

His face crumpled.

What I was saying was somewhat true. That was one way of saying how he truly felt. Perhaps, I had been demonizing him before with my comments. He was my cousin, not a monster.

“I'm not going to kill myself, Antony. I'm not going to do that anymore.” I whispered, “I outgrew it.”

“I'm sorry, Veda.” His face was dark violet, and he was fighting off the tears. He had been so immersed in the books he had stolen, he had forgotten I was a real person. Yet, he still had the syringe. For a moment, it looked like he might drop the rope as emotion overtook him, but then he rallied and got a grip on himself. He wiped his eyes with his dry palm and started again. “I have spent my whole life with you. What is it about you that I don't understand?” He dropped the rope.

I thought furiously. “Maybe it's just that fate hasn't been on the side of us becoming a couple.”

“Fate?” he wheezed like he couldn't believe what I was saying.

“It was fate that made us cousins. I've always thought we look alike,” I admitted painfully. I had never wanted to say that out loud, even if everyone knew it.

“Where? Where do we look alike? You look like your father.”

Thirty seconds later we were in the bathroom. I showed him how our eyebrows were the exact same shape, even though I plucked out the strays he still had. Then I showed him our lips and chins and how they were the same and then I showed him the last similarity.

“Our foreheads slope at the exact same angle.”

“Your forehead doesn't slope!”

“Yes, it does. That’s why I wear bangs.” I pulled all my fringe back and showed him. I turned my back on him to do so.

Slowly, he realized, “You’re never going to change your mind, are you?”

At that moment, he stabbed me in the thigh with the needle. I didn't even see his hand enter his pocket, but I felt the liquid disperse into my thigh muscle before I could even turn around. I had been so foolish to drop my guard. I thought I was helping him understand my position and his familiarity had made me feel safe. So stupid. I hadn't learned my lesson that he was no longer to be trusted, even after he made my ears bleed, I still thought of him as my cousin… someone who could never really hurt me. Nothing I said mattered.

He killed me.

In my last moments of consciousness, Antony caught me and whispered, “Inside your books, do you know how many times I have made you mine? Ever since I learned how to add text, you do whatever I say. Losing your tangible form will be a shame, but thanks to your prolific and extended writing, I don’t need you to have you whenever I want.” He smacked his lips. “Without your body, it doesn’t matter if we look alike, whether you want me or not, whether I have a girlfriend or not. You’re mine. And just in case you were wondering… this isn’t because I love you. It’s because I hate you. I never want you to leave and I never want you to be happy. I only want you to do as I say.”

Grabbing me by my armpits, he dragged me back to the hospital room. He jolted me up on the bed that Salinger had made and I felt his hand move up my thighs.

I couldn’t move when the blackness overtook me.