Her voice is terse in a way I recognize. She’s upset, but because of the circumstances, she’s still trying to be nice. I don’t want to prolong this, so I start down the hall to my bedroom. “Whatever you want is fine,” I say. I don’t give her a chance to respond. I don’t want to have an argument right now. I know I didn’t behave the way she thinks I should; I never have. Why should we rehash it every three months?
I shut my bedroom door behind me and wait with my hand on the knob, listening. If she doesn’t follow me now, she’ll leave me alone for the rest of the day. She hates missing work, and when she’s stressed like this, she works into the night. There’s always something for salespeople to do at the car dealership.
Her footsteps move away. The front door opens and closes and locks behind her. A few moments later, her car starts up and pulls out of the driveway. She didn’t even change out of her funeral clothes.
I’m still carrying my gift. I set it on my desk, then do what I’ve wanted to do for hours: kick off my awful black flats, tear the stupid little socks from my feet, and peel myself out of the too-tight pants and blouse. For a moment, I stand completely still in the middle of my bedroom, almost naked, blessedly free. There’s a red line across my stomach where the waistband cut in, and sweat cools on my skin.
I pull on fresh clothes—leggings, thick socks, a T-shirt, and a baggy hoodie—and climb under my comforter. The lights are off, the daylight filtering gray and weak through my curtains. My room and the house are quiet.
I relax for the first time.
It’s three o’clock on a Wednesday. I haven’t been to school since Alissa was found over the weekend. I don’t like this; school is routine. I know where I’m supposed to be and what I’m supposed to do, and there are clear guidelines for doing things well. Alissa loved days off, but I always get antsy and listless. If I don’t go to school, my homework builds up. If I don’t go to school, I can’t go to track practice. I went for a run around the neighborhood yesterday, but it wasn’t the same.
I pull my phone out. All I’ve heard about Alissa, beyond todayat the funeral, has been from social media. My messages are full of people I won’t answer. They ask what happened, if I’m okay, if I have any details. Mostly they’re friends or acquaintances, but there are also friends of friends, parents of classmates, people I’ve never met before, creeping in and sniffing for drama.
And there are con artists. Some woman named Macy let me know Alissa’s soul could be saved for the low low price of $24.99, sent directly to her telechurch in Vermont. I blocked her.
The posts outside of my messages are worse. There are hundreds of comments on Alissa’s accounts, her videos, her posts. Saying how much they miss her, how they wish she hadn’t done it, praying for her, for her family, asking for donations, promoting charities, promoting mental health networks, promoting churches, cursing sinners. Hashtags flourish. In the news articles, anonymous commenters speculate about how she did it. Why she did it. Someone has started a scholarship in her name for kids who want to go to Ball State for communications, like she had planned to do.
People who never looked twice at her, who never met her before, are participating as if it means something special to them.
If all feels so fake. Do they know what they’re doing? They’re using Alissa to get attention. Likes, follows, comments, views. A scholarship is good. It’ll help someone. But it’s not forher.It’s for the people who donate, so they can feel better about the fact they didn’t help her when she was here.
When the world inside my phone starts to feel more real than the room around me, I toss it across the comforter and get out of bed long enough to retrieve Alissa’s note from my pants pocket and the gift from my desk, and then I’m back under the covers. My fingers move lightly, carefully, unfolding the little square note like a piece of origami. I don’t think about what’s inside. That makes opening it easy. I pretend this is a note she passed me last month that I lost in my backpack. It’s going to be about the terrible new menu in the cafeteria. Nothing in this note could have stopped what happened from happening.
Most of the paper is covered in pen doodles, lines and stars, a shitty little shark chewing on a cartoon leg. The actual text is in the middle of the page. Three lines.
It doesn’t make much sense. In the summer of 2017, we were nine years old, playing softball on the same team, already friends for two years. Chilly’s Chicken is a local fast-food place that the team sometimes went to during tournaments, but it’s also where Alissa and I went some Saturdays for lunch. I don’t know what “pop the top” is supposed to mean.
But if she was giving me a riddle for my birthday, she probably thought she’d be around to give me hints. She was too nice to leave me with something I couldn’t figure out.
I set the note aside and turn to the gift. I remove the newspaper slowly, without tearing it, to reveal I was right: It is a stack of books. Four of them, in beautiful bronze dust jackets, with designs of poppies and weapons etched on the surface. They’re the four Children of Hypnos books, the series Alissa was obsessed with. But they’re not just the four books—they’reherfour books. I know this because I saw them on the shelf in her bedroom every time I went to her house. I know the wear marks on the edges of the jackets and the feeling of opening each book, how the spine on the first one,Dreamhunter, crackles because it’s the oldest and the one she read the most.
I also know they’re hers because each one has a sticker inside with “Property of Alissa Whitaker” inked in her neat handwriting.
CoH was the one thing she was into that I never cared about. I tried reading the books once and couldn’t get into them. Iread books for school.The Grapes of Wrath,Song of Solomon,1984. I read books to write papers and take tests. Mom buys them for me because it’s for my education. When I read for fun, it’s science fiction, space odysseys and alien adventures, things that aren’t real but could be.
Children of Hypnos was a fantasy, but much of it was too close to reality for me to enjoy. Teenagers in our world, dealing with issues. It had become infamous because the author, Olivia Kane, had never released the final book. Only four of the five books had been published, and it had been a decade since the fourth one had come out. People were convinced she was never going to finish.
Alissa loved them. Everything about them. She loved that the story was about teenagers hunting nightmares. She loved that it took place at a school. She loved the relationships between the characters, the weapons they used, the themes—thethemes, she could talk for hours about the themes, and now I feel guilty because I used to zone out. When she wasn’t at school or extracurriculars or church or hanging out with me, she was playing Children of Hypnos Online, a game I see internet ads for all the time, thanks to her. I’d joke with her about how she was wasting her time, and she’d needle me back about being a killjoy.
I remember a conversation I had with her a few months ago, and I reach across the bed for my phone again. A quick searchconfirms my suspicions: the final Children of Hypnos book comes out this October. Alissa was so excited about it. Olivia Kane had finally finished the series. All those fans would finally get their ending.
I lower my phone and stare at the four books arrayed before me. She must have planned to buy a new box set of the complete series when the final book came out. She wouldn’t have given me her copies otherwise.
“I guess it wasn’t enough to keep you around,” I say aloud. The words catch in my throat. I pinch my lips shut, dedicating myself to silence so I don’t lose my composure. My chest starts to tighten again the way it did in the funeral home, so I focus on my breathing.
What would have kept her here? Could anything have stopped her from doing what she did?
She was so stupid. Why would she think I’d want these for my birthday? I didn’t read them before, I won’t read them now.
When I go to stack the books again, a sheaf of paper slides out of the fourth. The pages are covered in Alissa’s handwriting and her pictures. She was a pretty good artist, nothing outstanding, but much better than me. The pictures are of a blond girl our age, wearing elaborate clothing that is halfway between armor and high fashion. She’s wielding a sword etched with complex designs. In some pictures she seems to be posing for the viewer, staring determinedly into the distance, sword at the ready. Inothers, she’s actively slaying nightmares, whether they be people or animals or monsters. In still others, she’s healing her comrades, bandaging them and using supernatural powers to bring them back to fighting shape. Accompanying many of these pictures is the name Briory, written in different scripts.
This is Alissa’s dreamhunter, the one she plays in Children of Hypnos Online. Played. I saw her drawing some of these very pictures in class, or on the bus to track meets. When she drew Briory, she went somewhere else. Calling her back could make her upset, if not downright angry.
I set the pictures aside and pick up the other pages. These, I’ve never seen before. They’re solid walls of text. A story.
As the nightmarecameswooped down, Briory used the last of her strength to raise her sword, and the blade sank into thecreature’sfell beast’s stomach, all the way up to the hilt, splitting it in half like a ripe tomatoso its guts spilled outso the Dream spilled out of it and emptied into the air around her and as the creature screamed into her face one last time
