The door was cracked open, and inside, Anya was sitting on the floor with her back to me, half sobbing, half screaming into the phone in rapid, high-pitched Russian. Pausing, she took a few deep hysterical breaths, said one last word into the receiver, and then slammed it into its base.
All was still as she caught her breath, hiccupping a few times. Then, without warning, she picked up the phone and threw it across the room. I gasped as it hit the wall.
She whipped around, her face swollen and red. Mascara was smeared across her cheeks. “You,” she barked, wiping her face with her sleeve.
The dial tone beeped in the background.
“Come here.”
She looked so crazed, it took me a moment to realize that she was addressing me. Without responding, I turned and started to walk back to my room.
“Why are you always here, lurking at my door?” she said, sticking her head into the hall. “Do you think I want to talk to you?”
I kept walking.
“You think you’re interesting or something because you didn’t die?”
I took a breath, trying to convince myself it wasn’t worth it to turn around.
“Because you had a fit in the middle of class? What’s your problem, anyway? Are you some kind of freak?”
I looked down at my hands, and realized they were clenched.
“Why aren’t you answering me? Did your parents never teach you English?”
At that I spun around. “I never said I was interesting,” I yelled, louder than I meant to. “And of course I can hear you. Everyone can hear you.” It felt surprisingly good to shout at someone. Maybe this was what I had needed to do all along. “I don’t lurk in front of your room. I get lost. And I really don’t think you’re in a position to be calling anyone a freak.”
She glared at me. “What is that supposed to mean?”
I took in her bad dye job, her asymmetrical clothes, and her acrylic fingernails. “You look ridiculous.”
“So do you!” she said, waving her hands wildly. “And you’re possessed!”
Catching our breaths, we stood there in silence, unsure of what to do next. Behind me, I could hear a group of girls gathering in the hall.
“A witch arguing with a liar,” Clementine said, as she put a hand on her hip. She was wearing slippers, her short hair held back with a series of bobby pins. The girls behind her started to whisper.
Before I could formulate a response, Anya’s voice cut through the hallway. “July thirtieth. Have you forgotten?” she said, her eyes dark and steady. “Because I haven’t.”
Confused, I glanced at Anya and then at Clementine, who was glaring back at her. Her friends seemed just as baffled as I was.
Clementine let out a nervous laugh. “Is that a threat?”
“Yes,” Anya said plainly.
“What’s she talking about?” Josie, one of Clementine’s friends, asked, her lips thin and pursed in a pout. I recognized her from class.
Clementine began to look uncomfortable. Prying her eyes away from Anya, she turned to her friends. “I have no idea,” she said, though I could tell it wasn’t true. “Come on, let’s go.”
After everyone had left, I turned to Anya. “What was that? July thirtieth?”
“Oh, nothing,” she said, her face bearing the hint of a smile. “Just a little secret of Clementine’s that I happened to stumble across this summer.”
“You’re blackmailing her?”
“No,” Anya said, a tiny wrinkle forming on her forehead. “I’m not asking for anything in return. Only that she leave me alone.”
“But isn’t that still—”
Anya cut me off. “Do you really think I look ridiculous?” Curling a lock of red hair around her finger, she studied me.
I considered how to answer. “No,” I said, lying.
She gave me a skeptical look. “Why did you say it, then?”
“I was angry.”
She wiped her cheek, smearing the mascara even more. “So you’re apologizing?”
Her words caught me off guard. “No,” I said. “Not until you apologize to me.”
“But you insulted me first,” she insisted, as if it were the truth.
I shook my head in disbelief. “That’s not how I remember it.”
“Fine. I’m sorry,” she said, so quickly I could barely catch it. “Now you have to come inside.”
“What? Why?”
“Because I apologized first, so now you have to make it up to me.”
“I don’t have to make anything up to you,” I said, confused.
“You don’t have to be rude about it,” Anya said. “I’m not going to hurt you. I just need some help.”
I hesitated, listening to Clementine’s melodic voice down the hall. “Help doing what?”
She waved her hand. “Oh, just something really small.”
Anya’s room was dingy and cluttered with charms and feathers and an odd collection of talismans. A few posters dotted the walls, but they all seemed a little off, either too small or poorly placed. One of the overhead lightbulbs had gone out. To make up for it, Anya had lit a tall red candle encased in glass with a stencil of the Virgin Mary. A single cross hung over her bed. It was draped in neon beads.
I sat on the edge of the bed. “What exactly do you want me to do?” I said, fingering a string of charms hanging from her bedpost.
“Hold on,” Anya said, sifting through her desk drawer until she found a pocket sewing kit. “Why did you collapse this morning?” she asked as she removed a needle from the kit and held it in the flame of the candle.
“I don’t know,” I said, not wanting to divulge that I had hallucinated.
“Come on. I’m not stupid, she said, handing me the needle. “Hold this for a minute.”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said, taking the needle from her.
She opened her closet door and rummaged through her shoes until she found a chunky platform. “I already think you’re weird, so it’s not like anything you tell me will make me think worse of you. And don’t even try to trick me with that cheating death story. I don’t believe any of it.”
After wiping the bottom with rubbing alcohol, she placed the platform shoe just behind her ear. “Hold this right here,” she said, and I put my hands where hers had been. I was surprised at how relieved I felt, hearing those words. I don’t believe any of it.
“Did it look that bad?” I asked.
“You fell off your chair, and then you started blinking. You were just blinking really fast for a long time.”
I winced.
Anya bent down and took an ice cube from a miniature refrigerator on the floor. She rubbed it against her ear. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ve seen worse, but everyone else basically thinks you’re possessed.”
“Maybe I am.”
Tossing the ice on the floor, Anya took the needle from me and shook her head. “I don’t think so. Have you ever seen a possessed person?” she asked, as if she had. “You’re too normal.”
Looking in the mirror, Anya held the needle up to her ear, where there were already four piercings. “Okay,” she said. “Hold the shoe steady.”
“Wait, what are you doing?”
“Piercing my ear,” she said.
I backed away. “No. I’m not doing that.”
“How do you expect to bury an Undead when you can’t even watch me use a needle?” she said, and put my hand back into place. “You’re not doing anything—I’m doing it. It’ll be over in a minute. Just hold your hand steady.”
“Are you sure this is safe?” I said as I tightened my grip on the shoe.
“Of course it is.”
I braced myself, trying to stop my hand from trembling as I watched her in the mirror, her eyes red and fierce. She took a deep breath and began counting in Russian. “Raz, dvah…” Just before she said “trie,” I pressed my eyes closed. The needle plunged into the sole of the shoe, and the entire room rang as Anya let out a deafening, high-pitched scream.
After the bleeding stopped and the silver cuff was in place, Anya opened a tin of almond cookies her father had sent her, and we sat on her shag carpet eating them until we were giddy on sugar. She tried to explain why she had been so upset earlier, speaking quickly, in jarring bursts, and by the time she was finished, I still wasn’t exactly sure what had transpired. Something to do with a boyfriend, or maybe an ex-boyfriend, and two other boys. One named Vlad, two named Dmitri. Or was it one named Dmitri, two named Vlad? They were Plebeians, which meant that Anya couldn’t tell them she was a Monitor. When she left for school, it made things a little complicated.
“I have a piercing for every breakup,” she said, pointing to the line of studs in her ears.
I told her I understood, because I did. It wasn’t easy dating someone when you were a Monitor.
“But how can you understand?” she said, fingering the new silver cuff that clung to her ear, which was now bright red and swollen. “Do you have a boyfriend?”
I hesitated. “No,” I said slowly, taking another cookie.
She rolled her eyes. “Is he a Monitor?”
I paused again. “I can’t really talk about it.”
When she kept pressing me, I changed the subject to my blackout, and the dream I’d had of the Royal Victoria Hospital. Or the vision, as she called it.
“What was under the bed?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I couldn’t see it.”
Anya looked disappointed.
“What if I’m seeing the future?”
She gave me a questioning look, and when she saw that I was serious, she burst out laughing. “I know people who can read the future, and you definitely can’t.”
“How do you know?” I said, taking offense.
“What’s going to happen to me tomorrow?” she asked, her lips in a pout.