Chapter One
Poor silver-wing! ah! woe is me !
That I must see These blossoms snow upon thy lady’s pall!
Go, pretty page! and in her ear
Whisper that the hour is near! —John Keats, Faery Song
“Stop crying!” I shouted.
I should’ve been normal. There was no reason I shouldn’t be normal. I splashed water over my face. It ran down my cheeks. The bathroom mirror loomed in front of me, and I refused to look too closely at the dark smudges under my eyes. The crying wouldn’t stop. And it wasn’t coming from me—I had never cried a day in my life. It wasn’t coming from anything. I covered my ears, and tried to drown out the noise with the music from my old school radio. It didn’t work. The baby kept going at it. Crying and crying and crying until I smacked the bathroom wall with my fist. Nothing would make the noise stop.
I could get used to pretending I was real. I could laugh when something was supposed to be funny. I could ask questions to make others think I cared. I was used to my numbness, but this? My life had turned into Midsummer Night’s Dream gone crazy, or actually, a Midsummer Nightmare. Our small town theater was celebrating the season by doing the Shakespearian play at the school. But that wasn’t the bad part.
It was my night to play the faery queen. Yeah, it’s spelled faery with an e (that’s how these faery enthusiasts like it) and even though I’m not the best actress at Omak High that still wasn’t my problem. It was just . . . that baby. It kept crying. And there was no baby. Anywhere. Something was wrong with me. The crying had haunted me from the moment I stepped onto that stage, and now it echoed in my dreams.
I focused on my New York poster next to the towels, taking deep breaths. After a moment, I turned down the radio to hear blessed silence. The ghost baby had finally given it a rest. Feeling shaky, I pulled the toothbrush from my holder and tried to go over my lines for the play that night. Anything to get my mind off what was happening.
Hearing a nonexistent baby who cried all the time wasn’t one of my usual symptoms. No, I typically just had to deal with a heart that refused to work. I couldn’t love; I had no empathy. I couldn’t count my friends on one hand—not even one finger. Sure, they always counted me, but a girl had to hide how crazy she was when her dad was the town’s only psychiatrist. My parents thought I was normal, but what they didn’t know was that their little girl was a highly functional sociopath. Either that or something had punched a hole through my heart and made it so I couldn’t feel. And now to top that all off with a cherry, I was hearing things?
I shoved the toothbrush into my mouth and scrubbed at my teeth. No big deal, right? I could hide this, go on like it wasn’t happening, keep pretending. I had almost convinced myself, until I saw my shadow move in the mirror. I froze, my body tingling with fear. It wasn’t my shadow, or if it was, it sure wasn’t connected to me anymore. It stood directly behind me, watching me as quietly as the late afternoon sun filtered through my window. My hand hesitated on my toothbrush.
Wait, what were the odds I was still asleep? I remembered taking a nap, getting up, reading some online college applications, but had I really? Or were my nightmares getting worse? I’d definitely take that over this being real. My fingers trembled as I pulled the toothbrush out of my mouth, and through the bathroom mirror, forced myself to study that thing behind me. I picked out hollow eyes that watched me . . . as if the shadow thought I couldn’t see it staring. The shadow thought? My mouth went dry. I hunched my shoulders and spun around.
