Mirror Girl | #ONC2023 (Prompt 29)

The Girl in the Mirror

The first time I saw the girl in the mirror was during a bathroom break. I was washing my hands, slowly and methodically, to delay my trip back to class and schmucking math and the prospect of learning about it, when I looked into the mirror and saw the girl.

The first thing I thought was, I need a haircut. The girl in the mirror was not my reflection; while I had a short bob that grazed her collar, Mirror-Girl had her hair in a braid tossed over her shoulder like an afterthought. While I was washing her hands, Mirror-Girl was arranging the pleats of her pinafore, her fingers carefully smoothing the creases. While I had an ellipses of acne on her jawline, Mirror-Girl's skin was smooth and pure as the driven snow. The background behind Mirror-Girl was identical to that of mine.

The tap had stopped running quite a while ago. I gaped at the mirror, which was manifestly not showing her reflection, while my heart jackhammered in my chest. Mirror-Girl did not move. It was most definitely not a picture; its borders glinted green and reflected the grey blob of the ceiling fan. I withdrew my hands from the sink and took a step back, and slowly and torturously rationality came to her like sunlight through the blinds at dawn - if it's not a mirror, maybe it's a hyper-realistic painting, or a hologram, or something, and there isn't a person trapped in a mirror because that's simply not possible, and maybe this is just a very vivid dream, or some sleep-deprived hallucination, and anyway I'll just look into another mirror and see my own face, and everything will be fine.

I stepped to the right, keeping my eyes on the next sink, convinced that in the next mirror I would see my own blessed reflection and that everything would be fine. I looked up.

It was not fine. I saw Mirror-Girl, no longer rearranging her pinafore but tying her hair, her slender arms bracketing the back of her head. Here she was throwing a sideways glance at me and frowning in concentration. I saw with a quick and thudding conclusion now that I could see her eyes. I thought of the eyes of dragonflies, which shimmered in their thousands of facets. It was so beautiful, I could have wept, but it looked so grotesque and wrong on her smooth white face that I did not. Looking back, I wondered why I had thought of dragonflies, of all things. But insects are as numerous and incomprehensible as them, and they creep constantly on the edges and ceilings of the world and move in hair-raising flashes. So really, there was a grain of truth to that comparison. Back in the silent toilet, those strange eyes sent a black strand of electricity through my veins and into my heart.

"Oh, shucks," I said hoarsely. It occurred to me somewhere in my mind where the alarm bells were ringing maniacally that I should probably have used a better curse word that wasn't a pg-movie-no-swearing-kids-are-watching kind of curse word, and that maybe I shouldn't be worried about curse words because there's a literal schmucking girl in the mirror that's not my reflection, while the door of my sane mind slammed back and forth on its hinges like a windowpane in a hurricane, revealing in degrees something strange and black that lingered, had always lingered, in the corners and in the dark closets of my rational view of the world and everyone else's.

Then the toilet door opened and shut with a loud and rude bang, followed by a chorus of girls laughing as they filed into the empty cubicles like streams into canals. I recognised those voices dimly as those of her classmates. One of them tapped me on the shoulder.

'Are you OK?'

Mirror-Girl continued to look at me with the barest traces of a smile. It was not so much a smile as it was a baring of teeth.

'Yes. I'm fine.' Despite the large influx of people and the noise and chatter, the black strand of fear continued to surge through me in quick and constant bursts like machine-gun fire through my limbs. I could not tear her eyes away from Mirror-Girl and knew with horrible dread that nobody else could see her. I forced herself to move, which I did. Avoiding the other mirrors, I faced the befuddled classmate, smiled a smile she did not feel, and left, my footsteps quickening into a run back to class. It was only when I sat down and put my face in my hands that I realised I was crying.