Crawlers

Crawlers, part 2

My face hurts. My head hurts. My whole body hurts. My eyes burn from crying.

Waitlisted.

For the past six years, everything I've done — or not done: every party I've skipped, every friendship I've let wither and die, every chance I've passed up to be a normal person with a normal life — has been in pursuit of one thing. Of getting into the right school — the only school. The only place I ever saw myself.

Waitlisted.

I feel sick. I haul myself to the bathroom and sit on the tile, leaning over the open toilet while yanking my hair back into an old elastic. I hold myself there, waiting to throw up. I can feel it rising in me, this sickness, this inability to hold onto anything. It feels like I've been holding onto everything for years and now it's going to slip away from me.

But I can't throw up.

I can't do anything right.

The dogs bark.

I lean back against the bathroom wall, trying but failing to keep back the tears. Mom is asleep, and I don't want to wake her. Somehow I held it in all evening. I stuffed the letter under my pillow and pretended everything was fine. I know there will be a right time to tell her, but this isn't the right time. How can there be a right time to do an impossible thing?

The dogs bark again.

"Must be a full moon," I whisper to the ceiling.

And then I get up and walk down the hall, shutting my bedroom door so the dogs can't follow me downstairs.

The house is quiet, except for the rattling hum of the fridge. 

I make it all the way to the back door but hesitate before actually opening it. This seems like the height of foolishness to me, but it also seems like something I must do. I am a train on a downhill track. I should stop, but I can't.

I can't do anything right, remember?

The knob is cool to the touch. I turn it and pull the door in toward myself.

Maybe they won't be there. Maybe my arrival will scare them away. Maybe they were never here to begin with. Just a figment of my overtaxed brain. A cry for help. An expression of the helpless state of the American adolescent. A metaphor.

But they are real.

I know because as soon as I step out the door, they surround me.

I'm so shocked that I can't move. I hear their movements — like silk whispering across silk — as they swarm and shift, huddling close but always, always moving. They're packed so closely together that I can only see their backs and the backs of their heads, which are strangely smooth and hairless.

One brushes my leg and I leap back, knocking into one that is behind me.

"Holy mother of God," I whisper, because nothing else seems appropriate.

At the sound of my voice, every single one of them turns to look at me.

They all have my face.

"Oh, no," I say. Which just makes them stare more. "Oh, no, come on."

I wave my arms. "Go away!" I shout, stomping my feet. Like a school of fish, they scramble away as one, in a sinuous clump. I turn and run for the kitchen door, racing inside and slamming it shut behind me.

So this is it. I've lost my mind. I've finally gone completely crazy. I guess I should wake Mom up and tell her I need to be sent to the loony bin.

My heart pounds so hard I'm afraid the artery in my neck might burst. My breath is heaving, horrified.

What am I going to do?

... What have I done?

It takes all the courage I have ever stored up in my entire life to turn and look at the door.

At first I think it is strangely dark outside, in spite of the full moon.

And then I realize that the light is blocked by a dozen struggling bodies, pushing for position in front of the glass.

My blank face stares at me, edged out by another version of my face. They struggle and grope, like crabs in the tank at a seafood restaurant.

I reach forward and turn the lock. At the click, they scatter.

I run out of the kitchen to the hallway, closing myself inside the hall bathroom because it is the only room in the house with no windows.

I don't sleep, of course.

In the morning, they are gone.

What have I done, what have I done, what have I done?

*

I become a student of astronomy. I know that in 28 days, the full moon will return. And with it will come... I don't even have a name for them. What do you call small, creepy aliens that have taken your face?

Crawlers.

The crawlers will be back in 28 days. So my job is to get as far from them as I can. And to get Mom as far from them as I can. But how?

I turn to the internet. I start with coy search terms, trying to find a sane explanation. A group of fellow sufferers. A diagnosis. But soon I am out of genteel options. I find myself among the craziest of the crazies, reading forums that detail government mind control and secret water additives designed to make us crazy. Forbidden experiments that blur the lines between life and death and afterlife. Tin foil hats. Tin foil everything.

But still, I seem to be the only one with a crawler problem.

Mom finds out about the waitlist. She smothers me with apologies and indignant theories about what could have happened. I'm a little weary of theories at the moment, so I tell her it's fine, I have other options. 

But I don't, really. I didn't apply to any safety schools. I guess it's not too late except I don't have a spare moment to fill out a lengthy application or compose a generic essay about what self-sacrifice in the name of academic excellence has taught me.

I'm busy.

It takes a lot of time and energy to lose your mind.

[to be continued...]

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