Dead Lines

6: What Are You?

Unedited.

The next thing I recalled clearly was coming to in my overly pink and princess-y room at the Agora. They’d toned it down a bit and when I asked Kells why they still had a room for me, he told me it was because he was still my patron. I got a nagging feeling that he refused to let them change it back to a uniform room for whoever turned Elite next. It made me think he was still looking for a way for me to be hermai instead of Assarion before I…died.

But being back in that room, seeing the little embroidered pillow hanging on the closet door, it reminded me of the last time I was here, among these things.

And no, it didn’t give me warm fuzzy feelings because the last time I was in here just happened to be when I came back from the Underworld.

 I was in a serious need of a shower and change of clothes. The dress I was still wearing was making my skin crawl. There were a few people trailing after me and I wanted nothing more than to hole up somewhere in order to process. But they kept asking what happened to me, how I was back from the dead, and if I was even still—me. Those were perfectly good questions and normally I would be happy to answer them.

But just like they were confused about how I was back, so was I. It’s one thing to go through it but you don’t necessarily have to think about it when it happens. Most of it was a little unclear and after seeing the look on their faces…

It was all disconcerting and even though Kells confirmed for everyone that it was really me and not a zombie, they were still asking incessant questions. Logios held them back for the most part when they came through the portal but Cecil and Andrzej accompanied Kells and I to my room. Without stopping or hesitating, I went straight to the bathroom and hunched over the sink. It took a few minutes for me to gather up enough courage to fumble for the light and look at myself in the mirror. I had a pretty good imagination and I almost didn’t look. Who wants to see the remnants of their own death? Or the proof that a once thought best friend was passed saving? It was something I wasn’t willing to believe, even then but one can only hold out for so long.

When I did look up, I locked eyes with myself. Those still looked the same, nothing different. They were the same blue I’d seen for years when I looked in the mirror, the same color my mother’s eyes used to be. I tried to hold onto that little detail. No matter what I saw next, I was still me.

As my eyes traveled down, I took in the unmarred skin on the right side of my face and the life lines on the left. They were still colorful and moving slowly. The black shadows that were left behind from when I was human gave the Elite lines definition, character. But that’s where the normal ended. The second I got to my chin, everything changed.

There were a few blood drops gracing the edge of my round chin. My eyes automatically tried to find where they might’ve come from, they landed on the end of a puckering pink line. My skin looked perfectly normal on top of that line but underneath…

My skin was glistening red. Some of it was smudged from where Cecil or someone had tried to hold it all closed, where I’d touched after coming back…

That was the detail I couldn’t get passed.

When I was younger, on a dare from Schylar, I’d watched Carrie. I swore after that one time, I would never watch that movie again. But there I was, staring into the mirror at myself, and comparing what she looked like to how I looked.

I couldn’t help but think the makeup people had done one hell of a job on Sissy Spacek. But unlike her, the red that was drenching my neck, chest, and was now dyeing the top of the dress, was my own blood. Not pig’s blood or whatever the prop department for the movie had used.