Five Stories for the Dark Months by Katherine Traylor Page A

backs of her gums and
bruised the inside of her cheek. As she brushed (tops... bottoms...
insides... outsides... twice all over...) she watched the
reflection of her face in the mirror.
    The girl in the
mirror was an unfashionable sixteen. She had frizzy hair and an
awkward nose, and her shirt was stained from a spill at lunch.. Her
cheeks were wet with tears; her eyes were red and swollen. This was
the kind of face you had when you were hopeless. When you weren’t
going anywhere. When you would spend Christmas break alone with
your own stupid parents... and when, worst of all, you weren’t
going to New York because you had been stupid.
    She spat her toothpaste into the
sink, then spat again to clear the dregs from her mouth. Now the
girl in the mirror had little dribbles of toothpaste foam all over
her lips and chin. Her nose had begun to run,too. She looked
ridiculous.
    Adie wrapped her
arms around herself and stared at the girl in abject misery. So. Stupid . Why had she
ever even thought that she would make it to New York? She was
probably doomed to stay here forever and rot, like an unharvested
pumpkin in the world’s worst field.
    A little more toothpaste ran down
the chin of the girl in the mirror. Despite her foolish appearance,
there was a glint in her eyes that Adie didn’t much like. The girl
looked mocking. Mean, even. Adie could understand why people
wouldn’t want to be around a girl like that. She wouldn’t want to
be around herself, either. She just made everyone angry. It was
probably for the best that she wasn’t going—Aunt Laurie would
probably have regretted inviting her even if she had
gone.
    She glared at the girl, and the
girl glared back. “Fuck you,” Adie whispered. She wiped the
toothpaste from her mouth with an angry fist.
    The girl in the mirror watched
dumbly, as if she hadn’t understood what she’d said.
    On a whim, Adie
licked her fingertip and wrote—in big, neat block letters—on the
surface of the mirror: FUCK
YOU .
    Then, to make it even clearer, she
wrote it backwards.
    When she looked
back down at her reflection, her stomach dropped: The girl was not looking at
her.
    She was looking, instead, at the
message Adie had written, and her lips were moving as she read the
words. When she finished, her eyes went wide. Slowly, she looked
back down at Adie.
    It was not a nice look.
     
    More than an hour later, as Adie
lay trembling in bed with the blankets over her head, someone came
into her room. She thought that it was probably her mother, because
she could smell her mother’s neat floral perfume over the faint
tang of her own unwashed laundry. Well-pressed chinos swished
efficiently to the center of the room, then stopped.
    The person who was
probably her mother stood quietly for a very long time. Adie lay in
the warm darkness beneath her blankets and wished that she could
be sure.
    “Still mad?” her mother said
finally. The sound of her voice was blessedly familiar.
    Adie shrugged. She hadn’t actually
thought that much about the argument since she’d seen what must
have been a hallucination in the bathroom mirror. She still
shuddered just thinking of the malice in her reflection’s
eyes.
    “Do you want to talk about it?”
her mother continued in her calm, reasonable way.
    Adie snorted. Tell
her mother she was hallucinating? Sure, that would smooth things
over.
    Her mother sighed. It was a soft,
gusty sigh, quite restrained: the sigh of someone who has too many
troubles to welcome another one. It also had that extra little
trill of exasperation that had always been applied exclusively to
Adie. This, more than anything, convinced her that it was safe to
come out.
    She pulled the covers from her face
and sat up. The air was a cool shock against her skin after more
than an hour between the blankets. Her mother, who had already
started to leave, stopped in midstride. She looked surprised, and
no wonder: Adie rarely left a sulk until at least a day after she’d
started