The Resurrected Compendium by Megan Hart

fun.”
    And it was fun, watching the kids I’d gone to school with make fools of themselves with too much drink and too much drugs. I drew pictures of them, caricatures, and mostly they liked them. Gigantic foreheads and over-bulbous noses, wild eyes, huge heads on tiny bodies. The girls especially liked it when I added curves in places they wanted them and took them away from places they didn’t. Those girls hovered around me, leaning on the arm of my chair, their perfume sweet, their breath hot. One touched my hair and cupped her hand on the back of my neck. She leaned close to whisper in my ear, and like the voice that had been with me for so many   years, her voice told me how to do things.  
    She took me upstairs with her hand in mine, fingers linked. She took me into a bedroom. Hilary’s brother’s, the one who’d gone away into the army and hadn’t come home. The bed had a plaid bedspread on it. Pillows covered in a thin layer of dust. Trophies on the shelves from when he’d played sports in school and pictures in frames of him wearing various sorts of uniforms.  
    She pushed me back onto the bed and got on top of me. She put her mouth on mine. She put my hands on her, and when the door opened and her boyfriend burst in, he broke all of my fingers. He threw me up against the wall so hard my head left a dent in the drywall. He broke the window and threw me out, where I landed on the wrought iron fence Hilary’s dad had put up around their pool. It punctured my throat, my stomach and my spine and would’ve left me permanently paralyzed if it hadn’t also stabbed me directly in the heart.
    I died within minutes.
    Or…actually, I did not.  
    Because the voice spoke to me at the top of the stairs and kept me from going into that bedroom. The voice had always been a whisper, a murmur, a soft, low tone. That night it hit me like a hammer. I stumbled back, hit a picture of Hilary and her brother hung in a golden frame. I caught it before it could fall and break the glass. It was smooth under my fingertips, and my touch smudged their faces.
    The girl I was with stared at me with bleary eyes and a slack mouth. My hand had already slipped from hers, and she stared at her fingers like she could will them to link with mine again. She seemed to find it strange I’d deny her what she was offering — me, the fat, weird kid with pimples who drew funny pictures. But in the next few minutes when I’d ducked away into the bathroom and heard the thudding pound of her boyfriend’s feet coming up the stairs, and his shouts for her, I knew the voice had saved me.
    Her boyfriend punched her in the face that night, made his mark, but at least he didn’t kill her. She wore those bruises around town like some badge of honor. Proof of his love for her or something crazy like that. I’d known for a long time that girls didn’t often give me the time of day, but it wasn’t until then that I realized I didn’t really care. I didn’t want to put my mark on anyone in order to make them love me.
    It wasn’t the first time the voice had led me away from trouble, but it was the first time it had done more than speak to me — it had actually shown me what would happen if I kept to the path I was on. The memory of falling from that window, of those iron spikes piercing my skin, wouldn’t leave me.  
    In its own way, the voice had marked me, and I loved it.
    Things were different after that. Not that anyone noticed. My parents kept on with their lives the way they always had, which essentially meant they worked and came home, had their separate dinners and went out with friends or stayed in to watch television while they had a few beers and argued over whose turn it was to take out the garbage. They weren’t bad people, my parents. Not cruel. They’d created me and raised me, made sure I was fed and clothed and had a place to live. In their absent, selfish way, they loved me.
    Which made it just a little more difficult to kill