Bloody, Lovely
byCASEY McQUISTON
OBJECTIVELY, THE PROMdress thing should be secondary to the thing where there’s a girl living in my bathroom mirror. But the girl’s been around for a while, and the dress thing just happened.
“You good?” the girl in the mirror asks me. A drop of blood rolls down her nose and into her mouth.
When I look at myself beside her, my own face is flushed and splotchy under the freckles. I think the splotches might be the only thing I like about what I see, since I’m not usually splotchy, so that’s something different. I want everything to be different.
Okay. I’ll start with the hair.
Back in middle school, I stole a pair of those big shears my dad uses for cooking from the kitchen and hid them inthe back of my bathroom drawer. Now I’m a junior, and I’m finally gonna use them.
“Whoa,” the girl in the mirror says when I wrap my fist around my ponytail and start hacking at it. “Slow down—”
“Can you,” I say to her, “for once, please shut up.”
She does, until it’s over, and then she gently says, “Well, at least it can’t get worse.”
I met Mary on my sixteenth birthday.
She wasn’t invited, but barely anyone was. I’ve always sucked at making the type of girl friends you invite to a sweet-sixteen slumber party. Not because I don’t like girls (and their soft hair and nice, tidy cuticles) but because I don’t really know how to be one of them. I’m pretty sure something in me was installed sideways and upside down.
Sweet sixteen’s supposed to be a big deal, though, and I wanted a big deal. I didn’t want to spend all four years of high school watching everyone else have inside jokes while I ran soccer drills by myself in the backyard. So I invited a couple girls from the team, and Sarah invited Emily, who invited Bella, and I really, really did not want Bella to be there, but high school is a numbers game, so Bella got to come.
Bloody Mary was Bella’s idea. I was outvoted. I never even wanted this in the first place. I’d like that to be noted for the record.
“It’s gonna be so creepy,” she said, lit up by the flashlight on her phone.
We all piled into the bathroom connected to my bedroom, and we said the words three times in the dark, and then Bella flipped on the lights.
And there, leering over my shoulder, was a girl. Hollow eyes, pale skin, covered in blood.
She tilted her head to the side and smiled.
Everyone was piled into Bella’s jeep and speeding out of my subdivision before I had even finished screaming.
The next morning, my social career was officially on ice, at least until everyone who’d stood in my bathroom that night could agree that my house wasn’t possessed by demons and that they must not have actually seen anything. It was a bad prank, they said, and I must have planned it. I was sixteen and still alone, kicking through party debris on my bedroom floor, scooping up Emily’s abandoned retainer.
I carried it to the bathroom to rinse it off, trying to figure out how to discreetly return it to her at school on Monday. I turned on the light.
The girl in the mirror was still there.
She was standing exactly where I left her, in the reflection over the bathroom vanity, still drenched in buckets of blood like an actual horror movie, and then she opened her horrible, wide, damp mouth and said, “Don’t freak out!”
I tripped backward, fell into the bathtub, and screamed, “Mom!”
“Don’t do that,” she said. Her voice—she looked like the type of infernal creature from hell whose vocal range should have been, like, Strangled Whisper to One ThousandTortured Screams at Once, but she sounded startlingly normal. Just an average teenage girl voice, a little on the raspy side, muffled and echoey through the glass. “You’re just gonna embarrass yourself.”
Under all the blood and dark hair, she looked annoyed when I screamed for my mom again. She shook out her gore-soaked white nightgown and folded her arms over her dark red chest.
When Mom arrived, I waited for her to scream the way we all had last night, but she looked into the mirror and said, “That’s you, Dylan.”
“No, next to me!”
“Told you,” the nightmare said, peeling a sopping lock of hair from her face with an unpleasantly sticky sound. “Embarrassing.”
Mom patted my head on the way out the door. “Put your contacts in, Dyl.”
