The Evolution of Mara Dyer

20

I WALKED BACK INTO THE LIVING ROOM AND GLANCED out the enormous picture window. Still no sign of Noah’s car. Good. He’d never go for this.

I sat down on the couch and positioned the spiral notebook conspicuously on my lap. “So,” I said to my brother casually, “At Horizons, they gave us this assignment,” I started, my lie beginning to develop. “To, uh, fictionalize our . . . problems.” That sounded about right. “They said writing is cathartic.” Mom’s favorite word.

My brother broke into a smile. “That sounds . . . fun?”

I raised my eyebrows.

“Okay, so maybe fun’s the wrong word.”

“ ‘Stupid’ would be more appropriate,” I said, adding an eye roll. “They want us to work things out in a safe, creative space. I don’t know.”

My brother nodded slowly. “It makes sense. Sort of like puppet therapy for little kids.”

“I don’t know what that is, and I’m glad.”

Daniel chuckled. “Mom told me about it once—the therapist uses a puppet to indirectly address the kid’s feelings in an impersonal way; the child transfers her feelings to the puppet. Your assignment sounds like the teen version.”

Sure. “Exactly. So, now I have to write this story thing about me but not me, and I need help.”

“It would be my utmost pleasure.” Daniel hunched forward and rubbed his hands together. He was into it. “So. What’s your premise?”

Where to begin? “Well . . . something weird is happening to this girl. . . .”

Daniel placed his hand in his chin and glanced up at the ceiling. “Fairly standard,” he said. “And familiar.” He grinned.

“And she doesn’t know what it is.”

“Okay. Is it something supernatural weird, or something normal weird?”

“Supernatural weird,” I said, without hesitation.

“How old is she?”

“A teenager.”

“Right, of course,” he said with a wink. “Does anyone else know what’s happening to her?”

Just Noah, but he was as lost in this as I was. And everyone else I tried to tell didn’t believe me. “She’s told other people, but no one believes her,” I said.

Daniel nodded sagely. “The Cassandra effect. Cursed by Apollo with prophetic visions that always came true, but were never believed by anyone else.”

Close enough. “Right.”

“So everyone thinks your ‘protagonist’ is crazy,” he said, making air quotes with his fingers.

Everyone does seem to. “Pretty much.”

A smile appeared on Daniel’s lips. “But she’s an unreliable narrator who happens to be telling the truth?”

Seems that way. “Yep.”

“Okay,” he said. “So what’s really happening to you—I mean, her?”

“She doesn’t know, but she has to find out.”

“Why?”

Because she’s a murderer. Because she’s losing her mind. Because she’s being tormented by someone who should be dead.

I studied my brother. His posture was relaxed, his arms draped casually over either side of the patterned black and gold armchair. Daniel would never believe that the things that were happening to me, the things I could do, were real—aside from Noah, who would?—but it was important to make sure he thought I didn’t believe they were real either. I had to make sure he didn’t think I believed my own fiction, or I would set off his alarms.

So I lolled my head back and looked at the ceiling. Stay casual, stay vague. “Someone’s after her—”

“Your antagonist, good . . .”

“And she’s getting worse. She needs to figure out what’s going on.”

Daniel leaned his chin on his hand and raised his eyebrows. “How about an Obi-Wan slash Gandalf slash Dumbledore slash Giles?”

“Giles?”

Daniel shook his head sadly. “I hate that I never managed to persuade you to watch Buffy. It’s a flaw in you, Mara.”

“Add it to the list.”

“Anyway,” he went on, “throw in a wise and mysterious character to swoop in and help you—I mean, your heroine—along on her quest, either by offering much-needed guidance or by taking her on as his pupil.”

I should be so lucky. “There’s no Dumbledore.”

“Or go really old-school and pull a Tiresias,” he said, nodding to himself. “From Oedipus.”

I shot him a look. “I know who Tiresias is.”

But Daniel ignored me. He was getting excited. “Make him blind but able to ‘see’ more than she can. I like that.”

“Yeah, Daniel, I get it, but there’s no mysterious figure.”

He waved his hand dismissively. “You just started working on it, Mara. Make one up.”

I clenched my teeth.

“Wait a second,” Daniel said quickly, rubbing his hands together. “Are you going to make her an orphan?”

“Why?”

“Well, if you don’t, you can have her family help,” he said and grinned. “You could give her a profoundly insightful and knowledgeable older brother.”

If only my profoundly insightful and knowledgeable older brother believed me. “I think that might be a little too transparent,” I said, growing frustrated. “It’s a creative writing assignment, not a memoir.”

“Picky, picky,” he said, rolling his eyes. “Write the requisite Google scene, then.”

I could see it now: Searching for “kids with powers” would generate about a billion hits about X-Men and derivative novels and movies.

“She wouldn’t even know what to Google,” I said, and sank back against the couch. This wasn’t turning out the way I’d hoped.

Daniel rubbed his chin, squinting. “How about a significant and portentous dream?”

Sure, I’ll just snap my fingers. “That’s a little . . . passive?”

“That’s fair. Is not-Mara a vampire or a creature of some kind but just doesn’t know it yet?”

I seriously hope not. “I don’t think so . . . she has, like . . . a power.”

“Like telepathy?”

“No.”

“Telekinesis?”

I don’t think so? I shook my head.

“Prophecy?”

“No.” I didn’t want to tell him what she—what I did. “She doesn’t know the extent of it yet.”

“Have her test it out. Try different things.”

“It would be dangerous.”

“Hmm . . . like she shoots lasers out of her eyes?”

I smiled wryly. “Something like that.”

“So she could be a superhero or supervillain. Hmm.” He folded one leg beneath him. “Is it a Peter Parker or a Clark Kent situation?”

“What do you mean?”

“Like, was your character born with this thing à la Superman or did she acquire it like Spider-Man?”

An excellent, excellent question—which I didn’t know how to answer.

“The weirdness started—”

When? When did it start? My seventeenth birthday wasn’t when this began—it was just when I remembered what I did.

What I did at the asylum.

So was the asylum the beginning? When Rachel died? When I killed her?

I heard her voice in my mind, then.

“How am I going to die?”

The hair rose on the back of my neck. “She played with a Ouija board.”

“BOOM!” Daniel fist-pumped. “Your character is possessed.”

My throat tightened. “What?”

“You should have told me earlier, the Ouija board changes everything.”

I rubbed my forehead. “I don’t understand.”

“Ouija boards are a conduit to the spirit world,” Daniel explained. “They are always, always bad news. If your protagonist played with one and then weird stuff started happening to her, she’s possessed. You’ve seen The Exorcist. You,” he said, pointing, “have a horror story on your hands.”

I shook my head. “I don’t think she’s possessed—”

“She’s possessed,” Daniel said knowingly. “I like it. She’ll get way worse before she gets better—if she gets better. Lots of conflict, and you can hit all the genre tropes. Good way to deal with the superhero-slash-supervillain issue too.” Headlights appeared in our driveway and Daniel stood up.

“What do you mean?” I asked quickly. I needed to hear this.

“If she’s a hero, she’ll use her powers for good and defeat it. If she’s a villain, she’ll give in to it. Become it. And whoever the hero is will probably defeat her.” He tucked his notebook under his arm. “But you should probably go for the hero angle—otherwise your therapists might worry about you—I mean, her.” He glanced out the window. “Looks like your hero has arrived,” he said with a smirk just as his phone rang. He held it up to his ear. “Hello?”

“Wait—”

“It’s Sophie—I’ll help more later, okay?” Daniel turned to leave.

“The girlfriend before the sister?”

Daniel waved and winked, then disappeared into his room.

I stood there, paralyzed, still trying to process everything my brother said when his head popped out from the doorway.

“You should write it in first-person present tense, by the way—then no one will know whether she survives the possession, although that creates a problematic narratological space.” He vanished again.

“But she’s not possessed,” I said loudly.

“Then she’s a vampire,” my brother called out from his room.

“She’s not a vampire!”

“Or a werewolf, those are popular too!”

“SHE’S NOT A WEREWOLF!”

“LOVE YOU!” he shouted, then closed his door.

I watched Noah walk up to our house, his gait languorous despite the rain. I was at the front door before he could even knock, and the second I saw him, I pulled him inside.

He stood there in the foyer, with wet hair curling into his eyes and droplets of rain falling from his soaked T-shirt onto the glossy hardwood floor. “What happened?”

I didn’t answer him. I led him into my bedroom instead. Opened my messenger bag and handed him the picture of me, the one Jude took. And then I began to talk.