The Evolution of Mara Dyer

42

So begins the unillustrious record of the observations and musings of one Noah Elliot Simon Shaw insofar as they relate to one Mara (middle name as yet unknown, must remedy) Dyer and her purported metamorphosis.

Mara has just left. We have just immolated her grandmother’s doll, which seems to have been (distressingly) stuffed with human hair, as well as a pendant identical to the one I own. Both of us are justifiably disturbed by this development, though it has provided a new avenue of exploration as to why the fuck both of us are so deeply weird.

Also, I kissed her. She liked it.

Naturally.

If there was anyone to speak to, I would have been speechless. I blinked, hard, and then stared at the page, at the words, in his handwriting, just to make sure they were actually there.

They were. And I knew when he’d started writing then. It was after I told him I was afraid of losing control. Of losing myself. After telling him—

That all he could do was watch. My own voice echoed harshly in my ears.

“Tell me what you see. Because I don’t know what’s real and what isn’t or what’s new or different and I can’t trust myself, but I trust you.”

He had closed his eyes. Said my name. And then I said—

“You know what? Don’t tell me, because I might not remember. Write it down, and then maybe someday, if I ever get better, let me read it. Otherwise I’ll change a little bit every day and never know who I was until after I’m gone.”

My throat felt tight. He was writing this for me.

I could stop reading now. Put the notebook back, tell him I found it and admit to reading the beginning. I could tell him I just wanted to check to see who it belonged to and once I saw it was his, stopped reading right away.

But I didn’t. I turned the page.

Ruth informs me that when my father returns home, I’ll be expected to return to school and attend classes without fail. I listen patiently but I can feel myself detach as I see it in exquisite, miserable detail:

I stare listlessly behind the teachers’ heads as I listen to them drone on about things I already know. I cut class and stretch out on a picnic table beneath the tiki monstrosity and lie there, completely still.

A group of girls walks by, peering over the edge of the table. I am envious of chameleons. I open my eyes, squinting, and the girls dart away. They titter and giggle and I hear one of them whisper, “too perfect.” I want to shake them for their ignorance and scream that their Sistine Chapel is filled with cracks.

In my previous life, for it seems that way though it’s barely been a few months, I would flirt, or not, with anyone who seemed remotely interesting on any given day. There’d be one candidate, if I was lucky. Then I would count down the hours and minutes and seconds until another pointless day would finally end.

And then I’d go home. Or go to a new club with Parker or some other asshole who wears a cardigan around his shoulders and pops the collar on his fucking polo. I would stumble out, two gorgeous, faceless girls clutching my waist, the dull thud of soulless house music matching the dull throb in my temples, evident even through the slight haze of ecstasy and alcohol, and I would drink and feel nothing and laugh and feel nothing and stare at my life for the next three, five, twenty years, and loathe it.

The image of it bores me so deeply that I’m willing to die, right now, just to feel something else.

When the words ended, I realized that I was no longer standing; I had backed onto the bed. The notebook, the journal, was spread open against it, and my left hand had covered my mouth. I heard Noah’s voice when I read his thoughts but there was a bitterness to them that I couldn’t ever remember hearing out loud. I turned the page.

The best money can buy is nothing. Nothing on Lukumi or whoever the hell he is, and nothing on Jude. Even the search for his family has proven fruitless; nothing on Claire Lowe or Jude Lowe or parents William and Deborah since the collapse. There was an obituary in the Rhode Island paper with donation instructions and such, but the parents moved after the accident—or incident, I should say. And even with Charles’s PI connections, zero. People can disappear—but not from people like him. It’s as though the longer I reach, the further the truth gets. I hate that there’s nothing more I can do. I’d go to Providence myself, but I don’t want to leave Mara behind.

I might say something when I see her, though at present she seems preoccupied with some psycho at Horizons. I’m not the only one who doesn’t play well with others. Perhaps that’s why we get on so well.

Those were the first words that made me smile. The next ones made it vanish.

I sift through my dead mother’s things. It’s been years since I’ve bothered and I feel empty as I explore the full boxes, mostly brimming with battered, dog-eared, highlighted books. Singer and Ginsberg and Hoffman and Kerouac, philosophy and poetry and radicalism and Beat. The pages are worn, well-read, and I skim through them. I wonder if it’s possible to know someone through the words they loved. There are photographs stuck in some of the books. Mostly people I don’t recognize, but there are a few of her. She looks fierce.

A book that doesn’t seem to belong catches my eye— Le Petit Prince. I open it and a black-and-white picture slips out—her from the back, looking down, holding a blond boy’s hand. My hand, I realize. My hair grew darker as I grew up.

A spot of red bleeds through the picture and spreads, covering her fingers, mine. I hear shouting and screaming and a boy’s voice begging her to come back.

The text ended there and didn’t pick up again until the following page. My throat ached and my fingers were shaking and I shouldn’t be reading this but I couldn’t stop.

Another fight.

I was already annoyed by the Lukumi-fraud situation when I heard some random on Calle Ocho say something vaguely insulting to the girl he was with. I said something profoundly insulting back. I desperately hoped he’d swing.

He did.

There is an unparalleled freedom in fighting. I can’t be hurt and so I’m afraid of nothing. They can be, so they’re afraid of everything. That makes it easy, and so I always win.

Mara calls. She’s hopeful for answers but I have none and I don’t want her to know.

He must have written the entries on Thursday, when he didn’t come over. After I called him and he hung up and I worried, wondered why he sounded so distant. I was riveted.

When I don’t see her, her ghost wanders my veins. And when I see Mara today after a day apart, she is different.

The word seeps into my blood.

It is subtle—so subtle that I hadn’t quite noticed it myself until she mentioned it; perhaps I’m too close. But now, the time apart throws the changes into relief and I watch her closely, so I can remember. She is still beautiful—always—but her cheekbones are more prominent. Her collarbone is diamond sharp. The softness I love is slowly being filed away by something inside or outside, I don’t know.

I don’t want to tell her. She came undone over nothing at the fair, after some hack fed her lines about destiny and fate. Things are precarious enough as it is.

He wrote that yesterday.

I tried to piece together the things he thought with the moments he may have thought them, moments he was with me. The words picked up again on the bottom of the same page.

I can’t forget the kiss.

It’s laughable. I barely touched her but it was distressingly intimate. She arched up toward me, but I placed my hand on her waist and she stilled under my palm. I don’t think she’s ever looked so perilously beautiful as she did in that second.

She isn’t the only one changing. Every day she shapes me into something else.

I am definitely a pussy.

Sharing a bed with her is its own exquisite torture. I twine around her like moss on a limb; our heartbeats synchronize and we become one twisted, codependent thing. She brings me to heel with one look and I hear an aching violin, a cello’s low swell. It hums beneath my skin; I want nothing more than to devour her, yet I do nothing but clench my jaw, press my lips to her neck, and savour the tremor in her chord. After a while, it softens at the edges as she slips into sleep. Her sound is a siren’s song, calling me to the rocks.

She thinks I don’t desire her and it’s almost ridiculous how wrong she is. But she has to fight her demons before I can prove it, lest I become one of them. She hears Jude’s name and her sound tightens, rises; her breath and heart quicken with fear. He fractured something inside of her and God knows, I will make him pay.

I can’t slay her dragon because I can’t find him, so for now I stay close.

It’s not enough.

My dragon. My demons.

Noah thought what Jude did to me was what made me afraid to kiss him. That if I was still fearful and Noah let things go too far, it would haunt me the way Jude does now.

He didn’t trust me when I said I wasn’t afraid of him. He didn’t understand that I was only afraid of myself.

Then there was nothing for five, seven pages. On the thirteenth page, there was more:

My theory: that Mara can manipulate events the way I can manipulate cells. I have no idea how either of us can do either thing, but nevertheless.

I try to get her to envision something benign but she stares and concentrates while her sound never changes. Is her ability linked to desire? Does she not want anything good?

Nightmare:

The sun slants through my bedroom windows, backlighting Mara as she draws in my bed. She wears my shirt—a shapeless black and white plaid thing that I wouldn’t normally notice but with her inside of it, it is beautiful.

The skin of her bare thigh glances against my arm as she shifts in my sheets. My hand holds a book: Invitation to a Beheading. I’m trying to read it, but I can’t get past this passage:

“In spite of everything I loved you, and will go on loving you—on my knees, with my shoulders drawn back, showing my heels to the headsman and straining my goose neck—even then. And afterwards—perhaps most of all afterwards—I shall love you, and one day we shall have a real, all-embracing explanation, and then perhaps we shall somehow fit together, you and I . . . we shall connect the points . . . and you and I shall form that unique design for which I yearn.”

I can’t get past it because I keep wondering what Mara’s thigh would feel like against my cheek.

Her graphite pencil scratches the thick paper and it is the soundtrack to my bliss. That, and her sound—dissonant, aching. Her breath and heartbeat and pulse are my new favourite symphony; I’m beginning to learn which notes will play when, and to interpret them. There is wrath and contentment and fear and desire—but she has never let the last get too far. Yet.

The sun sings in her hair as her head tilts, dips toward the page. She arches forward, her shape slightly feline as she draws. My heart beats her name. She glances over her shoulder and smirks like she can hear it.

Enough.

I toss the book on the floor—a first edition, I don’t care—and I lean into her. She coyly moves to block her sketchbook. Fine. It isn’t what I want, anyway.

“Come here,” I whisper into her skin. I turn her to face me. She knots her fingers in my hair and my eyelids drop at her touch.

And then she kisses me first, which never happens. It is light and fresh and soft. Careful. She still thinks she can hurt me, somehow; she doesn’t grasp yet that it isn’t possible. I have no idea what’s going on in her mind but even if it takes her years to let go, it will be worth it. I would wait forever for the promise of seeing Mara, unleashed.

I pull back to look at her again, but something is wrong. Off. Her eyes are glassy and blurred, shining with tears.

“Are you all right?”

She shakes her head. A tear spills over, rolls down her cheek. I hold her face in my hands. “What?”

She glances at the sketchbook behind her. Moves out of the way. I lift it.

It’s a sketch of me, but my eyes are blacked out. I narrow mine at hers.

“Why would you draw this?”

She shakes her head. I grow frustrated. “Tell me.”

She opens her mouth to speak, but she has no tongue.

When I wake, Mara is no longer in bed.

I lie alone, staring at the ceiling, then at the clock. Three minutes after two in the morning. I wait five minutes. After ten, I get up to see where she’s gone.

I find her in the kitchen. She is staring at her reflection in the dark window with a long knife pressed against her thumb, and suddenly I’m not in Miami but in London, in my father’s study; I am fifteen and completely numb. I skirt the desk my father never sits in and reach for his knife. I drag it across my skin—

I blink the memory away and whisper Mara’s name in desperation. She doesn’t respond, so I cross the kitchen and take her hand and gently put down the knife.

She smiles and it is empty and it freezes my blood because I’ve seen that smile on myself.

In the morning, she remembers nothing.

It is March 29th.

I couldn’t breathe when I read the date. March 29th is today.