Free A Head Full of Ghosts: A Novel by Paul Tremblay

really hurt me, either.
    Marjorie kept texting, fingers crawling over the phone’s keyboard screen while she talked at the same time. “I’ll wait until you’re asleep because you never wake up when I’m there. I’m in your room every night, Merry. It’s so easy.”
    I imagined her standing over my bed, pinching my nose shut, drawing on my hand, hovering her face close to mine, breathing my breaths.
    “Maybe the next time I’m there I’ll reach into to your mouth with pliers, no, wait, I’ll just use my fingers, clamp them up real tight, turn my hand into a claw, and I’ll pinch that fat, wriggling worm between my fingers and tear it right out of your skull, as easy as pulling dandelions out of the ground. It’ll hurt worse than anything you’ve ever felt before. You’ll wake up moaning around my hand, choking on blood, and seeing white stars of pain literally exploding in your head. And there’ll be so much blood. You never realize how much blood there can be.”
    Even knowing what I know now, I’ll never forgive Marjorie for what she said to me then, and I’ll never forgive myself for staying in the sunroom and taking it all. I just stood there.
    “I’ll keep your tongue and put it on a string, wear it like a necklace, keep it close against my chest, let it taste my skin until it turns black and shrivels up like all dead things do. What an amazing fucking thought that is: your never-ending tongue shrunken and finally stilled.”
    She kept talking and she kept talking. I thought she would never stop. Standing there, I felt the sun pour through the windows, setting and rising on my back. The sunroom had become a sundial measuring the geological age of my psychological torture.
    “And your mouth, stupidly opening and closing, gaping like a fish drunk on too much air. You’d feel that loss. You’d learn the oldest lessonthere is. The lesson of loss. We all learn it eventually. You’d feel that ragged stub of flesh cowering and hiding down by your molars. Or maybe your stupid flesh won’t have learned anything and it’ll wiggle and stretch toward the vowels and consonants forever out of reach.”
    I stood there as still and as silent as if my tongue had already been extracted.
    “The flooding black river of blood will be the only thing to ever pour out of your mouth again. No more words. No one will listen to you. That’s the worst part, Merry. You will not be able to speak ever again, which means you will never be able to tell anyone about what will happen next to you and everyone else in this house. All the awful, terrible, unspeakable shit that will happen to you, and it will happen to you, and to everyone else. . . . I know. I’ve heard about it and I’ve seen it. No one escapes.”
    Marjorie finally stopped talking and texting. She gently placed her phone on the side table and folded her hands in her lap.
    Wide-eyed, I stood up, my back against the wall, and sobbed into my hands that bravely cupped my mouth.
    Marjorie sighed again. “Oh, come on, I’m just kidding, Merry. Jeez. I would never do that to you. You know that, right?”
    That made me cry harder, because I didn’t know that. Not anymore.
    “Okay, that was a mean joke, I know, but it wasn’t that bad. Come here.” Marjorie pulled out of her slouch, sat up, and patted an open section of the loveseat.
    I stayed where I was, shaking my head. The sunlight flashed brighter outside and we both had to squint.
    “Please, Merry. I am sorry.”
    Still crying the kind of tears that don’t fall right away but instead build a wall on the lower lid, making everything blurry, I sidled over and sat down with my back to her, like I was supposed to.
    Marjorie drew a capital letter between my shoulder blades with her finger. “Guess the letter.”
    “M.” I was uncannily good at the back-letter-drawing game. Even in a state of emotional cataclysm.
    “I shouldn’t have said all that stuff to you, but I was very upset that you told Mom on me.