Free Be Not Afraid by Cecilia Galante Page A

impossible. She yanked on them, an impatient grunt coming out of her mouth.
    “No, no, don’t.” I reached out and touched one of them. “Just stay still.” I paused as she searched my face, looking for something. Her gaze felt like an insect of some kind, crawling over my skin, getting ready to burrow under the topmost layer. “Your brother came to get me.” I swallowed. “He said you wanted to see me? To talk to me?”
    She nodded, her eyes glued to my face. “My head,” she whispered. “I think it’s in my head.”
    I stared at her, confused. “What’s in your head?”
    There was a long pause, as if she was trying to retrieve the answer from somewhere very far away. “She is,” she said finally. “Don’t you remember?”
    Her answer made me take a step back, as if she had swung at me.
    Cassie blinked at the movement, raised her head an inch or so off the pillow. “Marin? You remember, don’t you?”
    I took another step back as a small moan drifted out between her lips, and then another, until I was within arm’s reach of the door.
    “It hurts.” She turned her eyes away from me, moving her head from side to side. “Oh my God, it hurts so much, Marin. You have no idea.”
    “It’s ’cause you’re sick,” I said. “You had a seizure at school this morning, and you hit your head on the floor. The doctors think you have epilepsy. But there’s medicine you can take, and—”
    I stopped talking as Cassie’s hands curled into balls and then released. For a moment they seemed to freeze justabove the metal frame of her bed, and then they curled up again. Her knuckles bulged beneath the skin, knobs of bone smooth as shells, and then her fingers relaxed once more. Slowly, she began to scratch the sides of the bed.
Scritch scritch scritch.
She dragged them across the thin metal, her nails making a low, rasping sound. The veins on the backs of her hands stood out as she scraped harder, and the edges of her nostrils turned white. The movements became more frenetic the harder she clawed, as if she were trying to flay a layer of skin with the top of the metal bar. A fingernail split and then broke, followed by another one on the other hand, but she didn’t seem to notice, did not even break her stride. The back of my throat tightened. Was this the beginning of another fit? Should I call for help? The horrific scraping sound continued, but now as I watched, the tips of her fingers began to turn a strange gray color. The color deepened and swelled, the gray morphing into a faded purple and then a violet, until, impossibly, all ten of her fingers were black. I squinted, as if my eyes were playing tricks on me. But these were not pain shapes inside her fingers. It was as though ink had leaked through her skin, staining her fingertips from the inside out. They looked dead, lifeless, as if she had suddenly gotten gangrene.
    By now, I had flattened myself against the door. My hands were over my ears, in a desperate attempt to block out the horrifying scraping sound. Without warning, Cassie turned her head and stared at me with the same awful intensity that she had in the auditorium, pleading, furious,demanding. The movement made me jump so spastically that my sunglasses fell to the floor, but I made no move to pick them up. Instead, I glimpsed the sudden swish of black again, a ribbon caressing the inner hollows of her head, slipping in among the wide space behind her eyes like a dark, fluid stream of water. There was no room for hesitation this time, no possibility of doubt. The blackness was as real as anything I’d ever seen; it moved slowly, deliberately through her head, as if on display this time, wanting to be seen.
    I opened my mouth to scream for Dominic, but nothing came out. It was like something clutched at my vocal cords, was squeezing them into paralysis. My hand scrabbled for the doorknob behind me, even as I felt my legs giving way.
    Cassie struggled to sit up. Her long hair fell around the