Free Be Not Afraid by Cecilia Galante Page B

front of her shoulders, and a vein bulged along the side of her neck as she wrenched at the restraints around her wrists. A horrible tearing sound came from one of them as the Velcro began to give, but they stayed. Impossibly, they stayed.
    I became aware of a faint rattling sound. It was coming from my teeth, which had started chattering, clicking against each other like some kind of windup toy. Cassie strained against the cuffs again, leaning forward, grunting with increased deliberation. Her dead fingertips curled at the tips like black hooks, and the inky stream inside her head continued to flow in an endless, steady current.
    Runrunrun!
my brain commanded.
Runrunrun!
But I could not make myself move. It was as if the blackness inside her head had somehow riveted me to the floor, some weird energy putting nails in my feet, stakes in my legs. The color was so dark that I could not see her pupils anymore—they had been swallowed into a mass of tar. Finally, I pounded on the door behind me with the sides of my fists, kicked at it with my heels.
    “Let me out!” My voice choked over the words. “Let me out!”
    I could hear the sound of someone pressed up behind it, the knob rattling in its slot. “Marin!” It was Dominic. “Marin, get away from the door!” Without taking my eyes off Cassie, I moved myself to the right. The door flew open, throwing me to the floor, and the attendant with the black shoes rushed in, followed by Dominic and Mr. and Mrs. Jackson. The attendant lunged for Cassie, grabbing at her flailing arms, his face tight with exertion, and shoved her back down against the bed.
    Cassie threw her head back and shrieked as he leaned over her, pinning her to the mattress with the weight of his body, and secured the loosened straps back around her arms.
    “Don’t hurt her!” Mrs. Jackson screamed. “Don’t you hurt her! She’s sick!”
    Dominic got down on one knee and helped me up. “Marin. Are you all right?”
    I was about to answer him when I heard a sob. It was coming from behind the attendant, who was standing up straight again, securing Cassie’s leg straps around her ankles; it was mingled with words, a plea of some kind, with my name in it. “Marin. Oh God, Marin, help me. Please.”
    I moved out from behind Dominic. Cassie’s hands were stretched inside the wrist straps, straining toward me. Her fingertips were white again, and she was weeping, her face freezing in horror and then giving way, over and over. There was no sign of the gangrene in her fingers, none of the serpentine blackness in her head. Both of them had vanished. She stared straight at me now with watery eyes, the ocean after a storm.
    “Please.” She began to lower her arms, as if exhausted. Her voice followed, just as weary. “Please help me, Marin. Please.”
    “What happened?” Mrs. Jackson’s voice was like a razor blade going through paper. “What’s going on? Will somebody please get the
doctor
?”
    “Marin.” Dominic’s head whipped back and forth like a metronome, staring first at Cassie and then back at me. “Marin, what just happened? Talk to me.”
    But I was not going to talk to him. I was not going to talk to anyone. I knew that if I didn’t get out of this space, away from whatever was in this room right this minute, this second, everything inside me was going to disintegrate. And I wasn’t talking about passing out the way Isometimes felt I might do in school when the colors got too overwhelming.
    I was talking about disappearing. For good.
    With a surge of adrenaline, I pushed past Dominic and Mr. and Mrs. Jackson, almost knocking them over.
    And then I ran like hell.

Six
    Air. I needed air. I needed to breathe. Oxygen. In and out of my lungs, as fast as possible, so that it could fill everything inside that had been touched by whatever I’d just seen back there, and then erase it. I ran harder than I had ever run before, forgetting about my bike in the back of Dominic’s Jeep, weaving in