Excerpt: Ice Queen

I.
The Girl in the Mirror

Jillian waggled her fingers with their bitten nails at me. ‘Bye, bye, beautiful,’ she mocked, in the tinkling voice which sounded oddly like broken glass.
I gazed back at her, rubbing my eyes. I shifted my foot forward, accidentally brushing the bathroom tiles with my toes, and jerked back. Cold, much too cold. Jillian hummed notes of the song, tousled hair gleaming with an ice-hard brilliance that mine could never have, not even in the midday sun. It was some few minutes past three in the morning – I knew that in the back of my head, the unconscious part that sensed things, somehow, when I was here – it was dark, and still every part of her was faceted and bright and solid. It was unreal, as if she were a human icicle.

Which in some ways she was, save without the human part.

Jillian’s pupils shrank, and she bared my teeth, their creamy ivory colour looking yellowish next to her paper-white skin. ‘Get out.’ It came from her mouth in a hiss. ‘You truly are everybody’s fool.’

It was my own fault that she could see fragments of song inside my head. That was how she spoke, of course, and speaking gave her power.

‘Can’t you see, can’t you see,’ and then she gave a high-pitched, little-girlish giggle. ‘Don’t you know that time won’t heal your dead boy’s scars?’ Flushed lips parted slightly, and she moved towards me, as if to kiss the glass between us. Then she jumped back with a shriek. ‘Fooled you!’

‘He’s not dead,’ I informed her, quite coldly. That was the way I had to talk to Jillian. ‘And he’s not a boy. You can’t see either. You’re as bad as I am.’

‘No, I’m worse,’ Jillian cackled. ‘Badder, badder, bad to the bone.’

‘I hate that song,’ I replied, shifting my bare feet.

‘I know, haven’t you seen the ruins of my world?’ The tone of her voice had changed. She was staring at me wistfully, almost sad. I could see her – my – irises, violet-blue. She blinked, tissue-paper eyelids momentarily closing over them. I had to remind myself not to fall for it. Jillian the poet, Jillian the malicious child – Jillian had two sides, and changed from one to the other as easily as breathing. Just as I did, only my self-metamorphosis was involuntary.

Suddenly, unexpectedly, she reached her fingers up to graze the mirror. I started back. I could clearly see the whorls of the imprints on her fingertips pressed against the glass, highlighted and enhanced by the peculiar light of the other side, and it made her hand seem just a little too human. Jillian’s eyes widened, obviously mimicking my own. I raised my own hand, wrist enclosed in a baggy, too-big pyjama sleeve, and touched the same spot, aligning my fingers to her own. For a brief moment – although it seemed extended to me – it was like we were as we should be, a girl and a reflection. Yet, somehow, at the same time, it was something more than that. She was a continuation of me, and I was a continuation of her.

Then Jillian pulled her fingers back, making a fist. ‘You belong to me, my snow white queen,’ she snarled, pulling her arm back as if to shatter the glass with a blow. I jumped backwards, coming precariously close to falling into the shower cubicle. I felt fragile again, too skinny and myopic and so regrettably teenage -
My sight cleared, as if to give me one last glimpse of her before the world was opened up. Jillian’s face was white with fury and rage and her own bloodlessness, her eyes a dry livid blue, dishwater-blonde hair clinging to her awkwardly shaped face in tendrils. She is the darker side of me. This time, the thought came from my own mind.

As her fist touched the glass, she melted away. The girl in the mirror was gone, and I stumbled backwards, alone, afraid, and panting in the bathroom.

II.
The Dawning of a New Day

I pulled the headphones out of my ears and painted a smile on my face. A few of the group of people at the table looked up, saw me, waved, and then went back to their mess of conversation.

I wound the cord around my MP3 player (thirty dollars on sale) and put it in one of the side pockets of my bag. I wasn’t actually supposed to take it to school, but it was my life, so screw you, Mother dear.