Twenty-Five

After a few days the world starts to blur. Sleeping and waking, nightmare and reality, it all runs together. I go to my classes, mostly. I do some of my assignments. Sometimes I shower, sometimes I don't. It doesn't seem to matter much, and Isabella doesn't care. I don't really taste my food—whenever I remember to bother to eat any, which isn't often.

Dr. Hendrix keeps emailing me and trying to talk to me in class. I manage to fend her off at first, but she grows more insistent, so I finally stop going to Gothic lit. I know that deep down I love that class, but I can't seem to remember why.

All that matters is Cicada. Isabella writes all night long, leaving me to catch true sleep here and there as I'm able, mostly in between classes, though sometimes I sleep right through them. Even when I'm awake, I'm in a haze, hardly aware of my surroundings. People talk to me and I don't really hear them. Penny keeps coming to my door, and I open it and stare at her while her lips move. I close it again without saying anything. I don't see Wren at all, so they must be bunking with Penny or sleeping in the practice rooms again. I can't bring myself to care.

The truth is that I'm not really here. And I don't want to be. It's a relief to sink down into Isabella's coffin while she sits at my desk and writes. It's a relief to lie in the darkness and listen to the world creak and groan and creep around me. It's a relief not to exist.

I wonder if it's possible for me to crouch in some dark little corner of my own brain and for Isabella to have this body all to herself, twenty-four hours a day. I'm not sure I would mind. It might be better that way.

There are times when I think Isabella and I are merging into one. My hands are her hands. My neurons, my synapses are hers. But I'm not just a vessel for her to inhabit. We're intertwined, our thoughts and feelings mixing. I feel her impulses as if they are my own. And more and more, they are the ones that rule me. The story she's writing is twined around my brain, my heart. I can't stop thinking about it. It feels more real to me than my own life.

Eugenia, her swelling belly. The bloody climax she's hurtling toward.

Every morning I type Isabella's words. They frighten me because I know that at least some part of what she writes is real. That it truly happened. But Isabella frightens me more, the dark edge of her mind sharp and slick as a bloodied blade. I can feel her craving, her bloodthirst. She loves the damage Eugenia is doing. She relishes every dark turn. She can't stop writing because she needs, desperately, to reach the apex of horror and watch humanity unravel. She is, in every possible way, her mother's daughter.

And I—at least in some sense—am her. I am Isabella Snow.

Right now, at this moment, I am glad to be her. I am glad to have my brain and my body put to a greater use than I could ever give them. Isabella might be bloody, but she's also brilliant. She came from dark and humble beginnings just like me. But she made something of herself. She built herself up into a person even death could not conquer.

She deserves the use of my hands. She deserves it more than I ever will.

Isabella is the writer I could never be.

But in a way, because of her, I get to be that writer. Because of her, I get to make something great, just like I've always dreamed of.

Tonight, I watch her as she writes. I follow the lines of her story across the page, as rapt as she is. She is nearly there, to the point of crisis. She writes feverishly, her pen scrambling. If it weren't my handwriting, I wouldn't be able to read it.

Eugenia, hugely pregnant, meets the boy who impregnated her late at night, deep in the woods, next to a stream. He wants to marry her. He begs her, on his knees. But Eugenia knows she would never be accepted in his world, not even by him, no matter how much he professes to love her. Her place is too well established. To Frederick she would always be a girl he saved. He would come to despise her.

He would raise her daughter as a hated thing, an object of shame. And that Eugenia could never allow.

So she refuses. The boy becomes angry at first, yelling at her that the child is his and he'll claim it. That she won't raise his blood among lowly people. But when he catches sight of the rage in her eyes, he changes tack, going back to confessing his love for her and the child.

The boy grovels before her; he presses his face to her belly. He gazes up at her, moonlight reflecting in his eyes. And Eugenia loves him, as well as she's able to love a pampered, privileged boy. But she loves herself more. She loves the child growing inside her more.

With her left hand, Eugenia smooths the boy's hair off his forehead, her touch gentle. She makes his head fall back, exposing the white expanse of his throat.

And I want to stop Isabella's hand. I want to scream at her not to do it. Not to let her father be killed. But I am as powerless against her as the boy is against Eugenia.

Eugenia brings her right hand up fast, sinking a knife into the side of Frederick's throat. His eyes open wide with shock and disbelief. She yanks the knife back out and lets the blood splatter the ground, the water, her dress. When his eyes go empty, she pushes him backward until he falls onto his back in the stream.

Eugenia wipes the knife on her bloody dress and goes home to have her baby.

Elation and triumph pour from Isabella's mind and into my heart, a feeling so intense and all-consuming that I lose track of myself, that I can no longer tell where Isabella ends and I begin.