The Boy in the Gray Hoodie

12...

12…

I was in my room again, the one with the pale walls and the metal bed, sitting in the corner as far from the door as I could get. James was out there. He was waiting for me. That’s when I saw the boy in the mirror. He was standing across from me and I realized that this was the first time he wasn’t doing exactly what I was doing.

            As I stared back at him I noticed his clothes were different from mine as well. He wore a pair of muddy red sneakers and a damp gray hoodie. His head was bent low, shadowed by the hood of his sweatshirt. Below the shadow, he was smiling.

            Bracing my hands against the wall, I slowly pulled myself up off the floor. Now we were standing the same way, but his head was still bent and mine was facing forward—facing him. I was afraid to look away from him, afraid that maybe…maybe he wasn’t real.

            “W-who…are you?” I asked. His lips silently formed the same words.

Who are you?

            I inched closer, keeping my palm against the wall, feeling the cold concrete against my skin to make sure this was real. Marley had told me about my reflection a long time ago, but she’d never mentioned anything like this. This wasn’t normal—it was…wrong. I knew that, but it didn’t stop me from coming closer. As I approached the mirror, the boy started to turn away.

            “Don’t go,” I said softly, my chin quivering. I was so nervous. I had never talked to my reflection before. Not like this, as though the boy in the mirror was a stranger that could turn and walk away from me. “Please tell me your name,” I begged in a quiet voice.

James would be ashamed of my tone—I was being pathetic. I wasn’t supposed to do what I was doing. I wasn’t supposed to be so weak, and I wasn’t supposed to be talking to anyone.

            The boy raised his chin a notch to look at me with my eyes. They were dark and blue and sad, even though he smiled.

We don’t have a name. He said it without a voice, but still I heard every word.

“Why?” I cried, putting my hands against the glass. This time the boy’s hands didn’t come to meet mine; they just stayed at his side, clenched into fists. He continued to smile, his eyes—my eyes—growing sadder. Without an answer, he turned and faded into the white wall on his side of the glass.

“Wait!” I shouted. My hand slammed against the mirror as I called after him. He didn’t come back. But the impact of my fist against the glass made the whole wall begin to quiver, and then all the walls. Soon the fluorescents were beginning to buzz on and off and the ceiling was starting to crumble.

It’s happening again, I realized. And that’s when the pain came back. It had been there all along; a dull ache in the back of my mind that I had somehow managed to ignore for this long. But now I was hurting again, and it was getting harder and more painful to breathe.

Doubling over from the sharp pain in my ribs, I watched as the room fell apart around me, reduced to dust and flames. The floor caught fire and the fire spread up the walls. Sweat soon began to soak my clothes from the heat of the flames. Smoke was rising, and even though I couldn’t smell it this time, I knew it would eventually suffocate me.

The fire was sweeping closer, the heat growing more intense. But just before the flames reached me, I felt something cold against my face and neck. Suddenly I was drenched in ice cold water as a heavy rain started to fall. It washed away the fire, and what was left of my room.