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bit of sugar at the bottom, and thought about how much she’d like a merchant marine to help her out right around now.

FOUR

The Thing in the Woods
    E arlier on that same Thursday in March, Liz Marley rubbed her eyes and rolled over in her bed. “I’m up,” she called out to her mother, who had shouted her name from the floor below. For some reason her legs ached, and her head was pounding. She felt like the sandman had visited her during the night and slapped her with a twenty-pound bag of cement.
    She buried her face beneath her red quilt, and wondered if her mother would believe that for the third time this month she was suffering from a mysterious twenty-four-hour flu and needed to stay home from school. Not likely.
    She’d had a nightmare last night, a pretty bad one. But she couldn’t remember it anymore. Something about her father, and Susan. Something so scary that she must have cried in her sleep, because her eyes were wet and her throat felt raw. She remembered snow, and blood, and the red roses on her father’s grave. If she thought about it, she could probably remember the rest. But she didn’t want to think about it. So instead she counted slowly: one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi…twenty Mississippi until the veil of sleep lifted, and her thoughts returned to the day ahead of her.
    The house was quiet and she could smell eggs frying in the kitchen. Her room remained as it had been before she fell asleep. Eels and White Stripes posters cluttered the walls. Jack White mugged at her from across the room. “Hi, stranger,” she grumbled while looking at him with one eye still shut. On her desk was her trigonometry homework, which, damn, she hadn’t started, and this would be the third time in two weeks that she got a zero. Yes, this was life as usual. High school still sucked, and so did Bedford. But at least there was Bobby, and maybe now that basketball championships were over, they could go to the Dugout and eat imitation neon cheese fries after school today.
    She got out of bed and pulled on her robe. The rain had started today, which meant that spring was on its way. And after spring came summer, and after summer fall. Soon, she’d be in college. Soon, her bags would be packed. She’d hop the Greyhound to Orino, and never look back. Hooray! Feeling almost back to her good old self, she skipped her way into the bathroom, oblivious to the icy linoleum floor against her bare feet.
    But then, in the mirror, she saw. What was this? She stood on tiptoe and leaned over the sink. She didn’t want to look. A part of her knew already what this was. There was a giant red splotch across the center of her trachea. Fingerlike red tentacles spread out and around the sides of her neck. Hands. The splotches were shaped like hands.
    She leaned against the cold glass and closed her eyes. One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi. Calm down, she told herself. Just calm down. There’s enough bad stuff in the world, stop inventing more. You’re going to fail home economics if you don’t sew that retarded sweatshirt, you know. And even if it is a stupid class and you totally should have taken art instead, you’ll still lose your scholarship to UMO and then you’ll never see Bobby because he’ll be in college and you’ll be waiting tables. Stop making things up!
    “Liz? You’re going to be late!”
    “I’m coming!” Liz cheerfully answered in a voice not entirely her own. Six Mississippi. There were tears in the corners of her eyes, but she managed to stifle them. She had three options. She had gone crazy on the anniversary of her father’s death, and was now imagining bloody sisters instead of little green men. She had dreamed this. It really had happened.
    She chose the least frightening option. She had dreamed this. Right. It had all been a dream. But what about her throat? Maybe she was coming down with a cold. Had wrapped her fingers around her neck in her sleep because