Sentinel Green 1.5

Begonia 1.5

    Victor’s frown deepens. “What?” he asks, and I cannot blame him for his intense confusion. The story tumbles out of me.

    “I was driving home from mom’s and--something happened. I saw a creature that... that doesn’t exist in the real world, and it turned me into--”

    “Stop,” Victor says, putting a hand up. “This some kind of joke?” He’s wearing his ‘it’s way too late at night, stop fucking with me’ face and my heart sinks.

    Mina and I, being the supernatural-sci-fi-fantasy geeks we are, had developed a code a long time ago. We write stories together--dozens of them--and as a result we’ve created characters that span any number of mythological creeds and cultures. Our code for “I met a vampire” is “I met someone like Vince,” Vince being a vampire character in one of our stories. It’s a sacred code, and one we’ve never broken to use against each other on April Fool’s Day or whatever. I’m now violently wishing Victor and I had a similar code.

    Still, what would I say? “I became someone like that one character that doesn’t exist, the one that ran over some magical girl and got turned into a magical guy by a floating pink monster thing.” That’d make perfect sense.

    I need to talk to Mina. She’s probably in the bedroom, but for now I have to try to deal with Victor. “No joke,” I say, feeling a shiver starting in my core. He was telling the truth, after all--he really would not believe me. My pessimism grabs hold of me with both icy hands and though I fight it, I’m failing. “I wish it was a joke. It’s me. Look--I can log in to all of my accounts. You can ask me anything at all about me, or about you, that Ash would know--I can answer you. I swear.”

    It’s sort of a miracle he let me get this far. “If she put you up to this as some kind of joke I’m gonna be pissed. This isn’t funny,” he says, but before we can get farther in this dance of failure, I hear Mina approach from the hallway behind me.

    “Oh,” she says, looking a little surprised that her husband is talking to some strangely dressed man in the middle of the living room near the middle of the night. Her normally friendly freckled face only holds a somewhat quizzical look, brown eyes peering questioningly at me from behind a curtain of curly brown hair. I don’t let her even get a word out. What’s a character from one of our stories I can reference? Who did we write who could gender-hop like this? A shapeshifter? Yeah, a shapeshifter--it’s the best chance I have.

    “I turned into someone like Jesse,” I blurt out to her. “It’s… it’s me. Ash. I turned into a… yeah.”

    She stares at me for a minute, looking nothing short of bewildered, and while she comprehends this, Victor speaks up again and I turn back to face him.

    “You’re really trying my patience. I think you need to get out.”

    “Please, give me a chance to try to prove it to you,” I ask, pleading now, running through anything I can think of to convince him. “The login to your computer is 9977553311. When you were a kid you broke both your wrists riding your Razor scooter and lied to your dad, said you fell up the stairs--”

    Mina speaks up from behind me, and what she says bursts through my core with so much raw relief I want to cry. The hope she gives me when she says, “Ash?” even with the disbelieving tone is so good it hurts. I spin to face her, open my mouth to talk, but Victor talks over me.

    “So wherever she is, you’ve been questioning her,” he interrupts with a growl. “You have five seconds to tell me where Ash is, or I’m calling the cops.”

    For a horrible second I’m tempted to just… give in. Haha, you really are impossible to fool, she was right, okay bye. See you never, mister! Then I can run and just… text Mina later on tonight after Victor goes to bed, work on convincing her, but...

    But I’m stubborn, almost as much as he is, and I shake my head vehemently. I spew out his social security number, then mine, then more emotional things, like the first time I ever saw him cry, where we were and what happened, the things he told me he’d never tell anyone else. He shoves past me and beelines for our room, and I freeze. Please be going to get a computer. Please. Maybe he wants me to log in to my Facebook and Gmail account in front of him.

    Mina takes the opportunity to speak now that he’s gone. “Ash. Is that really you?”

    “It is,” I say, my voice cracking. “It’s me. I got turned into this and it’s--they’re saying it’s permanent, I don’t--”

    It was a fool’s hope that Victor vanished to get a laptop. A moment later my cellphone rings and Mina’s eyes widen as she looks down at it. Victor reappears from the doorway of the room, and as he spots the device I now hold in my hand, his expression steels over with a kind of cold fury I’ve never seen him wear before.

    A second later he is in my space and my phone clatters to the ground. I’m too tall for him to lift me off my feet, but he tries anyway, grabbing me by the collar of my turtleneck jacket and shoving his face within an inch of mine. “What did you do with her?”

    “Victor,” I say, my voice a low rumble in my throat, pleading, miserable. “Please.”

    “You know what I said about you getting out of here? Scratch that. You’d better believe I’m calling the cops. Mina,” he says, never taking his eyes off me. “Dial up 9-1-1.”

    But Mina doesn’t budge. She’s staring between Victor and me, frozen with indecision. I hate putting her in this situation, but I have no choice.

    “It’s me. I would never lie about something like this.” It’s so hard to concentrate with Victor right up in my face. “I’d never put someone up to fooling you like this. You know that. You know me.”

    “Don’t listen to him,” Victor snaps. “There’s something very wrong here. He’s got her somewhere and we need to figure out where.”

    “I don’t know if Ash would really tell him these things…” Mina said, her voice timid and quiet as she stares hard at the side of my face. I can barely turn to look at her, and we meet eyes as she regards me intently, like she can discern my reality just by doing that. I try to impress upon her who I am with just a look, but my heart is thundering and I know now that Victor is a lost cause. Damn it! I should have texted Mina, had her come outside surreptitiously… I could have talked to her, convinced her away from Victor, tried to bring him around more carefully… what was I expecting, barging in here like this?

    “Really? Mina, seriously? Ash is in danger. Call the cops!”

    And then I catch a heartbreaking sight--the doubt that flashes across Mina’s face, and the unmistakable reach for her phone.

    Retreat, I realize. I have to get out of here. They’re going to call the cops, he’ll drop me just long enough to block the door, and I can’t afford to be detained. I’ve got nothing to prove my identity--no IDs, no name other than Ash, nothing but a blood stained car out front and what people will assume is a stolen cellphone. I try to take a few steps back, but he reels back and cracks me right across the jaw--and that’s when the house plants go insane.

    Mina’s mother has a green thumb, and the plants are everywhere in here. As Victor whips his hand back and shakes it out in pain, a small potted plant near my foot shoots out tendrils at lightning speed. It snags at Victor’s feet--he jerks and looks down, and as he does another plant from the nearby counter sprawls itself all up his arm, encasing itself completely around his hand. I’m not controlling them, not consciously, anyway, but my mouth drops open as I realize they are coming to my aid nevertheless.

    The strike--it hadn't even hurt, not in the slightest, but my newfound power is still out of hand. I could try to call to him, try to reason and logic this out some more, but now I’m just terrified that I’ll kill Victor if I stay any longer. I can’t control what’s happening--I need to get away. “I’m sorry,” I say to Mina, my chest feeling concave with despair. “I gotta go.”

    “Ash!” she shouts, but she’s latched to Victor’s side, trying to help free him while the plants restrain him. I only stop long enough to scoop up my phone before I turn and run. I hear shouting behind me, struggling, the sound of pots shattering on the ground, but I don’t look back even once as I let the noisy screen door bang shut behind me.