Safe with Me: A Novel

My mother is wrong, I think as I stomp up the stairs to my bedroom. I do hate my father. If she had any backbone at all, she’d hate him, too. Slamming the door behind me, I grab my laptop and plop down on my bed, quickly logging in to Sierra’s Facebook profile to write a status update. “Parents are soooo LAME,” I type. “Why do they think they can control my life?!”

After a few people “like” the post, I decide it sounds too immature and I delete it. I’ve listed Sierra’s age as twenty-one, and I’m pretty sure by that point, most girls aren’t constantly bitching about their parents. At least I hope not. Now that I’m fairly healthy, my plan is to get the hell out of this house the minute I turn eighteen. Two more years of dealing with my father will be enough; now, I have to deal with five hundred other kids at a school I don’t want to go to? Kids who won’t know me or want to know me, because even though I feel better than I did a year ago, my hair is still stringy and my body has a weird shape. I’m not an hourglass; I’m a barrel.

This thought is too depressing to deal with, so I decide to log in to my favorite gaming site instead. I discovered Zombie Wars about six months ago, when I was still stuck in bed a good part of the day and about to go out of my mind with boredom. It’s an online, alternate reality game set after the apocalypse, where you can create an avatar to join forces with other players to fight brain-eating zombies. I thought it was a little dorky at first, but once I got past the first couple of levels, I really started to get into the challenge of playing. Like pretending to be Sierra on Facebook and Twitter, I could pretend to be a butt-kicking zombie assassin who might just save the world. Maybe it was dorky, but it was definitely better than numbing my brain with daytime TV.

I click on my profile’s inbox to see if any other avatars have interacted with mine, and suddenly, an instant message pops up on my screen: “Hey Sierra. I’m Dirk. Saw you take down that giant zombie yesterday with one shot between the eyes. Nice work. Want to build an alliance?”

My fingers poise over the keyboard, hesitant. I tend to only message with other girls in the game, forming virtual friendships with people I will likely never meet, but this is the first time my avatar has been contacted by a boy. How could I not respond? His avatar is handsome, a blond-haired, black-leather-clad boy with bright blue eyes and a strong jaw. It’s almost eerie, how human he looks. In Zombie Wars, you can design how prominent you want your cheekbones, the shape and color of your eyes. Computer graphics are getting crazy realistic, and it’s totally what I want to major in when I get to college.

I check out his avatar again and wonder if he’s this attractive in person or if, like me, he has a reason to hide behind the screen. “Thanks,” I type, and for some reason, my heartbeat speeds up. “I like yours, too. Been playing long?”

“Just a couple of months,” he responds. “A friend turned me on to it, since he knows how obsessed I am with Zombieland.”

“That’s one of my favorite movies!”

“Best movie ever made. Well, beside The Matrix. And Star Wars.” There is a pause, and then he sends me another message. “So, what do you think? Want to partner up?” He ends the question with a winking smiley face, and I blush.

“Sure,” I reply, and before I can read his response, there is a loud knock on my bedroom door.

“Maddie, honey? Can I come in?” This is a new thing for my mom, having to ask to enter my room. When I was sick, she just came and went as she pleased, oftentimes even sleeping on the bed next to me instead of with my dad. But once I had the transplant and started feeling better, I asked her to knock, and—probably more difficult for her—to stay in her own bed.

“I’m kind of busy,” I call out to her, trying to mask my sigh.

Dirk sends me another message: “R U still there?”

“One sec,” I type. “BRB.”

“Doing what?” She opens the door enough to stick her head inside. When she sees me with the laptop, it’s her turn to sigh. “It’s a beautiful day. Let’s put that away and go for a walk.”

“Later, okay? I’m journaling.” One of the counselors I had to talk with after the transplant encouraged me to keep a diary about how I was feeling through the whole process. She told my mom about it, too, so now, whenever she catches me on the computer and gives me a guilt trip, I tell her I’ve been writing about my feelings, which usually makes her back off. “Can you close the door behind you, please?”

She stares at me with the hazel bordering on light-green eyes she passed down to me, blinks a couple of times, then quietly exits. My gut clenches, hating that I might have hurt her, but wishing she had something other than me to keep her busy during the day. What will she do when I go back to school? Dad won’t let her work, I know that much for sure. The one time after my transplant that she suggested she was thinking about getting recertified as a paralegal, or how she might want to go back to school and become a lawyer, he totally lost it, throwing a chair across the room. A few inches to the left and he would have clocked her with it, which I’m pretty sure was exactly what he was trying to do. Not that she’d ever admit that about him. She’d make some excuse about what a tough childhood he had . . . how his father used to beat him and how he never really worked through his anger about that. “That’s bull,” I told her once. “Why don’t you just leave him?”

“Because I can’t,” she said quietly, staring at me in a way that made me think that there was a damn good reason she hadn’t left, and the only one I could come up with was me.

The message box on the screen blinks at me, and I look down to see that Dirk has asked me another question. “So, how old are you IRL? You’re not really some gross forty-year-old guy wearing underwear in his mom’s basement, eating Cheetos, are you?”

“LOL! No, definitely not,” I answer, then pause before addressing the issue of my age. “How old are you?”

“Twenty-four.”

“That’s cool,” I type. “I’m nineteen.” I land on this age because it’s closer to my own than the twenty-one I’d listed as Sierra’s, and it also gives him a chance to pass on hanging out with me in Zombie Wars since five years younger might be too much for his tastes. “Almost twenty,” I quickly add, and then I wait for him to respond.

“Maybe I can take you out for your birthday,” his message reads, and I smile wider, thinking how desperately I want to live in this world rather than my own.