“Hey.”
Half awake, I feel something tap me on the shoulder.
“Heeey!”
Stop.
And then it shoves me, smashing my face into the pillow. I sit up quickly.
“Must be nice to sleep so soundly.”
I roll over and =see the shadow of a girl standing over my bed.
“Who’s there?”

And she laughs, or shrieks rather.

I rub the sleep from my left eyelid, not willing to close both at the same time. “Please go away…”
“NO!” The girl shakes her head with aggression. A drop of something thick hits me on the cheek.
“What is that?” I slick my palm against my face and smear the liquid.
“Do you really have to ask?”

My eyes have adjusted to the dark and I can see that the girl is leaning in, dangling her long hair just above my face.  She reaches over with her right hand to squeeze the saturated mess. A thick liquid pools on the top of my forehead.

“Oh God,” I slicked my palm across my face. Leaning over to pull the nearby lamp chain I lit the room and glanced down at my damp hand. It was covered in dark red blood. Slowly, I look up to face the visitor.

She grins, and her smile is my own.

“Who we?”

I studied my nineteen year old features staring back at me. She looked innocent, and also crazier than I could remember being at that point in my life. I remembered her outfit; I had worn it almost every day back then. “I miss that sweatshirt,” was all I could think to say.
“I can’t believe you forgot what happened to it!”
“I forgot a lot of stuff that day.”
She took her index and middle finger like a pair of scissors, motioning down the middle of the shirt. “Had to cut you out out out so you could live!”
“So how are you still wearing it?”
She leaned back over me, our faces inches from one another. Using one hand, she reached down over my face and forced my head to the left, hovering her remaining index finger over the scar from the accident, hidden in my hair.  “Because,” she snarled, pressing down hard on the wound “I didn’t (poke) make it (POKE POKE) to the hospital!”
She released her grip on my face, smacking the back of my head one last time before backing away and pointing at me as I sat up straight against the wall.
“AND YOU DID!”
It still hurts to run a brush through my hair near that scar on the wrong day. I sat with my hand over my head, eyes wide staring at the bloody girl.
“I don’t understand,” my voice was weaker than I anticipated.
“Didn’t you feel different in the hospital?” she glared at me. I watched the hair that rested on her shoulders, cascading over the hood of the sweatshirt. It had soaked through in some areas like a dark red bruise. “Lighter, like something was gone?”
“So…I left you behind?”
“LEFT ME?” she screamed. The girl reached up and wrapped her hands in her hair, pulling down hard. Blood squeezed between her knuckles and ran down her wrists. “LEFT ME? YOU KILLED ME!”
“How could I kill you? That’s impossible! You are me!”
“Wrong!” she lowered her fingers from her hair. “You were me, but you got to move on! You saw our car afterwards… You can’t make a mistake like that and not have to give up some part of yourself! Look at the stain, I died in there!”
I stared into her dark eyes for longer than I intended, remembering what it felt like to see the world through them.
She laughed suddenly, “You’re such a bad driver.”
“How is that funny?”
“Its really not.”
We sat in silence for a long time, she dripping blood on the edge of my bed and me sitting stiffly against the wall.
“So…you came back to abuse me then?
“Ha. Not really. I just wanted to see what twenty four looks like, for now.”
“And for later?”
“Well you don’t get to know everything. I’ll be back, I just wanted you to be aware that dead isn’t exactly gone.”
“Of course its not.”
She smiled at me, sad and genuine. The kind I know would have been difficult for me to do at nineteen. I studied her haunted, familiar eyes. There was a cut that slashed vertically over the left one, skipping over the eyeball. In an odd way she was a stranger to me; our last connected memories were the slow motion tilt of the world inside a tiny car, burning hot pain, and the fearful question as to why we were in total blackness with no hint of a light at the end of the tunnel. There wasn’t even purgatory; only nothingness. And that’s apparently where she ended and I began.
“You dyed your hair,” her voice shook me.
“Oh, right… never done that before.”
“Funny that you went with black.” She got up from the bed and walked towards the door.
“Why?”
“Beause,” she grinned, reaching for the handle, “You and I both know all you see in the mirror is red.”
The door slammed hard. I sat against the wall for the longest time staring at the thick red hand print that was left behind on the doorknob. I felt a migraine spreading its way out from the back of my head. Since the accident, all of my headaches have begun with the same slow tapping along the scar tissue line where the cut once was…

Luciana, 24