Thirty.

I had been running for hours. Had there always this many stairs? The impending weight nipped at my feet, dragging me, pulling me. I kicked it away and climbed forward on my hands and knees. Then I finally reached the landing.

Sweat dripped down my chin. I gasped for air. But I couldn’t stay here. I had to keep moving. I stumbled down the hallway as fast as I could go, as each muscle in my body caught fire. My constant struggle against gravity overwhelmed me and I slammed down onto the tile. But I had to get up again, I had to…

Mirrors filled the walls, edge to edge, on both sides. Thousands. Endless. No, there had to be an end. There had to be…

My heartbeat echoed in my ears. Tears mixed together with the sweat on my cheeks. Everything pulsed. Everything hurt.

I couldn’t look at my feet or they would stop moving. I couldn’t look at the ceiling or all the mirrors would put me back at the beginning of the hall. I’d have to start all over again. No, I had to look straight ahead, at the darkness at the end of the infinite hallway. A darkness that never grew and never shrank. A constant, lonely, unending darkness. That was salvation.

Face forward. Move.

Something flickered in my peripheral vision. I shook my head. It was nothing. It was nothing…

A light danced on the other side. The aching panic rose up in me, filling my stomach, cutting up my throat.

Almost there. Almost there. Words I’d said for hours…

My knees buckled and my forehead hit the hard tile. Everything started to spin. Blood pooled in the front of my head. But if I stopped now…

I fumbled to my feet, disoriented, and ran straight into the wall. The wall? No—!

I saw her in the mirror. Me. And then we switched places. She stood in the hall of mirrors and I was in the mirror itself.

I pounded my fists against the glass. Break! Fucking break!

The girl on the other side, the new me, smiled in at my prison. That same sick, condescending smile. I smashed my fists against the mirror. I swung at it with open palms. I dragged my nails across its surface. Nothing even made a sound.

“Stay put.”

Mom held me back. Tears poured down my cheeks like an early April rainfall. I didn’t understand. I didn’t know why he was leaving me. I struggled so hard to break out of my mother’s arms. I thrashed and kicked. I fell to the cement sidewalk. I fought to get up again. But I couldn’t get away from her. Until finally, he leaned down. His breath against my eyes was crisp and harsh, but no more than his words. Two words.

“Jamie?”

I snapped awake. I was breathing so heavily, but I wasn’t getting any air. My face was cloaked in a thin sheen of sweat and my hair stuck to my skin. Madison’s arm wrapped around me and she pushed her face into my neck.

“Bad dream?” she asked. Exhaustion and sound sleep permeated her questions.

I nodded my head, because my throat was too hot and sore to make words. Everything spun in the worst way, but I just knew throwing up would tear me apart. I’d dissolve from the inside.

“Mm. Nothing to be scared of,” she said into my ear. And before drifting off to sleep again, she told me: “I’m not going anywhere.”

I couldn’t remember if that was a night Madison Bell had been dressed little for bedtime or if that was a night Madison Bell hadn’t been dressed at all. Both were likely and both were her. But after I’d fallen back asleep, when my dream picked up where it had left off, when I had to return to my sentence alone in that mirror, Madison Bell was wearing a plain white dress.

I’d been there for years, crying against the glass. Silently screaming. Pounding and hurting and freezing. In the mirror, everything was so cold. Everywhere, there was no sound.

But when Madison came, she brought the sound with her. She brought warmth back to my skin. But she was not a flame licking the underside of a marshmallow. She didn’t burn or bubble. She thawed.

“Why are you crying?” she asked me.

“He left me,” I told her, in a voice I very quickly realized was not that of the Jamie Lawson that Madison knew. It was that of the young girl abandoned by her father. “He left for another mom, another me… a better me. And now I’m all alone.”

“But I’m here, aren’t I?” Madison asked, for she wasn’t on the other side of the mirror. She was on this side of it. With me. “Why are you here?”

I looked up at her with watering eyes and blubbering lips. “I gotta stay here,” I told her. “I gotta wait ‘cause if I go wander out there in the dark I might not find my way back.”

“Well,” Madison began, with a smile on her lips. A familiar, warm, radiant smile and beautiful, sparkling, swirling eyes. “Do you know what I think you should do?”

“Stay put?” I guessed.

She shook her head and took my hand. She felt like I always wanted to feel. She felt like the rest of my life, as much as anybody ever had.

“Come with me,” Madison Bell told me.

And I did.

[End]