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JULY 12, 2015

Blog Entry

It’s midnight. The family is out. Noémie’s at a party in the woods. Madame Blavette is on her date with Monsieur Right. I’m alone in the house in the middle of the French countryside, tucked into my lumpy bed that smells of bleach and jam and sterilized milk. A latchkey kid still, just in a different country. Through the slats of the wooden shutters, I can hear cicadas thrum, a thick carpet of sound, unbroken. It’s comforting somehow, though I’m almost too sleepy to work on the blog, sleepy and a bit drunk still, from cider and beer and cheap rosé all swilling together.

My phone beeps: one new message. I see the number and the knots of my spine draw closer together. The sweat on my face and chest grows cold. That number. It’s the one I mentioned a couple of posts ago, the one you guys all said you were worried about (I remember loserboy38 suggested adding it to Contacts under “Stalker,” but that was too creepy, even for me). So anyway, consequently it just comes up as just a series of ones and nines and fours and sevens. Sometimes the number series sends texts, photos like that one I posted up Thursday—the blurry photo of me sunbathing. There was another: my hoodie up, my school bag on my shoulder, and my sneakers kicking up dust on the road back to the schoolhouse. It creeped me out too much to post.

This time, it’s just a single emoji, a winking face. I delete the whole message thread, like always, and at that moment, a notification pops up, a Snapchat from lalicorne, some random person I only half remember adding a week or so ago because I thought it was a friend of Noémie’s. But they haven’t chatted me yet and the profile image is one of those gray mystery man icons so you can’t even tell if it’s a boy or a girl. I open the app and swipe onto the chat thread to see what they’ve sent.

I tap on the pink square and a video loads. The film is dark, hard to see, but I hear a noise like heavy breathing. A muffled scream startles me. I grip the phone harder. A girl’s face appears, too close up to see in detail. The film is choppy and moves so fast it’s hard to take in before the timer in the top right corner counts down. The girl’s breathing hard and there’s something—a plastic bag, maybe—stretched over her face. Three … two … one, and the screen goes black, the video vanishing forever as Snapchat deletes it and, with it, the girl.

For a long time after that I sat on the floor. The curtains were open and outside I could hear the constant cricket machine, see star-shine countryside black with no light pollution to reassure me that I was anything other than alone. Mme B says this place is haunted. I don’t think I believe in that stuff, but sitting there alone in the middle of the night, I knew what she meant, like I could almost hear the laughter of the people who lived here before trapped in the walls, behind the brick, the ghost of a good time.

I started to make up explanations to comfort myself—that it’s Noémie’s doing, a practical joke or some really weird junk mail. After a long while, I reached for the phone, half hoping it was all some weird dream, half wanting to see it again and find out that it’s really just a clever advertising campaign for a new handheld horror movie. But somehow I know it wasn’t a horror flick clip. It was too real for that. When I do pick up the phone, the video’s gone. Snapped into an untimely death in the virtual void, because it’s Snapchat, of course. All messages are instantaneous, ticking down the moments it takes you to read or watch them like a fuse on a bomb and then they’re gone.

She’s gone, as if she was never there, and I’m sitting with my back against the door, typing this on my blogging app. And here’s a straw poll: What do I do, guys? Who do I tell? Anyhow, I need to go now, to check the house, to lock the door. Something instead of sitting on the floor, feeling scared and alone in the middle of nowhere, waiting for them to come home.