Dreamless

peevishly. She reluctantly wheeled her ancient rig out of the garage, noticing that it had grown more rust over the past month than was scientifically possible.
    “Have a good day,” her father called after her.
    Helen rolled her eyes, thinking yeah, right , and pedaled off. She wasn’t more than a block away from school when she was nearly run off the road by a speeding driver. She had to veer off the shoulder, bump across the unpaved ground, and splash through the grandmother of all muddy puddles to avoid getting hit.
    Great gouts of oily, turgid water splashed up onto her legs and soaked her from the waist down. Helen hit the brakes, and had to take a moment to let the catastrophe sink in, stunned that so much freezing-cold yuck had spewed all over her.
    She looked back at the puddle. There was a dead animal floating in it. She smelled her clothes, and sure enough, they smelled vaguely of putrefying squirrel.
    “Unbelievable,” Helen mumbled to herself. She wasn’t usually a clumsy person, at least not when she had a full night of dreaming behind her, and she couldn’t believe this had happened.
    She read the time on her phone, and saw that she couldn’t go home and change. If she did, she’d get a detention from Hergie for being late for sure, and she had already promised that she would work for Luis right after school. Helen decided that spending a day smelling like dead squirrel was better than spending the rest of her life knowing she had robbed two impressionable children of their father on Halloween. Besides, she really liked Luis’s kids. They were so tiny , and Juan had the most adorable husky, little-boy voice.
    Sighing at her rotten luck, Helen got ready to pedal to school, only to find that she couldn’t. Her front tire had gone flat. She swung her leg over to get off her bike, and heard a ripping noise.
    Somehow, the hem of her jeans had gotten caught in the chain and she had nearly ripped the whole leg off. Readjusting her stance to stop herself before she could tear her jeans any more, Helen slid on some pebbles underfoot and fell headlong into the muddy, dead-rodent-infested puddle, with her ancient bicycle still attached to her pant leg. The bike collapsed on top of her before she could stand, the frame getting twisted and bent as it tangled with Helen’s strong body.
    “What the hell is going on?” Helen yelled aloud. She heard a tittering laugh and looked across the road to see a tall, thin woman grinning at her.
    Right away, Helen knew there was something not quite right about the woman. She had high, arching cheekbones and wave after wave of long, white-blonde hair that reached the back of her knees. At first Helen thought she was a movie star or something, because with her features and all that hair she should have been beautiful. But the sneer on her lips and the hollow, serpentine look in her eyes made her downright ugly. No matter how beautiful her body was supposed to be, her polluted spirit made her hideous to look at.
    “What are you?” Helen shouted. Goose bumps puckered her skin, more in reaction to the uncanny encounter than to the cold.
    The ghoulish woman shook her head at Helen, waggling it forward left to right, like a cobra blankly zeroing in on a hapless mouse. Then she broke eye contact and skipped off. Helen stared after her in shock, thinking to herself, Who the hell skips?
    Very carefully, in case there also happened to be a bear trap she was about to step in or something, Helen pulled herself up from the nasty-ass puddle and sat down next to her trashed bike. She knew that what she had just seen was no costume, and that her little run-in with Murphy’s Law was not a coincidence. Something strange had just happened, but she had no idea what.
    Picking up her demolished bike and putting it over her shoulder, Helen walked the rest of the way to school. She dumped her ex-bike somewhere in the vicinity of the rack and wandered into homeroom exactly as disgusting and torn up as the puddle had left her.
    There were a bunch of people wearing costumes, and more than one wearing ripped clothes and fake-dirt makeup. Even so, it was obvious that Helen was soaking wet, shivering, and covered in real mud. Looks of shock followed her as she walked across the classroom. Matt and Claire sat up straighter in alarm. She mouthed the words “I’m okay,” and Matt sat back in his seat, less alarmed but still scowling, wondering what had happened.
    “Miss Hamilton? Am I to