Glitch

the alarm
    going off in my head. Nothing made sense anymore. The
    feeling I had when I entered our house unit, the safety and
    comfortable familiarity, was gone.
    I lifted a hand to the wall separating my room from Mar-
    kan’s. I was sure there could be so much more to him than a
    body staring blankly at a wall, but I wasn’t sure if I’d survive
    long enough to see it.
    I swiped at my stinging eyes, then went to exercise. For as
    long as I could, I had to at least pretend that nothing was
    wrong. It felt good to run, to feel the pounding rhythm of my
    feet hitting the track. It made me feel alive and, at the same
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    G L I TC H
    time, calm inside. For the fi rst time since I’d glitched this
    afternoon, I was able to let go, just for a moment, and forget
    about what ever had happened when I’d arrived at Room
    A117 three weeks ago.
    I woke up in the middle of the night to the beeping of my
    heart monitor. I must have still been glitching in my sleep. I
    scrambled out of my blanket. It took me several horrifying
    moments to realize I was in my room, not drowning in a
    raging tide of water. I sat up and put my back against the
    cool wall, gulping in breath after breath. I wiped the sweat
    off my forehead with my forearm. After another couple of
    minutes, my heart calmed down and I closed my eyes, try-
    ing not to relive the terror of fl ailing uselessly in water.
    Markan had been there too, drowning with me, begging
    for my help, but I couldn’t do anything. I just watched help-
    lessly, trying to keep myself above water while he sank under-
    neath. He never came back to the surface, and it was my
    fault. Horror and guilt were thick in my throat. I swallowed
    hard and went to the bathroom to get a glass of water.
    Dreams. Nightmares. Darkness. I’d forgotten about those
    parts of glitching. I didn’t miss them. The Link directed
    REM patterns and sleep cycles and no one ever experienced
    disrupted sleep.
    I rubbed my face in both of my hands once I was back in
    my room. Ugh, how had I done this before? How had I kept
    all this to myself and managed to stay sane? Even in my sleep
    I wasn’t safe. Then I frowned, thinking about the dream—
    there’d been so much water rushing by, more than I’d ever
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    Heather Anastasiu
    seen in real life. I closed my eyes and tried to envision the
    scene again but the memory of it was fading.
    I climbed back in bed and tried to get back to sleep, but it
    was impossible. I got out of bed quickly and pulled out a
    clean paper bag from our weekly Materials Allotment and
    the marker I stowed under the foot of the mattress. The
    drawings could be dangerous, I saw that now. I’d fi nd a way
    to destroy it or get rid of it after, but I still had to get the im-
    age out of my head and onto paper. I lay down with my head
    near the tiny night auxiliary light cell in the wall so I could
    see the paper. I concentrated hard, determined to learn
    something— anything.
    I sketched out the mass of fl owing water. A couple of
    times, I was remembering it so clearly, I felt bowled over by
    the sensation of being soaked through, shivering in terror.
    But then I tried to pull back from the scenario, to see from
    the outside rather than from within. I needed to simply rec-
    ord every detail about the scene. I kept going, trying not to
    think, only to draw in the dim light. When I fi nally stopped,
    I’d covered one entire side of the crumpled bag. I put the
    marker away and laid it down to try to fi gure out what the
    images meant. Mostly the page was covered with the roiling
    mass of water, edged only by the circular walls.
    There was a fi gure in the water— it was Markan but at
    the same time, it wasn’t quite Markan.
    I frowned, looking at the face I’d drawn. Markan looked
    older in the picture than he was in real life— his cheekbones
    were sharper, all the baby fat gone. He kept showing up in
    my dreams— sometimes in this new drowning dream, or in
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    G L I TC H
    the old dream of the glitching boy being chased down.
    Always with Markan’s face staring straight at me in abso-
    lute horror. And why did I wake up feeling like it was all
    my fault?
    “Greetings, Zoel,” Maximin said as I sat down at lunch. I
    almost smiled at his predictability. I waited patiently for him
    to request my help with the lesson.
    “Greetings, Maximin.”
    “Would you be amenable to tutoring me after school? I
    have received authorization for you to come to my housing
    unit after school