The girls giggled as they urged me into the bathroom. My hand slid against the wall, feeling for the light switch, but one of the girls grabbed my wrist and pulled it away from the wall. They shoved me hard into the dark, ceramic room and shut the door, locking it from the other side. It was a cruel game that I had little faith in, which was half the reason they were forcing me to play it.
The game was called Bloody Mary.
I closed my eyes, shutting out the darkness with more darkness, and took a deep breath. Eyes opened wide, trying to adapt and suck in what little light was in the bathroom. My reflection was my shadow, the details lost in the dark. My eyes were black holes, my mouth a fierce, critical line. It was time. “Blood Mary, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary.”
I waited for something to happen, and the silence convinced me that I had been proven right: The game was bullshit. I pounded on the locked door. “Okay, let me out. Nothing happened.”
I looked over my shoulder at the mirror, only my reflection hadn’t moved with me. I stepped away from the door, the girls continuing to giggle on the other side. Eyes on the reflection, it moved of its own volition, mouthing something. Her mouth was a black void when the thin lips parted. I leaned in: perhaps it was whispering. “What are you saying? Are you Mary?”
The whisper came through harsh and strained. “I am mary.”
I swallowed the lump forming in my throat. Maybe I had spoken too soon about being proven right. Did the mirror just speak back? “You are in danger,” the voice rasped, full of vocal fry. It was the vocal tone of japanese ghosts, and I felt a knot in the pit of my stomach.
“In danger of what?” I replied, trying to get the entity to speak more.
“I will come through the mirror and kill you. Turn on the light to save yourself.”
Why was she warning me? Was the ghost just looking like me to be familiar? I had so many questions and little time. Each question subtracted seconds from my expected life span.
I lunged toward the left of the medicine cabinet, right of the door, which usually held the light switch. I frantically fumbled as a hand extended from the mirror, coming into the third dimension. My fingers eventually found the switch and flicked it on, revealing my reflection back to normal. The whisper was gone, as was the ghost. The door opened and I stumbled out, still sweating. The girls laughed and asked if I'd seen Bloody Mary. I thought long and hard about whether to reveal the fact that yes, i had seen her, but decided against it. “No,” I told them. “There was nothing. I was alone.”
“It was bullshit,” they said, frustrated. Surely they’d come up with a new cruel game to torture me with.
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