I sink deeper and deeper into the passenger seat of the truck, seven stitches richer. The passing streetlights flash through the windows, lighting Dad up intermittently. His face is tight and I can't tell if he feels bad for me or is still hung up on the fact that I got detention in the first place.

The truck is too quiet, but I don't feel like talking either, but I can't just sit here not saying anything. The silence will kill me. 

"So, Jesse cheated on me," I say.

"I told you I didn't like that guy," Dad says.

Right. Ah, rebellion has served me well. Maybe if he pulled the whole cleaning a shotgun in the living room trope, Jesse and I never would've made it to a stage where he procured himself a side chick. 

"Good call, Dad." I sink lower. At this rate, I'm going to be lying on the floor by the time we get home.

"Why are we always doing this, Delaney?" Dad says. "If it's not one thing, it's another."

Arguably, if it's not one thing, it's always another, but I don't say that. That's attitude and, for once, I'm smart enough not to give it. 

"I don't know." I shrug. "I didn't mean to drop the stupid jar."

I look back into the side mirror at the glowing street lights behind us. Not me, though. If it wasn't so unnerving, it would be annoying. I probably look like hell in a handbasket and I can't even check to confirm.

"You did mean to pour milk on Jesse, though."

I hate how Dad leaves no room for arguing. I did not never sounds very persuasive. Been there, done that.

"Yeah, and I think the world at large punished me pretty good for that one."

"We're going to talk about this when your mother's off work," Dad says. Clearly, he doesn't agree with me on the whole already punished sentiment. More to look forward to. More to cement this day as the worst in history. 

As soon as the truck pulls into the driveway, I jump out of the truck before this not-lecture can go any further. Yeah, I fucked up. I always fuck up. Thanks for noticing.

I let myself in before Dad can gather up his work stuff and get into the house. My steps thunder too loud up the stairs, putting on a show.

Anger is flashy. It dangerous and makes people not want to get too close. It makes them not see that I don't need extra help to feel like a failure, and maybe, it would be nice to have the reminder every once in awhile that there is more to me than that. 

I storm into my room and throw myself onto my bed like a Disney princess. Everything is exhausting. Thinking is exhausting and I'm starving and hangry and loopy off the little bit of pain meds the doctors gave me to take the edge off the stitches in my leg.

I scream a muted scream into my pillows. My hand gropes for my phone, tossed somewhere onto the bedspread in my vicinity. I lift my face from my shams long enough to send a text message: need wendy's and expertise pronto

*****

Fifteen minutes later, Milo Choi taps at my open window before sliding in. It's a testament to his athletic ability that he can climb a tree and hold tightly to a bag of Wendy's simultaneously.

As Milo slides in, so does the gross, unexpected guilt that I haven't exactly been a good friend or neighbor for the past couple months, sitting with Jesse and co. Yet, here Milo is, presenting the fries and Frosty I desperately need, no apology necessary.

His face is made for big expressions. His smiles are enormous, making his eyes squint into happy emoji-style arches. His eyebrows make everyone else's surprise look apathetic by comparison.  A huge relief washes over me at seeing Milo's face. It's so refreshing after hanging around with aggressively disinterested popular kids. I've been missing out on this. Milo's face and eating junk food and listening to new K-pop. 

"Are those stitches?" Milo balks at what are very obviously my stitches. "Did Jesse try to fight you after that lunch thing?" His surprise is over the top, his mouth forming a comically wide 'O'.

"Alas, that would be a way better story," I say. "I broke a glass jar during detention and then fell into it."

We sprawl across my bed, dipping french fries in our Frostys like it's the good ol', pre-Jesse days when I didn't ditch our regularly scheduled homework nights to go make out on a stupid suede couch.

"Wow."

"Can I ask you a weird question?" I ask.

Milo tilts his head, which is Milo for there's something I want to say, but I shouldn't. His Korean family moved in next door in the middle of fifth grade. Milo should definitely not have learned so much of his English from me, but I also learned the language of him.

"It's nothing to do with Jesse," I promise. If we can never talk about him again, I will be happier for it.

Unfolding myself from my cross-legged sitting position, I cross the room to the mirror over the dresser.

"Come tell me I'm hallucinating, please," I say.

The glass reflects my room back to me, the grrl power '90s band posters and my Venus flytrap hanging out on top of my bookshelf. It even reflects Milo rolling off the bed to come investigate.

"What are you seeing? Strawberry fields forever or bad omens?" Milo asks, half-seriously. His eyes widen in the mirror and my stomach does a barrel roll.

"Who are you and what have you done with Delaney," he says.

"I am me!" I insist, "I'm like Peter Pan, except instead of my shadow running off, it's my reflection that FO'd."

Milo looks a lot like he's about to bolt for the window, taking a running leap and hoping for the best.

"Prove it?" Milo says tentatively, a question in his voice. He's somewhere between superstitious and rational. Reflections can't just disappear, but here we are!

"You got that scar on your left knee from when I dared you to jump McClean Creek on your bike," I say. "Your mom wouldn't let you hang out with me for the rest of the month."

I have always been a bad influence, I guess. Mrs. Choi wasn't exactly wrong to ban me from their household.

Milo relaxes. At least, he doesn't look like he's about to swan dive away from me. "Where's your computer?"

I gather it up from my desk and take out back to the bed where we spread back out, Milo scrawling through the internet while spooning melty ice cream into his mouth.

"When did you first notice?" Milo asks.

"At the hospital," I answer. Wait, no. Not really. That was the first vanishing reflection, but not the first weird one. "In the science lab, I swear my reflection smiled at me."

Milo tip-taps away on the keyboard, a Googling mastermind. "The science lab?"

"That's where they sent me for detention. Cleaning out Ms. Isaakov's old room."

I lie flat on my back, staring up at the ceiling. I feel pretty much the same, painkiller high aside.

"What am I turning into?" I ask vaguely. It's for the universe at large, not necessarily Milo.

"The whole vampire mirror thing isn't really relevant anymore. It was a bigger deal when mirrors were backed with silver," Milo says, squinting at the screen.

I want to shoot him a snarky comeback, but that's actually kind of comforting. Both for me, and for the vampires that might be out there. Good for them.

"What else," I press, and even Milo seems a little disoriented by the lack of snark.

"Uh, there was this Korean movie about a mall employee that got trapped in a mirror world and killed people using their reflections," Milo offers.

If it weren't for the dire circumstances and too-close-to-home subject matter, I'd suggest we illegally download that gloriously trashy-sounding movie, god awful subtitles and all, and watch it right now. It sounds like a great distraction. It sounds like exactly the kind of late night Jesse would hate and right now I love the idea of doing anything Jesse would hate.

Milo would totally go for it, which is why it takes all my willpower to stay on track and not willfully ignore the problems at hand. What if my vanishing reflection is just the beginning? What if I have set off a chain reaction of world-ending badness?

"Bookmark that for later," I say, chewing my thumbnail while I read over his shoulder.

He moves along to other tabs, other web pages the keywords 'my reflection is gone please send help' have brought forth. I mean, Milo did not literally search 'my reflection is gone please send help', but he might as well have, for the pitiful number of results we've turned up.

I creep over his shoulder until he shrugs nervously from me breathing right down his neck.

There's something about summoning. Something about chanting into a mirror.

"Click that," I instruct, jabbing a finger at the screen.

A site with terrible web design pops up. It seriously looks like somebody coded it a decade ago. A sparkly animated glitter fire smolders under the article. The text is white on black. For real.

"Woah," Milo says, scrolling through.

A diagram illustrates five candles arranged in a circle, a mirror in the center. The whole thing looks very ceremonial. Everything is conveniently labeled. It's eerily mundane for an arcane instructional. So matter-of-fact.

"'Once the candles are lit, the summoner may chant their invitation of choice to open up a portal. Some rituals may require special materials or skills to be completed properly," Milo reads off the page.

My skin goes cold and clammy, remembering the chill from the science lab. It says candles, but would any source of flame do the trick? Does the mirror need to be in the center of the circle?

"What other materials?" I ask flatly. Animal sacrifices?

Milo navigates the page, leading to variations on the ritual.

"Chicken blood, goat blood, human blood, newt eyes, dog toes, various herbs, flowers..." Milo goes on, "graveyard dirt, animal bones..."

My stomach twists into knots. The rumors about voodoo and Ms. Isaakov don't seem so impossible anymore.

"Do you believe that Ms. Isaakov had vials of blood locked up?" I ask.

Milo shrugs. "You think she was doing spells in the science lab?"

He can't possibly understand. He wasn't there in the dark, standing in a circle of bunsen burners looking at his own reflection smirking back at him.

"The energy in there was weird, dude," I say, waving my hands like that'll somehow translate the weirdness of the buzzing lights and washing jars of eyeballs. "What if she was planning something big and she got caught before she could finish?"

Milo considers this, digging spilled french fries out of the bottom of the Wendy's bag. I take one, too. They've already gone cold and our frostys, sitting on my side tables, are starting to melt.

"You think she would start something she couldn't complete?" Milo asks.

"I don't know. I guess maybe she didn't know about the extra ingredients or whatever? Like, she tried but it didn't work?" I offer. How am I supposed to know how this works? Does this stupid glittery website have a troubleshooting page? Is there a portal-casting support chat open 24/7 somewhere?

Milo's hands reach into his hair, standing it all up into short black spikes. "You know that movie we watched a couple months ago? Right before..."

I wince. That 'right before' finishes with something a lot like 'you started dating that asshat douche canoe'. "Right, right. Dumb teenagers, ouija board, demon entity." I wave a cold fry to urge him on. I swear, if he even suggests that we have a demon entity on our hands. A chill runs up my spine just imagining some deep bass voice coming out of Milo's innocent baby face, a demon possessing him to speak to me and punish me for whatever sins I've committed.

Which, honestly, take your pick.

"The demon could attack them because they didn't close the session properly, remember?" Milo says, "because the jock freaked out and ran out of the room."

"Yeah..." I say. I really hope he has a point that isn't that I ruined everything by going to the hospital instead of speaking in tongues in the middle of the snake-slicked linoleum floor.

"Maybe if you don't finish a spell properly, it kind of lingers. Like the ouija session never really ended," Milo offers.

I squeeze my eyes shut, something becoming incredibly obvious. "The blood. Ms. Isaakov got caught with the blood."

I can imagine Ms. Isaakov in a white lab coat instead of a black velour cape, holding her arms up high and shouting her incantations. After a long day of listening to Jesse's fat mouth yapping in the back row and Lena not paying attention while making heart eyes instead of paying attention and every other idiot in the school being especially idiotic in her classroom all day long... maybe high school makes all of us want to do black magic a little. Ms. Isaakov just went for it.

"Ms. Isaakov was trying to collect blood for some ritual... then I just waltzed in and bled all over the floor."

Milo and I sit silently, the glitter fire silently crackling on the computer screen.

"Holy Toledo," Milo says.

"Holy fucking Toledo is right," I agree, "I need to get back into that room."

a/n  i had to take a break from this chapter to drive to wendy's to get a frosty and fries because i gave myself a craving... do you have weird but delicious food rituals?