The Glare

by Margot Harrison

Genres: YA Dystopian; YA Mysteries & Thrillers

Synopsis

After ten years of living on an isolated, tech-free ranch with her mother, sixteen-year-old Hedda is going back to the world of the Glare—her word for cell phones, computers, and tablets. Hedda was taught to be afraid of technology, afraid that it would get inside her mind and hurt her. But now she’s going to stay with her dad in California, where she was born, and she’s finally ready to be normal. She’s not going to go “off-kilter,” like her mom says she did when she was just a little kid.

Once she arrives, Hedda finally feels like she’s in control. She reunites with old friends and connects with her stepmom and half-brother. Never mind the terrifying nightmares and visions that start trickling back—they’re not real.

Then Hedda rediscovers the Glare—the real Glare, a first-person shooter game from the dark web that scared her when she was younger. They say if you die thirteen times on level thirteen, you die in real life. But as Hedda starts playing the so-called “death game”—and the game begins spreading among her friends—she realizes the truth behind her nightmares is even more twisted than she could have imagined. And in order to stop the Glare, she’ll have to first confront the darkness within herself.

Release date: July 14, 2020

Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

Print pages: 368

Sample

The sun is just up in the desert, the mesa red against the violet sky, as I watch my mother use the Glare. Mom huddles between the coop and the supply shed with her right hand raised to her ear, her shoulders hunched like she’s holding a live grenade. She doesn’t know I’m awake and spying on her from the window, but she hides the Glare-box with her body, just in case.

I’m not fooled. I’ve seen her break her own rules before.

The first time it happened, I was fourteen. It was a morning like this—barely dawn, still cool. When I saw those tense shoulders and the flash of metal in Mom’s hand, tears of rage pressed hard and hot against my eyes. For a second I was so angry I wanted to scream, I can see you! It’s going to get inside you, too!

A few days later, while Mom was out helping a goat deliver a kid, I went through the purse she only uses on our trips to town. Under a false bottom I found a smooth clamshell of metal. I pried it open just long enough to glimpse the flicker of Glare inside, then clapped it shut. Later, I wasn’t sure if I’d felt a humming vibration or just imagined it.

In those days, I still half believed the energy in that metal chunk could get inside me and make me hurt myself. It had happened to the girl in the story I grew up hearing: a girl who had so many screens, too many screens. The screens were full of Glare, and the Glare wormed its way inside the girl’s head and possessed her. When she realized what was happening, she put drain cleaner in her eyes so she wouldn’t have to see the screens anymore. But it was too late. As the EMTs carried the girl away on a stretcher, with the red lights flashing and her mom tight-faced and her little brother sobbing, the girl screamed at the top of her lungs, “I can still see it! I can still see!”

The facts of this story are true. It happened to my babysitter when I was six years old in San Rafael, California; Mom wasn’t the first one to tell it to me. But I know now nothing’s so simple, and it’s how we interpret those facts that matters.

Now I give Mom’s Glare-box its proper name—cell phone. I know she’s probably just talking to Dad, telling him stuff about my trip she doesn’t want me to hear. That’s why she didn’t use the phone in the kitchen with its sticky black cord.

And the tears that blind me today are tears of tenderness, because tomorrow I’m going back to the world of Glare, the world where I was born, and I’m not afraid.

Mom doesn’t let me clear the dinner dishes. She pours us both more watery iced tea and sits down opposite me in the sweltering desert evening, under the motionless ceiling fan that needs a new motor. “Hedda,” she says, “I know you’re going to be testing the boundaries at your dad’s.”

Think fast. Is she threatening to cancel my trip? My hands start shaking under the table. Flies tap the window where the scorching sun swells it amber, their drone drilling its way into my brain.

She can’t keep me here. Not when I’m so close to getting away.

I’ve been carefully monitoring Mom’s moods ever since I started plotting my escape from this ranch—ever since the call came from Australia. Mom’s childhood best friend in Melbourne had been diagnosed with stage IV breast cancer. She has no family, and Mom started talking about flying out there for a few months to take care of her.

It took me nearly two weeks to persuade her to let me stay with Dad in California. First Mom wanted me to come with her. Then she suggested sending me to New Genesis, a place run by her friends in Nevada where people wear white robes, obey rules set by a Council of Elders, and don’t use electricity or running water, so she could be sure I wouldn’t look at Glare-screens. I let her know that was an over-my-dead-body scenario.

Because yes, okay, maybe I am testing the boundaries. My plan is to get Dad to let me attend school in San Rafael, then use that as leverage to convince Mom I should go to school here. And if she still says no… well, that’s when I’ll tell Dad I want to live with him. Or threaten to run away.

There’s only so long you can live twenty miles from everyone and everything before you get left behind.

“If you know exactly what I’m planning to do on this trip,” I tell Mom, keeping my voice level, “then you must also know you can trust me not to take it too far. I’m not a little kid anymore.”

“I hope I can trust you.”

The stress she puts on “hope” makes me tense. “What makes you think you can’t?”

Trust me not to stare, she means. Trust me not to get addicted like those girls I see at Walmart who are so busy on their Glare-boxes that they barely raise their eyes long enough to check out. When I was little, every time we went to town, Mom used her body to shield me from anyone who was smoking or using the Glare. Nowadays she seems to realize a single accidental inhale won’t turn me into a two-pack-a-day addict, but she hasn’t gotten any less paranoid about screens.

“Let’s not get into the blame game again, Hedda,” Mom says. And then she reaches under the table and brings out her secret cell phone and plunks it on the worn oilcloth between us.

I stare at the phone, blood pounding in my temples. Should I look surprised? Betrayed? Is she trying to trick me into admitting I touched it?

“I know,” I say because it’s too late to pretend I’m the girl she wants me to be, the girl who wouldn’t have gone looking for that phone.

“I know you know.” She looks straight at me, her eyes enormous and indigo in a strong light, just like mine. “And you’ve probably guessed I have it for emergencies, in case we break down on the way to Phoenix to see your dad.”

For the past decade, I’ve seen Dad exactly once a year when he buys me a fancy dinner in Phoenix on my birthday. He has a cell phone, too, of course—probably a dozen of them—but he’s not allowed to use it in front of me, not even to show me a picture of my half brother, whom I’ve never met.

“So we both know you don’t follow your own rules,” I say. “What’s your point?”

Mom opens the phone. I wince—can’t help it—but the screen is dinkier and duller than I remember. It’s nothing compared to the brand-new phone that belongs to Shannon, a girl I see sometimes at the county fair. Hers is perfectly smooth and flat, with a screen that lights up in colors that remind me of hard candy or the costume jewelry at the dollar store.

“It’s just an old flip phone. Touch it if you want.” Mom pushes the phone across the oilcloth to me.

I shake my head automatically. I may not be scared of her “flip phone,” but I’m not going to get myself in trouble now. “No thanks. I can do without the Glare just fine.”

Mom keeps staring at me. We look alike—wiry bodies, unruly black hair, intense eyes—and we have matching tempers, too. Today she’s holding hers back, and not just because we’re separating tomorrow for the first time in ten years. She wants something from me.

“We both know you’ve had your fill of looking at screens,” she says. “I’ve seen you with that girl at the fair, the one in the ridiculously short shorts, staring straight at her phone.”

Blood rushes to my face, and my vision blurs. “I was curious.”

I wanted our last day together to be special, a throwback to the days when I was little and we’d work all day and then Mom would brush my hair and tell me stories about a crew of happy cactus mice who lived deep in the desert on insects and rainwater. But here we are having the old fight again.

“The important thing is, I’m fine. Nothing happened.” I muster my resolution like a clenched fist. “The Glare doesn’t actually make people put drain cleaner in their eyes. I mean, you know that, right?” Please tell me you know that.

Mom keeps looking straight at me. “When I worked at your dad’s company, I was exposed to the Glare at least seventeen hours a day. I have a very good idea of how it affects people.”

“I know that.” When we lived in California, Mom designed games that people play in the Glare. The goal is to get the players addicted; the goal of everything in the Glare is to addict you, to unstick you from reality, and you never know you’re unstuck until it’s too late.

But getting addicted or unstuck isn’t the same as getting possessed. The babysitter’s story still makes me sad, but it no longer sends shivers down my spine.

Mom goes on. “And you haven’t forgotten the things that happened to you, have you?”

“The Glare knocked me off-kilter. I know. But I barely even remember that stuff, Mom. I just know what you’ve told me.”

She’s told the stories so many times they’re emblazoned on my brain: How I screamed when she took my Glare-screens away. How I climbed out my window and sat on the roof. How I switched on the gas burners so the whole house could’ve burned down. Bad, scary, unmanageable Hedda, who had to be taken away for her own good.

But I haven’t been that little girl for so long.

I rise and brace myself on the edge of the table, frustration simmering in my gut. “Whatever I did when I was six, I’m not unstuck from reality now, as you can see. And I don’t ever plan to be.”

This argument never ends well, but I keep going, my voice rising: “You need to get it through your head that you can’t control me forever, and I don’t give a flying… freak about the Glare. I don’t want the Glare. I don’t need the Glare. All I want is not to spend the entire rest of my life in the middle of nowhere taking care of goats.”

Mom doesn’t snap back. I can see to the blue bottom of her eyes.

“Hedda,” she says, “you’re sixteen now. If I thought I could control you, here or in California, I’d be stupid. So that’s why I’m begging you—don’t tempt fate. You’ve seen the Glare for yourself—now let it alone. Or if you have to use it occasionally, use it carefully, the way I do. Control yourself.”

She closes her secret phone with a neat clap. I turn around, blinded by tears, and stumble outside into the August heat to do my chores for the last damn time.

Just an hour ago, the knowledge that I’m leaving was a pool of brightness inside me. Now I want to kick everything—the red dirt, the feed bucket, the dusty stalls, a stray hen.

Instead, I take a deep breath and start the routine that keeps me grounded, day after day. When I’m done feeding the goats, I pet them, feeling sorry for what I said about them earlier. They butt against my hand longer than usual, staring at me through their alien horizontal pupils. The chickens ignore me, too busy having peck fights and pulling up grubs.

The scrubby red desert stretches like a basking lizard to where Wedding Cake Mesa slices the horizon. As far as it’s concerned, I’ll be back here tomorrow to throw feed for these hens, and the day after and the day after that, till the sun has turned my face to leather. How could someone like me ever come unstuck?

I could’ve said more. I could’ve challenged Mom to prove the Glare had anything to do with my bad behavior—or with the babysitter hurting herself, for that matter. I could’ve picked apart the logic that made Mom bring me here to live on the ranch she inherited from her uncle, twenty miles from the nearest town, where she can homeschool me and keep me safe from screens.

I could have pointed out that normal people don’t even call it “the Glare.” That was my word originally, something I cried out in waking nightmares when we first came here. Whenever Mom left me alone in the house for more than a few minutes, she says, I’d run to her saying the Glare was after me—sneaking through the cracks, creeping along the floor, looming on my bedroom wall like an intruder. It had got the babysitter, and now it would get me.

We both had plenty to be scared of back then—the desert silence, the snakes. But little by little, as we fixed up this run-down place, it started to feel like home. I’d read to Mom from instruction manuals, sounding out the big words, while she fumbled underneath the water heater or the solar generator, muttering (usually) sanitized curse words.

The first time we helped a nanny goat birth her kids, we broke out the sparklers like it was New Year’s Eve. We learned to milk, to make cheese, to slaughter and pluck chickens, to plant the garden, to fix the roof. We turned a wreck into a ranch with tidy outbuildings and beds of chard and kale and rioting tomato plants.

It’s still so quiet, though. Sometimes, like now, I close my eyes and stretch my inner sensors out and out in every direction like insect antennae, looking for someone or something to connect to. All they ever report is echoing emptiness.

I open my eyes to the dazzling horizon, then examine my calloused fingertips and the sludgy white scars on my inner arm. I got those when I was six, climbing a cottonwood tree and falling in barbed wire.

Everything here is rough, dangerous—no playgrounds carefully designed to be kid-friendly. I’m not complaining. But after all the hard work we’ve done together, all the things we’ve both given up, all the years without friends or a father, she has the gall to tell me to control myself.

Well, I can—but not because she says to. From now on, I make the rules for me.

After chores, I finish packing and take a long look at the stuff I can’t take with me: the rock collection, the snake skins, most of the books, the stuffed animals, and the long scrolls of paper that unfurl across the robin’s-egg-blue walls of my room.

Soon after we got here, Mom found twenty paper rolls in the crawl space under the porch—from an old accounting machine, she said. For years afterward, I filled them with cartoonish images of the home I’d left behind: a brown-shingled, gabled house on a tree-lined street. There’s Daddy with his curly black hair and his Glare-box, Mommy with her wide smile, and me in a red shirt with my own Glare-box. There’s the babysitter with her tattoo of a blue flower. I drew her with sparkly eyes, the way she was before she hurt herself.

There are my two best friends and neighbors: Ellis with his freckles and shy smile, and Mireya with her glossy black hair. Ellis was the babysitter’s little brother, and in the pictures, we’re always happy and having fun. At the beach, on the playground, in school, at Mom and Dad’s office. On my ninth birthday, I filled a yard of paper with the party I dreamed of: friends, a sparkly dress, fireworks, a movie. For the movie, I drew blue light exploding from a black rectangle.

Blue light. That’s all I really remember about the Glare in my life before.

Blue light bathed me as I sat beside Ellis at Mom’s desk, pressing keys. Blue light bathed the babysitter as she stared at flitting shapes on a screen. “Don’t look, this isn’t for kids!” she snapped, but I kept looking because I wasn’t a baby.

Then the blue light was gone, disappearing somewhere in the red dust, and the desert drew a clean line across my life: before and after. And here I am, still reaching out toward something I lost.

I’m having the dream again.

A girl walks through a vibrant green forest flecked with autumn reds—lush and moist, nothing like the desert. Dead leaves carpet the ground. Blue sky stretches above a square black tower.

The girl is me. Someone whistles, and she turns to find a boy with freckled cheeks—my friend Ellis. “They’re coming,” he says.

Fear rockets down the girl’s spine; she hears them slithering through the leaves. “Let’s go!”

The boy runs, and she runs after him as the wind rises. A sickly blue light bleeds through the trees. Together they wriggle inside the tower, where a stink of old burning sears their nostrils. The tower is a smokestack rising to a ring of bright sky, and that brightness is the Glare. A good Glare, a light that will never hurt them.

But now clouds film over the sky, forming a shape like a grinning skull. The girl shivers.

The boy releases her hand. “You have to leave, Hedda. You’re already dead—did you forget?”

How can he say that? How can he abandon her? “I’m not!” she yells.

A wind swirls up from nowhere and drags the girl outside, away from the boy. She screams, but his back is turned.

The storm rips leaves from trees as the girl runs helter-skelter, looking for a tree with a safety rune on the trunk. Stray twigs sting her cheeks. A massive branch falls in her path, and she staggers backward. A high keening splits the air. They’re here.

All the trees are one tree, the leaves thrashing above and the deadfall crackling ominously below. Something stirs under those leaves, slithering toward the girl, and she tries to run, but her legs won’t work. Something perches on a branch above her, crouched to spring, and she screams and screams—

And I cry out and wake to my room, starting to lighten with the new day.

My heart’s racing, my body drenched in sweat. I throw off the blanket and breathe deeply until everything slows down to normal. The nightmare is as familiar to me as the lines on my palm. Ellis always deserts me in it, though in real life I was the one who left him behind.

Dawn creeps over the creek and the cottonwoods, the sky violet again from mesa to flat horizon, and I need Mom.

When I think of how we fought yesterday, a ragged void opens inside me. The two or three months we plan to be apart might as well be forever.

I tiptoe down the hall and ease the door of her room open. She doesn’t stir, a dark lump under the covers, her jaw swollen with the mouthguard that keeps her from grinding her teeth all night.

Part of me wants to creep into bed with her like I did when I was six and had the black tower nightmare, and part of me is pretty sure she’d scream bloody murder. She solves the dilemma by opening her eyes. At first they widen with panic, but then she wakes for real, her face becoming the calm, patient one she always had when she bandaged my scrapes and reassured me there were no monsters under the bed.

As she yanks the mouthguard out, I say, “I’m sorry.”

She holds out her arms, and I sink onto the bed and into the hug. Her breath is soft and even, raising fine hairs on the back of my neck as she says, “It’s a big change for us both.”

And I can handle it, something whispers deep inside me, still rebellious, but I stay still and let the warm cliff of her body protect me one last time, knowing that tonight I won’t sleep in the bed I woke in.

I’m going home. And when—if—I come back here, I won’t be the same.

The airport has acres of stainless steel and mirrors and clanking conveyor belts. Boxes of bluish Glare flicker everywhere—bolted to posts, on people’s laps, in people’s hands, on people’s wrists. Even children have them.

Is California like this? My experiences at Walmart, the feed store, and the county fair haven’t prepared me for this level of Glare.

It’s not the Glare that really fascinates me, though; it’s the girls my age. I’ve read every book in the town library about them: Carrie and The Runaway’s Diary and Go Ask Alice and newer books when I could find them. I know never to go anywhere with a stranger you meet at a bus station, never to assume a cute guy is also nice, and never to trust popular girls. I even know what texting and friending are, in a vague way, and how to hold a phone.

But these girls—they’re real. They wear ponytails and pin-striped shorts and frilly blouses and leggings and headwraps. They stretch out their long, tanned legs and yawn as if everything bores them. They tap on their phones like it’s the most natural thing in the world.

I know how to avert my eyes from the Glare so Mom won’t think it’s sucking me in. But how can I be friends with girls like this without using the Glare?

Mom must be noticing my furtive eyes, because she says, “You’re okay, Hedda. You know you’re okay.”

“I know.” I try to keep the sarcasm out of my voice. She’s already scrutinizing me for signs of losing control.

It hurt saying goodbye to the goats and the chickens. It hurt driving away, smelling the familiar blend of moist clay and gritty sand and animal dung. And it hurts as we stand at the gate and she folds me in her arms.

“Maybe you’ll find Raggedy Ann,” she says as we come apart.

She’s told me the story a hundred times: When we were halfway to Arizona, I wailed because I’d forgotten to pack my favorite doll. Dad promised to bring her to our first birthday dinner, then claimed he couldn’t find her.

“Maybe.” I think of those girls again, how they’d roll their eyes and maybe call me a freak. I’m not a child. Stop wishing I were.

“Your dad understands everything. He promised he won’t give you culture shock.”

“Okay.”

Mom’s crying, her eyes too bright in her wind-burnt face, the ranch’s scent clinging to her fleece. As her arms wrap tight around me, I feel cold, like she’s already gone, and I whisper, “I love you.”

It’s harder to ignore the Glare on the plane, where it’s right in my face. The back of each seat has a tiny screen embedded in it, and the instant the lights blink on, so do the screens. Their sharp-edged jewel brightness draws me in: winking, twitching, flashing. Like they’re trying to send me signals.

Did Mom know about this? Presum. . .