Wet Paint Face

The air in the girls' bathroom smelled like a chemical spill in a candy factory. It was a thick, suffocating mix of cheap vanilla body spray. Penny leaned over the sink, her hands gripping the cold, cracked porcelain. The fluorescent light overhead flickered with a rhythmic hum that vibrated in her teeth.

It was Spring, the season of supposed new beginnings, but the room felt like a graveyard for things no longer needed. The trash can was overflowing with discarded paper towels and crushed corsages. The soap dispenser was empty. The mirror was the worst part. It was missing its silver backing in jagged patches, but where the glass was clear, Penny saw her reflection. It wasn't right. Her left eyebrow was a dark, fuzzy comma that had migrated down to her cheekbone. It hung there, sticky and limp. Her skin looked less like flesh and more like a candle left on a dashboard in July. It was sagging, losing its grip on her skull. She touched her forehead and felt a terrifying lack of resistance. Her thumb left a deep, smooth indentation that didn't spring back.

She reached into her small, glittery clutch—the one her mom bought because it looked 'sophisticated.' Inside, she found a heavy, industrial staple gun. She didn't remember putting it there. It felt heavy and honest compared to the flimsy silk of her dress. Penny pulled her eyebrow back up to where it belonged. She held it in place with two shaking fingers. The metal nose of the stapler pressed against her skin. It was ice cold. Click-thunk. The first staple bit into her forehead. There was no blood, just a dull, hollow sound, like a nail hitting dry plywood. She did it again. Click-thunk. The second staple secured the tail of the brow. She stared at herself. The silver metal glinted under the dying light. It looked industrial. It looked desperate. She tried to smile, but the corner of her mouth slid toward her chin like a slow-moving drop of syrup. She grabbed the stapler again, but the door behind her swung open.

Anne walked in, or rather, she glided. Anne was wearing a dress the color of a bruised plum. She was holding a plastic cup that smelled like fermented punch and regret. She stopped, looking at Penny, then at the staple gun, then at the silver bits of metal embedded in Penny's face. Anne didn't scream. She didn't even look surprised. She just took a slow sip of her drink and leaned against the doorframe. "Girl," Anne said, her voice flat and bored. "Your vibe is literally disintegrating."

"I'm just trying to keep it together," Penny said. Her voice sounded muffled, like she was speaking through a thick layer of felt. "For the photos. You know? For the memories."

Anne laughed. It was a jagged, ugly sound. "What memories? We leave in three weeks. This whole place is already a ghost. Look at you. You're already halfway to the airport." Anne reached out and poked Penny's shoulder. Her finger sank an inch into the fabric of the dress and the soft, yielding substance beneath it. "You're losing your signal, Pen. Just let it go."

Penny wanted to argue, but the bathroom floor began to tilt. The hum of the lights grew louder, shifting into a low-frequency growl that made the floorboards rattle. "We should go back out," Penny whispered. She tucked the staple gun back into her clutch. She didn't look in the mirror again. She couldn't.

They stepped out into the hallway. The lockers were gone. In their place were long, empty stretches of drywall that felt damp to the touch. The posters for the 'Senior Sunset' and the 'Spring Fling' were just blank squares of white paper. Everything was being erased. The closer they got to the gym, the louder the music became. It wasn't a song anymore. It was a mechanical grinding, a rhythmic scraping of metal on metal.

When they pushed through the double doors of the gym, the world turned into a blur. The dance floor had transformed. It was no longer a flat expanse of polished wood; it was a massive, spinning vinyl record, miles wide. The students weren't dancing. They were standing still, trapped by the centrifugal force as the floor spun at impossible speeds. They were nothing but streaks of neon—hot pink, electric blue, acid green. They were light trails in a long-exposure photograph.

"Keep up," Anne shouted, though she wasn't moving her lips. She was already being pulled away, her plum-colored dress stretching out behind her like a line of paint.

Penny stepped onto the record. The world jerked. Her feet felt heavy, glued to the spinning surface. The air smelled like burning rubber now. The friction was heating up the soles of her shoes. She looked down and saw her own hands. They were losing their definition. Her fingers were blurring, blending into the air as she spun. She was becoming a streak of gold—the color of her dress. She wasn't a person anymore; she was a shutter speed error.

She saw him near the center of the record, where the spinning was slowest. Her ex-boyfriend. He was wearing the same charcoal suit he’d worn to their junior formal, but it looked oversized now, draped over a frame that was too thin. Penny fought the wind, leaning her body toward the center. Every step felt like wading through chest-high water. When she finally reached him, she grabbed his shoulder.

"Leo?" she gasped.

He turned around. He didn't have a face. In the place where his eyes and mouth should have been, there was a sleek, black iPad screen. It glowed with a harsh, blue light. The screen was blank except for a small, red icon in the center: a battery symbol with a single, flickering sliver of energy. A notification popped up in a white bubble: Low Battery. 1% remaining.

"Leo, it's me," Penny said. She reached out to touch the screen. It was warm, humming with a static charge that made the hair on her arms stand up.

"Connection lost," a Siri-like voice drifted from his collar. It wasn't his voice. It was a simulation of a voice. "Please check your network settings."

"We're leaving," Penny told the screen. "We're moving. We have to go."

Leo didn't move. Another notification popped up: Update Required. Then, the screen flickered and went dark. He stood there, a hollow suit topped with a piece of dead glass. He was a bricked device. He was a placeholder. Penny realized then that she wasn't talking to him. She was talking to her memory of him, and the memory was out of storage space.

Suddenly, the grinding music stopped. The silence was violent. It hit Penny like a physical blow. The gym didn't go quiet, though. The sound changed. It was a low, wet thumping. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. It was a heartbeat. Her heartbeat.

It was being broadcast through the massive subwoofers stacked on the stage. The sound was so deep it rattled her ribcage. It felt like her internal organs were being rearranged by the vibration. With every beat, the gym floor groaned. The windows along the top of the gym wall began to ripple like liquid.

Thump-thump.

A crack spider-webbed across the glass above the bleachers.

Thump-thump.

The sound was deafening now. It wasn't just in her ears; it was in her blood. It was the sound of a countdown. The sound of a deadline. Penny looked at the neon streaks of her classmates. They were vibrating, their colors shaking apart. Anne was a smudge of purple on the horizon. The staples in Penny’s forehead began to itch. They felt hot.

THUMP-THUMP.

The windows shattered. They didn't fall inward; they exploded outward into the spring night. The glass shards didn't hit the ground. They just hung in the air, suspended by the pressure of the sound. Penny felt her face give way completely. The skin of her cheeks slid down, pooling around her collarbones. Her nose felt like wet clay. She tried to reach up to fix it, but her hands were gone. She was just a torso and a heartbeat now.

She looked at the empty space where the windows had been. There was no night sky. There were no stars. There was only a vast, humming expanse of blue static, like a television tuned to a dead channel. It was the void of the future. It was the 'across the country' she was so afraid of. It was the nothingness that waited after the final bell.

Penny realized she didn't have a mouth anymore. She didn't have a jaw. She didn't have the hardware for speech. But the scream was there, coiled in her chest like a spring. It was a howl of pure, unadulterated terror—the fear of being forgotten, the fear of disappearing before she even started.

She let it out.

She didn't need a face to scream. The sound tore out of her, joining the rhythm of the heartbeat. It was a silent, vibrating roar that shattered the rest of the gym. The record player floor cracked down the middle. The charcoal suit of the Screen Boy dissolved into gray ash. The neon streaks of the students evaporated.

As the school dissolved into the blue static, Penny felt a strange, cold peace. The staples fell out of her non-existent forehead, clattering into the abyss. She was finally unanchored. She was finally weightless. The static rushed in to fill the gaps where her identity used to be. It was cold. It was bright. It was everything she had ever been, being rewritten into a zero. The last thing she felt was the smell of ozone, sharper than ever, as the screen of her life finally flickered to black.