Joan Agnes McKittrick was born August 10, 1978, to Mark and Jessica McKittrick of Dublin, Georgia. She was named for her great-aunt, a colorful figure who—

Wait. You went back too far. This is isn't how you tell a story.

(snip)

She heard the creak of hinges and soft footfalls somewhere behind her. It was so dark in here, so easy to get turned around. She couldn't believe she let Audrey talk her into this. It was nonsense, total nerd shit, the kind of thing where the fun was in making up the rules, not actually playing.

But a game was a game. And Joanie didn't come to this school to lose games.

She advanced toward the interloper, as quietly as she could. It was harder than it should have been, in the ridiculous cloak made of hula skirts they forced her to wear. Audrey had left that part out of her little pitch. The grass swished with every step, broadcasting her presence throughout the tunnel.

"I can hear you," said a voice, maybe twenty feet ahead.

"I can hear you too," Joanie heard herself say. Fuck it, why not get in the spirit of things? "You're in my territory now." Something came to her, something weird that she could say. Something too weird to say, maybe. But they were here in the dark, alone. "I'm the thing you can't unsee."

"Spooky," said the voice, but it was farther away. Joanie could hear their footsteps gathering speed. She started running, no longer any need to be quiet. The grass swirled wildly around her. With her long strides, she'd be on them any second, and then she would have her Envoy to the outside world, one step closer to victory.

The strands of grass hit the wall first, like antennae, but Joanie received their message too late. Her knee slammed into a 2x4, and then her forehead, and then the darkness swallowed her up.

The player she was chasing heard the impact and stopped running. She turned around and felt her way through the dark until her foot hit Joanie's leg. She pulled her keychain out of her pocket and clicked on her little flashlight. In the weak yellow light, Joanie bent down and looked into her own face.

(snip)

The ancient gentleman turned the crystal knobs and threw open both doors with a flourish. "Miss Joanie McKittrick," he announced, and stepped to one side to await further instruction. Joanie stepped over the threshold into an office the size of her entire house. It was two stories tall, and bookshelves lined two walls, floor to ceiling. They were filled with small volumes bound in purple-dyed leather. A wheeled ladder waited on its rail. Joanie had always wanted one of those. To her left, a fire crackled in a hearth set in a wall covered in brocaded silk wallpaper in a royal purple so rich it was almost black, hung with portraits of various mustachioed gentlemen in sporting attire.

Directly across from the entrance, a massive oak desk sat in front of a bank of tall windows. The purple velvet curtains were drawn three-quarters of the way, allowing a thick shaft of light to fall on the desk and the voluminous man sitting in a brown leather chair behind it. Joanie was sure she'd been here before, but she couldn't remember the fat man's name.

"Miss McKittrick," he said, groaning as he rocked in the chair once, twice, and then heaved his body to its feet, steadying himself with a hand on the desk. He walked toward Joanie with a slight limp, the broad expanse of golden cloth that served as a waistcoat rising a bit with each step to reveal the pale flesh of his belly. In the ten steps it took to reach Joanie, a sheen rose on his forehead. He pulled a silk handkerchief from his coat and dabbed at it. He looked up at Joanie with an apologetic smile. "Is it time for the game? We were not expecting you."

"We?"

A creak of leather from Joanie's left. A man rose from one of the oversized armchairs facing the fire. He was wearing something ridiculous, a military costume designed by children, all bright colors and impractical silver accouterment. He had pale skin and black hair and a red scar on his face. This was wrong. This was all wrong.

"You aren't supposed to be in here," she said. The scar flickered, on and off, and then his whole body flickered on and off, and then he disappeared, not even leaving his smile behind.

(snip)

She didn't have a class with Dr. Burton this semester, but since she was already in town she thought she'd stop by his office and see if he was in. It was strange to be in Thorn Hall when it was this empty. Even when she'd been here late at night, it never truly felt unoccupied. There was always a janitor, or even just the fluorescents, buzzing with low-key malevolence.

But the lights were off now and the janitor wasn't needed yet. The place was drained, bloodless. Dust hung in the air, catching sunlight. Joanie could almost feel it, like walking through water. Squeaks from her Reeboks ping-ponged up and down the hall.

She took the stairs to the second floor three at a time. When she reached the landing halfway up, she started to hear it: an insistent beat, a pounding piano, a guitar shooting sparks all over the top. A voice howling wordlessly into the void.

She bounded up to the second floor. The music was coming from Burton's office, near the end of the hall. She crept closer. She could hear him singing now, over the music: "Strange ideas mature with age, like leaves when autumn falls." His voice was terrible. Joanie smiled. Burton was younger than most of the English department, and to many of his students this made him the cool one, even the hot one; but Joanie knew, she knew that he was a colossal dork. This was why she believed him when he said she could get into Iowa, why she believed him when he said anything. He never made her feel too tall.

His door was open halfway. She knocked as she pushed it the rest of the way open. He was shuffling clumsily in front of his turntable, studying an album cover. Two women were on the cover, both lean and dark-eyed and half-naked. Burton jumped when he noticed Joanie standing there. He dropped the sleeve and fumbled for the tone arm to turn the music off.

"Joanie! What are you..."

"Nice pipes, Doc."

Burton gave her his dorkiest, most sheepish grin, and picked up the record sleeve. He thought for a second, then set it on his desk face down. "I didn't think anyone was here."

"Sorry, I was just walking back from downtown and I thought I'd see if you were in."

"I'm glad you did. Gives me a chance to talk you into taking Creative Writing 201."

"I want to," said Joanie, and she meant it. She'd always been a decent writer, strictly on a technical level. She could put a sentence together in a non-embarrassing way, and that was enough to win awards in high school. But in Burton's class she actually got good at it. She finally had an audience she wanted to impress. "But it's the same time as practice. I can't make it."

"Right. The spiking and the serving."

"That's about it. But that's what's paying for me to be here."

"Well, next semester."

"Definitely. Oh, check it out." Joanie dug in her bag and pulled out a manila folder. "Some new stuff I wrote over the summer."

Burton took the folder and peeked inside. "Yeah? Can't wait to read it. I'm serious about Iowa, too. You've got to start thinking about that now." Burton put the folder on his desk, next to the album cover. "I'll read these tonight."

All Joanie wanted was for him to read her poems.She imagined him lingering over the pages, smiling at particular lines. Theidea was almost more than she could stand, but she managed to offer anunconvincing "Take your time." Then she saw it: the corner of a photograph peeking out from under the manila folder. Some tiles, it looked like, and a foot. But the tiles were familiar.

"So," said Dr. Burton, "we know you're not taking my class. What are you taking? If you say Dr. Moore's Early American Lit class, I'm going to be so disappointed." Those tiles looked so fucking familiar. And that foot – there was a tattoo on the ankle. She inched a little closer for a better look, trying to be nonchalant.

"No," she said. "Not Dr. Moore." The tattoo was a knife. A purple knife. Just like the purple knife on her own left ankle. And those were the tiles in the shower in the Lady Ambassador's locker room.

She didn't remember how she got out of Burton's office or how she made it to the gym for practice. She only remembered snippets of barging into Coach Klaven's office, throwing around accusations without ever coming right out and saying it. She didn't want to believe it, didn't think Klaven would believe her even if she believed herself, except that of course Klaven would believe her because he knew, she knew that he already knew. He was pissed off even at what she did say, even at the hint of accusations. He made them all do suicides, again and again, punishing them for her crimes. She couldn't remember running. Her head was numb and thick, her body wired with adrenaline. She needed to reverse that. She needed gunpowder.

"Joanie, what's the fucking problem?" Kenya was yelling at her as she ran out the door, not showering, never showering in there again. She got on the first bus but it was a Yellow Line and it took her all the way out to godforsaken graduate housing before she found a Blue Line and rode it back to Mary Rutherford, staring out the window but not seeing a thing, her jaw working independently in fear and rage and anticipation of the gunpowder. Speaking in tongues.

Thank god Kenya wasn't in the room. She went straight for the elephant, but then thought better of it. She should think. She should talk to Kenya. That was the smart thing. She took a shower, turning it up as hot as she could stand, trying to peel the day away. It didn't work. She got dressed. She was supposed to meet Kenya at Weston. It was their thing. She could make fun of Kenya's stupid Cheerios obsession, see if Bathrobe Billy changed up his wardrobe over the summer. She should go, tell Kenya what happened. Kenya would get mad, in a good way. In a useful way. She should go.

She lunged for the elephant again, unwrapped all their stupid useless layers of security, dumped the powder out, all of it, on the mirror glued to the back of her Handbook. She grabbed the pen from her desk, dismantled it, bent her head to the mirror and snorted it all at once.

Too much thinking's got you down again

Well let your senses skip

(snip)

"Rip it out. That's my advice."

"I think you have to give these back at the end of the year. They charge you if it's damaged."

"That is absolutely not true. It's got your name on it, doesn't it?"

It did have her name on it: JOAN AGNES MCKITTRICK, embossed in gold on the purple cover. It was a perfect little object, balanced in form and function in a way that few things she had ever owned were. She liked looking at it so much she didn't even mind that her full name was on the cover, those two old-lady names her parents had saddled her with. Joan! Come over tomorrow and we'll play bridge, Joan! Agnes! O Agnes, the lamb of god, a perfect name if you're a hundred-year-old virgin with dementia. But even with AGNES shining there on the cover, she wasn't going to deface this work of art.

"I guess. But I'm still not ripping it out."

"Suit yourself." From her bed, Kenya bounced a volleyball off the floor and the wall and back to her hands, Steve McQueen-style. "I'm just saying don't let a book make your decisions for you." Joanie had barely known Kenya for two weeks, but she already felt like an old friend. Joanie'd put so many filters and walls in place over the years, she needed someone who didn't have any. Audrey had been like that. They balanced each other out.

Joanie opened the Handbook again to page 56. "It's not a novel," is what the older girls on the team told her. "You don't just read it like it's Stephen King or something." Joanie hadn't read Stephen King since the eighth grade. She wasn't afraid of a book. She'd read it cover-to-cover if she wanted to, and so she'd started at the beginning, with the Introduction and the Argument and the Words of Welcome, and then some history and some rules and some important phone numbers and some interminable lists of campus buildings and facts about said buildings. Then she came to page 52, and a section titled "Your Roommate," and there she found out some stuff about Kenya that Kenya hadn't told her, and that she's pretty sure Kenya would never want her to know. And then she turned to page 56, with the heading "The Boy in the Tunnel," and she read the first sentence: "For one of you, it's love at first sight," and then she stopped reading because she wasn't sure she wanted to know more, not after what she read about Kenya.

But then she told Kenya about "The Boy in the Tunnel," without mentioning the "Your Roommate" section, and in the process of trying to convince her not to read it, Kenya convinced her that she definitely should read it. If you're traveling somewhere new, you consult a map. It's just common sense.

Joanie settled back in her bed, the good one, and started to read.

From outside the door of Mary Rutherford 237, in the hall, Joanie watched herself reading. "What does it say?" she said, and her year-ago self looked up for a moment, a tickle in her ear like static from a far-away station.

(snip)

The deep purple wallpaper started to melt first. It oozed down the walls like thick tar. The bookshelves sagged and the purple books dropped in fat drops to the floor. The fat man's legs melted together into one gelatinous mass. He inched over to the bookshelves like a slug, leaving a slick trail on the swirling carpet. He pointed to an empty space on a shelf that was already drooping downward in a viscous V. "Look," he said. "One is missing."

Joanie could feel her insides melting, her brain and her heart and her guts. She felt wetness on her face and reached up to touch her cheeks. Her fingers came back stained with an oily black liquid. She opened her mouth to scream, but no sound came out, no words, just black vomitus that covered the fat man, the desk, the books, the fire, everything, drowned it all in black, erased all light and sound until

(snip)

she was in the tunnel

and

he was in the tunnel

(snip)

"You're just growing too fast." Snip. She didn't want to hear it, but her mom was right. Thirteen and six feet tall, towering over everybody in her class, even some of the teachers. She felt wrong, stretched out. Her bones hurt. All the looks, the whispers. They thought she couldn't hear them, all the way up there. Snip. Twelve inches of faded red bell-bottom fell to the sewing table.

"I see that look, Joanie. Don't you even worry about what other kids think." Snip. "I've seen those videos you girls watch. This is exactly the kind of stuff they wear." Joanie couldn't really imagine Kim Gordon or Kim Deal wearing these patchwork jeans, or the elongated dress in a rainbow of mustards and browns. Tori Amos, maybe. Probably Natalie Merchant. Her mom gave her a wink. "This is the height of fashion."

Snip

Joanie's mom breathed in sharply through her teeth. "Shit," she said, a word Joanie had never heard her use. She dropped the heavy scissors, one blade now stained with blood that looked black in the shadow under the table. Joanie wanted to be of use. She grabbed the bell-bottom scrap from the table and took her mom's hand, to wrap her finger in it, but when she saw the blood it was black and oily. Her mother wrapped her fingers around Joanie's hand, squeezing tight, smearing the black blood on both their hands. Joanie looked in her mother's face, which was her face, and she said "I forgot what it said."

(snip)

Joanie looked at him – more the shape of him, as if through tinted glass. She could look down at the top of his head. She could see his eyes, barely, but enough to see the expectation in them. She had that same look, once. He thought she was part of his story.

He didn't seem to know what to do with his hands. He fidgeted with the pockets of his khakis, where she could see the bulge of a Handbook. "Are you okay?" he said. "You're the girl on the bus."

I'm the girl on the bus. She was always the girl on something or in something or at something. The girl at the concert. The girl in the doorway. The girl on the roof. She wondered what Tim really saw, when he saw her on the bus.

Tim. That was his name. She remembered that, at least.

"You wouldn't believe what it says." Tim pulled the Handbook out of his pocket and flipped through to a dog-eared page. "Look at this. Everything is in here. This is you." Tim held the open Handbook up to her face. She closed her eyes and kept them closed, until she was sure that he had closed the book.

Tim was frowning. "But it says...Am I in your Handbook?"

Joanie walked forward. The top of her head scraped the roof of the tunnel. Tim was forced to back up, and they emerged in the grove of magnolias next to the Garden. She took his head in her hands, pulled him close until she could see her black eyes reflected in his.

"Rip it out, Tim," she said. "Rip me out of your book." She let him go, and it was as if she let go of the anchor holding her to this world. She fell, like a tree sawn at the stump, and as the glass in front of her face turned opaque, she heard voices calling her name from the Garden.

Kenya finds out what happened to Joanie.

This chapter was written with some guidance from Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies. What are your favorite tips and tricks for generating ideas and breaking through writer's block?