“Some write to remember. I write to forget.”

- Rita van Asch, January 1, 1787

Once upon a time, I was a normal girl living in a normal world with normal friends, a normal job, and in love with a normal boyfriend.

I still had those things today. The normal friends, who were catty and shallow and who used me for their own ends. The normal job, that was doing its best to grind me into the ground. The normal boyfriend, who had chosen to stay in Hong Kong for two months instead of coming home for a week in between like he normally did.

Once upon a time, I also clicked a link in a random email, discovered a secret world, completed Quests, survived a fight to the death, and found a magic ring.

But it wasn’t as thrilling as it sounded. The secret world, it was turning more sinister by the day. The Quests, well, they had led me straight into the mind of a mad woman. And the ring, it was trapped on my finger, put there by said mad woman.

That ring had adorned my right ring finger for three weeks, but as for the woman who put it there, well, she had gone radio silent.

As soon as I had returned from the library, I had locked the dusty book away in a drawer in my bedroom, along with the top half of Beatrice’s note. I didn’t want any part of Rita van Asch, didn’t want to know what she had done, didn’t want to know why the diary was so important.

No, I had a constant reminder of Rita on my finger at all times, and that was enough.

The bottom portion of the note, with those words that had compelled me to put the ring on, I had placed in an envelope, which I had then put inside a second envelope and then inside a still larger third envelope for good measure. I had buried the Russian doll of envelopes under a smattering of old clothes in a box in the corner of my closet, where hopefully no one would find it.

I had waited a day before attempting to take the ring off again, and when I did, Beatrice’s voice returned, commanding me to put the ring on. I complied, and the voice stopped once more. This became my morning routine, but every result was the same. Some days I lasted a minute before succumbing and other days I had given up before the voice could even finish the sentence.

One random morning a week ago, I had resolved to hold out as long as possible.

In one fluid motion, I had pulled the ring off my finger, dropped it into the same drawer that held the diary, and then quickly closed and locked it again. But the command returned, as if a set of speakers were held up to my ears, and I writhed on the floor for what seemed like an eternity trying to resist its pull. In the end, I had lasted a total of 75 seconds. There was no text from Beatrice afterward though. Did she know what I was attempting to do? Or was she so confident in the command’s power over me that she didn’t feel the need to check on me?

And if her torments during my waking hours weren’t enough, there was no refuge in sleep either. It had taken about a week for me to realize that the weird dreams I had been having weren’t dreams at all, but more of Beatrice’s memories that had seeped into my mind during our encounter at the party.

Each morning, I tried to write down whatever I could recall but all I produced were meaningless fragments: a baby’s cry, a deserted path in a park on a moonless night, a woman reading a newspaper at a coffee shop.

Tonight, as I continued my new nightly ritual of numbing myself with scotch and trying to speedrun through A Link to the Past before my midnight FaceTime with Duncan, I read over the unintelligible scribblings and searched for a deeper meaning. I didn’t find it.

The time on my laptop flicked to 12:00 and I clicked on Duncan’s number in the chat window and waited for his visage to appear. But the pinging noise continued on with no response from him halfway around the world.

The bottle of Bruichladdich and a shot glass were already next to my computer from last night, so while I waited for Duncan to answer, I pulled up the Quest Board, clicked on a random Quest, and then took a shot. I clicked back to FaceTime and then back to the Board to open a different Quest, and took another shot. By the fifth shot, my mouse hand could barely move the cursor over the End Call button, so I took that as a sign to retire for the evening, Duncan be damned. I laid down in my bed, closed my eyes, and waited for sleep to claim me.

I opened my eyes. A bottle of red wine was in front of me and I was sitting on an unfamiliar couch in an unfamiliar apartment. A phone next to me vibrated several times before I picked it up and brought it into a kitchen full of marble and stainless steel. As I set it down, it vibrated again and I read the messages that appeared on the screen.

An inexplicable jolt of anger suddenly flared up inside me, but I didn’t know why. I blinked and I was now standing in a doorway in front of a man in his boxers, who was sitting on a bed. I held up the phone so he could see it before letting it fall from my hand and storming out of the apartment.

On my cab ride to somewhere, I pulled out a different phone and began texting random numbers until one responded. I blinked again and I was in a bar, a drink in my hand, an older man in the seat next to me. I blinked a third time and we were in bed together, our bodies pressed against each other. A fourth blink and I “awoke” sat up in that same bed to find the man from the bar lying asleep next to me. My head was pounding, so I rose and walked to the bathroom. I rubbed my eyes and stared at myself in the mirror. Except it wasn’t me.

It was her.

Beatrice.

The reflection of Beatrice stared back at me. My eyes (or were they hers?) were weary with the weight of a thousand problems, my lips were tinged with sadness, and I let out a low sigh.

Suddenly, the face in the mirror frowned. Then without warning, the woman in the reflection cocked her ring-adorned fist and smashed the mirror to pieces.

I awoke again, this time in my own bed. My hair was matted with sweat, my sheets, the same. What had I just seen? A distant memory from Beatrice’s life or something that had just happened last night? Whatever it was, I hoped that the next time I drifted off to sleep, my dreams would be my own.

My phone suddenly buzzed on the nightstand.

“Meet me at Bleecker St Grounds at 1030. Bring the diary.”

I felt a pit grow in my stomach. Finally, the bitch had summoned me.

I retrieved the diary from its prison, sat down at my desk, and opened the book to a random page. The entry was short and dated September 30, 1777:

I pressed Henry for more information about troop movements, but he refuses to divulge anything. It seems he does not trust me as much as I thought.

It made no sense to me. Who was Henry? I flipped through the worn pages, searching for something that would help me make sense of it all, but my throbbing head halted any further examination. I took the top half of Beatrice’s note out of my desk drawer and placed it in between the pages.

That’s when I noticed something else in the drawer, next to my ever-growing stack of tokens: a small green bit of something wrapped in plastic. It was the extra gummy that Steve had given me in the bar so many weeks ago. And, the perfect cure for my semi-hungover state.

I unwrapped the plastic and stared at the gummy. The last time I had eaten one of these, I had just imbibed several stiff drinks and it had magically whisked away the alcohol and returned me to my clear-headed state. But now I was several hours removed from my latest binge. Would it have the same effect?

I broke off roughly a quarter of the gummy, set it aside, and wrapped the remainder back up. No sense in wasting my only one if it didn’t work. I popped the piece in my mouth and began to chew. The horrible taste of rotting fish was nauseating even the second time, but thankfully the whole ordeal was over in a few seconds. I waited for something to happen. Even if my headache dulled a little, it would be worth it, as I would need my full mental capacity to face Beatrice in case this meeting was anything like our first one.

Finally, after about five minutes, the pounding started to subside and I slowly stood up from my desk, the ill effects of my scotch consumption completely gone.

Incredible.

I walked over to my closet to dig out something big enough to hold the diary. Under a pile of old sweatshirts, I found my worn blue-and-gold backpack that had served me well in Ann Arbor. It had its fair share of holes and one of the straps was frayed within a few inches of life, but it would do the trick.

On my way to the subway, I shot off an email to my boss, explaining that I was coming down with something so I’d be working from home today. As I waited on the platform, my mind started racing. Would she try to get inside my mind again? Could she even? If the linkage between us was because of the apples we had both eaten, well, that was weeks ago and I hadn’t dared to eat any of the leftover ones still in my freezer.

The train arrived and I grabbed a seat in the nearly empty car. I set my backpack down and pulled out Beatrice’s note from the back of the diary. If she was still angry from our meeting at the party, her words held no trace of it. If anything, it sounded like she needed me to help her take the right course at her inflection point.

Then I read over the list of items in her note that she had fetched as part of her first Quest - 90/10 beef, a tillandsia, an apple popsicle, and a handful of blueberries - and my jaw dropped. They were the same items as my first Quest, except with a different blend of beef and a different flavored popsicle. What did it all mean?

I put the note away and tried to clear my mind for the encounter ahead, one that might change my life completely. I had relished this secret world that I had discovered, but now it seemed like I was at my own inflection point. Would I continue on with my Quest alone or would I take a chance and join forces with Beatrice? Would she even give me a choice?

The train arrived at the Bleecker Street stop. It was 10:25 and I was going to be late, so I dashed out of the car and up the stairs, breaking into a slight jog after I reached the street. As I drew closer, I felt as if my hand was being pulled toward the coffee shop like a fish on a hook being reeled in and I looked down at the silver ring on my finger.

I spotted her immediately, sipping a coffee on the brisk fall day in a high back chair just outside the shop, talking on the phone. My would-be mentor. The potential scorpion to my frog.

The force pulling my finger increased as I walked around to the seat across from her and sat down. Only then did I realize that she wasn’t talking on the phone, but to a little boy in the seat next to her.

Next: Jen meets Beatrice face-to-face for the first time.