The Screaming Season

by Nancy Holder

  But my dorm mates didn’t want to hear about it. I’d tried before. And now . . . no one would believe me about anything.

  “Linz?” Julie asked. “Are you okay?”

  Her question focused attention on me, which I did not need. I needed someone to tell me I was okay. I was so tired of being questioned about the state of my sanity.

  “I just get tired,” I said. “Pneumonia and all.”

  “Mandy says she had pneumonia two years ago, in Gstaad. She nearly died from it,” Elvis declared. “Of course, you know that her case was worse than yours.”

  Everyone smirked. They were no bigger fans of Mandy than I was.

  The wind whistled hard as the main door to the infirmary slammed open. We all jumped, and Julie let out a little cry.

  “It’s just the nurse,” Marica said, not naming her, as if Ms. Simonet was one of the anonymous army of staff that catered to our every whim.

  The door opened, and we all turned expectantly. A very tall figure with straight, square shoulders stood framed in the doorway, obscuring the hall light, so that all I saw was a silhouette. Then he stepped into the room. He was wearing a black wool overcoat and white muffler. Tendrils of gray hair framed his face like a fluffy halo. He had a small nose and full lips and very blue eyes, nearly as deeply blue as Troy’s. For an older man, he was kind of hot.

  Ms. Simonet came in behind him. She looked around the room, her attention landing on me, and she made a little gesture—That’s the one.

  “Ladies, this is Dr. Anthony Morehouse,” she announced in a chipper tone I had never heard her use before. “He’s joining our staff.”

  Julie stood. “Hello,” she said politely.

  No one else got up. Everyone just looked at him.

  “What about Dr. Steinberg?” I asked. He had been in to see me every day since I’d collapsed. He had discovered that in addition to having pneumonia, I was anemic.

  “Oh, he’s still on the staff,” Dr. Morehouse said. He had a funny accent, almost Scandinavian.

  Then I got it. By my friends’ looks of polite confusion, I was the only one who did get it.

  “Dr. Melton is gone,” I murmured. My other doctor. The school shrink. I had liked him. Very much.

  “Dr. Melton was offered a wonderful opportunity he felt he couldn’t pass up,” Dr. Morehouse said smoothly. “He wanted very much to tell you all goodbye personally, but he had to leave on short notice.”

  Canned. Possibly because of me. Had he had time to dismantle his pretty fish tank?

  No one else looked particularly distressed. Some of the girls had been to see him when they found the dead birds and the cat, but no one else had had a standing weekly appointment, as I had.

  “It’s time for all of you to go, or you’ll be late for first period,” Ms. Simonet informed my visitors. In other words, I was supposed to see Dr. Morehouse alone.

  As they got ready to leave, I could sense their embarrassment for me, their possessive unease. The new shrink had braved the elements to come see their girl. A therapeutic house call for the current school psycho.

  “We’ll come at lunch to start catching you up,” Julie said. This time, she did kiss my cheek. She smiled at everyone. “We’ll each take a subject.”

  “Rose will do math,” Ida announced, and Dr. Morehouse chuckled. High school high jinks. We were cute.

  Dr. Morehouse smiled pleasantly at the group at large. I didn’t want them to leave me alone with him. I was afraid I would slip and tell him the truth.

  But they did go. He said, “I think Trina said she had some coffee,” and excused himself from the room. It took me a second to connect “Trina” to Ms. Simonet. Maybe they had a thing. Maybe she knew him from some other job.

  “You have to get rid of him,” Celia told me. I was afraid that she was speaking through me, that I was speaking aloud. That happened sometimes. I still didn’t fully understand how the possession worked. I didn’t know if Celia was inside me all the time, or if she somehow slid in from time to time. All I knew was that sometimes I would feel very cold, and then I would sense that she was there. And then I would hear her speaking.

  But there were times, I knew, when I blanked out and she took over. I had found myself waking up in places I had no memory of going.

  The operating theater, for one.

  “Make him go away,” she demanded just as Dr. Morehouse came back in the room with a white cup stamped with the Marlwood crest in hunter green. The steam was rising from the cup, and he blew on it as he sat in one of the plastic chairs the girls had left scattered all over the room.

  “Well, you’ve certainly been through the wringer,” he began. “The death of your mom, your breakdown, coming here . . . ”

  “Breaking down again,” I filled in. I was already weary, and we hadn’t even gotten started. As far as I was concerned, when you’d been to one therapist, you’d been to them all. They all said the same things. Asked the same questions, looked for the same answers. And I was fighting overtime to ignore Celia’s thrashing, like a bird in a chimney.

  “Is that how you see it?” he asked me. “You had another breakdown?”

  “Hallucinating and hitting a guy with a hammer; that’s pretty much the standard definition.” I heard the petulance in my voice.

  He took out a pack of tissues from his pocket, extracted one, and genteelly brought it to his mouth, depositing some gum into it. Sipping his coffee, he shifted in his chair, moving his shoulders as if he had an itch he couldn’t reach. I wondered how much he’d gotten paid to take over Dr. Melton’s job on such short notice.

  Jane used to say that people became psychologists because they had issues of their own to work out. After my mom died, the hospital had suggested that my dad and I join a grief support network. The social worker running the group had asked my dad, in front of me, “Are you angry with your wife for leaving you with a child to raise by yourself ?” We left at the break and never went back.

  “Tell me about the Marlwood Stalker,” Dr. Morehouse requested.

  I jerked, caught off guard. But of course he would have heard about it. Dr. Ehrlenbach would have told him.

  “We were scared.” I picked up a purple Froot Loop and popped it into my mouth. “Someone was killing birds. And leaving slash marks on trees.”

  “That would be scary,” he agreed.

  “Dr. Ehrlenbach told us that mountain lions were spotted during the break. Someone’s dog at Lakeshore Prep got taken. That’s the boys’ school,” I added.

  “So the night of the Valentine’s dance, you were scared, and you were upset.” The steam from his coffee reached up, as if to tickle his chin. “I gather there was a fight about a boy you liked. And you left the dance in search of him in a snowstorm, without dressing warmly enough.”

  I nodded. That didn’t sound so crazy. That sounded like good solid teen drama.

  “And you were out there for quite some time.”

  “So you’re going with the exposure scenario.” I made a show of picking out more purple Froot Loops, then wondered why I was doing it. As if to prove I didn’t care. But that was dumb. I needed the brand-new shrink of Marlwood to recommend that I stay. I needed him to think I was going to work at getting better. So I dropped the Froot Loop back into the bowl and put my hands in my lap.

  “Actually, it works for me,” he replied. He peered at me. “But you’re not convinced.”

  He set down the coffee cup on the chair to his right and fished in his pants pocket. He pulled out what looked like a thick gold pen; then he flicked it on and I realized it was a thin flashlight.

  “Let’s go back over what’s been happening to you. Together.”

  “Don’t say anything,” Celia hissed.

  He raised a brow. “Sorry, what was that?”

  “Nothing.” I raised my brows too, trying to look innocent and approachable. I was grateful there was nothing close at hand that I could use to hurt him. Correction: that Celia could use to hurt him.

>   And then I spotted the hot cup of coffee, an arm’s length away, as the beam of light wove an arc across the floor. The steam rose.

  It would burn.

  FOUR

  DR. MOREHOUSE CROSSED back to the light switch, unknowingly removing himself from the trajectory the hot coffee would make should Celia force me to fling it at him. He flicked off the room lights. The thin beam of his flashlight sliced the blackness. Then he experimented with the switches until the lights were dim, and I could see everything except the colors of my cereal. I licked my lips. My hand was shaking. Celia was still trying to make me pick up the coffee. Wasn’t she thinking this through? If I hurt him, they might expel me. Expel me, and she was stuck with her unfinished business.

  And I would wind up screaming in an unmarked grave.

  Stop. That’s just drama.

  “I know you’ve been to a lot of therapists,” he began.

  “Only three, unless you count the hospital social worker. Then it would be four.” Instead of the coffee, I lifted a glass to my lips. It was grapefruit juice. Julie knew I preferred it to orange. I had a friend. I had lots of friends. I wasn’t alone.

  But I was never alone.

  “Three’s a lot.”

  “Not if you live in Southern California.”

  He chuckled. “I’m from Fargo, North Dakota.”

  That explained the accent.

  “Have you seen the movie?” he asked me. “Fargo?”

  “Before my time,” I replied. “Are you going to hypnotize me?”

  Celia thrashed. “No. Refuse. Get him out of here.”

  He inclined his head as if to say, I sure can’t get anything past you. “I thought I’d give it a shot. During all this therapy you’ve had, has anyone discussed the notion of the committee?”

  I shook my head. “Is it like the Spanish Inquisition?”

  “Maybe.” He raised the light and pointed it at the wall. It flattened onto the wall like a yellow hole. Sipping my grapefruit juice, I tried to ignore Celia’s movements. My brain felt like an iceberg. The bridge of my nose ached. She really didn’t want me to do this. If ever there was a reason to give something a shot, that was it.

  “Some people think our personalities are really a number of layers of individuality, established at different times of our lives and molded by various situations.”

  I fought as Celia tried to make me put the grapefruit juice down. My foot moved forward; she wanted me to stand up.

  “When we talk about being ‘of two minds,’ some of us mean that literally.”

  He sounded kind of pompous, and I tried not to laugh. If only he knew.

  “And those people are mentally ill,” I ventured.

  “Not at all,” he replied. “We all have a committee. We talk to ourselves, rehearse scenarios, write ourselves notes and ‘to do’ lists.”

  Kill people, I filled in.

  “So what is schizophrenia?”

  “We all have an ‘I,’” he said. “The committee leader. If you have more than one leader . . . ”

  “You get bickering. In public.” An understatement.

  “Exactly. Bickering. Lack of functionality.”

  “You don’t get anything done,” I said.

  “Right. Now, if I suggest to you that we walk along a path . . . ” He glanced over at the bloom of light on the wall. Drinking more coffee, he cocked his head, appraising the view. “Let’s walk along that path and meet some of your committee members on the way. Are you comfortable in that chair?”

  I wasn’t particularly, but the only piece of furniture more comfortable was my bed, and there was no way I was doing that. I had never been to a therapist’s office where I had to lie down. I wasn’t about to start now.

  I could feel Celia struggling, and I coughed to hide it. The grapefruit juice sloshed on my index finger. He noticed.

  “I’m making you nervous.”

  Why hide it? Therapists valued honesty. Crazy people told themselves lies. Sane people faced trouble head-on. Or so I had been informed. Over and over again.

  “Maybe I’ll tell you how the exercise works, and you can do it on your own later.”

  Said the spider to the fly. I smiled politely, pretending to buy it. I knew full well that he was going to try his mojo out on me.

  “So, are you ready?” he asked.

  “I’m taking a vote,” I said, and when he grinned, I honestly thought there might be hope for the relationship.

  “You’re walking along a path,” he said, looking not at me, but at the circle of light on the wall. “You make the path as real to yourself as possible. It’s bordered with palm trees, or ice plants, or geraniums . . . ”

  Southern California borders, then. We had geraniums in our front yard. I could smell them now, their pungent, earthy-lemon odor. I could see the glint of light on my mother’s wedding ring as she weeded the beds of shocking pink and orange blossoms. The wheels of my trike, squeaking as I rode up and down the driveway, up and down, watching her weed, impatient for her to finish because I wanted a grilled cheese sandwich.

  When she got sick, we let the geraniums go and our front yard became a weedy mess. We had never had a sprinkler system because my mom liked to water the yard herself. Someone put an anonymous note in our mailbox and called us white trash because parts of our yard were so overgrown, while others were dry as dust. When CJ started dating my father, she hired a service to install sprinklers and we weeded together. She called them our “dirt dates,” and pretty soon I relaxed around her. In no time at all, I could smell the geraniums again, even from the backyard.

  The backyard . . . where Celia had appeared in the pool and told me I had to come back here . . .

  The little girl in me resented CJ for taking my mom’s place. But the young woman that I was becoming was grateful to her for the weeding, the home-cooked meals, the snacks for sleepovers. And the two goofy little boys who became my stepbrothers.

  “And as you walk along the path, bordered by geraniums . . . ” He paused. “What’s on the path? Gravel? Dirt?”

  Ashes, I thought. Open graves. But I said, “Sand. From the beach. We’re barefoot.”

  “The warm sand squishes between your toes and above you, the . . . seagulls? . . . are circling.”

  Vultures. Ravens. But now I was just fighting him in my private, childish way.

  “You discover you’ve been moving up an incline. And as you look down over the crest, it looks . . . ”

  “Like Marlwood,” I said, surprising myself.

  “Which looks like . . . ”

  “Something out of Charles Dickens, mostly,” I said. “The old buildings, anyway.”

  I pictured Founder’s Hall, with the bell tower, very creepy. Always cold. When we sat in there for assemblies, we took turns seeing who could make the most clouds of breath. And my dorm, Grose. The brick walls covered with bad art, the dark wood floors, so shiny that when I walked down them, I could see . . .

  I felt Celia’s icy presence. She was joining the party. Mad tea party.

  “You can see your reflection in the wood,” I told him.

  “Go on.”

  “And there are five huge bathtubs in the bathroom, and you can see where they used to have lids on them. They put the bad girls in them and locked the lids on. Only their necks and heads stuck out.

  Celia moved inside me. “Stop it, Lindsay. He’s going to know.”

  “Hydrotherapy. They don’t do that sort of thing now.”

  “No. The lids are gone. But before, when we . . . when they were bad . . . ” I heard what I was saying and tried to turn it around. “The faucets in the tubs don’t work. We take showers.”

  “What else do you see when you look at Marlwood, walking down the path?”

  “Jessel. The other old building in Academy Quad. It has four turrets and a lake view. It’s supposed to be haunted,” I blurted, before I realized what I was saying.

  “Do you think it’s haunted?”

  “Of cour
se not.” I don’t think it’s haunted. I know it’s haunted. “Mandy Winters lives there, with her friends.”

  “I’ve met her brother, Miles.”

  “They’re twins,” I said. I heard the tremor in my voice. I was sure he could hear it too.

  “Go on,” he prompted again. I relaxed a little. He wasn’t going to ask questions about the Winterses. He wouldn’t pry. Not yet, anyway. First he had to gain my trust. That was how it worked in therapy.

  “Past Academy Quad, there’s the commons, where we eat. There are around a hundred of us. Then the gym. And the library.” And the statue garden. I didn’t mention it. Someone had stalked me there. And it’s where I found Celia’s locket, given to her by David Abernathy a hundred years ago as a token of his love.

  Of course, he had given Belle an identical one . . .

  “There are some abandoned buildings, but those are off-limits.” Except for parties, and séances, and attempted murders. The lake house. The operating theater.

  “Don’t, don’t!” Celia protested.

  “Excuse me, what did you say?” he asked softly.

  I pressed my mouth shut. To distract myself, I gazed at the yellow circle of light on the wall, golden and warm as the sun. There were weeks at Marlwood when the sun hadn’t shone even for an hour. Gray, scary days, when the fog boiled off the lake and the birds wouldn’t land on the water. Where Mandy and her ally, Belle, tracked girls for the other ghosts to possess so they could try to kill Celia, through me.

  I shifted in my chair, barely able to keep still. I couldn’t tell him about any of that. I stared at the yellow circle.

  And suddenly, I was remembering my ride back to school with Troy. Driving up the Pacific Coast Highway as surfers rode the waves and Troy grinned at me, tanned, his eyes an unearthly blue. Dimples. Freckles. And the best kisses, ever. Then he dropped the bomb two hours before we were scheduled to arrive on campus: he was still Mandy’s boyfriend. Despite his promise to break up with her—a promise I had not asked him to make—he hadn’t. Kiyoko had died, and Mandy was so torn up about it that he hadn’t had the heart to add more agony to her life.