The Screaming Season

by Nancy Holder

  “Not him!”

  I looked into his eyes . . . I tried to look into his eyes. His head was blocking the moon and his features were masked by shadow. His breathing sounded different.

  His hands around my neck tightened.

  Oh, my God, oh, God. I whimpered.

  A little tighter. He was beginning to cut off my air, and he lowered his face toward me. He was humming under his breath. I tried to knee him, but I was pinned.

  He put his mouth over mine.

  In my mind, Celia screamed, and screamed, and screamed.

  “Not him!”

  And I bit him.

  “Ow!” he yelled, letting go of me, stumbling backward. He put his hands over his mouth and pivoted in a circle. “Ow!”

  I pushed past him, flying down the path. I knew I should scream, but I couldn’t utter a sound. God, God, God . . . I was heaving, running faster than I ever had in my life, faster even than when Belle and the other spirits had come after me outside the operating theater, hell-bent on murdering me.

  And Miles shouted after me, “Why the hell did you do that ?”

  I kept running.

  “I found the messenger bag, you ninny! That was my surprise. And I found something else!”

  “I don’t care!”

  I thought I was yelling, but not even I could hear myself. I was crying and stumbling over my feet, racing back to the dorm.

  “I want out of here, I want out,” I whispered. I tasted Miles’s blood on my lip and spit on the back of my hand.

  I stumbled onto our porch and pushed open our front door. Julie was standing with Ms. Krige, holding the remains of the white head in her arms. Both of them stared at me as I skidded to a stop. Ms. Krige looked alarmed, and Julie was near tears.

  “How could you do it?” she demanded.

  I looked from her to Ms. Krige, then back to her. I took a step toward her.

  “Julie, I didn’t break that.”

  “I found this.” She held up the crescent moon pendant.

  “Yeah, I lost it. Someone took it,” I emphasized. “Probably whoever broke the head. And I—”

  “I don’t care about the stupid head,” she said, cutting me off. “But of course you knew that. How could you?” Her eyes were glittering. Our housemother stood a little closer to her.

  I was baffled. Then Julie held the head out to me, and I reluctantly peered inside.

  Her little stuffed corgi, Panda, lay in tatters. He looked like a bird’s nest. One little black eye stared up at me.

  “Why on earth would I do that?” I said. “Rose took your head without asking.”

  Julie turned away, sniffing. I held out my hand to her. When she ignored it, I put it on her shoulder. She stiffened as if at a horrible violation. Like me with Miles.

  Ms. Krige said, “I told Julie you would never do something like this.”

  “But she would,” Julie shouted, whirling back around. “She’s crazy! Everyone knows it!”

  “No.” Wounded, I folded my arms across my chest. Hugged myself.

  “I don’t want to share a room with her anymore,” Julie said. “I want her to move out!”

  She turned on her heel and ran toward our room. Correction: her room. She had invited me to share it with her when I’d gotten accepted late. It was her first time away from home and she was anxious. Plus, her parents would get a rate reduction. But it was her room. She could kick me out if she wanted.

  “Ms. Krige,” I said, “I didn’t ruin her things. I swear it.”

  “I know, honey,” Ms. Krige assured me. She liked me. She’d tried to warn me about how mean some of my classmates could be, especially toward an outsider like me. But Julie had always been there, sweet and thoughtful, my friend.

  “Do you know who did do it?” I asked the older woman.

  She hesitated. “No. But I’m sure we’ll find out, and the guilty will be punished.”

  I almost told her then that Miles Winters had been in our room. But it was Julie’s room now.

  “Claire has asked if she can move into Ida’s room,” she said, in a tone that said she didn’t entirely approve. “Would you like to move into hers?” The haunted room. But weren’t all the rooms in our dorm haunted?

  “Sure,” I said.

  My housemother looked relieved. I’m sure she didn’t want any of this happening on her watch.

  “Thank you, dear,” she said. “I’ll have someone help you pack.”

  I SKIPPED DINNER and Ms. Krige herself helped me pack. I was moving from a room with a perfect view of Jessel and the quad to a room with no view at all. No windows. It was unbelievably dark.

  Luckily, I didn’t have that much to move—I had brought everything in a couple of suitcases and a cheesy plastic backpack, while the other girls had sent large trunks ahead. They were called steamer trunks, and in some cases, they had been in their families for generations. Marlwood might be a new boarding school, but most of my schoolmates had been to boarding schools before. People were trying Marlwood out. I wondered how many would come back next year, with all our bad press. That had to be why Dr. Ehrlenbach had still not returned.

  Ms. Krige and I finished carrying the last of my books into the dreary room. Claire hadn’t taken down her Hawaiian art prints from her mother’s gallery yet, but I didn’t mind them, no matter that they were kitschy. I didn’t have any posters for my walls.

  “Can I help you unpack?” Ms. Krige asked as we set down the box of books. She looked sweaty and tired. She was getting up there.

  “No, that’s okay,” I said.

  She smiled and walked out of the room and I sat on the bed. I knew it was dark outside, but it was as dark as a basement in my new room. I wanted to close my eyes, see if I could smell geraniums, but I was afraid to. I had no idea how I would ever get to sleep.

  Then Ms. Krige walked back in. She knocked gently on the door and poked in her head.

  “Dr. Morehouse says he’s had a cancellation and he’d like to see you tonight,” she said.

  I wondered if he’d been informed of what had happened. If I were being summoned to explain why, under stress, I destroyed other people’s property.

  I put on my army jacket and went outside. As I headed up the path, I saw Mandy walking with the rest of the Jessel girls. Spotting me, she gave me a wave. Other girls—Jessel and non-Jessel girls alike—took note and elbowed each other, surreptitiously watching us.

  I wished that we had ESP, instead of being possessed by each other’s mortal enemies. And just as I wished that, Mandy broke from her pack and trotted up the hill, to me.

  “I heard what happened,” she said breathlessly. “You broke that head and Julie booted you.”

  “That’s not what happened. Booted me, yes, but I didn’t do it. And I didn’t shred her little stuffed dog. But I have some big news for you.”

  “Hey, Mandy, c’mon.” Lara climbed the hill, making a show of huffing, and put her hands on her hips. “We’ll start the movie without you.”

  “Go ahead,” Mandy told her, gazing regally at her over her shoulder. “I care not.” She turned back to me. “What?”

  Lara hadn’t budged. She stared straight at me, as if she still couldn’t believe that this month, I was in. As far as social acceptability at Mandy’s lofty level went, I bounced in and out like a pogo stick. With all the cozying up and whispering we were doing, Lara’s position as Mandy’s second in command looked to be less stable than before.

  “Can’t tell you now,” I said. “But we’ve got to talk.”

  “Conservatory, elevenish,” she whispered.

  “Okay.”

  Then I turned and headed for the admin building, wondering if Miles was still there.

  Wondering what I would do if he was.

  TWENTY

  WIND WHIPPED THE trees and threw shadows on the walls of the admin building as I walked to my appointment. The shape of a man appeared here, there, but no one was really there. I began to wonder if I’d actually seen
a man in Mandy’s room. Stare into the abyss long enough, and it stared back at you.

  Professionally pleasant, Dr. Morehouse let me in and walked me into Dr. Ehrlenbach’s office. He was wearing a dark green sweater with the Marlwood logo embroidered on the front. She’d kept the office very cold; he had a space heater, and I settled in as it dissipated my chill.

  “Would you like some tea?” he asked me.

  I said yes; he went to get it. I leaned forward and cocked my head to the left, trying to see the crack in the wall where I did my spying. It wasn’t visible; I relaxed a little, assuring myself that he wasn’t on to me.

  He brought in the tea—peppermint, and then sat behind Dr. Ehrlenbach’s highly polished wood desk. I saw that my hand was shaking, set the tea down, and folded my hands in my lap.

  “Bad day,” he said.

  “Yours or mine?”

  He pulled a sympathetic adult-as-friend expression. “I know Julie asked you to move out.”

  “I didn’t break her head or rip up her dog.”

  “I didn’t think you had,” he said. “It hurts to be unjustly accused, no?” He wasn’t going to waste any time with small talk tonight. Maybe he was tired. Or he figured I needed extra help stat.

  I inhaled the scent of peppermint. “Yes,” I said. “It sucks.”

  “Especially when people who do terrible things seem to get away with them repeatedly.” He drank his tea. “You’re one of the smartest girls in this school, Lindsay. If I ever seem to patronize you, I apologize.”

  Accepting what amounted to a compliment, I managed to steady my hand enough to pick up my tea. I was hurting. Scared.

  “You’ve had a lot of disappointments. Losses. Boys, your mom, now Julie. None of it through anything you did.” I set down my cup and watched the steam. Evaporation was what I was all about.

  “Julie wanted a roommate because she was scared to be alone,” I said. “But I just made her more scared.”

  “And you’re wounded by that.” He regarded me over the rim of his teacup. “And if these wounds aren’t taken care of, they become scars. So let’s take care of them.”

  That sounded ominous. Cupping my hands around my cup, I resettled in my chair. “Okay.”

  “Let’s begin at the beginning.” He smiled kindly. “Get it out in the open, so you can move on. I know you’ve been to other therapists, and you’ve done a lot of work. So this should be easy.”

  “Okay,” I said again.

  “I want to take you back to when your mother was sick. You tried very hard to get her to try more aggressive treatment. You live in San Diego. There are all kinds of high-tech biomed companies there, running experimental drug trials, inventing new surgical methods.”

  “She didn’t want to,” I murmured, but a flash of anger ran across the backs of my eyelids.

  “Your father said that she didn’t want to, am I right?” He drank his tea. “He told you not to bring it up.”

  She would have listened to me if she’d had the chance, I thought. But she let him take over. She did what he said. And he said not to try.

  He said not to try. I was trembling.

  “Do you think that if your mother had stood up to your father, she’d be alive today?”

  “Whoa.” I took a breath and sat back. “My dad is a good guy.”

  “It’s what you think,” he said gently. “Deep down. How you feel. It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. It’s your reality, inside your mind.”

  “He did what he thought was right,” I said, but we both knew that was what I thought I was supposed to say. What my other therapists had told me. Dr. Morehouse was the only one who actually listened.

  “You couldn’t save her. From the cancer. From him.” I drank more tea. It was too hot. I drank it anyway.

  “They wanted us to talk about our anger,” I said. “Especially the social worker at the hospital.”

  “Who probably used all the finesse of a cattle prod.”

  He was proud, my Dr. Morehouse. He thought he was better than that social worker. And he was. I had listened to him draw out the secrets of the other girls and make them deal with them. He would help me. Maybe he could exorcise me. Celia had picked me because I matched her in so many ways. But if I changed, would she move on?

  “So, your mother dies. And then, you try to put your life together. You’re mad at your father, but you can’t say that. So you turn away and try to start over. You make new friends. You have a new boyfriend. Riley. And let’s talk about what he did.”

  I sat in silence. I didn’t want to talk about it. It was too humiliating.

  “This is what you’re haunted by,” he said. “You think your anger at your father is acceptable, even admirable, because it’s on behalf of your mother. But being mad at Riley seems, what?” He opened his hand to me, as if to say, You’re on. It was time for me to make him look even better.

  “Pointless. It was just a crush.”

  “It was a betrayal.”

  “People our age hook up. They move on.” I tried to sound philosophical. It was what Jane had told me, afterward. She had expected me to get over it. All her lectures about using boys and never caring for them had zinged right over my head. I had unleashed my inner drama queen when I found out that she’d slept with him just for fun.

  People hook up. They move on. That was what she’d said to me when we ran into each other at the park, after my breakdown.

  She also said that people who had breakdowns were weak. They bailed out of their problems by going crazy and forced other people to pick up their pieces. My breakdown annoyed her. And it cast doubt on her ability to pick the right people to allow in her presence.

  “You really liked him. You gave him your heart.”

  “Yes,” Celia said inside me. I jerked. He noticed.

  “Are you all right?”

  I cleared my throat. “Yes.”

  “Tell me about that night.” He leaned forward, giving me his attention.

  “Jane wanted me to throw a party. I didn’t want to, but I did it.”

  And I told him all the rest. About worrying about the broken glassware, and the carpet, and the noise. Knowing my dad hadn’t really wanted me to throw a party but was happy that I had a social life, so he let me do it. But people were OOC. At Jane’s, they followed the rules: cleaning up as they went, being respectful of her family’s things. At my house, not so much.

  Someone had announced that my dad’s car was in the driveway, so the partyers had to terminate any nonapproved activity, including the couple—whoever they were—who had locked themselves in my parents’ bedroom.

  When the bedroom door had opened and Jane and Riley stood there arm in arm, Jane had tittered and said, “Whoops.” She had slept with him in my parents’ room, on the throw I had knitted for my mother. Riley had the decency to look shocked and ashamed, as if he couldn’t believe what he’d just done.

  But I had heard laughter through the door, before I’d known who was doing the deed. He hadn’t been shocked and ashamed then.

  I had known I was supposed to step aside and let Jane have him if she wanted him. But she didn’t want him. Wanting a boy implied you thought they had value.

  “You fault yourself for taking this relationship seriously,” Dr. Morehouse said. “You weren’t sophisticated enough not to care.”

  Jane had laughed at me. All the girls had. She’d said I was too young to hang out with “her babies.” And when I had refused to speak to Riley, she said I didn’t really care about him. If I had, I would have fought to get him back.

  “You equate not fighting for this boy with the battle your father refused to fight for your mother. You think that if he’d loved her enough, he’d have done more to keep her.”

  “Whoa,” I said again.

  “And this disappointment runs very deeply. It’s a wound you’ve been ridiculed for having, and that you’ve been told is inappropriate.

  “And now, another boy has betrayed you.”


  He meant Troy. “Not really,” I murmured. “All he did was break up with me.”

  “To the heart, that’s a betrayal,” he said. “We’re dealing with feelings, not rationale.”

  “Betrayal,” Celia said. “By men.” I felt itchy, as if Celia were scratching from the inside, trying to burrow her way out.

  He raised a brow and cocked his head. “I’m sorry. I didn’t catch that.”

  “I—I didn’t say anything.”

  Itchy, and overloaded. Too full. Brimming over.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “You’re safe in here.”

  “I am not safe.”

  And something in me blew. Everything I had been dealing with—or trying to deal with—overwhelmed me. It was too much, all too much; I started sobbing. My mind jumped from my father to Riley to Troy to Miles.

  And from there, to David Abernathy:

  It was December, and there was snow. The girls were freezing. They had no blankets. They were dressed in linen shifts, in preparation for the operation. They were moved through the tunnels so they wouldn’t sound the alarm. There were secret tunnels everywhere, to make them disappear. So the other girls, the lucky girls, wouldn’t panic and scream.

  David and Celia had planned the escape. She would start the fire, as a diversion. They would help everyone out, he and the orderly, Mr. Truscott. And the horrible lobotomies and the starvation and the inhuman living conditions would end. There would be no stain on his record of service, and she would be spared.

  He and she would escape together and be married, and no one would take her from him. Because she would be his, plucked like a rose from her father’s garden.

  “My love is like a red, red rose,” he sang as they made their plans. As he kissed her and promised her that true love would win the day.

  Stealthily, she stole the lamp oil that was left out—not realizing at the time that he was the one who left it for her—and the oily rags, and she hid them in her cell. She and the others were scheduled for the surgeries the next morning—Belle Johnson would be first, and Celia would be number seven.

  But Celia would start the fires and save them all, even Belle, whom she despised for trying to take her David from her. Belle, who had tried to murder her in the hydrotherapy bath because she stood between Belle herself and David.