by Hannah Jayne
At some point, Brynna slipped back into her clothes and someone called her mother. She remembered everyone being silent, everyone watching as she hiked up her shoulder bag. In the locker room, Lauren linked arms with Brynna, ready to steer her toward the hall. Her lips felt numb.
“I just freaked out.”
She felt Lauren squeeze her arm. “It’s okay. Do you want to talk about it? Talk about what—”
Brynna wagged her head, the stink of chlorine in her hair making her nauseous. “Do you think Darcy hates me?”
“I don’t hate you, B,” came a voice from the back of the locker room. “You can tell us what’s going on.”
Brynna looked at the faces of her new friends, both drawn, both concerned. She wanted to talk—but what could she say? My best friend is dead, really dead, because of me. I thought she was alive, was after me, but it was all in my head. I saw her in the pool today, but it was all in my head…
She pressed her palms to her ears as if she could quiet the chatter that kept going, the constant stream that told her she was crazy, crazy, crazy, and broken, that she would never be fixed, that she would always pay. Her own mind was her enemy, splashing up pictures of Erica, bringing up that moment, that night, the dare.
“I don’t know,” she said thinly. “I just—I thought Darcy was someone else.” It felt like a betrayal to Erica, but it was all Brynna could say to keep herself afloat.
Her mother arrived with that same pinched look that Brynna knew from before—the one that was constantly worried, constantly blaming herself for the things her crazy daughter did. Brynna wanted to reach out and pat her shoulder, to tell her mother that none of it was her fault, but she couldn’t. Her limbs felt stiff and immobile and she rested her head against the cool glass of the passenger window as her mother drove her home in silence.
When they reached the house, Brynna made a direct line for the door and from there toward the stairs, but her mother stopped her, her hand tight on Brynna’s.
“Honey, was this about Erica?”
A maniacal giggle gurgled up and Brynna fought it back. “Of course it was about Erica,” she wanted to scream. “Everything is always going to be about Erica.” But instead she stayed silent.
Her mother rubbed her hand. “That’s over now, Bryn. Erica is going to be laid to rest. She’s at peace.”
She smiled as though she actually believed it, and Brynna nodded then shook her hand free and headed up the stairs. She washed the chlorine stink out of her hair then slipped into her bed, pulling the comforter up over her head. She wanted the darkness. She wanted to sleep. She wanted to be wherever Erica was if only so that Erica would stop coming after her, would stop making her feel so goddamn crazy.
Even if that meant she had to die.
Brynna kicked off the covers and went to her bathroom, yanking open the medicine cabinet. She pawed through everything in there—some old makeup, a few boxes of Bioré pore strips, and some hair gel—but there was nothing there that would soothe her. She stepped into the hallway, hearing her mother popping off plastic take-out lids. Brynna crossed the threshold into her parents’ room and went directly to their medicine cabinets.
Her mother’s was stripped clean other than a box of hair dye and some Tums; her father’s had even less.
“There’s got to be…” she muttered under her breath while pain pounded a steady drumbeat against her skull. Brynna went through the bathroom drawers and found exactly two aspirin in a tiny pillbox. She popped them in her mouth and chewed, liking the bitter taste of the chalky things as they splintered under her molars. She dug in the same drawer and came out with a bottle of Nyquil, the safety seam already broken. The warning on the bottle said everything Brynna wanted: extreme drowsiness.
She could sleep.
If she could sleep, she couldn’t feel Erica. She couldn’t feel crazy. She couldn’t feel anything at all. She twisted open the cap, tilted her head back, and drank every last bit.
•••
“Brynna! Brynna! B!”
A boy was saying her name. He was touching her too, his fingers pressing hot spots onto her bare shoulders. She smiled at him and tried to speak, but her tongue was stuck up against the roof of her mouth and it was so heavy, too heavy. She didn’t need to speak though, because he saw her and she could see him too. Sandy hair, bright eyes, fuzzy all around the edges.
“Brynna, can you hear me?”
There was a shriek, like seagulls, and the sun was too warm, making Brynna break out into a damp, cool sweat, but she nodded her head because she could hear him. Her head felt heavy too. Heavy and oversized and nodding, it took monumental effort and shot another round of heat, another round of beaded sweat at her hairline and above her upper lip. She wondered who the boy was.
She told him she was going to close her eyes. She heard her own voice even though she couldn’t feel her lips move, and she knew, somehow, that the boy agreed with her and would keep her safe. She told him her stomach hurt. He told her it would be okay.
THIRTEEN
It was the buzzing that woke Brynna up. It was constant and excessive, and Brynna couldn’t tell if it was inside her head or outside. Inside, she guessed, because her head ached like nothing else had before, a constant, sickening pulse that shot nauseating waves to her gut.
“Ugh,” she moaned. “Ughhh…” Her body felt foreign and restrained. Something pinched at her arm, and her hand—just one of them though—was ice cold. It made her fingertips hurt.
“Brynna?”
Her mother was at the side of her bed, and Brynna liked the cool feel as she pressed her palm against Brynna’s cheek. “Oh, thank god, Brynna.”
“She’s awake?”
Brynna finally pulled her eyes open, but it was like blinking through a thick coating of Elmer’s glue.
“Mom? Dad?” Her parents were blurry blobs in front of her. They swirled and straightened and then the details came into view. Her mother’s face, drawn, pale. Her father, his cheeks ruddy and purplish, his eyes glazed.
“Don’t try and move. Don’t try and do anything.”
Brynna shifted in her bed and then looked around. “Am I—is this the hospital?”
“Where the hell else did you expect to end up?”
“Adam, stop!”
Brynna watched her mother bat at her father and then block him from her view. “Brynna, honey, if you were having problems, you could tell us. If you were so unhappy.”
“I don’t understand—why—” Brynna paused, the whole ordeal flooding back to her.
“You drank a whole bottle of Nyquil, Bryn. And you took pills.”
“And whose fault is that, Adam? Why were those even in the house? You know she’s an addict. We don’t keep temptation in the house!”
Brynna broke out in a cold sweat, her stomach twisting in knots. “Stop! Stop it you, guys! Please!”
Her parents turned as if they just realized she was in the room. Brynna opened her mouth and then closed it when there was a knock at the door. A nurse poked her head in, smiled warmly at Brynna and said, “Your friend is here to see you.”
“One second, please.”
“It was an accident,” Brynna whispered, feeling tears at the edges of her eyes. “I didn’t mean to. It was an accident.”
Her father sighed but looked resigned. Her mother wouldn’t look at her at all.
“We’ll talk about this with Dr. Rother later,” was all her mother said as they followed the nurse out the door.
“I didn’t mean to interrupt—” Brynna heard from the hallway.
She perked up, surprised as the little blond came into her room. Darcy’s pale features looked even more washed out under the harsh fluorescent lights. She shifted the miniature rose she was holding from one hand to the other before she placed it on Brynna’s nightstand. Brynna instinctively pulled her blanket u
p to her chin, trying to hide she didn’t know what, wondering how much Darcy knew.
“Hey, Darcy,” she said.
“If it blooms, they’re supposed to be yellow,” Darcy said, gesturing to the plant. “You know, the color of friendship or whatever. And the balloon is cheesy but it came with.”
Brynna glanced at the mini Mylar balloon, a Blue’s Clues knock-off barking “Being Sick is Ruff!” She broke into a soft smile.
“It’s great, thanks.”
“So, I’m sorry about the pool.”
Brynna blinked. “The pool? I was the one who dive-bombed you.”
“No. I know you were just trying to help…because you thought I was drowning or whatever. I wasn’t, but that was nice of you. So thanks.”
Brynna felt the blood rush to her cheeks and was certain that her vitals would pick up the spike in her blood pressure. She had plunged into the pool to rescue a perfectly adequate swimmer, and then she went catatonic in the shallow end.
“I guess you think I’m kind of a freak, huh?” She played with the satin edging on the pale yellow blanket.
“It doesn’t matter what I think.”
The girls each studied opposite walls for a beat before Darcy, without turning, spoke. “I know you were there that night.”
Brynna held her breath, her eyes wide and fastening to Darcy’s profile.
“I know what happened to you.”
Brynna’s lips felt like they wouldn’t work, and this time it wasn’t because of the Nyquil. “Wh—what are you talking about, Darcy?”
Darcy turned to face her. “At Point Lobos. The night your friend died. I know that you were there.”
Brynna felt her mouth fall open.
“Don’t worry.” Darcy rushed up close. “I’m not going to say anything about it. It’s just that your name sounded familiar. My dad is a photojournalist. He was there that whole month. I help him develop his pictures, and I saw—I remember you.”
Brynna felt a chill that had nothing to do with the weather. “What?”
“My dad told me what happened. That a girl, about my age, jumped off the pier and didn’t come back up. He told me that girl did it with a friend but she survived.” Darcy’s eyes flashed with something, and Brynna didn’t know if she should feel relieved that someone knew her secret or terrified that someone was going to call her a murderer.
“I didn’t recognize you at first. You changed your hair color and your cut.” Darcy absently brushed her fingers through her own thin blond hair. “And I knew I recognized you but I just couldn’t place you. Until today.”
Brynna’s saliva soured and she swallowed it down, her stomach feeling hollow from when they pumped it and desperately achy. If she had the strength—and wasn’t hooked up to all the buzzing, beeping machines—she would run out of the room, straight past Darcy and her parents pointing fingers at each other, straight back to the pier at Point Lobos. She would crash into the water and welcome the riptide when its fingers wrapped around her and pulled her under, tumbling her along in a pitch-black abyss.
“You said her name.” Darcy’s eyes looked dreamy. “Erica, right? It was Erica.”
Everything inside of Brynna was pulsing, moving, throbbing. She thought about the tweet, about Erica in the coffeehouse. Could Darcy be responsible?
“You jumped in without a second thought, thinking I was her.”
“I—I—”
“You must have really loved her. Erica.”
“I did. I do. She’s my best friend.”
“So why did you come here?”
Brynna’s blood pressure stared to come down. She started to feel a modicum of calm as Darcy sat in the visitor’s chair by Brynna’s bedside.
Brynna licked her lips, pressing her top teeth against her bottom lip. “My parents wanted me to leave. I got—I was—it was really hard for me after Erica.” Her eyes flicked to Darcy’s, trying to read them, but Darcy’s still held that glossy, dreamy look. “It wasn’t like I wanted to go.”
Darcy dragged her long, elegant fingers up the length of the chair’s armrest, her head cocked as she listened to Brynna.
“It must have been hard for you.”
“Yeah.”
“Leaving her behind like that.”
Brynna’s attention snapped like a broken rubber band. “What did you say?”
“Knock knock!” The overly cheery nurse poked her head through Brynna’s door a millisecond after she knocked. “Visiting hours are over, honey,” she said to Darcy.
Darcy hopped up while Brynna tried to process the last fifteen seconds. “What do you mean by—”
But Darcy had already left with a halfhearted good-bye while the nurse poked around Brynna, trying to fluff up her pillow. When the nurse shut the door, Brynna was left with the faint smell of the miniature rose and Darcy’s last words turning over and over in her mind: “It must have been hard for you…leaving her behind like that.”
•••
Four days passed uneventfully, but Brynna still found it hard to breathe. She wanted to think that “Erica” had gotten tired of her or had moved on to someone else, but she couldn’t quite believe that. Her parents were keeping a tight leash on her, dropping her at school, picking her up the minute the bell rang, and surreptitiously sniffing at her hair and clothing for telltale cigarette smoke or general drug odor when they thought she wasn’t paying attention. She had to present her backpack and purse upon coming and going and grit her teeth while her father pawed through it, his own breath a noxious combination of smoky scotch and Crest that she wasn’t supposed to notice.
On the fifth day, Brynna dumped her backpack at the usual checkpoint, but her parents still circled around her like nervous sharks, unsure if they were predator or prey.
“What?” Brynna asked, her head snapping first to her father then her mother.
“Come into the living room, please.” Her mother sounded strangely formal and even seemed to walk with a more careful step. Brynna looked over her shoulder as her father followed behind.
“What’s going on?”
Her mother stepped aside with what would have been a tah-dah! if the item on the table were something that Brynna should have been excited about. But all it did was make her stomach sink and resigned her to knowing that no matter what she did, no matter what was happening, she would always be a drug addict and her parents would never stop second-guessing, never stop wondering how they could have protected her better.
“You’re giving me a drug test?”
Her father edged in front of Brynna and started yanking open the little cardboard box on the kitchen table. He turned and presented her the “sample” cup, and Brynna shrank back, remembering those first humiliating days at Woodbriar Rehabilitation Center.
Brynna woke up and stepped out of bed. There really was no reason to get dressed, although the nurses here at “Hugs Not Drugs,” as some of the other patients called it, encouraged them to get back to their daily routine—the parts of it that didn’t include getting drunk or high—as much as possible.
She shimmied into a hospital-approved robe, startlingly white, like everything else in the place, and was met in the doorway by Marcus, the orderly. He was two whole heads taller than Brynna and had forearms like giant hams. Faded tattoos were barely visible on his dark skin, and he looked every bit like he could crush you with a stare. Marcus was linebacker big and bald, and had the softest, sweetest voice Brynna had ever heard. He was getting off duty when she came in last night, but he was the one who put her instantly at ease. Louise, the night warden, was sour and pinched, and for every one of Marcus’s soft, doughy folds, she was angled and sharp, wearing her disdain for her charges as plainly as she wore her uniform.
“Hey, Marcus,” Brynna said softly.
His face broke into a wide, easy grin. “How’d the first night go, Sleeping B
eauty?”
Truthfully, Brynna wasn’t sure she’d slept at all. She remembered staring at the industrial ceiling above her, watching the way the raindrops cast murky, gray-blue shadows against the ceiling tiles.
“Okay, I guess.” She pointed to the ladies’ room across the hall. “I’ve got to go to the bathroom.”
“No problem.” Marcus turned around and fiddled in his cart, then Brynna heard him mumble something into the miniature walkie-talkie that all the Woodbriar nurses had clipped to their shoulders.
Brynna took a step into the hallway, and he held up one meaty palm to stop her. “Escort’s not here yet. And you need this.”
She looked down incredulously as Marcus placed a little plastic cup in her hand. Heat shot through her, and her mouth went dry as she blinked at the man in front of her.
Marcus gestured toward the cup. “You know the rules. Every morning.”
Brynna tensed at the thought of locking herself in the bathroom, peeing into that stupid cup, and—what? Handing a full cup of urine to Marcus? Humiliation hummed through her body, and she wanted to sink into the shiny white laminate underneath her. A woman Brynna didn’t recognize came strolling down the hall with a neon-green bungee keychain wrapped around her wrist. She paused in front of the women’s restroom, sunk her key in the lock, and opened the door a foot. “You coming?”
Brynna looked at the specimen cup in her hand. She looked at Marcus with his eyes that suddenly didn’t look so soft anymore. She looked at the woman, her “escort,” guarding the threshold to the bathroom.
And she wondered how it was that she had gotten herself here.
Brynna took the cup from her father’s hand. All she ever wanted at Woodbriar was to come home. But now home was just like rehab.