But now when I walked in the kitchen, the fullness to the room was suffocating. Like his arms, wrapped around me, squeezing and squeezing until I was short of breath and then out of breath. I felt the word whispered throughout the room, grazing the exposed skin on my arms, my legs, my neck. Mine, it whispered. This one’s mine.
I shivered and grabbed a slice of pizza from the dining room table and took it to my room. I packed a second suitcase. My flip-flops and shorts and frayed jeans. My toothbrush and cell phone charger and sleeping pills. The essentials.
Then I swallowed a sleeping pill and waited. It sucked me down into the mattress, my limbs heavy and sluggish. And as I waited, I stared at the ceiling fan, same as every night. I looked straight upward so I wouldn’t catch a glimpse of his shadow beside my closet door, his outline on the curve of my dresser. I kept the comforter pulled up to my chin so I wouldn’t feel his breath against my neck. The word “mine” whispered onto my skin.
I heard it coming, same as every night. Far away at first. Downstairs somewhere.
Boom, boom, boom.
Coming closer. Slow and steady, in that place between sleep and wake. Like I was half hearing, half imagining.
I couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer. I didn’t want to, anyway.
Because it was here.
Boom, boom, boom.
My whole room throbbed with it.
The beating of his hideous heart.
And then there was nothing but the dream. Same as every night. One moment, stretched out to fill the hours. A breath. A blink. Infinity in a heartbeat.
Amber eyes clouding with confusion. A raspy voice pleading, “Mallory, wait.” The word “no” dying on his mouth.
The blood on the floor, the blood on my hands.
The door as I pushed through it, staining it red.
The dark. The night.
Even in my dream I ran.
I always ran.
CHAPTER 2
There were voices downstairs. Familiar, but not. It took me a second to place them. The new tightness in my mother’s voice, the way she squeezed her words out of her throat. And my father, who spoke too deliberately. Like every line had been rehearsed before he released it for consumption.
I swung my legs out of bed and jerked myself upright, steadying myself against the wall. Then I tiptoed into the hall and waited at the top of the stairs.
“Call the police, Bill.”
“And tell them what exactly? We can’t prove anything.”
“She’s supposed to stay two hundred yards away. Two hundred yards. That’s what the restraining order is for.”
“You don’t know it was her.”
Her. The word lodged in the base of my skull, sent chills across my shoulders. I gripped the stair rail and ran down the steps, feeling the wood grains bite at my palm. I stood at the kitchen entrance, back door swung wide open. Open, so I could see the outside of the door. The weathered white now stained a mottled purple, tiny globs of flesh clinging to the smears. Near the edges, the smears spread out in distinct lines, like being dragged by fingers.
My parents noticed me hovering in the entranceway, and Dad moved his body in front of the door so I couldn’t see.
“Don’t worry, Mallory,” Dad said. “It’s not what you think. It’s not blood.”
But I already knew that. It looked nothing like blood. It looked like blueberries. Which was how I knew it was her.
I’d met Brian’s mom before. Just once. She didn’t really like me. Well, she liked me at first, and then she didn’t. I’d met Brian at sunrise that June morning so he could teach me to surf. That’s where I met his friends Joe and Sammy for the first time. They liked me at first too. More than his mom. They liked me all the way up until the day I killed him.
So we surfed. Or they did, anyway. Turned out Brian didn’t really want to teach me. He wanted me to watch him surf. And then he wanted me to lie on his board while he floated next to me, tracing circles on my back.
“New Girl coming to breakfast?” Joe asked when we were all back on the sand. Joe and Sammy both had this dark hair that got impossibly darker in the water. They were twins, but easy to tell apart. Joe was bigger and his nose was crooked from a fight.
“We’ll meet you there,” Brian said, snaking an arm around my waist. “Gotta swing by home to get my wallet.”
“I hope New Girl likes grease,” Sammy said. “New Girl doesn’t look like she eats bacon.”
“New Girl loves bacon,” I said. As long as it was chopped into microscopic pieces and sprinkled on a salad. Except for today. Today, I’d eat it, swallowing my nausea along with the grease.
And with that, Brian led me to his home. At the time I thought maybe it meant something. But it probably only meant he needed his wallet.
Brian’s house was more like mine than Colleen’s. Big, open, airy. White. Everything echoed. The grinding blender echoed through the hallway, then wound down to silence. “Who’s there?” someone called from down the hall.
“Just me, Mom.”
He walked toward the kitchen, pulling me behind. Brian’s mom was scooping blueberries into the top of the blender. She was blond and kind of stocky, and she’d probably been pretty when she was younger. But now she poofed her hair too much and slathered foundation on too thick, which settled into the lines in her face. She reached out to hug Brian but kept her hands out to the sides. “Careful,” she said, “it’ll stain.”
Her palms were a mix of purple and blue swirls. “And who’s this?”
“Mallory,” I said.
“Mallory. I’m Paula. Nice to meet you. Would you like a smoothie?”
I started to decline but Brian spoke for me. “Going out for breakfast.”
Brian reached into the strainer in the sink and pulled out a handful of blueberries, popping them into his mouth. His fingertips were purple. His mom—Paula—shook her head. “Don’t let him touch your white shirt with that hand.” Shirt was kind of an overstatement. It was a tank top, tight, nearly transparent, so anyone could see the detailing on the top of my pink bikini. I folded my arms across my stomach.
Brian grinned, reached his fist into the colander again, and squeezed a handful of berries. His hand came out coated in purple. He walked toward me, smiling. I backed up against the wall, looking from him to his mother. “Brian, leave the poor girl alone.”
But he didn’t. He leaned into the wall, blocking me in, which was way too intimate for his mother to see, and apparently she agreed because she looked away. He whispered, “Won’t hurt a bit.” Then he pressed his right hand around my upper arm, leaving behind a tattoo of his imprint.
And seeing as Paula was pretending we weren’t there and had her head in the refrigerator, I strode to the sink, squeezed the cool berries in my hand, felt the juice coat my fingers, and planted my hand on his upper arm.
“You own me now,” he’d said, and he grabbed the bottom of my shirt, balled it up, and pulled me toward him. It was stained now, I was sure. I squirmed away from him, because his mother was right there, and also because he was ruining my shirt.
I turned my back to him and washed my hands in the sink. And then I felt him beside me, sharing the same water.
Then a boy in nothing but boxers barged into the room. “What the—”
Paula spun around, cutting his sentence in half. “Dylan, this is Brian’s friend, Mallory.”
“Yeah, I know who it is. I’m just wondering why my lab partner from chemistry is in my kitchen at nine in the morning.” And there was another question lingering in the air as he cut his eyes from me to Brian.
Paula narrowed her eyes. “Your lab partner?”
I looked at the floor, not because of his mom’s question, but because of Dylan’s look. And because Dylan was in his boxers. With Brian standing right there. Like Brian might see something in the way Dylan was looking at us, or he might see something in the way that I was looking at Dylan. I leaned into Brian’s side, hoping it hurt Dylan to see.
>
It did. I could tell. “Seriously?” Dylan said. And I was worried he wasn’t going to stop there.
“Brian,” Paula said, “a word, please?”
Brian laughed and ran a hand through his hair. “Don’t worry, Mom. She’s eighteen. Right, Mallory? Tell my mom so she’ll get off my case.” I liked Brian. I liked Brian in the way that girls like boys when they see them surfing. And the way girls like boys slinging their arms over them in front of their friends. And I liked the way he reminded me of Dylan, only he was Dylan times two. More outspoken, easier to read. And best of all, he didn’t already have a girlfriend.
Maybe I’d come to like him more than that, but I didn’t know him well enough yet. We’d never crossed paths when we were in the same school, and he’d been away at college this past year. He’d be going back there soon enough. I was still New Girl, and he was still a little intimidating, which was something I wasn’t used to.
“Eighteen,” I said, my breath coming too fast. “I’m just pretty bad at science.”
Brian laughed at the lie and Dylan cringed, while Paula’s eyes moved from me to Dylan to Brian to me again. Like she was assessing my age, holding my face next to each of her children for comparison. I knew she could tell. I should’ve been with Dylan.
“I didn’t realize you guys knew each other,” Brian said.
“Just a little,” I answered, because after that first lie, the next came easy.
“Yeah,” Dylan said, like he was trying to mock me, but it didn’t come out right. I couldn’t understand how Brian didn’t notice. Probably because he didn’t pay that much attention to his little brother. Or maybe I had just spent way too long paying way too much attention to Dylan, trying to pull meaning from every shift of his expression. I was still doing it right then, trying to decipher his words: was there an inflection where there shouldn’t have been? Was he secretly directing his words at me? Was there meaning just below the casual phrase? I’d always thought there was. But maybe I’d been imagining it.
Brian planted a kiss on his mother’s cheek and pulled me down the hall again. And when I said good-bye, her mouth was a tight line. Her eyes creased. Her shoulders tensed. It was like, even then, she knew I’d somehow ruin his life.
She was right.
I’d marked him with my handprint. And two weeks later, he was dead.
Now she had marked me.
The stain on our door was dry. I picked up a rag from the sink, doused it in vinegar, and started rubbing. That’s how I got his handprint off my arm later that day. Brian kept his on. It took three days to fade.
“Stop,” my mother said as I scrubbed the back door. “Stop. The fingerprints. You’re ruining it.”
Seemed to me like I was fixing it.
Semantics.
Dad helped me scrub, but the stain wouldn’t budge. And the whole time, I felt this prickly feeling along my back, the kitchen charged with this energy, and it grew and grew until it felt like the entire room would burst from the tension.
I threw the rag on the floor and retreated to the living room. Dad said, “I’ll take care of this,” like it was up for discussion or something, and disappeared into the garage. He returned with a bucket of leftover white paint and applied a thick coat over the entire door before he left for work. I watched from the safety of the living room.
We had to leave the door open for the paint to dry, so Mom sat at the kitchen table, staring out the open door.
Mom used to fight to keep the doors open as soon as spring hit. “Let the outside in,” she’d say.
Dad would position himself in the entranceway, like he was doing the door’s job, and say, “The bugs, Lori.”
She’d turn to me and mouth the bugs, and I’d smile. “They won’t stay forever,” she promised. But Dad hated bugs. Stomped them with his work shoes, using twenty-thousand times the necessary force. Or he’d chase them around with a flyswatter, stalking them from room to room.
But he always caved to her. We both did. Everyone did. I think maybe it was her smile. Or maybe the way she’d laugh at you, but also kind of with you. Or the way she’d just declare something and expect that that would be the end of it.
But now she was terrified of what might come through open doors. Or open windows. Even unlocked bedroom doors.
The new version of my mother had two gears. One where she sat still and stared off into the distance, like now, and another where she fluttered unpredictably around the house, never making eye contact. She fluttered when she woke—paused through the middle of the day—and fluttered again before bed. She darted from window to window, diagonally across the room and back again, with no real pattern. She revisited the same window two, three times. She flipped the locks, open, closed. She turned the deadbolts, unlocked, locked. She checked the upstairs windows.
And three nights ago, I waited in the hall outside my bedroom door. I waited for her to finish and retreat into her room. I held out my hand to steady her, to ground her again. To make her look at me. I touched her elbow and she flinched. I drew back my arm.
Then she locked eyes with me for a fraction of a second and said, “Good night, Mallory,” backed into her bedroom, and shut the door.
And then she turned the lock.
That’s when I learned that hate is a funny thing. It can manifest out of nothing in an instant. It can jump from there to here. Like how Dylan taught me in chemistry, electrons jumping from cloud to cloud, never passing through empty space. It doesn’t take time to grow. It’s just not there. And then it is. Effortless.
So I backed into my bedroom, bubbling with hate, and turned my own lock.
After the paint on the back door was dry and my mother shut and locked it, she settled into her lifeless state. She was perched on the edge of the white sofa, staring through a crack in the lace curtains. Every time a car drove by, she’d suck in a breath and stare out the window even harder. I tried to see what she saw, but everything was muted by the white curtains. Filtered somehow. A little more abstract, a little less real.
There’s nothing ominous about white. White walls, white tiles, white furniture. It’s clean, pure, innocent. Nothing hides in white. Except sometimes when the sun is directly overhead, nothing casts a shadow. And it’s hard to tell where the wall ends and the floor begins. Like there’s just this expanse stretching outward, curving back around. Like there’s no depth perception. It feels like the opposite of claustrophobia.
“She’ll stop when I leave,” I said, standing behind her.
“I don’t . . .” No smile. No laugh. No declaration. Just this uncertainty. Half a sentence. I hated her for it. And suddenly I couldn’t stand the thought of seven hours in the car together. Of Mom staring out the window or maybe fidgeting with the lock, and Dad telling all these stories about his time at Monroe, hearing about so-and-so’s son or daughter, or so-and-so’s second cousin twice removed. Of saying these formal good-byes—all fake smiles and fake words and fake everything.
“I’m ready to go now.” But the words came out quiet and unsure.
She shook her head. “We’ll drive up together tomorrow.”
“I’ve taken the train before, you know.”
“Not that far. You’d have to switch lines in Boston and you’d be all alone . . .” Her voice trailed off at the word. I’d be alone for the entire school year.
“Your father’s at work,” she said.
I tried to think of how to appeal to her senses. “I’m scared,” I said, which, as it turned out, was the most honest thing I’d said to my mother in weeks.
She stayed silent, doing the staring-off-into-space thing. Then she snapped to attention, nodded vigorously, and grabbed the keys off the holder next to the front door.
We left.
I didn’t call Colleen. I didn’t leave a note for my father. I didn’t lean my head out the door and scream, “I’m leaving!” at Brian’s mom, wherever she was. I didn’t tell anyone. I just grabbed my bags and walked out the front door into the sti
fling heat. One last glance toward the kitchen, to the white spot on the floor.
Good-bye.
At the train station, Mom handed me several twenties. Then she leaned across the center console, a halfhearted attempt at a halfhearted hug. “Be good, Mallory love,” she whispered into my ear.
It was the type of thing she’d never said to me before. It was the type of thing she never felt the need to remind me of before.
I felt the hate again, flashing from nowhere. Light off. Light on.
And then I walked away from the car.
My hands shook as I handed the money to the cashier. I didn’t know why. Colleen and I used to take this train into the city several times a year. And, really, I was glad to leave. Brian’s mom was always waiting, two hundred yards away. And there was that thing in my house, waiting for me. Coming for me.
I should’ve felt relieved as I boarded the train. Free. I was free. I whispered it to myself, like this whole thing was my idea, and by the time I reached Boston, I almost believed it.
I transferred to a bus, dragging my luggage behind me. There were so many people, and nobody paused to give me a second look. Most people here never even gave me a first look. As I boarded the bus for the middle of nowhere, New Hampshire, I thought that maybe my parents were right. Maybe a fresh start was all I needed.
Maybe next time I went home the grout between the tiles would be dirty and I wouldn’t see the outline of Brian’s body. Maybe my parents wouldn’t flinch when I reached for a steak knife. Maybe Colleen would be allowed to see me. Maybe Brian’s mom would move away.
I was downright saturated with the hope of the Maybes when the bus screeched to a halt in the middle of the road a few hours later.
The doors opened and the light flickered on inside, making the dusk outside seem even darker. “Monroe,” the driver announced, with his finger extended down a fork in the road. “This is as close as I get.”
Hysteria Page 2