“Taryn,” Krista said, looking directly at me. “I think you have this one.”
Taryn cleared her throat and rifled through the folders. I walked to her side of the table, but she passed the folder to Krista instead. And then we all stood in this awkward triangle: me with my folder, Taryn looking purposefully away, Krista looking purposefully toward me.
And then a voice from somewhere behind the table said, “Computer room next.”
Krista looked at a guy sprawled out under the nearest tree and said, “I was getting to it, Reid.” Then she turned back to me and said, “Computer room. Laptops.” Fake smile.
She gestured over her shoulder to the building behind her.
But I was looking at the boy under the tree. Reid. I knew him—I used to know him. I hadn’t seen him since freshman year, when I was an awkward fourteen and he was a cute fifteen, as long as you didn’t look too closely at his uncontrollable hair.
Reid wore sneakers and khaki shorts and that ridiculous red polo, and I started to worry I wouldn’t be able to tell anyone apart. When I passed close by him, he raised himself up on his elbows and smiled, and not only did he have that ridiculous shirt, he also now had this ridiculous brown hair that curled at the bottom. Not even close to the uncontrollable mess I remembered.
“You got taller,” he said.
“You got all . . .” I waved my hands around my head. “Nice hair.”
Reid laughed and stood up. “So you do remember me.”
Hard to forget the guy whose father—who also happened to be Dad’s oldest friend—died in a freak accident, or the funeral your parents dragged you across three states for, or the fact that you sat with him in his room while everyone else mourned for his father downstairs. Hard to forget the first guy who rejected you.
When my lack of speaking turned awkward, Reid shuffled his feet and asked, “Need help orientating?”
“No thanks,” I said. I would’ve thought that after two years, I wouldn’t feel the pit in my stomach when I looked at him. Wouldn’t feel the urge to spin on my heel and self-righteously walk away. And definitely wouldn’t feel the urge to close the space between us.
Walk away, Mallory.
I spent the rest of the morning orienting myself at the computer lab and the student banking center and the registrar’s office. Then I spent the afternoon orienting myself at the cafeteria and the bookstore. The new kids stood out—we hadn’t assimilated yet. Hadn’t learned how to wear our hair or carry our books. Hadn’t put on the red shirt and adopted the sameness yet. So when they smiled at me, I smiled back, like we were in this together.
I had my laptop bag swung over my shoulder and a stack of books propped between my arms and my chin as I moved slowly back toward my dorm, rocks getting stuck in my flip-flops every few steps. Reid was still under that same oak tree, like there was nothing worth moving for, but now he was eating a giant sandwich.
He was watching me, but I didn’t know whether he was staring because he’d heard about what I’d done or whether he was remembering me, reconciling the Mallory in his head with the Mallory in front of him. Whether he was remembering the same moment I was: his hand in my hair and his face an inch from mine the moment before he walked away.
Or maybe he was staring because I had to stop every few steps and shake my feet while simultaneously balancing a stack of textbooks. He put down the food as I passed by again. “Hey,” he said.
I kicked off my shoes and started walking faster.
There was a girl in my room. Actually, she was only half in my room. The upper half of her body was leaning out the window, blowing smoke toward the trees.
She turned around when the door slammed shut behind me but held her cigarette out the window. She had blond hair cut blunt at her shoulders, a heart-shaped face and jeans that fit her perfectly, and a T-shirt that fit too tight, but guys probably wouldn’t agree.
She watched me, expressionless, until I dumped my gear on the bed and said, “Hey.”
She smiled, which I guess meant I had passed some test. She held up a neon-pink lighter from her other hand and said, “You want?”
“I’m good,” I said, and she ground the cigarette onto the bricks outside the window and flicked it somewhere toward the forest. Apparently not worried about being caught. Or starting forest fires.
“So,” she said, quirking her mouth to the side and leaning her back against the wall. “Like what I’ve done with the place?” She had hung band posters over the other standard-issue bed, and there were stand-up lights in the corners of our room now. She walked over to me and stuck her hand out all formal like. “Brianne Dalton. Bree.”
I shook her hand and said, “Mallory Murphy. No nickname.”
She stepped back and looked me over, scanning me slowly from my bare feet to my bare shoulders and raised an eyebrow at me. “Hmm. Well, you don’t need one. You new here?”
I nodded, searching through my suitcase for another pair of flip-flops, feeling her eyes on me.
“Me too. Transferred from Chelsey. You know it? No? All-girls school. Can you picture me at an all-girls school?”
Actually, I could. Probably how she learned to make other girls uncomfortable just by looking at them. She reminded me of Colleen, even though they looked nothing alike. Colleen was the one who taught me how to walk when you know someone is watching, and how to walk to make someone watch. She oozed attraction just by being in a room. Same as this girl.
Bree looped an arm through mine and led me back into the hall. “Come on, orientation tours are about to start. And trust me, you are in for a treat.”
I looked down at the registration paper. Bree’s idea of a treat was my idea of perpetual humiliation.
“I see you made it unscathed,” Reid called to me as we approached the grass. Unscathed. Who says unscathed? Prep school boys, apparently. With perfect hair. Who reject you.
Bree leaned closer into my side. “You know Reid?”
“Not exactly,” I said, because it was true. I knew him two years ago, when his hair stuck out in every different direction. I knew him before his father was taken from him, before all of this. I didn’t know him anymore.
“Whatever,” she said. She kept her arm looped through mine, but I felt her pull away.
The whole quad area between the dorms and the school buildings took up the space of two soccer fields. Students were scattered in circular groups, like they were singing “Kumbaya” or something. Reid was already surrounded by two guys and one other girl. He must’ve been the leader since he was the only one in uniform.
Reid held my flip-flops out in an extended hand. “Hey, Cinderella, you lost your shoes.” He smiled and showed his dimple, which I’d forgotten about until right that moment, and suddenly I was back, three years earlier, a year before Reid’s dad died, walking into Dad’s twenty-fifth reunion and pushing through the crowd until I’d found Reid, and he was saying, “Miss me?” with that same dimple, and I was saying, “Hardly,” and trying not to smile.
Now he was holding my shoes and smiling, like this whole thing wasn’t horrifically awkward. “I didn’t lose them. I left them right there.”
“Well then, you’re welcome for keeping them safe. There’s a big demand around here for worn-out flip-flops.”
Or maybe this wasn’t awkward for him. Maybe two years was long enough to forget. Maybe he started the process of forgetting as soon as he walked out of his room. Not that I blamed him. He’d had enough going on that day, and in the days that followed. And if I could’ve made myself forget that, I would have.
I took them from his outstretched arm. “They’re not worn out,” I said, careful not to touch his fingers. But I threw them back onto the ground because I was pretty sure they actually were. I’m also pretty sure I was grinning.
Bree caught sight of someone over my shoulder and smiled a “hello, I’m cute and somewhat mysterious” smile that, as it turns out, was not at all mysterious. Must’ve been a boy. A cute one.
&
nbsp; “When’s the tour start?” My shoulders tensed because I recognized that voice. I turned around just in time to see Jason, nighttime dorm lurker, skillfully pull out yet another obnoxious grin.
Reid narrowed his eyes and looked around the group gathered in front of him. “What do you want, Jason?” he asked. For the moment, I trusted Reid’s untrusting expression.
“Hanging with my new friend, Mallory.” He rested a hand on my shoulder.
I slunk down and stepped away. “New friend, huh?” Reid asked. But before I had a chance to throw an “I’d rather have my teeth pulled” expression his way, Reid shrugged, and it didn’t seem like the shrug was directed at me.
“This is the quad, obviously,” Reid said as he started walking backward, like he owned this place.
Jason leaned in close as we followed Reid. “I get the feeling you don’t like me.”
I didn’t answer.
“Didn’t mean to scare you last night. I wanted you to feel welcome.”
I grabbed Bree’s arm and said, “This is Bree. She’s new. Welcome her.”
Bree dislodged her arm and rolled her eyes. She was nobody’s second choice. And she sure as hell didn’t want my leftovers.
We walked out the gate with the M over the top and started walking around the perimeter. Reid said, “This is the West Gate—what the town considers our main entrance, but our main entrance is actually farther down this road.” He pointed behind him as he walked backward, and we all strained to see. Apparently there was a gate in our immediate future, but the only thing I could see was the car pulled off the side of the road, engine off. Same color as the surrounding weeds.
Jason was trying to say something again, but I had stopped moving. “Mallory?” Reid asked, shooting a glance from me to Jason.
They were all still moving toward the car. I turned around, picked a spot in the distance, woods on woods on woods.
And, like always, I ran.
CHAPTER 4
I ran past the scarlet M again, past the corner of campus, and then I kept running as the sidewalk turned into packed dirt, roots, and stone mangling the ground. And again my flip-flops held me back, so I kicked them off and ran some more. The path narrowed, twigs and briars reaching toward me, and then suddenly opened again to a large clearing.
I bent over at the entrance, still sheltered by the trees, and sucked in some air. Then I held my breath so I could hear the noises around me—wind filtering through the trunks, leaves rustling up high, faint scurrying below. But nothing human. So I rested on the side of a fallen tree and took in the unnatural scene in front of me: a dilapidated brick building, half-walls standing, piles of bricks scattered around the floor of the clearing.
Those half-walls were the perfect place to hide, so I balanced myself on the piles of bricks and carefully stepped my way to the building, watching for nails or sharp rocks as the bricks dislodged and scattered below each step. Then I crouched at the spot where two of the partially standing walls still stood and leaned back into the corner.
I closed my eyes, but in my mind I could still see through the back window of the car, and I pictured her hair poofing over the top of the seat. I imagined her turning and watching me with those eyes, red and dry. I could see her rise higher still, pulling herself over the seat, and I could see her clenched jaw and the vein fighting to escape her neck, pulsating and pulsating.
Like I saw at Brian’s funeral.
Brian’s mom didn’t see me then. Nobody saw me. Not even Colleen, who didn’t tell me she was going. But there she was, squeezed between Cody and either Joe or Sammy—I couldn’t tell from the distance. I didn’t know whether Colleen was there for Cody or as some sort of atonement for herself. Or if maybe she was there for me. Colleen had her hand cupped over her mouth, and I could tell, even from between the pickets of the fence across the street, that she was doing that thing where she wasn’t really crying, but her body was still shaking like she was.
Brian’s mom wasn’t paying attention. She looked like she was, but if you were staring, like I was, you’d see she had her head tilted to the side like she was listening to something. Listening for something. Dylan stood next to her, his fists balled up. Staring at the ground like he was furious with it. Like it had taken something from him. Which, I guess, it had.
Then they all walked up to the hole in the ground. His mother dropped a handful of dirt into it, and someone, I’m not sure who, but someone released this noise. This horrible, unnatural sound—a wail. It traveled across the field and through the pickets of the fence. And it buried itself deep within my stomach, like grief was a concrete thing. It settled inside me, and there wasn’t room for anything else, not even air. I was suffocating. I turned around with my back pressed up hard against the fence, and I felt hot and cold all at once, but then only hot. And I vomited into the bushes behind me.
Then they were coming. They all crossed back over the street, finding their way to their cars parked along the curb. I held my breath between the fence posts. Brian’s mom was right there. I could reach out and touch her between the slats. I couldn’t see her face, but she paused right in front of me and tilted her head to the side. Like maybe that whole time she had been listening for me. Then Dylan was beside her, pulling her along. I saw her jaw tense, and that vein, seething.
Later that night, when Colleen snuck over to see me, I said, “The funeral was today,” because I wanted her to tell me why she went.
And she said, “Really? I thought it was next week.” I still didn’t know why she went, but at least I knew why she wouldn’t admit to it then: there was nothing quite like watching Brian’s body being lowered into the ground to fully understand the horror of what I had done.
Someone was running up the path. Heavy steps, stomping the dirt. I crouched lower. And then a muffled voice said, “Shit.” A decidedly male voice. I scrambled to my knees and peeked over the top, breathing in the dust from the bricks under my nose. Reid was scanning the woods beyond, my second pair of flip-flops in his hands.
I stood up, brushing the dust and debris from my shorts.
“God, are you trying to kill me?” He stepped over the piles of bricks, but froze a few feet away. He shook his head to himself and stared at the bricks. “I mean, you could’ve gotten me in a lot of trouble.” He held my shoes toward me again, like a peace offering.
I took the shoes and slid them onto my feet. “I guess it’s no secret, huh?” At least I knew why he’d been staring at me when I crossed center campus.
He had the decency not to act like he didn’t know what I was talking about. “It is and it isn’t,” he finally said. “Jason’s dad is Dean Dorchester, so no luck there. And Krista’s part of the family, though she was away for the summer, so I don’t know if she knows yet.” She did. She definitely did.
“Siblings?” Made perfect sense to me. They had the same hair color and, from what I could tell, the same cold attitude.
Reid shook his head. “Cousins.”
“What about you, Reid?” It’s not like our dads could confide in each other anymore.
He looked away. “I heard from Jason.”
“You’re friends?” I didn’t know why I assumed they wouldn’t be—it’s not like I knew him all that well. And even when I did, I never saw him with his school friends. He could’ve been an entirely different person with them. Like how being with Colleen made me bolder, more sure of myself, more confident.
Reid paused, like he was thinking really hard about the question. “We’re teammates. And secrets are like currency here. You tell one, you’re owed one. There’s a hierarchy to it.”
“You’re high up?”
He shrugged. “I’m high up.”
Reid’s eyes skimmed the trees as they rustled, like the wind was a thing and he could trace its path. “You shouldn’t be here. It’s not safe.”
I looked around. The remaining walls were kind of unsteady, but nothing seemed dangerous about it. Reid continued, “This is the old student c
enter. You know what’s past here?”
“No,” I said.
“Nothing. Well, not nothing, just nothing you’ll ever find your way out of again.”
“It’s just trees.”
“No, not trees, a forest.”
Now that was something I could understand. The way a bunch of little things can become something bigger—something more than the sum of its parts. I stared off into the distance, no longer seeing the trees stacked up behind one another, but seeing this big thing—a forest, a living, breathing single entity.
“Once you get going,” Reid said, also staring off into the distance, “it’s hard to find your way back out again. There’s this story about this kid, Jack Danvers, who got lost during initi— Anyway, he wandered off one night and didn’t come back.”
A chill ran down my spine. “What happened?”
“Don’t know. They never found a body. I tried to look it up but couldn’t find anything. Didn’t you notice that form you had to sign about not going into the woods? It basically excuses the school from liability. And a few years ago, the school finally raised enough money to build a new student center so we could stay more centralized.”
I stared off into the trees, thinking about that kid who disappeared. I wondered what the end was like for him—was it fast? Slow? Was he scared? Resigned? Was it violent? Gradual? But then I realized it didn’t matter. Dead is dead is dead.
The wind blew and Reid narrowed his eyes at the woods. “Sometimes I think I can feel . . .”
I shivered and cleared my throat. I didn’t want to talk about ghosts. “Anything else I should know?”
“Jason’s an ass. Don’t let him get to you.”
I shook my head, about to explain that it wasn’t Jason I was running from, but I wasn’t about to offer up yet another secret for distribution. If secrets were currency, I was holding onto the ones I had left. “Noted,” I said.
“So come on,” he said, holding his hand out for me. I stared at his open palm, at the lifeline running down it.
Hysteria Page 4