Hysteria

by Megan Miranda

Colleen traced mine once, back in middle school. She ran the dark nail of her pointer finger along the crease toward my wrist and said, “Better live while you can.” I had laughed uncomfortably, and Colleen had smiled, even though she’d been trying to keep a straight face. “Just kidding,” she’d said. “We’re going to live forever.” Because that’s exactly the type of thing you think when you’re twelve.

  Reid’s arm eventually dropped to his side. “Come on,” he said again, but this time without the open palm.

  I pictured us walking back together, side by side on the narrow trail. Either in awkward silence, where I’d be thinking about how he used to be, or with him telling me stories about Monroe, like almost kissing me wasn’t something worth remembering.

  “I like it here,” I said. “Quiet.”

  He dug at the dirt with the toe of his shoe, but didn’t make any move to leave.

  “I won’t get lost. Promise.”

  “Okay,” he said, making his way through the rubble again. “So I’ll see you later?”

  “Later,” I said.

  After he’d left, after I couldn’t hear his footsteps, even in the distance, and after I couldn’t really even hear the scurrying of animals anymore, I maneuvered my way back over the piles of bricks and shuffled down the dirt path, back toward Monroe. I stood in front of the apparently not-main gate watching the students weave around in pairs and clusters. But before I went back through the gate, I had to know. I had to get close enough to check the license plate—check to make sure it was her. Before I called Dad. I skirted the edge of campus, easing my way slowly down the street, watching for the car.

  I kept moving until I could see the main gate that Reid had been pointing out. Smaller and single arched, but smack dead in the middle of the school. From here to the gate, no car. And beyond, as far as I could see, no car. I squinted, straining to differentiate the shades of green on the shoulder of the road. The sun had sunk below the tree line, and the shadows loomed again. I tiptoed down the road, the noises from campus getting farther away, and eventually darted to the other side of the street, where I was sure I’d seen the car.

  Weeds tickled my calves and the backs of my knees as I made my way through the underbrush. Nothing. I turned around to go back, wondering if I had imagined it all, if my brain put it in my head—like how I’d see Brian’s shadow against my furniture in the dark. And then I stepped into a hole. A flattening of weeds. And beside it, another. And ahead, two more. The indentations from the tires of a car.

  I whipped my head over my shoulder and stared into the trees—no, into the forest. I closed my eyes and listened for sounds from a car. The shadows stretched farther, crisscrossing the street, making the gate to Monroe contort backward, concave, like a spoon. I swatted at a mosquito on the back of my arm. And then the first firefly of the evening flashed in front of me. Light on. Light off. Here and not here. Like a signal to the rest, they lit up the roadside.

  One flittered in front of my face, black as night. Light off, it flew.

  The night Brian died, Colleen was catching fireflies on my back patio when I stepped outside. She had one cupped in her hand, and when I walked down the steps, she released it into my face, laughing as I swatted it away. “I think that’s bad luck,” she said. “Like breaking a mirror or walking under a ladder or something.”

  “I thought you were grounded,” I said, looking over her outfit: black miniskirt, tight blue top.

  “I was. Until Martha next door got in a fight with her husband and my mom went over, and my bedroom window just happened to slide open a little, and I just happened to fall out of it. And then I just so happened to remember that Brian is having a party this very instant.”

  “There’s late, there’s fashionably late, then there’s God-where-were-you-you-missed-everything late. Guess which one we are.”

  “He’s your boyfriend. Or something.” She smirked.

  I grinned. “My parents will be home in two hours. What’s the point?”

  “What’s the point? What’s the point?” She gripped me by the shoulders and shook. “Cody fucking Parker, that’s the point!”

  “He called?”

  “No, he texted.” She fumbled around in her bag and pressed a few buttons on her phone and held it in front of my face, the screen illuminated like the firefly.

  where U at

  Classy.

  “I’m not ready,” I said.

  “So get ready.”

  I smiled. Colleen smiled back, big and toothy. “Two minutes, Mallory.”

  I took three. Exchanged my boxers for a jean skirt and threw on a black tank top. Since we were God-where-were-you-you-missed-everything late, we didn’t walk up to the beach, down the boardwalk, and cut back in, even though it was safer according to my parents, who didn’t like me walking in the alleys after dark. Especially since people came and went so quickly in the summer, renting homes for a month, or a week. Then they’d be gone and replaced with more people we’d never get a chance to know.

  So as we walked, Colleen took out her black mini canister of pepper spray with the key ring on the end and swung it around on her pointer finger.

  “It’s probably not effective if they know you have it.”

  “This is preemptive,” she explained. “They see I have it and that I’m not afraid to use it. You should get one.”

  “That’s why I have you,” I said. Also, I never carried a purse if I could help it, just stuffed my back pocket with a few dollars and hid my house key at the base of the gutter beside the front porch.

  Colleen skipped ahead, spun around, and struck some made-up martial arts pose. “You wanna mess with this? Do ya?” Then she tilted her head back and opened her mouth, and her laughter echoed down the alley, across the ocean, and back again.

  I crossed the street and entered campus through the main gate. As I walked back toward my dorm, I noticed a few people looking at me. I finally understood Colleen’s feeling of power as she walked to the party that night. I could walk across campus and people would know. They’d know what I was capable of.

  And I didn’t even need the pepper spray.

  A girl with long black hair, short black bangs, and thick black eyeliner put her hand on my arm as I walked through the lounge. “Do you remember me?” she asked. She moved a piece of gum from one side of her mouth to the other. “Chloe. Remember? You came to my mom’s wedding. I was a bridesmaid. Orange dress. Big bow. You can’t forget something like that.”

  Her hair had been lighter and shorter, and that had been before her discovery of eyeliner, but she was right: hard to forget an orange dress with a giant bow.

  “The chocolate fountain,” I said, because that wasn’t something you could forget, either. Especially since I got it all over my dress. Actually, Reid had gotten it all over my dress. Chocolate-covered-strawberry handoff gone wrong.

  Chloe smiled. “Exactly. My mom told me you were enrolled this year.” I wondered what, exactly, her mother had told her, but I could tell from the way she didn’t ask that she already knew. “Come sit with us at Preview?”

  “Preview?”

  “Yeah. Fall Preview. It’s like a dinner-dance thing in the dining hall the day before classes start every year. Kinda lame, but, you know, tradition.”

  “Oh, I can’t go,” I said, because I was fairly certain I’d never go to another party again.

  She scrunched up her mouth. “All right. Well, I’m in 233.” She pointed straight up. “Come visit sometime.”

  “Okay,” I said, and Chloe left through the front door. I walked down the hall toward my room. I wished it was that easy. Walk up the stairs to room 233 and talk about her hideous bridesmaid dress. Be friends in that easy, simple way. Talk about easy, simple things.

  Think about easy, simple things.

  My dorm room was empty—emptied. I guess this was just another part of consequence, like my grandma had warned me. Everything we do has consequence. This was just another.

  My bed was pil
ed high with my stuff, but the other side of the room, where Bree had been, was now consumed with an emptiness. Her bed was stripped. Her desktop was bare. The lights were gone. The posters were down. The only thing remaining was the sticky tack where the posters used to hang.

  I unpacked and set up my room, trying to spread everything out so the emptiness wasn’t so overwhelming. It wasn’t a big room, and it hadn’t felt empty when I’d first arrived. Only after Bree came. And left. People are funny like that.

  I booted up the laptop and followed the instructions to set up the Internet connection and a school e-mail account. Then I composed a message to Colleen:

  1 ex-roommate.

  1 creep.

  2 bitchtastic girls.

  79 days till Thanksgiving break.

  I hit send, pressed my thumbs into my temples, and felt this chill along the base of my neck. I squeezed my eyes shut and thought No, but that doesn’t do anything either. My laptop made a tiny ping—a message from Colleen:

  Miss you too. Will come as soon as detainment is over.

  And that was just like Colleen. She didn’t send cryptic messages, saying anything but what she meant. If she loved you she said I love you. If she hated you she said I hate you. She said what she meant.

  And she did what she wanted.

  We were a block away from the party that night when she stopped walking. She’d put her hand on my arm while I was re-tying a ponytail that I’d just undone. “You’re nervous,” she said.

  “My hair won’t cooperate.”

  She reached up behind me, pulled out the elastic, and threw it to the ground. “It’s perfect.” Then she put her hands on her hips and lowered her voice. “Mallory, it’s no big thing. You do what you want to do and you don’t do what you don’t want to do. No biggie.” Then she shrugged her shoulders and fluffed my hair with both hands.

  Easy for her to say. Turns out Colleen mostly wanted to do everything anyway.

  “Hey,” she said, her hand on my elbow. “We don’t have to go.”

  “But Cody Parker.” I grinned.

  “I like you better,” she said.

  Then I was laughing and not as nervous anymore, which I guess was her point, and we continued walking down the alley.

  She hung an arm over my shoulders and pulled me in close for a few steps. I could hear the smile in her voice. “Dylan’s gonna freak,” she said. “You know he dumped Danielle last week.”

  No, I hadn’t known.

  People in the dorm were getting ready for Fall Preview. Whatever that meant. Were they previewing the new kids, like some meat factory? Did they bring a pen and take notes for later? All I knew was the bathrooms were overrun with girls spending hours trying to look like they hadn’t spent any time getting ready.

  I saw Bree skip across the hall, following Taryn into her room at the other end, near the lounge. I guess they were roommates now. If she noticed me, she didn’t let on. I went back to my room and made a list of things I’d have to buy at the campus store tomorrow. First on the list: lights.

  I thought about sending Colleen another e-mail about this ridiculously pretentious school that calls their lame-ass dance a Fall Preview, but I couldn’t concentrate enough to compose a coherent sentence. Something was scraping my outside window. A tree branch, probably. And there were footsteps. Quiet, shuffling back and forth. Some guy waiting outside his girlfriend’s window, probably.

  Probably.

  But in the back of my mind—no, in the front of my mind—I kept picturing that car. It was somewhere nearby. And if the car was nearby, so was Brian’s mom.

  My room was nestled into the corner—far enough so the noise from the hall didn’t really bother me. Also far enough so nobody in the hall would hear me either. So I left the room, locked the door behind me, and walked through the cluster of girls streaming back and forth down the hall. I pushed through the door leading to the lounge and found a couch tucked away in the back corner. I watched the people waiting for their friends to show up, or waiting for their friends to come out of their rooms. So they could walk over together, I assumed. Like Colleen and I would’ve done.

  Krista and Bree came through the hall door, side by side. And Taryn came tagging along right behind them. Jason barreled through the front door, pushing the wooden doors so hard they ricocheted off the wall and bounced back toward him. He stopped them with his open palms held out at his sides.

  He stood in the entrance, scanning the room, scanning right over me, until his eyes landed on Krista. “Lovely, as always.”

  Krista curtsied and Bree smiled her nonmysterious smile.

  “Who’s this?” Jason asked, scanning Bree from head to toe.

  “Bree,” said Bree, even though I’d already introduced her as Bree not half a day earlier.

  He looked between Krista and Bree and rocked back on his heels. “So are we going or what?”

  “We’re going,” said Krista, with Bree on her arm and Taryn trailing behind.

  But as they crossed the threshold, I saw Krista reach behind her and take Taryn’s hand, pulling her along.

  And for a second I thought that Krista was all right. It’s the kind of thing Colleen would do for me. Making sure I was included. Making sure I was with her. Making sure I knew she was thinking of me.

  She’d done it that night. When we left the alley and stood on the corner of Brian’s street, she took my hand and pulled me toward the front steps.

  CHAPTER 5

  I didn’t know Brian at first. First, there was Dylan. My lab partner in chemistry, and something else, something lingering under the surface, waiting to bubble over.

  Which it eventually did.

  Dylan liked me. I liked him. He knew it. I knew it. But there was the small issue of his girlfriend. Even she knew it, which is why she scowled at me whenever she passed me in the hall. Colleen told me to be bold. But I thought I already was.

  I spent the semester giggling at his jokes, purposely bumping into him, and leaning too close while he used the dropper to fill a test tube—like it was the most fascinating thing I’d ever seen.

  And he spent the semester looking me over. And over. And over.

  Sometimes he’d text me in between classes, from down the hall, where I could see him standing with his group of friends. He’d look up and smile at me, and then I’d feel my phone vibrate. I didn’t even have to check—it would say: I didn’t do my homework. I’d write back: me neither. He’d write: library? And we’d meet there for study hall. I was pretty sure we were both purposely not doing our chemistry homework just to have an excuse to hang out during study hall.

  But nothing ever happened. He kept his girlfriend, and our homework always sucked. And then we were failing. And that’s when I got bold. Because everything suddenly felt so frantic, so urgent. We couldn’t get our year-end project to work. The test tubes kept fizzling out and dying. So we stayed after school, and Dylan scribbled in his notebook and squinted at a calculator. Finally he said, “You don’t want to know how many decimal places we were off by.”

  Then Dylan measured things out, and I leaned too close to the dropper, like I expected to remember any of this after the final exam, and finally our solution bubbled over, spilling out the top.

  I leaped off my stool, spun around, and high-fived him.

  Then I started laughing and said, “Oh my God, did we just high-five? Over a chemistry experiment?”

  And he’d said, “No way, you misinterpreted my raised hand. I was waving at someone in the hall. And then you slapped it. Very uncool, Mallory. Your social status is plummeting as we speak.”

  I perched on the stool beside him. “Am I ruined?”

  He smirked. “I could be convinced not to tell.”

  I didn’t wait for him to elaborate. I leaned in and kissed him.

  He didn’t kiss me back. I mean, he didn’t push me away or anything, but he didn’t really put forth the effort. It was like he was undecided about the whole thing. And then there were foots
teps in the hall. He’d glanced toward the door and said, “I’m supposed to meet Danielle.” Right.

  I thought maybe they’d break up, once he had time to think about it, but the next day they were walking down the hall together. The day after that too. Weeks of them walking down the hall together and kissing by her locker. Until school let out for the summer. And one day, I saw this guy on the boardwalk. I could’ve sworn it was Dylan. But it wasn’t. This was an older version with a broader smile, and something else in his eyes. He saw me staring. And the first time he looked at me, I knew. He’d kiss me back.

  He was a way to forget.

  Forgetting wasn’t really an option anymore.

  Everyone had already left for Preview at least an hour earlier—even the stragglers were gone. My eyes were closed, not that I was sleeping. Not that I could ever sleep on my own anymore. But I could feel that thing coming. The way the room suddenly felt alive and charged. So I kept my eyes closed. Something grazed my arm. I opened my eyes and jumped up.

  “Sorry.” Reid was standing back, his hands held out innocently. “Didn’t know if you were awake.”

  “I’m awake,” I said, waiting until I couldn’t hear my heartbeat pounding in my head anymore. I pushed the hair out of my face and scanned the empty room. Just me and Reid. I stared at my arm, where he had touched me, and wondered how long he’d been standing there. Wondered why, if he wanted to see if I was awake, he didn’t just say my name.

  “You’re waiting for someone?”

  “No,” I said, checking out the room again. Then I looked at Reid again and said, “No, no one.”

  “Oh, I just figured since you were sitting out here, and, you know, you weren’t there . . .” Reid was still standing on the other end of the couch. He was dressed up, I assumed. Hard to tell at a prep school.

  “I wasn’t where?”

  “Fall Preview.”

  I sat back down and pulled my legs underneath me. “Wasn’t really in the mood to preview. Or to be previewed. What, did you think I got lost in the woods or something?”