Not real, I thought. He’s not real.
Except I held the pepper spray forward and flipped the red switch to the unlocked position. I pointed it at the door. The canister was shaking.
Then the door handle moved gently side to side, like someone was testing the lock. I closed my eyes and thought not real again. But I could still hear the jiggling of the handle.
And then I heard something more. Metal inside the handle, scraping along the inside, searching for something. Someone picking the lock.
Then the door swung open. Water splattered onto the carpet, falling from the sky, dripping from his hair.
The realest thing in the world.
Dylan took a step inside.
CHAPTER 18
I backed up, moving deeper into the living room until my back was pressed against the bathroom door. It was so thin, I didn’t think it would support my weight. Dylan stared at me, water dripping all around him, and I shook my head. Just shook it, and shook it again. The room was buzzing with that other thing that wasn’t real. Like the whole room was about to pop.
And still I held the pepper spray out in front of me. But I was too far away now for it to work. Dylan let the door fall shut behind him. The room was crackling with energy. Even Dylan seemed to sense it. He looked around quickly before his eyes settled on me again.
And I kept shaking my head. Because I couldn’t figure out what was real and what wasn’t. Because in my head I heard those same footsteps, chasing after me. Dylan’s footsteps. And I saw the moon in the upper corner of the night sky—the sky that felt like it could burst open at any moment and—
“Hello, Mallory,” Dylan said from across the room, all drawn out, like a rumble of thunder.
I lowered my eyes to the floor. Except for a second I saw pavement instead of beige carpeting. I heard his feet move across the ground. Scuff, step. Scuff, step. I put one hand on the doorknob behind me, and I kept my other arm extended in his direction, like a warning.
He stopped moving.
I raised my eyes. “What are you doing here?”
He looked around the room, confused, like Brian had done that night, like he wasn’t really sure what he was doing here after all. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
“Waiting?” Nothing was making sense. Not back then, and not right here.
And then I remembered Dylan breaking into the lifeguard supply shed the night on the beach, when I shoved Danielle into the wall, so long ago. The paint on my door, and my shirts, slashed up. And the green car driving past Monroe, always waiting. It had always been Dylan.
“What do you want from me?” I kept the pepper spray aimed in his direction, and I stepped to the side, trying to judge the distance between me and the door. I wondered if I could sneak by him before he could grab me. But the whole room was buzzing, thick, like I might not even be able to break through that energy.
Dylan tilted his head back and laughed, only it came out through a grimace. “What do I want? What do I want? I guess that’s the question, isn’t it?”
I took a deep breath and heard myself wheeze a little, and then I blew it out slowly. Dylan took a step, and then another, toward me. “Are you going to hurt me, too?” he asked. “Don’t you think you’ve done enough?” He leaned forward, definitely within range now, and he whispered, “You killed him.”
I kept staring at him. Of course I’d killed him. That wasn’t a secret. I didn’t understand why he was telling me this.
The buzzing in the room grew. My eyes darted around, not looking at Dylan, looking for that other thing, taking form somewhere. I could feel it. I knew it was near, just out of sight.
And then Dylan was in my face and the pepper spray was on the floor, and he had both hands on my upper arms, and he was shaking me. “Look at me. Do you know what you did? Do you?”
Then for the first time since I held that knife, since Brian’s blood covered the floor and my clothes and my hands, since Colleen found me and I learned he was dead, I felt my own tears. “Yes, I know what I did. I know.”
“I don’t think you do. Did you know my mom had to be committed to a mental hospital?” he asked as he pushed me into the wall.
“Yes,” I whispered.
“I have no home anymore. No family. I had to move in with my dad. In fucking Massachusetts. Did you know that?” he asked again, shoving me even harder into the wall.
I shook my head. And I heard the thud as my back hit the wall, but I felt nothing, really, at all.
He let go of my arms and ran his hands through his hair, only he was pulling at it. “I don’t understand,” he said. “I don’t get how this happened . . .”
And while he was distracted, I dove for the pepper spray, only he dove for it too. My fingers brushed the key ring at the base, and then Dylan jerked it from my grip. I sat with my back against the wall, and he was on his knees in front of me. He threw the pepper spray across the room, where it hit the opposite wall and landed somewhere behind the couch.
I was still breathing too heavily, trying to figure out why Dylan was here at all, what he had been waiting to do to me. “What do you want? What?”
He put one hand around my upper arm, and he looked at the base of my throat, but I didn’t think he heard me at all. “Joe and Sammy think I should take something from you.” He looked at my throat, and then lower. “That you deserve it.” As his eyes drifted down, I understood, with sickening terror, exactly what they thought he should take from me.
But he didn’t do anything. If Joe and Sammy were here, I wondered if he would have. His face contorted and he squeezed his eyes shut. Finally, he released me—threw his hands up in the air, like he was surrendering to something.
I turned to the door, before he could change his mind, and started walking slowly. Step. Breathe. Step. Glance to the couch, checking for the pepper spray. Another step. But halfway across the room Dylan was suddenly right behind me again. He put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Wait.”
Wait.
I heard it echo around the room in a whisper. Like it did every night.
Brian had asked me to wait, he did. But the voice in my room at night hadn’t been his.
I staggered backward. Because I remembered.
The footsteps following me down the alley and the hand on my shoulder and the voice in my ear—
It had been Dylan.
“Wait,” Dylan had said. I had been running, but he caught up. And his hand was on my shoulder. He wanted me to wait. He wanted me. I spun around in the alley between the back of the homes. The moon was bright, but a cloud moved across it, and Dylan’s face darkened. “Please, Mallory,” he’d said. “I hate that you’re with him. I hate it. I’m a moron, okay?”
I leaned closer, because I couldn’t really see him. Couldn’t tell if he meant it or if those were just words he had rehearsed, but I think he misunderstood because he put his palm on the side of my face, and he ran his thumb across my bottom lip, and he said, “Okay?”
I thought that he meant it. And I felt like saying yes.
And just in case I wasn’t okay with it yet, he leaned even closer and brushed his lips across mine, and he smiled. Because it felt like this was what everything had been leading up to. We just got there the wrong way.
“Okay,” I said. But then I frowned and glanced down the alley, toward the party. “I think I should . . .”
Dylan shook his head. “Did you see him? Not a good idea. Later.”
The sky was about to break open. A fat drop fell between us, and then another—he took my hand, and we started running. We were laughing, racing the storm.
Dylan watched as I dug the key out from under the gutter, and then the sky busted open. I ran up the porch steps, and Dylan was right behind me, pressed up against my back to escape the rain. I slid the key into the lock. And I felt him smiling against my neck.
We slipped inside and I turned the deadbolt behind us.
And then I wasn’t sure what to do. The windows were still op
en, and I thought maybe I should close them. I saw there were drops of water on the display table next to Mom’s vase.
But Dylan was still smiling like he won something. Or like he was about to win something. He kissed me in the middle of the living room. Not like when I’d kissed him in chemistry class. Like I was the only one he wanted. Me.
He took a breath and said, “No, really, I was a fucking moron.”
“You were,” I’d said. “You really were.”
And he kissed me again.
That’s what we did for seconds, or minutes, or hours. Until the beating started.
Boom, boom, boom.
“Dylan!” a voice called from outside.
Boom, boom, boom.
Not a heart from the grave. Not a heartbeat at all. Brian was pounding on the front door.
And now Dylan was asking me to wait again. The room was buzzing. Vibrating. Even Dylan seemed to sense it, because his eyes darted into the upper corners of the room. I turned around and jabbed my finger at his chest. “You were there,” I said.
He stared at me, unblinking.
My brain tried to make sense of it. He was there. But then he wasn’t. Brian was there. And now Brian was dead. But the mark on my shoulder was exactly where Dylan had grabbed me that night. Like the memory wanted to make itself known. I was stuck in that back alley with Dylan, with his hand, reaching for me. The moment replaying each night, over and over and over again, until it had become something more than a memory. I just hadn’t known it.
“I just want to know,” Dylan said. “I want to know why. Because I don’t understand.” He swallowed and his mouth hung open a little, and he looked so empty.
Don’t tell.
It was whispered through the room, with the buzz, riding the vibration, bouncing back and forth across the room, off the walls, the ceiling, the floor. Dylan was watching me, watching the room. “Did you hear that?” I whispered.
“Hear what?”
“Don’t tell,” I said.
Dylan froze. One hand still on my shoulder, his skin the color of ash. He didn’t move.
“I think,” I said, “I think he’s here.” I shook my head. Hard. Because I understood that it wasn’t the soul of Brian in the room with me. That I wasn’t haunted by him. I was haunted by an elusive memory. I was trying to remember, but I couldn’t. “I think he told me not to tell.”
Dylan shook his head, at least I think he shook his head, but he might have just had a chill instead. “No,” he said. And then he pulled his hand away and backed into the wall. “No,” he said. “I did.”
Brian had been shouting in the rain. “Mallory!” he’d screamed. “Open this goddamn door.” The door smacked against the frame, but the deadbolt held. “I know he’s in there. I saw you guys. I saw you.”
Dylan had backed away from me. “Shit,” he said. “Shit, shit, shit.” He cowered, like maybe Brian could see through the walls or something. “He’s drunk,” he added.
“So are you,” I said, which had nothing to do with the situation at all.
“Yeah, but I’m not . . . like that . . . when I’m drunk.”
“Dylan, you little shit, I know you can hear me! You fucking lay a hand on her and you’re dead. You hear me? You’re dead.”
Dylan scanned the room quickly, walked back through the kitchen, and silently turned the lock on the back door. He gently pulled the door open, put a finger to his lips, and said, “Don’t tell.”
He eased the door shut behind him.
And I was alone.
“You left me,” I said. “Why did you leave me?”
The whole room was pulsating, like my kitchen used to do. “Everything was fine,” he said. “When I left, everything was fine.”
“No, it wasn’t fine. Brian climbed in the goddamn window. He was looking for you, and he was yelling at me, and he was completely out of control.”
“He was drunk!” he yelled. “Couldn’t you just leave or something? Why did you have to kill him, Mallory?”
And with that, he raced across the room and got in my face like Brian had done that night. “Why did you do it? Why?”
I remembered racing into the kitchen, racing away from Brian, and looking at the back door. Looking for Dylan. Hoping he would see me and come back, hoping he would help me. And Brian was right behind me, practically breathing down my neck. But all I saw, out in the darkness, was the high gate, swinging open and closed with the wind.
Dylan was gone. And Brian said he wanted to kill him. And I was—
“Scared,” I said. “I was scared.” Dylan didn’t back up, so I added, “I’m still scared.”
He walked backward, out of the room, out the door, into the rain. And when I looked up to meet his face, I knew he’d left me alone that night for the very same reason: he was scared.
I ran after him and caught him when he was halfway to his car. “Dylan,” I yelled. The rain was so loud, I could barely hear myself even when I was yelling. He spun around, and I gripped the front of his shirt.
I had to say something, had to do something. But all I could do was hold onto his shirt, trying to bridge the gap. Remind him of something.
He peeled my hands from his shirt and held my arms down to my sides. He leaned forward over my shoulder and whispered three words into my ear, which I think I must have been waiting for.
“I hate you,” he said.
I felt it in my heart, all the way to my bones. Because he meant it all the way to my soul.
“You didn’t always,” I said. “I remember. Don’t you?”
I had my hands on the sides of his shirt again, like I could will him to remember somehow, and he had his hands gripped around my arms. I couldn’t tell whether he was pushing or pulling me, and we stayed like that, like he didn’t know what to do with me other than hate me. And I didn’t know how to make him remember. He must’ve felt something at some point that was something other than hate. But not now, because he was shaking.
Then I remembered he left me. He left me. And if he’d felt anything back then, really, he wouldn’t have done that.
He was just a boy I had liked because he smelled good in chemistry, and he smiled at me when I walked in the room, and I could feel him looking me up and down when I was leaning over the lab bench. And I couldn’t have him.
I was just a girl he didn’t want until he couldn’t have me. And it was the most tragic thing I could even imagine that someone was dead because of something so cliché. Because of us. Because of me.
“I’m sorry,” I said. I was doing something halfway between crying and yelling, so it came out all cracked and angry and sad. “I’m sorry,” I said again.
“Don’t,” he said, prying my fingers off his clothing.
That night was a lot of people’s fault. It was Brian’s fault, it was Dylan’s fault, and it was my fault. I grabbed onto his shirt again. “I’m sorry,” I said again. “Please,” I added, “please.”
Dylan was still shaking, and he took these deliberate steps backward, like it was the hardest thing in the world. He got in the car, and I heard him yelling in rage, I heard him through the metal and the rain. No words, just noise. And then the engine turned over, and all I saw were his taillights.
I stood in the rain, watching him go, feeling this unbearable weight in the pit of my stomach.
“I’m sorry,” I said again. “Please, I’m sorry.” But I wasn’t talking to Dylan anymore.
The only answer was the rain, washing away nothing.
“Mallory?” I turned and saw a figure standing in the rain against a car. Reid, frozen, like he didn’t know whether to stay or go, like he was trying to make sure it was really me.
I shook my head at him and stepped back toward the hotel room.
“Are you okay?”
I backed up again. Shook my head again. Imagined what Reid thought he was witnessing. Stepped away.
“What was that about? Who was that?” He was coming closer, now that he was sure it was me.
“Nothing. No one.” I watched the empty road, silently begging for something. Then I looked at Reid, who looked like he wanted so badly to understand.
Brian. Dylan. Jason.
“Mallory?” he asked again, like he wanted to give me the benefit of the doubt, like always. Like he wanted to believe.
“It has nothing to do with you,” I said, which wasn’t true at all.
“It has everything to do with me,” he said. And he was right. Because over his shoulder, down the road, was his uncomplicated life, and his uncomplicated future, and I was its opposite. I wouldn’t be responsible for ruining this life too.
“Reid,” I whispered, and I put my hands up, face out. “I can’t do this.”
Reid stopped walking toward me. “What, exactly, can’t you do?”
But I didn’t need to say anything at all, because he already knew the answer. I fumbled for the door handle behind me, my hand still shaking.
“Don’t,” he said. “Wait.” I couldn’t breathe. And I couldn’t look at him as I slipped inside and shut the door behind me. Too much. It was all too much.
I put my head between my knees until I found my breath again. The selfish part of me still wanted him here, unwavering, standing with me against everyone. I stood and faced the door. There were things I knew about Reid. Things I was sure of. If I opened that door, he’d come inside. He’d listen. He’d believe me. If I opened that door, he’d stay.
I wondered whether he heard, through the rain, the metal clicking into place as I turned the lock.
I watched through the curtains as his car drove away, down the same road as Dylan, and then there was nothing. No one. Not Mom, not Dylan, not even that presence anymore. And definitely not Reid.
I guess that, at least, I deserved.
CHAPTER 19
I used half the towels in the bathroom to soak up the water that Dylan had brought inside. I showered. I pushed the couch aside and found Mom’s pepper spray. And when she returned, I was sitting in the exact same place I was when she’d left. She let her bag drop on the floor and sat next to me on the couch. “Not much they can do about an off-campus incident,” she said, leaning back against the cushions.
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