NOTE TO SELF: these things have no sense of timing.
This was never going to be easy. You thought it’d be, at least, straightforward. But this isn’t the five stages of grief people keep telling you about. This has no sequence. It resists scheduling. It will come when it will come, and it will come at Marin Levinson’s graduation party, surrounded by people you know, with the longest year of your life still ahead of you.
But first, some answers to questions you may have. Yes, this is happening. Yes, Marin Levinson’s earth-shaking sound system is to blame, although that’s not for you to know yet. Right now it’s just you and the slow-growing awareness that whatever this is, it isn’t stopping. It’s tight, tight in your chest and lungs all at once, and it burns like sprinting down a long, cold road.
You’re taking sips of water, like you can wash this down. But your heart starts clawing like an animal, too wild and too fast to be exertion. You weren’t doing anything. You were just standing here.
There’s a wet shock down your thigh, and it takes a good second to realize that you’ve spilled your drink down the front of your dress. No one’s noticed. No one’s noticed you for a while now. Gaby was the one who babysat you at these kinds of things. They’re not doing it on purpose. It’s been months, and you seem okay. And that’s good. You didn’t want them watching you. You’re fine. You’re supposed to be fine.
You go for another breath. It catches hard and short in the back of your throat. You’re dying. You’re dying, and you’re not even going to say anything about it. The bass pounds away, hijacking your pulse, reeling and shivering and squeezing and clawing—
You wrap your arms around your ribs like that’ll hold your insides in, you drag the air in and out of your narrow throat, but someone laughs, and someone else screams, Marin Levinson’s sound system keeps pound, pound, pounding at you from your feet up. And when you can’t stop it, you try to outrun it instead. Distance doesn’t help. It’s just as fast as you are.
You hit the railing of Marin’s front porch with both hands, but you’re not done. You keep going, down the stairs and down the street. You don’t remember where you parked, it doesn’t matter where you parked, nothing matters more than running as fast as you can.
At the end of the cul-de-sac, the sidewalk dips and flings you to the pavement. The gravel bites into your palms. The wind, unseasonably warm, hits you like a wave. With every gasp of your breath, a little more color seeps back into the world. Exactly five seconds pass.
And this is when you finally think to wonder what you’re doing.
You push yourself back to your knees, and you stare down at your hands, watching the beads of blood swell through the skin. The air’s still warm. But for some reason your teeth keep chattering.
“What the hell . . .” It comes out in a huff of air. It’s then that you notice how sore your chest is, how scratched your throat feels. Slowly, you stand up, look around. But if anyone heard you, no one’s coming out to look. The only movement is the rippling of the trees in the middle of the cul-de-sac.
You should get it now. You have everything you need to piece together what’s been happening, slowly, these past few months. But nobody saw you leave. And if no one’s here to ask if you’re okay, there’s no one to think up an answer for.
But you’ll catch up. Gaby’s gone. What else do you have if not time to think?
Six
THE SPLIT SCREEN
FACT NUMBER ONE: I’m sitting in my car, parked along the cul-de-sac down the street from Marin Levinson’s house.
Fact number two: I’m also standing in front of my car, directly in the headlights, watching myself through the windshield.
But other than that, everything’s fine.
I lift a hand—carefully at first, and then right in May 24 Rose Colter’s face. She looks straight through it. But to be fair, she’s looking through pretty much everything.
“Neat trick,” I say softly. She doesn’t hear that, either.
I keep looking at her, this living, breathing aftermath of my first panic attack. She doesn’t look like how I remember feeling. She’s fished her—my—flannel shirt out of the back seat, and she’s blasting heat from the front vents. I know, I remember, that she’s waiting until she feels steady enough to drive. But other than the occasional, subtle shiver, her face is still, placid. Distracted, maybe. But normal.
It’s not cold—I can still feel that unseasonable warmth through the memory, or the flashback, or whatever this is—but I shiver, too. Sometimes, when it gets bad, I have this disconnect. Like everything’s gone quiet and muffled, like I’ve stepped outside my own trembling mess of nerves and sound to try to get a good look at myself.
To literally step outside myself, though—that’s a little different. But it’s also a little easier to look at myself and know, for once, exactly how I’m feeling.
She takes the car out of park, and I jerk back onto the curb, unsure if this place can hurt me, but not willing to test it. But she drives past me—down the street, round the corner, out of sight.
Marin Levinson’s neighborhood doesn’t disappear with her.
I turn in a slow circle. The path from Marin’s house to where I’m standing has gone from black-and-white to full color: from the sidewalks, to the houses that surrounded me, to the tiny dots of blood on the pavement where my hands hit the ground. In the cul-de-sac, the trees have started rippling gently, gray shadows slowly defining into individual leaves.
It’s Marin’s house that looks flat and lifeless now. The colors and lights have dimmed, and as my car ventures farther down the street, the thump of the bass gets quieter. As my taillights turn the corner and disappear, the music stops. Like now that I’m gone, the party has ceased to exist.
Sliding my phone out of my pocket, I turn on the camera and take a long look at myself. My face white in the streetlights, whiter still next to my dark auburn hair. My shoulders straight, drawn up to my full gangly height—lanky, Gaby would want me to say, because supposedly that sounds sexier. My brown eyes big and dark. The image, splintered in the cracked screen, shakes with my hand. But I look as normal as I did that night, sitting in that car.
At least this answers one question I’ve had all these months. If I looked like this the entire party, it makes sense that no one came out to check on me.
I pull up my text messages and flip back to the one Maurice sent the day I left. In case anything comes up. And his number.
I tap the number with my finger. It isn’t until it starts ringing that I realize I didn’t plan any further than this.
It rings again, which means it’s officially too late to hang up. It’s going to look weirder if I do. He has my number, I gave it to him during that first appointment—it won’t exactly be hard for him to figure out it was me.
Maybe it’ll go to voicemail. He told me it almost always goes to voicemail. But even then I still have to tell him something. And not about Flashback Theater in 3D. Or that I ruined my visit with Flora. Or that I might soon be responsible for the destruction of an entire town.
Rescheduling. I’ll tell him I need to push back a week. And then I’ll sound like I don’t need to see him the second I get back.
So I’m completely prepared. For everything except the possibility that he’ll pick up.
“Hello?” he says.
“Oh, shit,” I blurt out.
“Rose?” he says.
And I immediately hang up.
The phone sits flat in the palm of my hand. It’s silent for a few beats. And then it rings.
I suck in a deep breath through my teeth, and I pick it up.
“Hi, Maurice,” I say.
“Hello, Rose?” Maurice sounds totally, enviably even. “I think I just missed a call from you?”
Oh my God. That was way more generous than I deserved.
“Um. Yes. Sorry,” I say
. “I was going to leave a message. I thought you had a separate work phone.”
“That’s right,” he says.
“You’re checking your work phone at midnight?” I say.
“It was next to me.” I can hear the jovial shrug. “I was awake anyway.” Probably at his desk, learning a fourth language. Goddamnit, Maurice.
“You know,” I say, “there’s this thing called work-life balance—”
“And I’ll be sure to look into it,” he says. “Something on your mind?”
I straighten. Mild as it sounds, that’s as direct as I’ve ever heard him. I can waste time all I want in our appointments. But if I’m going so far as to call him, he’s going to know something’s up.
I think. It’s not like I know a lot about him personally. His office is in a first-floor apartment, facing the street. He takes clients in French, English, and three dialects of Arabic. When I ask if he had a nice week, he always says that he did, in a way that suggests we’re stopping there. He has two framed paintings of cities behind his chair. The first is Paris. When I asked about the second, he told me it was Algiers.
And he’s a ridiculously, frustratingly kind person. Kind in a way I’ve never doubted.
So. What’s on my mind.
I laugh. “Can I have an easier question?”
“Okay,” he says. “What would help, then?”
I start tapping my feet in a rhythm. The beat echoes. “What helps other people, when they call you?”
“Sometimes it helps to just talk,” he says.
“Hard pass,” I say, smiling despite myself. “What else?”
I can hear him mulling it over. “Well . . . I’m not sure how to put this, but oftentimes what people are looking for is a . . . I’m trying to think of a better phrase than reality check.”
“Reality check is an excellent phrase,” I say. “But you’re probably not talking about the ‘blue just isn’t your color’ type.”
“Blue is everyone’s color,” he says very seriously.
This time, I laugh for real.
“So you mean, like . . .” I rub my thumb against the inside of my palm. But the cuts I’m thinking about are long gone. “If someone’s seeing things?”
“Could be like that,” he says. If he reads anything into the question, it doesn’t show. “Or maybe they see what’s there just fine, but they don’t know how to interpret it.”
Somehow, sitting on a street I know is hundreds of miles away, watching a night from seven months ago—it feels about ten times more surreal now, talking to someone so unrelentingly grounded. But I know what he’s saying. Everything I’ve ever asked him, since that first appointment, has been some form of “Is this happening or not?”
I swallow, hard. “You get texts, right?”
“I do,” he says.
“So . . .” I stare into the floodlights of the house across the street until it hurts my eyes. “If I texted you a picture, right now, could you describe what’s in it without asking any questions?”
There’s a beat of silence. And this is the one thing that annoys me about him. No matter what I say, he never seems that surprised.
“And that’d help?” he says.
“Yeah. I think it would.” It’s my turn to pause. “I’m going to hang up now.”
“You can always call back later if you want to talk.” After some consideration, he adds, “Maybe not later tonight.”
“Sure, yeah,” I say. “Sorry again.”
“Not at all. Take care, Rose.”
I hang up. And for a second, I consider not taking the picture. But maybe this will help.
I angle my phone’s camera straight down the middle of the street, I take the shot, and I text him the picture. No context.
An ellipsis pops up on his side of the screen. He’s typing.
Cul-de-sac with three trees in the middle, says the text. The same thing I see.
But when I look up again, that cul-de-sac is gone. I’m in the middle of the street, but a street back in the Lethe Ridge housing development. That ever-present stirring over my shoulder feels farther away now, like whoever it was took a big step back. And Marin’s neighborhood isn’t there.
But if my reality check saw it, too, then there we are.
The phone buzzes again. Maurice sent another text. Why?
I shake my head as I text back. I said no questions. ☺
I read his message again. And this time, it lands. Cul-de-sac. There had been a cul-de-sac on the public access channel when I had that little jolt of panic, back at the house. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I saw that and thought of Marin’s neighborhood. It’s the kind of logic leap that hypervigilance is so good at. But I didn’t consciously connect the dots.
So how did this thing—this flood—recognize what I didn’t?
I close out my messages and go back to my home screen. It’s midnight. If I’m going to trust Cassie, that means that in exactly three days, whatever I’ve brought to this town will be here.
And it suddenly feels much easier to believe her.
Before I delete the picture from my phone, I take one last look at it, broken into three parts by the cracked screen. I wonder how Maurice would react if I told him where I’d taken that picture—when I’d taken it. As far as he knows, that’s where the story started: that first panic attack, this street. Everything before that, I sketched in fuzzier terms. I told him how normal it all was. I lost my best friend, sure. But everything else was normal.
Maurice is very good at his job. If he doesn’t believe what I’m telling him, it doesn’t show. And if he wonders what I’m not saying, that doesn’t show, either.
He’s not wrong to wonder. I’ve told him a lot. I haven’t told him everything.
Seven
THE FIRST DAY
FOR THE FIRST time in months, my phone doesn’t wake me up.
Not for lack of trying. The only time I keep it on silent these days is in class. If someone calls, texts, whatever—I want to know right away.
But I wake up to silence. The only thing moving in the empty model bedroom is the light through the blinds, shifting upward. And when I check my phone for the time, I see two new texts. The first is from my little brother, Sammy. The second is a number I don’t know.
Coming to pick you up, be there in 20 min—Alex Harper
I pull up Sammy’s text as I wiggle into my jeans. Hi, Rosie, I read as I jam a clean shirt over my head. Is it warm where you are? It is cold today but Mom says it will not snow. Dad says to tell you to call tonight if you have time. Please write back. Bye.
I allow myself a second to smile before I shove a granola bar into my mouth. Getting Sammy to practice writing has been like pulling teeth, so much that his teacher gave him a project recently: to write, just once a day, about whatever he wants, and to show it to one of us. So every day, he texts me.
Sammy is seven. I used to think he was too young to notice me flinch every time my phone buzzed. Now I can’t help but wonder if he’s trying to fix something.
The doorbell rings, and I hurriedly swing my backpack over my shoulder and bolt for the door. But the person waiting for me on the other side isn’t Alex Harper.
“Well, now.” A middle-aged woman stands on the porch, her sweater set matching her eyes, her teeth matching her pearls. There’s something intensely familiar about the lines at the crease of her mouth, thinning her cheeks. “I suppose a welcome is in order?”
“Oh,” I say involuntarily, because I remember now. I saw this woman last night, on the public access channel.
“Aren’t you lovely,” she chirps. “My daughter has always wanted to grow her hair out past her shoulders. She’s got that beautiful wave you have, too. How do you keep it from tangling?”
My brain stutters, bypassing the what are you doing at my house and the I guess i
t’s not my house but still that are on the tip of my tongue. Somehow what I say is “Coconut oil twice a week.”
“How nice.” Her lips widen. “But you look so tired. Were you not comfortable here? You know, I love this neighborhood. I have since it was built. I was on the planning board, I remember when this was an empty bit of desert. Twenty of the houses sold before we broke ground!”
I smile, nod, and let her keep going. But as the lines around her mouth deepen, I shift my weight to my back foot, still resting safely inside the house. She’s fully blocking the door now.
“And do you want to know what happened?” the woman says. I finally notice that her smile never reaches her eyes. “None of these houses ever filled. No one wants to live in a half-empty community, as it turns out. Most of the buyers left town, dear. Because of you.”
Neither of us speaks for a long moment. Her stare, directed at me, never wavers.
Finally, she thrusts out an arm and an open palm. “Marguerite Williams. Mayor of Lotus Valley.”
For a long moment, all I can do is stare down at her steady, outstretched hand. Then, gingerly, I shake it.
“Rose,” I offer quietly.
“Oh, good. You’re polite at least,” she says. “Don’t look so worried. We’re just going to talk. That’s okay, isn’t it?”
“Do I have a choice?” It’s out of my mouth before I can think twice. But lucky for me, she laughs.
“Not too polite, I see,” she says. “But that’s good. That’s smart. Polite doesn’t mean you have to let people walk all over you. I think you can relate to why I’m here, then.”
I wouldn’t go that far. But remembering that election ad last night, I think I have an idea. “If by that, you mean you want me gone . . .” She smiles. That’s a yes. “. . . then to be honest, I don’t understand why there are people who disagree with you.”
She laughs, high and humorless. “We do understand each other. But I can’t force you to leave, much as I’d like to. It’s not that simple, even I know that. There’s a force older than the rule of law. Do you know what that is?”
The Valley and the Flood Page 6