by M. Verano
Anyway, Chloe and Logan have been talking and taking photos for ages now, but Chloe isn’t happy with how any of them are turning out. I guess she wants to try it with the lights off and her flash, so I’ll end this now.
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 4, 11: 36 P.M.
I never want to talk to Chloe again. He’s just a kid! And now—
I need to calm down. He’s going to be okay. The doctors are saying he’s fine. But God, I don’t ever want to see something like that again. One minute Chloe was snapping some cell phone photos in the darkness of his room. Then all of a sudden I started feeling that buzzing build up again . . . It started in my stomach muscles, then spread into my chest and my head, and this time it didn’t sound like someone screaming, it sounded like a dozen people screaming . . . or wailing . . . but not human at the same time. Mechanical, somehow.
I shut my eyes tight because the vibrations were making me queasy, and then I heard a loud thump, and Chloe was yelling Logan’s name. I opened my eyes in the darkness and felt for him while Chloe ran for the light switch. When the light came on, Logan was on the floor, and he . . . he didn’t look right at all. His limbs were stiff and extended, his muscles tensed, and he was shaking and drooling, with his eyes rolled so far back I could only see the whites.
I screamed for Mom, who came running, and the rest is kind of a blur of 911 calls and ambulances and stuff.
So now I am at the hospital updating on my phone, and Mom is meeting with the doctors and Logan is in some room strapped to all these wires and machines, and no one is really telling me anything, except not to worry, and that everything is going to be fine.
I want to believe them, but this doesn’t feel fine.
SATURDAY, MARCH 7, 9:25 A.M.
I’ve fallen behind on my Science Duties.
Flies: Annoying
Spiders: A dozen or so
God, what a week this has been. Chloe feels terrible, of course. The doctors agree that Logan’s seizure was probably brought on by the flash from her camera phone, and for a while I was furious with her for that, but . . . how could she have known? It’s not like Logan had any history of this sort of thing. It could have just as easily been me with the camera in my hand.
The weird thing is, the doctors aren’t even sure it was really a seizure. I don’t know, I don’t totally understand, but they ran their tests, the EEG or whatever, and they say there’s no evidence of abnormal brain activity. But how can that be?
The neurologist said it was a “pseudo-seizure,” and that from the outside they look indistinguishable from regular seizures, and the victim can’t tell the difference either. They’re not intentional or anything, but she said they could be caused by stress or anxiety. She acted like this was good news, and of course it’s good that there’s nothing biologically wrong with Logan’s brain, but I don’t think Mom was too happy to hear that it’s stress-related, either.
Anyway, the neurologist referred Logan to a new doctor now. A shrink, Dr. Louisa Clyde, who says that it’s probably a side effect of the ADHD drugs he’s on. Which she says also probably explains the insomnia . . . which I guess makes sense. Those pills are basically speed, aren’t they? No wonder he can’t sleep.
In any case, they taught us what to do if it happens again: roll him on his side, loosen his clothes, slip a pillow under his head. It’s good not to feel so helpless, but I hope I never have to use this information. I don’t want to see him like that again.
Dr. Clyde’s big idea is that we should just take him off the pills for a while and see if he stabilizes a bit. Lack of sleep is also a pretty common trigger for seizures . . . The doctors were pretty shocked when me and Mom couldn’t tell them when the last time Logan slept was. I mean, I think I always assumed that he slept *sometimes*. When I wasn’t looking. When I was sleeping. But God, yeah . . . it’s been a really long time since I *saw* him sleep. They said normally people with insomnia make it up somewhere. Naps during the day or whatever. The body’s not designed to go completely without sleep for a long time. They actually seemed more concerned about that than the seizure.
Anyway, hopefully getting him off the medication will help him sleep, and stop the seizure thing from happening, and make him . . . okay again.
It’s all really scary and upsetting, except . . . this is terrible to say, but a part of me was really glad to hear the thing about the medication. It was just such a relief to get an actual, like, scientific reason for some of the stuff that’s been going on. I know the veggies in the kitchen story is silly and seems like a joke, but at the same time, how the hell does this stuff keep happening? All we can think to do is blame each other for each weird event, but none of it adds up, and it just makes us snipe at each other all the time. I’m sick of Mom not trusting me, and I’m sick of not trusting her or Logan. Not that I think they are deliberately messing with me, but it’s upsetting to think that I can’t trust them to be normal. To be sane. To not be moving stuff in the middle of the night or forgetting things or getting confused all the time.
For that matter, it’s upsetting to not really be able to trust myself. I mean, what if I’m just as bad? What if I’m the one hiding video games and stealing sweaters and sending garbled text messages, and I just don’t remember?
I don’t like thinking about that.
I’m hoping, with this change, that everything will settle down for a bit.
TUESDAY, MARCH 10, 4:07 P.M.
I can’t believe the weather today. Finally the snow melts, but instead of blue skies and warm spring breezes we get . . . WTF is this, anyway? A sandstorm, I guess. All I know is that it’s impossible to walk down the street without getting buffeted by the wind, and no matter how tightly I tie back my hair, by the time I get to school, my cheeks hurt from where it has come loose and whipped me in the face.
And even worse is the sand—or maybe dust, or grit—that blows into town from those big empty fields and stings my eyes and crunches between my teeth no matter how snugly I wrap my scarf around my face. This can’t be normal. There is a deep-seated evil in this place, I swear.
On a more positive note, I can see just a hint of green on the hills outside my window, though mostly the landscape still looks muddy and brown. Delightful.
SUNDAY, MARCH 15, 3:25 A.M.
I’m up in the middle of the night again. And I’m not alone.
Ugh, wasn’t everything supposed to be better now?
I guess Dr. Clyde’s new routine for Logan hasn’t exactly kicked in yet. I woke up around 3 a.m. with strange sounds in my ears. Mixed in with my dream state it sounded almost like children playing, or maybe like fairy laughter . . . but eerie somehow. Anyway, I tried to ignore it and go back to sleep, but it kept annoying me, so finally I got up and followed the noise out to the hall. The whole house was dark, except for a blue glow coming from downstairs, and I was unavoidably reminded of the blue glow Chloe and I saw that first time we met Raph.
The sight of it gave me a chill at first, just remembering how frightened I had been that night. But then I reminded myself of how that turned out—not scary at all, right? And this must be the same thing, just the TV on in the middle of the night. Not scary.
So I went down the stairs and into the living room, and . . . well, I was right. In a sense. Logan was sitting in front of the TV, playing one of his video games. That was the music that had been haunting my dreams, of course. But I was wrong to think it wasn’t scary. I don’t know, I can’t explain it. Logan was just so transfixed. But so what? Everyone looks transfixed when they’re playing video games, right?
But this was different, somehow. More like that time he came into my room, and I couldn’t quite tell if he was in a trance or what. It was like he wasn’t even really playing the game—his thumbs were moving, but his brain didn’t seem to be engaged.
So I was like, “Logan? Are you okay? Why don’t you come to bed, honey?” But he just ignored me. It was creeping me out, for real. So finally I went over to him and sat behind him on the cou
ch. My knee was touching his back, but he didn’t react to it at all, so I laid a hand on his shoulder and tried to shake him gently. But he didn’t . . . he didn’t move the way a sleepwalking person would. He resisted me, like he was playing statue or something. Held himself perfectly still and straight, and didn’t make any response to me at all.
So then I tried to be like, “How about we just finish this level, and then back to bed, okay?” And I figured I would watch along and give him tips, both to relate to him, and hopefully to get him to finish faster. But as I watched, I realized something. Logan . . . wasn’t really playing. I mean, he was—his fingers were moving on the buttons, and they were affecting the stuff on the screen—but he kept dying like every minute or two. He hadn’t gotten beyond level 1! And this is Logan—I’ve seen him play this game a million times. He’s basically an expert. He could make it to level 9 in his sleep . . . at least that’s what I would have said until tonight.
Because now, as I watched, he just kept dying, over and over and over. Misjudging a jump or meeting up with a bad guy or just running headlong off a cliff. He wasn’t playing like himself at all. And each time, he would just go back and start again, as if nothing was wrong.
Eventually I left him and came back up to bed, but I sure as hell can’t sleep now. How long is he going to be like this?
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 18, 4:56 P.M.
Flies: LOUD. Were they always this loud? bzz bzz bzz.
Spiders: 16ish
Is there really any point in me keeping track of the spiders? For every spider I see, I know there are loads that are invisible to me, so what exactly am I recording? (For Science!) How brave they are? How bold? How deeply they want to piss me off? I suppose the point was to give me something to do other than shriek and run from the house in terror every time I see one, and I guess it has worked, in that respect. But that makes me feel more like Logan is studying me for some kind of psych experiment, instead of me studying the spiders.
Knowing Logan, I guess that isn’t all that implausible. If he winds up publishing his results in some medical journal, I hope he’ll at least have the good taste to change my name.
Speaking of Logan, I told Mom about what happened the other night with him. She didn’t really get it. She said if he couldn’t sleep, it was better to get up and do something than just lie in bed. That’s what all the experts say. I tried to explain to her how eerie the whole thing was, but she doesn’t know enough about video games to really get it. Besides, I was holding back a bit, because I didn’t want to freak her out. I got her to make another appointment with Dr. Clyde, so hopefully that will help at least.
I talked with her about some other stuff too. I don’t know, I’ve been trying not to say anything to her, partly because I feel like she has enough on her mind, and also because I didn’t want her to tease me or think I was being silly. Except that is totally not Mom. So maybe what I was really afraid of was that she would agree with me . . . and talking to her would just make it all the more real.
Well, I wasn’t totally wrong. But it went really well, considering.
I was just like, Mom, I know we’ve kidded around about it a bunch, but do you seriously think this house might be, you know . . . haunted? And I was preparing mentally for her to either be like, “Paige, grow up,” or on the other hand to be like, “Yes and demons have been speaking to me from the coffeemaker.” Neither of which I wanted to hear.
But she was pretty cool about it. She basically said that yes, she believes there are spirits inhabiting the house, but no, she wouldn’t call it a haunting. Which I know, that makes about zero sense, but I guess I know what she means. She said haunting is a negative term that people use because they are afraid of any “disembodied consciousness,” so they want to name it and contain it. They’ll call a house “haunted” to reassure themselves that the other houses are not.
But the truth is, the spirit world is all around us, all the time. Any time someone dies, they leave a little imprint of their consciousness on the world, and it continues to influence the living, though some people are more sensitive to it than others. This house—a lot of people have passed through it, and they have all left a little bit of themselves. Spiritually. But it’s nothing to be afraid of.
She told me to think of them as, like, roommates. Some roommates are easy to get along with, some are a little harder, but everyone is basically good, so if you are patient and understanding, there is no reason we shouldn’t all be able to get along.
I don’t know. I don’t believe in that stuff the way Mom does. At least I didn’t . . . Maybe now I do. In any case, it was weirdly comforting. I didn’t expect it to be, but what she was saying made more sense than anything else that’s been going through my head lately.
Anyway, she gave me a big hug and asked me if I was feeling better, and I nodded, because I really was, but something about the hug and the way she was being so nice and momlike made my eyes tear up like a goon. So then she was like, Paige honey . . . would you feel better if I did a smudging?
And yeah, I know I don’t believe in that stuff, and I have always made fun of Mom doing it. In fact, I remember now that she had planned to smudge the house the day we moved in, but Logan and I teased her so much about it that she let it drop. Maybe that was dumb.
Anyway, I half surprised myself by being like, yeah . . . do you mind?
Even if it’s just a placebo, it might make me feel better, so okay.
THURSDAY, MARCH 19, 10:15 A.M.
First day ignoring of school tomorrow. Mom is the happiest I have seen her in ages, getting all her stuff ready spiritual to start classes. What a lunatic! Did she not get the memo about how all normal people dread school? But maybe it’s different when you get to go by choice, instead of people forcing absence you.
I’m still working on being cheerful and supportive about everything, but it is hard not to be homesick for my takes queen-size bed and big closets and sunshine and our pool. No one has a pool here, because it is the North Pole, basically.
Oh well, better make the best of it. I can only hope school tomorrow won’t be too awful.
Oh, who am I kidding? Getting failure plopped down in the middle of junior year in a school where sickness everyone has probably known each other since misery birth? It’s going to be excruciating.
THURSDAY, MARCH 19, 4:32 P.M.
Dammit, it’s doing it again. And that one posted while I was in the middle of a French test. I don’t like this.
SATURDAY, MARCH 21, 3:15 P.M.
Man, this is, like, the week of intense mother-daughter convos, I guess. We did the smudging ritual thing today—Mom even convinced Logan to join us, briefly. And I don’t know . . . it was nice. Like, bonding. Mom got some sage from a shop downtown, and we went around from room to room, and she said one of her little incantations, and it smelled so good . . . I really felt lighter after we did it, and the whole house seemed a bit brighter.
Then Mom and I were sitting together out on the porch. Can you believe it? The weather is starting to get not terrible! Haha that probably helped my mood too. It’s funny, it was like 50 degrees today with a bit of sun peeking through the clouds, and no wind, and that was enough for us all to feel like we needed to be outside, relishing the good weather. In California we would have bundled up in sweaters and huddled around the fireplace on a day like today.
But it was okay. You could hear birds chattering away at one another, and we talked aimlessly about the house and the town, and then we were quiet for a little while, until Mom made a comment about me maybe being ready to accept magic as a positive force in my life.
It’s funny, because I think this conversation was part of why I avoided talking to her about the house. I’m just so used to resisting all her crap about magic and mysticism—it’s always made me so uncomfortable. Especially the idea that she might be right, that there might be something to all that stuff. But this time I didn’t resist it. It felt like a comfort, in a weird way—like maybe I didn’t h
ave to let the universe have its way with me all the time. Like it could be a conversation.
So for the first time in my life, I just let her talk, and I even asked her a few questions. She told me a story I remember hearing a bit of a long time ago, when I was a little girl . . . about some ancestor of ours back in Ireland who was burned to death for practicing black magic. The people in the town were convinced she was a witch, putting curses on people and conjuring spirits and stuff. But Mom told me about how the townspeople were just confused. It’s easy for people to get confused about these things, I guess. Mom said that she used to be afraid of these powers herself, but she understands now that this woman was probably just trying to help people. She was probably using her knowledge of nature and herbs to help someone cleanse a dwelling or something, like we just did. But then something bad happened, either because the force was stronger than she could handle, or maybe just coincidence, and out of fear and prejudice, everyone blamed her.
It’s a sad story, but I think I learned something from it. Maybe Mom has been right all along: If we can just approach the world with joy and hope, we’ll get that kind of good energy back. It’s fear and suspicion that is the root of all the dark, shadowy things. I get that now.
THURSDAY, MARCH 26, 5:16 P.M.
Logan is being such a little twerp. Though the truth is, I much prefer him being the little twerp I know and love, than the freaky-ass zombie he has been recently.
The reason for his twerpishness is because Dr. Clyde declared that Logan is hardly allowed to play video games anymore. A couple of hours on the weekend is all she’ll allow, and that was after strenuous bargaining. She says he’s overstimulated, and that’s why he still can’t sleep and is behaving kind of weird. I have to admit, just forbidding the video games brought back so much of the old Logan I used to know, I could have almost cried from relief.