All Unquiet Things

by Anna Jarzab

Harriet sighed heavily, like I’d let her down. “Why not?”

  “I don’t want to become dependent on them. That happened to a kid I knew.” On television.

  “I wouldn’t have suggested you take them if I didn’t think they would help you,” Harriet said. “If you take them responsibly and don’t abuse them, then there shouldn’t be a problem.”

  I shrugged. I wasn’t really interested in the sleeping pills. Yes, I was having trouble sleeping, and yes, that was partly due to the fact that I often experienced nightmares, many of which involved Carly and any number of absurd dream-scenarios connected to her death and the memories of finding her body. I didn’t know what the dreams meant—I don’t even know if I believe that dreams can mean anything—but I wanted them to go away on their own, I didn’t want to drug them into submission. To me, that just seemed like putting a lid on a problem and expecting it to go away, which in my experience rarely works. That, combined with how I felt the day before when the sedatives from the hospital had worn off, convinced me I was not the sort of person who would benefit from the use of sleeping pills.

  Harriet put down her pen and leaned forward just slightly. “Can I be completely honest with you?”

  “Sure.” I doubted that she was capable of complete honesty, but I was eager to hear her evaluation of me. After all, I’d been seeing her for over a year and she had never given me any feedback other than a prescription for Ambien.

  “I’m worried about you.”

  I scoffed.

  “It’s been over a year since it all happened and you don’t seem to have come to terms with the loss in any significant way. That concerns me.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s kind of hard to get over something like that.”

  “I am aware of that. No one is suggesting that you should just ‘get over it’—trauma like you experienced isn’t commonplace. It takes time.”

  “That’s exactly what I just said.”

  “The problem is that you’re not trying to work through what happened. Instead you’re trying to bury it inside of you, which is counterproductive to the healing process.”

  “Wow,” I said, picking up a seashell from her desk and tossing it from palm to palm. “That’s deep.”

  “I’d prefer it if you wouldn’t touch my things,” she said, holding out her hand for the seashell. I gave it over without argument, squinting at her.

  “Maybe you could use some therapy yourself, Harriet.”

  She ignored me. “I believe I was saying that it’s unhealthy to try to push things deep inside of you instead of letting them go. You’ll never move on that way.” She took in a deep breath and sat back in her chair. This is how I knew the clincher was coming. “Then again, maybe you don’t want to move on.”

  I slumped in my seat and heaved a melodramatic sigh. “There it is.”

  “Why do you keep punishing yourself?”

  “You think I’m responsible for what happened?”

  “No, but it’s obvious that you do.”

  “That’s crazy. I don’t blame myself. Enzo Ribelli killed Carly, and he’s in jail. What have I got to feel bad about?”

  “Okay, maybe you don’t realize it, but I think that the nightmares are definitely a sign of latent guilt. The sleeping pills are a temporary solution, because you need sleep to live. But if you want the nightmares to stop, you’ll have to face whatever it is that’s causing them to manifest.”

  “They’re just dreams.”

  “Right.” She glanced at her watch. “It looks like we’re out of time for today. We’ll pick this up again next week.”

  “Can’t wait,” I remarked, getting up and slinging my bag over my shoulder. “How long am I going to have to keep coming here?”

  Harriet paused. “I don’t know. I’ll have to speak to your parents about that.”

  “Great.”

  I opened the door and turned to leave, slamming into Audrey on her way in. The contents of my backpack went skittering across the hallway. Audrey and I bent down to gather them up.

  “Oh, hi!” she said brightly, but falsely. She handed me a stack of notebooks.

  “Sorry,” I mumbled.

  She shook her head. “No problem.”

  “Everything okay?” Harriet called.

  Audrey smiled anxiously and shifted from one foot to the other. “Weekly appointment,” she said.

  Harriet appeared at the door. “Hi, Audrey. Come on in.” She shot me an impatient smile. “Class, Neily?”

  “Yeah.” I glanced at Audrey one more time and started down the hall.

  The last words I heard Harriet say to Audrey: “I’m so glad you decided to start seeing me.”

  “So, what words of wisdom did the headshrinker have for you today?” Harvey asked, falling into step beside me as I made my way to my next class.

  “Huh?” I wasn’t really listening. I was considering the odds of running into Audrey outside of Harriet’s office. I mean, the school had approximately five hundred students, so the odds of running into anybody anywhere on campus were pretty high if you did the math, but still.

  “Blue slip. Harriet the Spy? They should really stop color coding—everybody knows when you’ve been called to her office,” Harvey said.

  “Yeah, right. Weekly checkup. Pretty standard.”

  “I don’t mean when you’ve been called to her office,” Harvey backpedaled. “I mean, you know, anyone. Lots of people get blue slips.”

  “Don’t worry about it, man. Hey—what do you think about Audrey being in Carmen’s class with us?” I asked.

  “Uh, I don’t know. I wasn’t aware I would be expected to form an opinion.”

  “Off the top of your head.”

  “It’s weird. Don’t you think it’s weird? Wasn’t she always moping around in the dumb classes, with Cass and Adam and … all them? I mean, we only overlapped for like six months in sophomore year, but wasn’t that the way it was?”

  “That’s what I was thinking. Padding the resume in preparation for college applications?”

  “I guess. Although I always thought it was a foregone conclusion she was going to USC, since her grandmother donated, like, a building or something.”

  I shrugged.

  “Why?”

  “No reason. Thought it was weird.”

  “Well, I agree. It is weird.”

  It got weirder in AP government, when Audrey came in halfway through class and took the last remaining seat in the front row for the second time that day. Harvey, who was sitting in front of me, turned around and raised his eyebrows. I did my best to look uninterested.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  An hour later, I sat alone with my lunch. I was twisting off the stem of an apple when Audrey emerged from the library and took a seat at an empty table. I shifted to get a better view. She put down her tray and pulled a book from her bag, the same book that she had been reading in the library that morning. She didn’t appear to have noticed me, and she rarely looked up from whatever she was doing to glance around. Over the course of the hour, not one person came up to talk to her. The rest of the seats at Audrey’s table, as at mine, remained vacant.

  The past year had been hard on Audrey. Her father’s arrest and conviction for Carly’s murder had been disastrous, especially since she and Carly had been so close. She and I had been friends briefly at the beginning of high school, and I remembered her as quiet, well behaved, smart but no genius like Carly, with very little interest in really trying. Her family situation, even back then, was considered amply tragic; Enzo, notorious in Empire Valley during his youth, was an alcoholic and compulsive gambler who squandered his wife’s trust fund at the Indian casinos, and Audrey’s mother had left for good when Audrey was in the sixth grade. When Enzo had brought his daughter back to Empire Valley, the town was simultaneously scandalized and relieved: scandalized that Enzo Ribelli was once again living within their borders and relieved that his daughter had been returned to the bosom of her more responsible and upstanding family m
embers. When she moved back to town, Audrey was showered with both pity and praise, for about ten minutes before everyone forgot about her and all they could talk about was Enzo’s latest exploits.

  Carly took it upon herself to befriend Audrey and put every bit of effort she could spare into understanding, loving, and sympathizing with her. This was the summer before our freshman year, soon after Carly’s mother was diagnosed with the ovarian cancer that killed her less than a year later. Their connection wasn’t anything I particularly understood, but it was real and strong and largely unaffected by Carly’s later transformation. I hadn’t hung out with Audrey since the end of our freshman year at Brighton—since Carly broke up with me, in fact—and I certainly wasn’t interested in striking up an acquaintance now, even though we seemed to be fellow outcasts.

  Apart from the obvious, Audrey’s penance for being the daughter of a murderer was social ruin. She was bearing up as well as could be expected. I could barely remember her from the previous year—in my memories of the police investigation, depositions, and trial, she hovered only at the very periphery, if I could recall her presence at all. Audrey fascinated the papers. I assume it was because she and Carly were like sisters, roughly the same age, and both students at Brighton. The word used most often in the articles to describe her was “stoic,” so that is how I pictured her: silent and stone-faced, absorbing everything.

  For cousins, Audrey and Carly looked nothing alike. Carly had inherited her mother’s creamy Irish skin, straight dark hair, and brilliant china blue eyes, the envy of every girl in our class. She was much shorter than Audrey, petite and curvy and certainly eye-catching, but there was no doubt that Audrey was the gorgeous one. Audrey was solid, tall, and athletically built. Her skin was darker, always a little tan courtesy of her Italian blood, but she had gotten her mother’s blond hair, green eyes, and flushed, heart-shaped face.

  Through a combination of good looks, patience, and plain dumb luck, Audrey managed to attract the attention of Cass Irving, the most popular guy in our class and a very promising basketball player. Only a few days after Carly’s murder, Cass—under pressure from his parents and his friends to disassociate himself from Enzo’s daughter—unceremoniously cut his ties with Audrey. He might as well have taken her out to sea and thrown her overboard; the friends her relationship with Cass had attracted dispersed quickly, and though I suppose that I should have admired Audrey’s resilience, at the time I felt as though she had gotten what was coming to her. I certainly didn’t feel sorry for her. I guess I thought things would inevitably get better once she moved into her maternal grandparents’ mansion in the hills, reminding everyone that she was actually part of Empire Valley’s elite, but that never happened. She had been tutored privately throughout the trial last year, but now she was back and I hadn’t seen one person make an effort to speak to her. Her old friends appeared to be giving her an extremely wide berth. It was strange seeing Audrey without a swarm of people. She didn’t seem built to be a loner.

  When the bell rang for sixth period, Audrey closed her book, got up, and disappeared into the cool darkness of the science building. I gathered my things and ran after her.

  “So, I have a question,” I said, falling into step beside her.

  “Sure, go ahead.”

  “How did you get into AP English? I didn’t even know you could read.”

  She stopped and turned to stare at me, her expression not so much offended as bemused. “Does it bother you?”

  I hesitated before saying, “No, why should it?”

  She shook her head and continued walking. “Finch let me into AP classes because of all the work I did last year with my tutor. Caring about school isn’t exclusively for the brain trust, you know, Think Tank.”

  “Don’t call me that.” Think Tank was what Audrey and Carly’s dumbass group of friends—Adam Murray in particular-called me.

  She shrugged. “Mind if I go to biology now? It’s the first day—I want to get a good seat.”

  “Sure, fine. Be my guest,” I said sarcastically.

  “Don’t worry, Neily,” she said. “It has nothing to do with you.”

  “I didn’t think it did,” I lied.

  When I got home, my mother was already at the hospital. She had left me a frozen packaged casserole to heat up and a note saying my father had called to check in. When my father was on a paternal kick, it was better to let my mother answer the phone, or let the call go to the machine. That way, he was able to prove he cared without ever having to speak to me. The presence of a middleman assured him that yes, he was a good father, but circumstances beyond his control had made me unavailable to him. Then we both got what we wanted.

  I took an energy drink out of the refrigerator and popped the tab. There was plenty I could do, but I didn’t feel like it. The thing was, I didn’t feel like much of anything. Even wasting my time watching television didn’t seem remotely appealing. I lay on the couch, draining can after can of Red Bull, listening to cars peel out on the street and neighbors arguing on their front lawns.

  The couch also offered an excellent vantage point from which to look out the window and observe the comings and goings of the neighborhood, something I took advantage of. For about an hour I stared out at a car parked across the street. It was a nice car, a BMW, painted an understated shade of dark blue—not the sort of vehicle I often saw pull up within twenty blocks of my driveway. And as the light shifted, I began to notice something moving, a shadow—there was someone in the car. And they had been sitting there for a while. I thought back to earlier, when I arrived home. Had I seen the car then? Or did it appear later?

  It took me a while, but eventually, after dredging through my memory bank, I recognized the vehicle. I was unsure of what to do next. I didn’t want to be paranoid, but wasn’t there something illegal about following a person home from school and sitting outside their house for hours at a time with no clear and upright motive for doing so? I was certain I could make a case for it somehow. So I went to the kitchen, picked up the phone, and reported Audrey’s car to the police.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  My mother still insisted on driving me to school, even though I had told her over and over again that I was fine. I was early, which often happened when I got a ride, so I went to the library as usual. I expected to see Audrey sitting in Carly’s old seat again, but she wasn’t there. I was relieved, but also a little disappointed. I had provoked her, and I was looking forward to seeing what she would do next.

  Before class I got ahold of Harvey and copied his homework. Harvey normally didn’t care that I kept things close to the vest, but he was still human. He did sometimes betray a casual interest.

  “I called your cell this morning but it went straight to voice mail.”

  “You did?”

  “Yeah. I was on my way to Starbucks and wanted to check in, see if you wanted something.”

  “Sorry. I didn’t even hear it ring.” I didn’t remember putting my cell in one of my pockets, but I patted them down anyway just to make sure. I figured I must have left it in my backpack.

  “No problem. You were probably on the other line with 1-800-HOT-GIRLS or something.”

  I smiled and shrugged. “I can never get Natasha to shut up. I keep telling her I’ve got to go to school, but she won’t let me off.”

  “Imaginary girlfriends are such a drag.”

  He grinned and held up a sketch he’d been working on of Phyllis, our physics instructor, complete with horns and a tail. “Nice, huh?”

  “Perfect likeness. Except that you forgot the fangs.”

  In AP physics, just as we were sitting down to a chapter on vectors, a slip came for me via the office aide. This time it was yellow, which meant that I had been summoned to the principal’s office, to see Finch.

  Back when Finch was only the vice principal, he spent most of his time devising a scheme to oust Dr. Darling, his predecessor, whose outward hostility and indifference toward all students made it abundantl
y clear that he had no intention of living up to the tender disposition that his name suggested. I never officially met Darling, but many of my earliest Brighton memories are shadowed by Finch’s presence. Eventually, Darling retired, and there I was, heading to meet with Finch in the principal’s office, just as he’d always dreamed.

  I handed my slip to the receptionist, who barely looked up from her computer screen. “He’s waiting for you,” she said. “Just a heads-up, he doesn’t look happy.”

  “What’s new?”

  I barreled into Finch’s office unannounced and planted myself in front of his desk. “If this is about my grades, I remember our three-hour parent-teacher conference last June and I am perfectly aware that my GPA is on eagle-eyed watch. Now that I’ve boiled this scolding down to its essential elements, am I free to go?” I knew I was just asking for trouble, talking to Finch like that, but my relationship with His Majesty, King of Brighton, was unusual. My stint as his program mentee had forged a more casual, almost familial bond between us, one that I had simultaneously resented and exploited since leaving the program.

  Finch looked up, not amused. “Sit down, Neily.”

  I flopped down in a chair. “So I can assume that something other than my ‘disappointing academic performance’ last year earned me a yellow slip this morning?”

  “I found out about your little episode last weekend,” Finch told me, scrawling his name on a piece of paper and putting it aside.

  “From who?”

  “Your father.”

  “Figures.” I leaned back and stared at the ceiling.

  “He’s very worried about you and thought that I, as your mentor, should know about it.”

  “Jesus, you’re not my mentor, Finch. It was nothing. A blip. I wasn’t getting any sleep and I just fell off the grid for, like, a day. But I’m back, and I’m fine, and I even completed all of my summer assignments, so unless you called me in here to give me a gold star and a pat on the back for finally listening to you, I’d like to return to class now. I’m missing vectors.”