Brian stood under the living-room window, the screen lying beside him on the tiled floor. His mouth was moving and he was screaming, but he wasn’t making any sense. I stared at the floor, at the pieces of the white vase with the blue flowers. A petal lay at my feet.
Then I looked back at Brian, and this chill ran up the base of my spine, like I could feel the wrongness of the situation.
“What the hell are you doing here?” I shouted back. Finally.
Brian shook his head, like he was clearing his own words. He looked at the floor, and looked at me with this odd expression, like he wasn’t really sure why he was there either. He seemed to register the wrongness of the situation too.
Then Brian was just breathing hard, thinking. And I was thinking too. Thinking Brian wouldn’t hurt me, wouldn’t try to hurt me, because people are generally good. But then I had believed that Brian wouldn’t break into my house either, because good people don’t do that. Yet here he was. And I was thinking about that guy on the skateboard, the one he beat the crap out of for no real reason at all. So while he stood there thinking, I sprinted for the phone on the side table.
And that seemed to make Brian’s mind up for him, because he sprinted too.
My hands shook as I pressed power, and Brian was right in front of me, but he wasn’t doing anything. “Mallory, wait,” he said. His amber eyes were pleading, but there was something off about them.
He was so close, and he was so much stronger than me, so all I could punch was the 9 before he slapped the phone out of my hand. It shattered on the floor, the battery pack shooting out across the tile. “Shit,” he said, gripping my wrist. “Just . . . wait.”
“Let go,” I said, only it came out all high-pitched and tiny, like the fear was gripping me around the neck. Or like my body was trying to hold on to all the oxygen, just in case.
But he didn’t let go. His grip tightened around my arm and he shook me and said, “Listen.”
Up close I could tell that his pupils were dilated unnaturally, and when he spoke, his breath smelled like cigarettes and liquor. So I wrenched my arm as hard as I could and backpedaled into the dining room. Then my foot caught—slipped on the phone’s battery pack. I fell, back, back, into Mom’s china cabinet. It gave out with barely any resistance, shards of glass cascading around me as I slid to the floor. Tiny specks of red bloomed on my arms as Brian’s footsteps crunched the glass, coming closer.
There was a part of me that wanted to run from the way Jason was looking at me. Like I had witnessed something I shouldn’t have. Like he wanted to take his anger out on something, and I was the closest thing. But there was another part of me that didn’t want to run at all, something I tried to ignore, fighting its way to the surface.
I shoved it back down. “You’re disgusting,” I said.
He blinked in surprise and said, “You’re one to talk.”
“You make a habit of bullying girls?” And I felt that thing rising up in me, but I shook it away again.
Jason laughed. “Her? You think she’s a girl? She’s nothing. What’s it called when something can’t live without a host? A parasite, right? That’s Krista. She’s a parasite. And she’s nothing without me.”
I didn’t like Krista, I didn’t like anything about Krista. But this feeling kept rising until I could feel it in my arms, making me jittery. I wanted to hurt him. I wanted to smack the smile off his face, push his skull into the concrete wall, feel his weight give out as he sank to the floor.
I was breathing heavily, filled with terror over what I wanted to do to him, so I turned and ran down the hall.
“Run along, Mallory,” Jason called after me. “Run along.”
I found a place in the quad to work so I wouldn’t have to go back to my room. So I wouldn’t have to think about the feeling that was fighting to get out. I had to pass the time until noon when the school store was open anyway. I sat under the giant oak where I’d first seen Reid, opened my laptop, and stared at the blank document for my Lord of the Flies essay again.
I couldn’t figure out how to write what was so obvious to me. How you can look at little pieces of someone’s life and tell the type of person he is. In flashes. Only you don’t know what you’re looking for until much later—like when the news crews show up to interview you and you say, “Yeah, there was always something not right about him . . .”
I wondered if people said that about me.
Like anything, there are always signs.
The summer before I met Brian, before sophomore year, we had a bonfire on the shore. It was just me and Colleen and our friends and our sort-of friends. Cheap cans of beer, people from our class, Dylan, before I knew him all that well, and Danielle, his girlfriend. We were supposed to camp out there, only Danielle started complaining about the cold. And she was right. The sand got cold, and it was kind of gross to lie in. And there weren’t enough blankets to go around.
So Dylan led us down the beach to the shed where the lifeguards kept their gear and the chairs and umbrellas for rent. Dylan pulled a Swiss Army knife from his back pocket and fiddled with it inside the padlock until it clicked open. We’d marched in single file behind him.
Colleen swayed across the room and swung her arm over Dylan. “My hero,” she’d said.
And then Danielle pushed her in the back.
“What the hell?” Colleen asked.
“Hands off my boyfriend,” Danielle said.
“Him? Don’t worry. Not my type. Too skinny.”
“I’m not too skinny,” Dylan said. Even though back then he was.
And Danielle said, “Right. Is there anyone in this room besides him that you haven’t been with?” Colleen’s mouth fell open, but nothing came out. Danielle smirked and said, “Like you have a type, you fucking slut.”
And I felt this thing start to rise. It started in my gut and moved up through my chest, and it clenched my fists and shot through my legs. I ran at Danielle and pushed her into the back wall.
She scratched at my arm with her sharp, manicured nails. I pushed her again and heard her head thump against the wood, and it felt good. Someone screamed, “Girl fight!” But then someone pulled me off, pulled me outside, and Colleen had her arms around me. She turned me around and looked at my arm. “Crazy bitch cut you.”
I touched my right hand to the scratch on my left arm, raised my fingers up, and looked at the blood. Then Colleen and I started laughing. Uncontrollable laughter. We stumbled back down the beach and found a place to camp out, behind a dune.
We lay shivering from the cold sand beneath us. And Colleen said, “You know, I didn’t really have a comeback for that.”
And I’d said, “Yeah, well, you’re my fucking slut.”
She rolled onto her side and curled her body around mine, trying to keep us both warm, and then she started laughing again. She whispered into my ear, “Those boys don’t know what they’re missing right now.”
The prosecutors didn’t know about that night on the beach. I was sure of it. Because if they did, it probably would’ve canceled out what they knew about Brian. Brian liked to fight. He went looking for it. That guy on the skateboard wasn’t an isolated incident. Even Joe’s crooked nose was because of Brian. But I had a history too.
And now I was wondering why Dylan didn’t tell the cops about that night when I shoved his girlfriend into the wall so hard the sound from her head hitting wood echoed through the shed. He didn’t tell. Otherwise, Brian’s history of violence would’ve meant less.
So I wrote that Lord of the Flies essay about everything we didn’t see. About the boys at their boarding school. About who they were beforehand. About how they were always those people, if only William Golding would’ve showed us their history. It wouldn’t have been so shocking.
At noon I went to the school store and used the account Dad had set up to replenish my supply of Monroe polo shirts. I changed in the bathroom and went to the rest of my afternoon classes. By the time classes were over, a fog had settled, low and heavy, over campus. People kept jumping out at each other, I guessed, because there was lots of squealing and laughter. Like it was funny not knowing what was two feet behind you.
I left my books in my room, but I couldn’t stay there. Everything in it felt like limbo. The cracked closet door. The shades on the window, halfway up. The unmade bed. The knife in the bottom drawer.
The great thing about the fog is that it works two ways. I couldn’t see if someone was lurking behind me, but nobody could see me through the fog either. I saw muted red moving in the distance, students walking across campus, but I couldn’t tell who they were. Which meant they couldn’t tell who I was either.
It felt safe.
I walked off campus, toward the old student center, where nobody would be. Just me and forgotten buildings and a sign for a forgotten boy. But at the road I heard an engine. A low rumble, slipping through the fog. I stepped into the street, and a green shape came into focus. All soft around the edges, muted by the white, like a dream.
I stopped breathing. Underneath the fog, the car drifted in and out of focus, like a memory I was trying to grasp onto. Like something I was forgetting, just beyond my reach. The engine turned off. A door clicked open. A step. Two steps. A door slamming shut. I backed up, silently, until I couldn’t see the green anymore, letting the fog hide me as well. Then I turned around and ran back toward campus. I stared at the two feet in front of me, which was all I could really see, until I tripped over the front steps of my dorm. But I didn’t even pause before pushing myself back up and racing down the hall.
My fingers shook as I dialed the 800 number for home.
“Mallory?” Dad answered the phone. Which was odd. Since it was Monday, and only late afternoon.
“What are you doing home?” I asked.
“I took off. There were a few things I needed to help out with around here.”
My stomach flipped. “Is Mom okay?”
“Of course,” he said, like he was annoyed I’d even suggested she might not be. “But she’s resting right now, so maybe if you call back tomorrow you can catch her—”
“Dad. It’s Brian’s mom,” I said. “She’s here.” My voice broke and I cupped my hand over my mouth.
And then there was silence. I could hear him breathing and, beyond that, I could hear the swish of fabric as he moved to another room.
“No, Mallory, she’s not.”
“I saw—”
“Mallory. Brian’s mother. She was admitted to the hospital yesterday. She’s not in New Hampshire. She’s here. At a hospital. She’s not going anywhere.”
“What happened?” I asked. But underneath that I thought of the vision in the fog, drifting in and out of focus.
“She had a breakdown. She was here,” he said, hushed. “At the back door. Looking for Brian.”
“Like—?”
“Yes,” he said, probably remembering the same thing.
“Gotta go,” I said, just a whisper, picturing her screaming for her son as she stood in the doorway to my kitchen.
I paced the hall with my hands resting on top of my head, like I used to do after the required mile run in gym class, trying to catch my breath. I stared at the entrance to my room, but I didn’t go in.
I was scared of what else I might see. Like when I was seven and I’d wake up and still see the people from my dream, moving like a fragmented video. At the door. Blink. At the foot of my bed. Blink. At my side.
Here and not here.
And then they’d fade away as the fog lifted and the dream remained a dream and the real remained real. As I got older, the boundary grew stronger, and the things that weren’t real remained on one side, and the things that were remained on the other.
Until now.
I kept pacing that hall. People ignored me, on their way to dinner and back again. I needed to know that something was real. I needed to feel something real.
So I left. I sprinted down the hall and across the quad as dusk settled in like a long shadow, clinging to the fog. I raced to Danvers West and busted into the lounge, breathing heavily. Jason and a bunch of guys from the soccer team stared at me. Stared and smirked.
“To what do we owe this pleasure?” Jason asked.
I looked from couch to couch, looking for Reid’s face. I swallowed the thick air, along with my pride. “Can someone get Reid?”
Jason bared all his teeth when he smiled this time. “Get him yourself, Mallory.”
When I turned for the hall, someone whistled at me. The hallway was empty, and so was the stairwell. Then I wondered how Reid had snuck out of his room from the second floor the night before. Not through the door, that’s for sure. They’re alarmed at night. Through someone else’s room. Great. Another secret for distribution.
Music came from room 203. I knocked gently.
“Come in,” he called.
I opened the door and pulled it shut behind me, leaning against it. Reid had his back to me, his bare back actually, since he was half dressed, postshower.
“Oh,” I said. And then I looked away. At anywhere but at his bare back. At the walls, with the posters of bands I’d never heard of. At his desk, with books I’d never read. At his bed, with the black-and-gray stripes.
“Oh,” he said back. He pulled a gray T-shirt over his head. “How did you . . .”
“Jason,” I said. “I had to see you, but they wouldn’t get you, so I came up . . . Sorry you didn’t know it was me.”
“Yeah, because obviously I’d never want you to see me without a shirt. God forbid.”
I almost said you wish or something else coy or flirty or meaningless. That’s what I’d say if it was Dylan, or Brian—I’d say something not serious. Because I hadn’t been.
“Okay, so what’s up? You had to see me?”
But now, in his room, the whole thing felt ridiculous. To say that I saw something that couldn’t be real. That I saw it and heard it. To say I didn’t know what was real anymore.
To say that I wanted to feel something real.
“I was just thinking how different things would be if I’d come here freshman year.”
Say something real.
“If I was how you remembered me instead.” But the words I didn’t say felt stronger.
Am I even real anymore? Am I here, standing in front of you, or am I still under the boardwalk somewhere, covered in blood?
Reid looked like he didn’t know what to say. “You’re not exactly how I remembered you,” he said. And this buzzing filled my ears. “Mostly, you’re more than I remember. But in some ways, you’re the same. Like you still hold your breath when you’re nervous.” He grinned, and stepped closer. “You held your breath in your room this morning. And you’re holding your breath now. Why are you nervous, Mallory?”
Because this wasn’t in his car, where it seemed like we were finishing something we’d started two years earlier, like it was the only choice, like everything had been leading up to that moment. Because last night, when he asked to stay, he had held his breath too. Because I had come here, on my own, and now he was standing halfway across the room, daring me to close it. And I was closing it.
“I’m not nervous,” I said, except I was. Because it felt like we were starting right now. Then I was so close I could feel his breath, coming a little too fast. And my hands were on his chest, like I could push him away any minute, but I didn’t. I spread my palms flat and tried to feel his heartbeat.
It was racing.
And then there was knocking. “Open up. Now.”
Reid winced and I looked around the room for some place to hide. But Reid just shook his head and put a finger to my lips.
“Mr. Carlson. Open this door, or I’ll open it for you.”
He jabbed his finger at his desk chair, and he backed up toward his bed. I guess so it would look like we were having an innocent study session or something. And then Mr. Durham turned the handle and was in the room, trying to look disappointed, but he had looked at me, and now he only looked confused.
“Out,” he said.
I didn’t look at Reid as I left. And I didn’t look at Jason as I walked through the lounge. But I could feel him smiling.
I started taking sleeping pills again that night. Because it turned out the things I was most scared of didn’t really exist. It’s only real if you let it be, I thought as I drifted off to sleep to the boom, boom, boom coming closer.
But in the morning, there was something dried and stiff across my shoulder. Drops of blood, sticking my skin to my shirt. I ran to the bathroom and looked in the mirror. I hissed and shivered. Because underneath the dried blood, a blister had formed and burst along one of the finger marks on my shoulder.
I ran my finger along my skin and brought a dark drop of blood close to my face.
Then I smeared it across the mirror, just to make sure it was real.