That night, like always, it started with the heartbeat. Boom, boom, boom.
And then my name. Mallory. Wait.
And then the hand. The fingers, digging in, grinding down through muscle and nerve. Shocks of pain radiating down my arm.
But then, there was a different dream.
First I saw Brian’s mouth, saying, “Mallory, wait.” Like always. And then Brian’s mother appeared, reaching a hand out to me, garbage hanging from her clothes, asking me to wait. Then I was leaning in to kiss Reid, but his hands were on my shoulders, pushing me back, and he was saying, “Wait.” And then Colleen was curled up behind me on the sand, whispering, “Wait,” into my ear. And then I was walking into the fog, wandering away from campus, down that path past the cross, and a boy was running in front of me, getting farther and farther away, and I was the one chasing after him. I was the one screaming, “Wait!”
Click.
My door. Was it in my dream? Or was it from that place where things that did not exist whispered in my ear? It felt real as anything.
I jumped out of bed and my head swam like my blood was running in the wrong direction. I dove for the door, but it was locked.
Maybe it was the closet.
I took my scissors out and held them in front of me as I flung open the closet door, but nothing moved except the clothes, the hangers squeaking with the faintest motion.
I checked the window. This time I kept the light off. I pulled the shade up and placed my hands against the glass, peering out. The moon was bright, and the trees looked like tall shadows. Nothing moved.
Then I stepped back and saw a mark against the glass. A handprint. I flipped the lights on and saw that it was red, like blood. I went closer to inspect the handprint, hoping it was something other than blood. But it wasn’t.
And it was on the inside.
It was mine.
The moon had been bright that night, even though it was raining. And I was running, sprinting, wheezing with each step. The alley moving by me in a blur. Feet on the wooden boardwalk. The moon was too bright. I was too bright. Over the dunes. Down on the sand at high tide. The white light reflected off the water, reflected off me. There was so much blood.
Too much blood. I didn’t understand how there could possibly be that much blood on my hands, on my arms, on my chest. How did it get there? How did it get everywhere?
I raced toward the pier, where the boardwalk juts out. To the darkness. And I fell onto my knees in the water and dug my hands deep under the sand, trying to scrub it all off. I fell face-first, and I picked up fistfuls of sand and ground it into the front of my shirt. Over my arms. Everywhere.
The salt water stung my eyes. And it stung my arms, where the blood was my own. And then I sat back, while the water and Brian’s blood lapped around me, and I waited. I waited. I waited.
In the light of my room, my hands came into focus. The right one was clean. The left was coated red. I wiped it on my pants, but the red had settled into the lines of my palm. There were no cuts. The blood was dripping from my shoulder, down my arm, to my hand. Blood fell from my middle finger onto the floor.
I balled up a shirt and wiped up the blood. Then I pressed it to my shoulder. I was scared to look, but I had to. The whole handprint was raw—blistered—like it had been faintly seared into my shoulder. And the blister where the pinky finger left a mark was weeping blood.
It was nearly dawn. I ran to the bathroom and dabbed at my shoulder, hissing with pain. I rinsed all the blood off before anyone woke up, and rebandaged it gently. I pressed my hand down on top of it, like I might somehow hold in all the blood, or make it clot or something.
Stop the blood.
Stop the blood. Stop the blood. The words echoed in my head, like they were mine, but I wasn’t thinking it. Stop the blood, I heard it again.
My hand shook as I pressed down harder. By the time the blood stopped dripping from the wound, people were starting to come into the bathroom, half-awake, carrying shower caddies. I waited until they all went to class before stripping the sheets from my bed and running everything down to the laundry room.
Another unexcused absence would land me an additional violation, according to the handbook. I wondered what the consequence would be this time. What could they possibly take away from me now?
After I remade the bed, my first instinct was to find Reid and show him my shoulder. Tell him what was happening. Ask if he knew what to do. Or maybe ask nothing. Maybe just seek some sort of comfort with him.
But we were starting over. He made me think I actually could. So when I saw him briefly after class, before practice, I tried to mirror the smile on his face.
“Good day?” he asked.
“Great day,” I said. All these people were milling by us, smiling at Reid.
One of his teammates hooked an arm around his neck, dragging him down the hall, laughing. I turned around, toward the other exit, and then he was beside me again, spinning me around. Really close. His hands were on my upper arms, and he was staring at me, like he was willing me to say something. But I didn’t. When he finally spoke, he said, “You know what tomorrow is?”
“Saturday,” I said. He was smiling as he backed away, and was smiling still as the crowd swallowed him up. I turned and bumped directly into Bree.
“Hey,” I said, but she tried to move around me without looking.
I stepped to the side, stood directly in her path, and said, “Bree.”
She froze, and there was something not quite right about her. I realized she was holding her breath. Waiting.
“You okay? I mean, the sleep?”
Her shoulders relaxed and she let out her breath. She nodded rapidly, like she didn’t want to really talk. “I’m good,” she said.
I was so used to Colleen, who I could read. Most of the time, at least. But now I felt like I was squinting at Bree, trying to decipher the meaning. “You’re good,” I repeated slowly, almost to myself.
“That’s what I said.” Bree’s eyes locked onto something over my shoulder, and she kept moving.
Friday night. Two hours until it was technically Saturday. Eight hours until I could say it was Saturday and mean it. Eleven hours until breakfast opened and I had a legitimate excuse to look for Reid. Eleven hours.
I could sleep through eight of them, easy. Then I could get ready. Maybe even call Colleen beforehand.
The room was pulsating. Just like the kitchen used to. Except my shoulder was throbbing along with it. Like I was a part of it now. Like it had claimed me, or claimed part of me, and it was yearning for the rest. Like it had its talons in and wasn’t about to let go now.
Boom, boom, boom. I started to fade. I thought of Reid, telling me to go back. Boom, boom, boom. It was getting louder. Coming closer. Right outside my door. But I couldn’t see anything.
Go back. Think, think, think. I heard my name, and the word “wait,” and I thought Wait. And I felt that hand reaching for me, but instead it was hovering. In the moment before.
Think.
But I was fading.
Think.
But I felt someone—something?—no, someone, standing over me.
Think.
But I was gone.
Brian stood over me, as I lay in the remains of the china cabinet, tiny pinpricks of glass sticking out of my skin. He shook his head, like he was trying to undo it all. It was like he realized, even in his out-of-control state, how out of control the situation had gotten. But he didn’t stop. He reached for me still. “Why are you doing this?” he screamed, which made no sense, like this was all somehow my fault. “How could you do this?” he yelled again, like this was his house and I was destroying it.
I crab-walked backward through the glass, and pieces pierced my skin again, this time into my palms. And I thought, No, no, no, but he kept coming anyway, crunching the glass under his shoes.
Then he stopped and looked around the room and he winced, paled. And he said, “Can you just wait one goddamn second?”
And in that pause, I righted myself, scrambled to my feet. Then I ran. I sprinted into the kitchen, and he ran behind me—I could feel him, right behind me. I looked to the door, and it felt important, that look, like I was willing something to happen, but I couldn’t remember what. And when nothing happened, I made a choice. Because he was right behind me and he wouldn’t stop. So I darted left at the granite island and I grabbed a knife. “Mallory,” he said.
I spun around. So he would see the knife. So he would stop.
“Wait,” he said.
Because he couldn’t. But I couldn’t, either. There was no time.
I turned my head away, toward the door, but I still felt the resistance. The pressure. The shock. I looked back at Brian, like maybe I was imagining it, but I wasn’t. Brian was looking down. And then he looked up at me, and his mouth formed the word “no.” A long exhale. Like the word was dying along with him.
I woke up choking. Like something was sitting on my chest, constricting my lungs. I stared at the ceiling, suffocating, trying to remember how to breathe. Breathe. And finally, I sucked in a horrific, wheezing breath. I squeezed my eyes shut and breathed deeply through my nose. And then I smelled it. Something faint, metallic, acidic.
I opened my eyes. The room felt full. I pushed myself up on my elbows.
There was a person on the floor. Face up. And there was blood. A lot of blood. Two static bloodred puddles, stretching out from the arms. Both wrists were slit halfway up the arm. And the knife, just beside the body. Taunting me.
“No.” I scampered down from the bed. “No!” I yelled.
I couldn’t see, even though I could look. And in a brief moment of clarity I thought, Hysteria, even while the rest of me refused to process. I couldn’t see his face, just a blur. I could look, but I could not see.
And my brain whispered, Brian, Brian, Brian.
I stumbled past my desk, and my foot slipped in the stickiness, but I caught myself on the edge of the desk and kept moving for the door. My fingers scratched along the door and fumbled with the handle and then it flew open and there was light, there was so much light. I ran down the hall, and the word in my head fought its way out. “Brian!” I shouted.
And for a moment, all I could see was him, and I heard his name being shouted, but I couldn’t tell whether it was then or now and it didn’t matter anyway because this couldn’t be real.
This was not real.
Brian was in the ground. I saw them lower the wooden box into the hole in the earth. I heard somebody wail for him as I cowered behind the pickets of a fence.
I spun in the hall, and there were footprints on the floor, made of blood, leading from my room, directly to me.
Crazy. I was crazy.
“Help!” I cried. And a door creaked open. And then another. Because I kept screaming for help. But nobody helped me. People crept along the path of bloody footprints, tracing it back to its source.
And I knew it was real when the screaming started.
There was too much screaming. So much. Until it didn’t even sound like screaming anymore. More like that ringing I’d hear in my ears when there was nothing making a sound at all.
People came. People in authority. The screaming around me turned to crying, and there were questions, but I couldn’t speak. I was still sitting, silently, in the middle of the hallway.
A name was being passed around, in whispers, underneath the crying, just out of earshot.
And then it reached me, the word. Jason, I heard. Jason Dorchester. Jason Dorchester. Jason Dorchester.
Then the cold hands came. Maybe the presence. Maybe a new one. Maybe something else.
Maybe this is how it ends. With a dead body and cold hands, reaching for me.