Something wasn’t right. I could sense that even though I was nearly asleep. I shouldn’t have taken the sleeping pill. Someone was out there. Someone had thrown red paint on my door, playing a joke on me. Or maybe it wasn’t a joke. Maybe it was Brian’s mom. And here I was, sleeping. Almost sleeping.
The heartbeat filling the room paused, the room still buzzing with energy, and then there was a harsh whisper. “Mallory,” it said, sounding far, far away.
Something grazed my shoulder. Just barely. Like I might’ve imagined it. And then fingers tightened around my shoulder and I felt warm breath on my ear. A whisper. Wait.
My eyes shot open.
Morning. The alarm was blaring beside me. I fumbled until I found the snooze button, then rubbed at my left ear, where I still felt the warmth. I jolted upright and moved my arm in a giant circle, stretching my shoulder. But when I stood up, I could still feel it. The spot where four fingers had pressed down on the front of my shoulder. The feel of a thumb on my back.
Something lingered in my room. Like the dust hovering in the slant of light beside my bed. Like the air before a thunderstorm. The threat of something coming.
I ran to the bathroom and stood in front of the mirror, the neck of my shirt jerked down past my shoulder. I stretched the skin and squinted at the mirror. I thought I could just barely make out four pink marks.
Taryn barreled through the bathroom door, half awake. She glanced at me, quickly looked away, and went to a shower stall on autopilot.
The mirror fogged up as I bent close to the sink, straining to see. I pulled at the skin of my shoulder repeatedly and wiped at the condensation on the mirror, but everything was muted. Filtered. Like viewing the world through white curtains.
Another girl came into the bathroom, pointed to the other shower stall, and said, “Are you using that?”
I took a step away from the mirror. And then another.
“Hey, I asked if you were using that shower.”
“Huh? Yeah. Um, I need to get my stuff,” I said, stumbling by her.
“Somebody needs some coffee,” she mumbled as I passed.
Shower. Khaki pants. Brown shoes, not broken in yet. Scarlet shirt. I grabbed breakfast in the cafeteria on the way to first period and saw Reid in the student center with a group of guys, including Jason.
Reid patted someone on the shoulder and excused himself, and I walked a little faster. I felt Jason’s eyes following me.
“Mallory,” Reid called. “Wait.”
The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end, and I backed into an alcove behind a column. The whole hallway seemed to throb like my room at night, when I wasn’t fully awake.
Reid jogged over to me. “Hey,” he said.
But before he had a chance to say anything else, I said, “Did you see anyone last night?”
“Huh?”
“In the dorm. Around the dorm. Last night.” Because there was red paint on my door. Because something grabbed onto my shoulder.
“Not that I noticed. What happened? You don’t look so good.”
What happened? I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t even sure if I was seeing clearly. I yanked at the collar of my shirt, pulling it down over my shoulder. “Do you see something?” I asked.
Reid smiled, then tried not to smile, then smiled again. “Um.” I followed his gaze to the black-and-silver bra strap. Damn Colleen and her proclamation that the only thing more boring than a white bra was a sports bra. I released the neck of the shirt and shrugged it back up over my shoulder.
“I meant like marks or something. On my shoulder,” I said, looking at the people rushing past, but not really focusing on them.
His forehead creased and he leaned closer. “Did someone hurt you?”
I shook my head. Maybe. No. I don’t know. “Never mind.” I looked at his hands, which were kind of hovering between us, like they were undecided.
There was a chime from the speakers. “Warning bell.” Reid started backing away in the opposite direction. “I have soccer later,” he said, like I had wondered. “But I’ll see you.” Like I had asked. Then he turned and fell into stride with a sea of red shirts and khaki pants.
He disappeared.
Colleen said I disappeared when I was with Brian. Which at first I didn’t get—because I was louder and more sarcastic and I laughed more whenever I was near him.
I was always on my toes, deflecting his friends’ half flirts, half jabs. Reminding Joe that Sammy was the hot twin, without the busted nose. Making sure Brian saw me doing cartwheels at the waterline. I was me, and then some. I was me times ten. So I rolled my eyes the first time she said it. But then I realized she meant that, even then, I still paled in comparison to Brian’s forceful personality. The way he demanded attention, demanded respect, demanded me.
“Mallory, come on,” he’d said, while we sat with Colleen, Cody, and Sammy on the beach. “Show me your place.”
I waited for Colleen to come up with an excuse for me, like she always did, because she could usually sense, without asking, that I wanted one. But she stayed silent, staring off at the horizon.
“Colleen,” I’d said. “Don’t we have plans this afternoon?”
“Yeah,” she said, keeping her eyes on the distance. “We do.” Then she turned to me and kept her face hard. “Sorry, I didn’t notice you were here.”
Bree was hard not to notice in English class. She was demanding attention too, laughing a little too loudly. Making sure everyone overheard her telling some story to Krista about some guy over the summer. I rolled my eyes, but I kind of understood why she was doing it. Krista sat directly across the room from me, on the other side of the U of tables, wedged between Bree, who wouldn’t shut up, and Taryn, who was drawing in her notebook. There was this berth around them, almost like they were exclusive, except I got the feeling that nobody else wanted to touch them.
Chloe sat beside me. “Word to the wise,” she whispered. “Mr. Durham can make your life easy, or he can make your life hell. Choose wisely.”
“Thanks.”
“Also, we’re about to have a pop quiz on the summer reading. Happens every year.”
“I didn’t get the summer reading list.”
“Not good.” Chloe tore a paper from her notebook and started scribbling titles and names and half sentences. Quick plot summaries. Then Mr. Durham walked in the room and she quickly balled up the paper and stuffed it in her bag.
I was definitely going to fail.
I only saw Reid once during classes, and he didn’t see me. He walked into a science classroom down the hall from mine, laughing at something the girl next to him was saying, raising his hand in greeting as he passed his teacher. And that was all I saw of him. He was a senior, with senior classes and senior friends, and presumably a better lunch slot than me. Seriously. Who eats lunch at eleven in the morning?
And after school, with nothing better to do, I worked. Well, first I changed. Then I worked. I made a serious dent in the summer reading list even before study hall began. After Ms. Perkins made the rounds and checked that we were all in our rooms for the mandatory two-hour study-hall block, I sent a quick message off to Colleen: Day 1: success. And by “success” I mean “survived.” 78 days left. I ran through make-believe responses in my head: telling me how much her day sucked maybe, or sharing some piece of mindless gossip—real or imagined—about someone we both knew.
I picked up Lord of the Flies, waiting to hear a chime from my computer, but nothing came. So about halfway through study hall, I started writing another email, this time about Reid. Except I realized I’d never once mentioned him to her. And I wasn’t sure why.
There was a knock at my door, and I froze. Could the faculty sense when we weren’t studying during study hall? Someone jiggled the door handle, and I slammed my laptop shut. “Hey, it’s me,” a voice called. Like I should just know who it was. Which, okay, I did.
I opened the door and Reid wedged a triangle block underneath it, propping it open. Part (b) of visitation rules as stated in the Monroe Student Handbook.
“You carry those around?”
“Ms. Perkins hands them out at check-in,” Reid said. Right. Part (a).
“Oh.” Then I stood in the doorway, wondering what I was supposed to do. Reid brushed by me and sprawled out on this particularly unattractive orange shag carpet I’d found that afternoon in the closet of spare furniture beside the laundry room.
“God, this is hideous,” he said. He flipped a textbook open, stuck a pen behind his ear, and said, “By the way, I’m helping you with math.”
“I don’t need help with—”
And then Ms. Perkins was standing in the entrance to my room. “I wasn’t aware you were taking senior courses, Mallory.”
“Oh, I’m not.” Reid was giving me a Look. I opened the top drawer to my desk and pulled out my calculator. “Reid’s helping me with math.”
He smiled at Ms. Perkins, dimple and all. “That’s very generous of you, Reid.”
He shrugged, like it was no big deal. “Yeah, well, we used to be friends.”
Ms. Perkins left and I stared at the blank screen of my calculator. Used to be friends. Is that what we were? Were we ever anything, really? “Mallory, I didn’t mean—”
“Why are you here, exactly?”
He glanced toward the hall again, where Ms. Perkins was making the rounds from room to room, and scribbled absently in his notebook. Or maybe all those letters and numbers meant something to him.
“How was your first day?” he asked, without looking up.
“I already failed my first quiz.”
Reid smiled and put his pencil down. “Durham, right?”
I nodded. “And I eat lunch at eleven.”
“The horror.” He looked down the hall again. Empty. “So, here’s the thing.” Reid lowered his voice so I had to lean forward off my chair, and I still could barely hear him. “Tomorrow night—”
“Knock, knock.” Chloe stood in my doorway, something clutched to her chest. Her eyes moved from me to Reid to me again, and she grinned. “Am I interrupting something?”
“No,” Reid said, before I could even open my mouth. He went back to scribbling intensely in his notebook.
“Oh good,” Chloe said. She stepped inside the room and pressed her back against the wall, out of view of the hallway. “I come bearing gifts.” Apparently whatever she was clutching to her chest were the gifts. Looked like a stack of yellow books. Then she turned them around so they were facing out. CliffsNotes for all the summer reading.
“Oh my God,” I said.
Reid glanced up. “Prep-school porn.” He laughed to himself and started packing up his stuff. “I can’t indulge this behavior. It’s appalling. What would your parents think?”
Chloe was shaking with laughter. “Leave already so we can close the door.”
“I’d rather be caught with a girl in my room than that,” he said, hands held up.
“You mean Mallory?”
I looked at the floor, so unlike the version of me he remembered. As far as I could tell, Reid ignored the question. “Hey, I need to talk to you tomorrow.”
“I have e-mail, you know.”
“Oh no,” Chloe said, “that doesn’t really belong to you. Don’t send anything you don’t want them knowing.” She pointed to the ceiling, like they were all-powerful, all-seeing.
“Will you be here tomorrow? Same time?” Reid asked.
“Not like I can be anywhere else.” I pointed to the Monroe handbook on my desk. “I think every hour is regimented.”
Reid smiled as he backed out the door. “Nah, Mallory. Those are only suggestions.” It sounded exactly like something Colleen would say. And before I could stop myself, I was grinning ear to ear.
Chloe closed the door behind him and threw the books on my desk. “I suggest we get to work.” She pointed to the CliffsNotes for The Grapes of Wrath. “This. This is a particular brand of torture I can’t let anyone endure. Start here.” I searched for a pen. “And Mallory? Write fast.”
When Chloe left with her books at the end of study hall, the emptiness of the room was overwhelming. I started to see things, like I used to at home. Brian’s shadow on the dark window. A handprint on the wall.
Ms. Perkins came around to give the lights-out notice, and I held the vial of sleeping pills in my hand, thinking about the hand on my shoulder when I was half conscious. I started to worry that maybe someone had been in my room—someone real. I tilted the vial back and forth, listening to the pills fall against one another. Then I threw them in the bottom drawer of my desk and slammed it shut.
My mind raced with possibility. That green car. The red door. The restraining order. Was it only good in New Jersey?
The alarms on the outside doors were armed at night, at least.
But the window. Crap, the window. I checked it and double-checked it, like Mom would do at home.
I sat on my bed and stared at the door, the window, the door again. The dorm settled into silence.
And then it started, in the distance. Even though I wasn’t sleeping. Even though I wasn’t in the in-between. I was wide awake. Sitting upright. Staring at the door. And it started.
Boom, boom, boom.
I stared at the light framing the door, which seemed to pulsate brighter with each beat of his heart, coming closer.
I used to have nightmares when I was a kid. The kind where you wake up, but you still see the dream. Back then, I used to close my eyes from it. Remembering what Mom always told me—it’s only real if you let it be. So I’d close my eyes until it passed.
The air changed in my dorm room. It started throbbing with the slow and steady beat. And because I was a coward, I ran for the desk. I threw open the bottom drawer, snatched the vial of sleeping pills, and took one.
I buried myself face down on my bed and covered my head with my pillow, but sleep didn’t come quickly enough. I felt something taking shape behind me. And this time, I swear I could hear it laughing.
I felt the hand on my shoulder, fingers digging in, as it held me down.
There were marks the next morning. I saw them in the shower. Red and thin, like fingers. I thought of Mom sitting by my bed, stroking the hair away from my sweat-drenched forehead, saying, It’s only real if you let it be. I looked away from my shoulder. If I didn’t see it, it wasn’t real.
Mr. Durham perched on the edge of his desk and took out his tattered copy of Lord of the Flies. I’d read most of that one on my own yesterday. And not the CliffsNotes version. Everyone took out their crisp copies and placed them on the tables in front of them.
“So,” he began, licking his finger and thumbing through the pages, “I think we’ve already established that Golding was saying, underneath it all, that without civilization, we are essentially savages.”
I opened my notebook and wrote, We are savages.
Mr. Durham stopped flipping pages and smoothed down a corner. “They stop thinking for themselves. When they kill Piggy, do they know it’s Piggy? Do any of them know?”
Krista spoke. “They had to know. How could they not? It’s pretty unrealistic.”
“Is it?” Mr. Durham asked. “You’ve all witnessed herd behavior.”
I wrote, herd behavior. Yes, I had witnessed it. At the ice cream shop.
Everyone leaned forward a little over the tables. Everyone but me. This wasn’t news to me.
“It can be as benign as shopping on Black Friday—haven’t you heard of people stampeding to get the cheap televisions? Trampling others? And when you cheer at a sporting event, would you get up to shout or cheer or boo on your own? Or do you only do it because everyone else is doing it? Because you are part of something greater?”
Silence in the classroom.
“And trends,” he continued. “I mean, really, who thought mullets were a good idea?”
A few of the guys laughed.
“Or blue eyeshadow,” Chloe said.
“Or bell-bottoms,” another kid said.
“Exactly,” Mr. Durham said, nodding his head and smiling.
“But it starts somewhere,” Bree said. “Right? I mean, blue eye shadow didn’t just appear from nowhere. Someone had to start it.”
“Yes, the idea comes from somewhere,” Mr. Durham answered. “Is that person more culpable than the followers? Less? If one person says, ‘Pull that person from the car and beat him to death,’ and twenty people oblige, who’s at fault?”
We stayed silent.
“And that, my friends, is why it’s nearly impossible to convict a mob.” He cut his eyes to me for a fraction of a second. I didn’t know why he was thinking of me. I hadn’t been part of a mob or influenced by group thought. No, it was just me. My decision. I chose death.
“So,” Krista said, speaking carefully again, “Lord of the Flies is really just a metaphor for bad fashion decisions?” A few giggles escaped around the room.
Mr. Durham grinned. “Or maybe it’s just one big allegory for high school.”
Reid showed up for study hall again, as promised. He spread out his work across my floor, and then he put a finger to his lips and motioned for me to come toward him.
I crouched beside him and said, “What?”
“Tonight,” he said in a voice that was so low I had to lean even closer. “New students get initiated.”
“Initiated?”
Apparently I spoke too loudly because he glanced toward my open door. “Tradition. They’re going to take you after lights out.”
“And do what with me?”
“I’m not telling.” He was fighting a smile.
“What the hell, Reid?” I sat cross-legged across from him, his notebook between us.
“Mallory, it’s fun. I’m only giving you the heads up because . . . Because. We all did it. It’s tradition.”
“Tradition. You sound like my dad—at Monroe, it’s tradition that blah, blah, blah.”
“It’s really not so bad here. And personally, I’d give just about anything to learn more about my dad.”
Crap. There were words I was supposed to say now. But they seemed so worthless, so I pressed my lips together instead.
“Sorry,” he said, like someone had to say it. “I’m just saying. This is practically my home. I like the traditions. You will too. I’m just giving you the heads-up. I feel like I owe you one.”
Because we used to be friends. Right.
“Nobody’s taking me,” I said.
He started to speak, then stopped. Then grinned. “Are you fast?”
“Yes.”