11

My first session with Alice is eerily similar to every appointment I’ve had with real therapists, as long as you completely ignore the Hoarders-esque state of her office and the way she keeps snapping her gum and the fact that she occasionally rolls her eyes when I say something she disagrees with. I have this sense that she’s assuming the pose, role-playing the whole thing like we had to do in A.P. Psychology.

It’s like we’re playing doctor until we get to the bits that might actually be useful, when she sits forward abruptly, drums her lips, then jots something down haphazardly in her notebook.

“Are you sure there’s no faster way to do this?” I ask. “Maybe if you told me what you’re writing down.”

“There’s no faster way,” she says, scribbling furiously. “I’m following my gut. Some things may seem mundane to you, but they might hold the key. Other things may seem really big and have nothing to do with it. I just want you to keep talking.”

And I do. For ninety-five straight minutes, and I don’t leave a single second empty. And I feel productive, like I’m getting something done and need to keep plowing ahead.

I tell her about my tantrums and how dance seemed to get them out of me, and how Mom thought that meant maybe I’d had ADHD. I tell her the night terrors started out as dreams, then spread to the visitors at my bedside and I’d scream until they disappeared and Dad would come running in with the baseball bat he kept under the bed. I tell her things I’ve never said aloud, not even to the other counselors, because the words themselves make me feel weak, and when I feel weak, I cry, and when I cry, I feel out of control. I tell her how, when I was little, I thought Debra Messing and Isla Fisher and Amy Adams were the very definition of beauty and how, when the twins turned three and their baby-blond hair started darkening toward Mom’s reddish color, I was secretly heartbroken, as if I’d lost something, no matter how stupid or self-absorbed that sounds. They were going to look like our parents, and I was going to keep looking like a stranger.

But I tell Alice the truth, because for the first time, I want the counseling to work more than I want to hide the parts of me I’m scared of.

At some point we bounce toward the present. “The Wrong Things,” Alice says. “The changes or flickers. Tell me about those again.”

So I talk, telling her about the most recent events with Gus and the buffalo and the renovated church. But the more I talk, the more the piercing headache behind my eye swells. “I don’t understand what’s happening,” I gasp.

“You’ve come to the right place,” Alice says, without looking up from her notebook. She has the voice recorder I traded her this morning balanced on her lap. “I mean, maybe. Hopefully. In an ideal world, yes, this is the right place. Look, you may have been having these extended conversations with one of Them for your entire life, but what you’re experiencing now is much more common. I mean, typically they’d only be happening on your way in or out of a dream state, but the gist is the same.”

“Well, what are they?” I ask.

“Too soon to say. What I do know is that most people only experience very brief visitations, like the flashes you describe. You wake up and you’re not in your room, but as soon as you scream you’re back. You fall asleep on the bus and when your eyes open someone’s staring at you—you jump up and they’re gone. You hear someone talking downstairs, so you go see a couple having dinner at your table. When you flip on the light, they vanish. Usually, they don’t even see you. When they do, witnesses describe the Others as seeming just as surprised as they were. I don’t think they’re fully aware of us.”

“Grandmother is.”

“Grandmother, like you, my dear Natalie, is different. And that’s why this is so important.”

“She is God, isn’t she?” I say.

Alice exhales. “I’m a scientist who studies nighttime hallucinations under the primary assumption that there’s something supernatural about them. I’m the last person prepared to make a statement about what God is and if it exists. I personally have never really bought the idea of a higher power, but then again, as far as the rest of the faculty’s concerned, I might as well be the chairperson of Leprechaun Studies. All I know is that Grandmother and all the visions that came before her are something. God, ghost, or something in between, we’re going to find out who Grandmother is. I believe that, Natalie.”

The next morning Jack and I are walking out to the Jeep when it happens again. The shutters and door flash red. The basketball hoop in the driveway and my baby brother vanish. I stand in the middle of the front yard, the whole world frozen and congealed, feeling like I’d have to cut through gelatin to move another step.

Just as quickly, though, a blast of sound tears through the stillness, and I jump.

“Hurry up!” Jack calls from the car. He’s leaned across the seat to hit the horn, which wouldn’t be so alarming if I had any idea how he got there. I shake myself out of it and climb in beside him.

“Sorry,” I say. “Thought I forgot my phone.”

Jack chortles then tries to play it off like he’s clearing his throat, a trick Dad frequently employs when Mom disapproves of whatever he’s laughing at. “Nothing,” Jack hurries, before I even get a chance to glare. “You just checked it, like, three times between the kitchen and the porch.”

My cheeks burn at his observation, and I start the car, devotedly pretending not to have heard. It’s been four days since Matt’s party. I’m still actively fuming over what happened with Matt that night, but it’s Beau who has me wavering between giddiness and obsessive, all-consuming overthinking. It seems like the Wrong Thing incidents and the thought of Megan leaving for Georgetown in a couple of days are the only things that make me stop wondering why he hasn’t called.

As I drive toward the school, I do what I’ve done every time I didn’t want to deal with or think about something for the past two years: I imagine myself at Brown, with new friends who don’t know about Matt or care about why I quit the dance team, a place where I can start over. But the daydream gives me no relief. I’m too angry at Matt, too embarrassed about whatever happened with Beau. It felt right while it was happening, sweet and genuine and so intense that I’d been sure he was feeling the same thing. Now I’m forced to replay all the highly personal details I shared with him and cringe at my own vulnerability.

When we pull up to the gate outside the field house, Jack springs out of the car, calling, “Later!” but I don’t drive off right away. Instead I watch my brother sprint across the field. He’s blipping in and out of view—just like Beau did at Senior Night—and then I see his teammates in the distance buzzing with the same strobe-light effect. Only those guys aren’t disappearing like Jack is. They’re shifting, rearranging with impossible speed, on the left side of the field one second and the right the next; mid jumping jack one instant and jogging along the far side of the track the next. I watch one boy in particular, T.J. Bishop, whose hairstyle keeps oscillating between a close shave and a pathetically short ponytail, his body bulking up and slimming down in steady, alternating beats.

“The Wrong Things,” I say aloud to myself. I still have no idea what they mean.