Hysteria (11 page)

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.