Hysteria (2 page)

“Coll,” I whispered into her bedroom window.

She had her music turned up and face turned away, brown curls bouncing to the beat.
Yet somehow she knew I was there. She spun around, glanced at her open bedroom door,
and sent me a quick sequence of hand signals. A twist of her first two fingers. A
cross of her wrists. A flash of three fingers. Dairy Twist. The one near the Exxon.
Three minutes.

Yes, there were two Dairy Twists within walking distance. Yes, we ate at both. I let
myself out of her yard and walked the last two blocks to the Dairy Twist. I was slouched
against the white vinyl on the side of the building when Colleen strode across the
intersection. She sank down beside me on the pavement, like me and nothing like me.
She was pale and curvy where I was tan and straight. Curly light-brown hair to my
dark straight hair. Blue eyes to my brown.

People still got us confused. Must’ve been the way we walked, or maybe talked. We’d
been inseparable since her family moved to town in the fifth grade. Ever since Carly
Preston made fun of the gap between her front teeth and I’d told Carly it was better
than walking around with a hideous mouth full of metal. Nobody makes fun of anything
about the way Colleen looks anymore, but not because of me.

Colleen laced her fingers with mine and leaned her head back on the wall. “She says
I’m grounded for life. What do you think that means in Dabner family talk? Two months?
Three? What will you do without me?”

“They’re sending me away,” I said, my voice wavering.

Colleen released my hand and stood up. “Sending you where? Did the lawyer come back?”

I shook my head and stood. “Not prison. Boarding school.”

Colleen sucked in a giant breath and exhaled, “No!”

“Yes. New Hampshire. My dad’s old school.”

She shook her head, her curls whipping around. “No. No fucking way. This isn’t happening.”

I started to panic at the way she was panicking
—
so unlike Colleen. When the cops showed up, she lied through her teeth. And when she
found me later that night under the boardwalk, she didn’t freak out. Didn’t adamantly
shake her head or say things like
no
or
no fucking way
or
this isn’t happening.
Instead she’d said, “I’m sorry,” which made no sense. And besides, I hated apologies.

And now she was freaking out. “God, I can’t
believe
I didn’t go home with you that night.”

“Cody Parker,” I said, forcing a smile. Trying to force
her
to smile. “Who could blame you?”

“Cody fucking Parker,” she mumbled. “So not worth it. God, this is one of those things
I don’t think I’ll ever be able to make up to you, you know?”

“Coll, it wasn’t your fault,” I said, because it wasn’t.

And she said, “No, it was Brian’s fault. That little prick.” Because that was just
the sort of thing a best friend should say. She started crying and said, “Shit,” as
she wiped at the mascara under her eye.

She grabbed me around the middle and cried into my shoulder, and I felt that ache
in my throat like I was going to cry too, but nothing came out. I held on tight, reasonably
sure that I would never love another human being as much as I loved Colleen Dabner
in that moment.

Someone leaned out a car window and whistled. We both shot him the middle finger.
And then Colleen’s hand tightened around my arm. Because standing on the corner of
the street was a group of guys, watching us in a way that made Colleen dig her fingers
into my skin.

Joe and Sammy and Cody fucking Parker. And Dylan. Brian’s brother, Dylan. I did a
double take before I realized it was him. Even though Dylan was three years younger
than Brian, sixteen like me, he had his brother’s same lanky build, same blond hair,
same amber eyes.

Empty now, just like Brian’s.

They didn’t speak. Dylan stood so still I wondered whether he was breathing at all,
until I noticed the fingers on his left hand twitching. Cody stared straight at me,
but he wasn’t making eye contact. Sammy dropped his hands to his sides, and chocolate
milk shake sloshed out the top of his cup, running across his knuckles. And without
communicating with each other, they spread out in a semicircle in front of us. I could
see it happen, the shift in thinking. Like they were losing individual accountability,
becoming part of something more.

“Hey now,” Colleen said, putting her hand palm out in front of her.

They shuffled closer, and we backed up against the dirty siding. The only one who
seemed to be thinking anything for himself was Dylan, and it didn’t look like he was
thinking anything good.

“Cody,” Colleen said, brushing her hair off her shoulder. Cody jerked his head, registering
Colleen for the first time. Colleen could get guys to do whatever she wanted with
a single sway of her hips or a tilt of her head, and this was no exception. Cody stepped
to the side, forming a little path.

“Get out of here, Colleen.”

“Yeah, I’m gone.” She gripped me by the wrist and pulled, like maybe they’d think
I was just an extension of her. I brushed Dylan’s shoulder as I passed, and all the
muscles in his arm went rigid.

I turned my head to say something, but really, there was nothing to say. And Colleen
was moving fast. One more step, and we were gone. We sprinted until we reached Colleen’s
back fence.

“Maybe leaving for just a little while isn’t such a bad idea, huh?” Then she squinted,
even though there wasn’t any glare, and backed into her yard. I heard her feet scrape
against the siding as she scrambled back through her bedroom window.

There was pizza on the dining room table, but my parents were eating on the couches
in the living room. We didn’t eat in the dining room anymore because of the tiny fragments
of glass. There weren’t any, really, not anymore. But no matter how many times my
mother vacuumed the floor, she swore there were pieces left behind. She said it wasn’t
safe. And the kitchen, well, it looked pretty much the same as always except for the
spot on the floor where the cleaning company had used bleach. Even though the tile
and the grout were both white, we could still see the outline where they had to scrub
out the blood. Whiter than all the rest.

And there was this feeling now. A presence. Not quite a ghost. But
something
.

It was that same something my grandma tried to tell me about before she died, but
after she knew she was dying. I’d sat on the side of her bed, looking anywhere but
at her, and she snatched my hand and pressed it into her bony chest. “Do you feel
that?” she asked. I didn’t know whether she was talking about her heart or her soul,
but all I felt was knobby bone, riddled with cancer. And then, below that, a weak
pulse. “That has consequence.”

I glanced to the door, hoping Mom would come in soon. I never knew what to say when
the medicine took control of her mouth. She squeezed my hand tighter and said, “Mallory.
Pay attention. That’s real. It lives on. It
has
to.” Then she released me. “It’s not the end,” she’d said. “This cannot be the end.”

She died anyway. All of her. But sometimes when I’d walk by her room, I’d catch a
whiff of her perfume, feel a fullness to her room. I’d think about what she told me,
and I’d stand at the entrance, staring in. Not sure what was left behind. But it was
something. And sometimes I’d turn around and find my mom standing behind me, watching
me, watching the room.

But I didn’t stand at the entrance of the kitchen contemplating what that
something
was. I didn’t really want to know. This one time I was supposed to meet Brian on
the boardwalk after lunch, which was infuriating because he wouldn’t specify a time.
Summer was supposed to be timeless, he’d said, which usually meant I ended up waiting
so I wouldn’t miss him. I found Colleen hanging out with a group of guys from school
and joined her. We were both in the usual dress code for the shore: bathing suit tops
and short shorts, and some guy had his hand on my bare back when Brian walked up behind
me.

He’d wrapped his arms over my shoulders and said “Hey” into my ear, and I could tell
he was smiling. Then he pulled me backward and tightened his arms and said, “Sorry,
guys, this one’s mine.” I smiled and mouthed the word “Bye” to Colleen, and walked
with Brian’s arms around me, smiling because he had called me his.

But now when I walked in the kitchen, the fullness to the room was suffocating. Like
his arms, wrapped around me, squeezing and squeezing until I was short of breath and
then out of breath. I felt the word whispered throughout the room, grazing the exposed
skin on my arms, my legs, my neck.
Mine
, it whispered.
This one’s mine.

I shivered and grabbed a slice of pizza from the dining room table and took it to
my room. I packed a second suitcase. My flip-flops and shorts and frayed jeans. My
toothbrush and cell phone charger and sleeping pills. The essentials.

Then I swallowed a sleeping pill and waited. It sucked me down into the mattress,
my limbs heavy and sluggish. And as I waited, I stared at the ceiling fan, same as
every night. I looked straight upward so I wouldn’t catch a glimpse of his shadow
beside my closet door, his outline on the curve of my dresser. I kept the comforter
pulled up to my chin so I wouldn’t feel his breath against my neck. The word “mine”
whispered onto my skin.

I heard it coming, same as every night. Far away at first. Downstairs somewhere.

Boom, boom, boom.

Coming closer. Slow and steady, in that place between sleep and wake. Like I was half
hearing, half imagining.

I couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer. I didn’t want to, anyway.

Because it was here.

Boom, boom, boom
.

My whole room throbbed with it.

The beating of his hideous heart.

And then there was nothing but the dream. Same as every night. One moment, stretched
out to fill the hours. A breath. A blink. Infinity in a heartbeat.

Amber eyes clouding with confusion. A raspy voice pleading, “Mallory, wait.” The word
“no” dying on his mouth.

The blood on the floor, the blood on my hands.

The door as I pushed through it, staining it red.

The dark. The night.

Even in my dream I ran.

I always ran.

Chapter 2

T
here were voices downstairs. Familiar, but not. It took me a second to place them.
The new tightness in my mother’s voice, the way she squeezed her words out of her
throat. And my father, who spoke too deliberately. Like every line had been rehearsed
before he released it for consumption.

I swung my legs out of bed and jerked myself upright, steadying myself against the
wall. Then I tiptoed into the hall and waited at the top of the stairs.

“Call the police, Bill.”

“And tell them what exactly? We can’t prove anything.”

“She’s supposed to stay two hundred yards away. Two hundred yards. That’s what the
restraining order is for.”

“You don’t know it was her.”

Her.
The word lodged in the base of my skull, sent chills across my shoulders. I gripped
the stair rail and ran down the steps, feeling the wood grains bite at my palm. I
stood at the kitchen entrance, back door swung wide open. Open, so I could see the
outside of the door. The weathered white now stained a mottled purple, tiny globs
of flesh clinging to the smears. Near the edges, the smears spread out in distinct
lines, like being dragged by fingers.

My parents noticed me hovering in the entranceway, and Dad moved his body in front
of the door so I couldn’t see.

“Don’t worry, Mallory,” Dad said. “It’s not what you think. It’s not blood.”

But I already knew that. It looked nothing like blood. It looked like blueberries.
Which was how I knew it was her.

I’d met Brian’s mom before. Just once. She didn’t really like me. Well, she liked
me at first, and then she didn’t. I’d met Brian at sunrise that June morning so he
could teach me to surf. That’s where I met his friends Joe and Sammy for the first
time. They liked me at first too. More than his mom. They liked me all the way up
until the day I killed him.