Hysteria (3 page)

So we surfed. Or they did, anyway. Turned out Brian didn’t really want to teach me.
He wanted me to watch him surf. And then he wanted me to lie on his board while he
floated next to me, tracing circles on my back.

“New Girl coming to breakfast?” Joe asked when we were all back on the sand. Joe and
Sammy both had this dark hair that got impossibly darker in the water. They were twins,
but easy to tell apart. Joe was bigger and his nose was crooked from a fight.

“We’ll meet you there,” Brian said, snaking an arm around my waist. “Gotta swing by
home to get my wallet.”

“I hope New Girl likes grease,” Sammy said. “New Girl doesn’t look like she eats bacon.”

“New Girl loves bacon,” I said. As long as it was chopped into microscopic pieces
and sprinkled on a salad. Except for today. Today, I’d eat it, swallowing my nausea
along with the grease.

And with that, Brian led me to his home. At the time I thought maybe it meant something.
But it probably only meant he needed his wallet.

Brian’s house was more like mine than Colleen’s. Big, open, airy. White. Everything
echoed. The grinding blender echoed through the hallway, then wound down to silence.
“Who’s there?” someone called from down the hall.

“Just me, Mom.”

He walked toward the kitchen, pulling me behind. Brian’s mom was scooping blueberries
into the top of the blender. She was blond and kind of stocky, and she’d probably
been pretty when she was younger. But now she poofed her hair too much and slathered
foundation on too thick, which settled into the lines in her face. She reached out
to hug Brian but kept her hands out to the sides. “Careful,” she said, “it’ll stain.”

Her palms were a mix of purple and blue swirls. “And who’s this?”

“Mallory,” I said.

“Mallory. I’m Paula. Nice to meet you. Would you like a smoothie?”

I started to decline but Brian spoke for me. “Going out for breakfast.”

Brian reached into the strainer in the sink and pulled out a handful of blueberries,
popping them into his mouth. His fingertips were purple. His mom
—
Paula
—
shook her head. “Don’t let him touch your white shirt with that hand.” Shirt was kind
of an overstatement. It was a tank top, tight, nearly transparent, so anyone could
see the detailing on the top of my pink bikini. I folded my arms across my stomach.

Brian grinned, reached his fist into the colander again, and squeezed a handful of
berries. His hand came out coated in purple. He walked toward me, smiling. I backed
up against the wall, looking from him to his mother. “Brian, leave the poor girl alone.”

But he didn’t. He leaned into the wall, blocking me in, which was way too intimate
for his mother to see, and apparently she agreed because she looked away. He whispered,
“Won’t hurt a bit.” Then he pressed his right hand around my upper arm, leaving behind
a tattoo of his imprint.

And seeing as Paula was pretending we weren’t there and had her head in the refrigerator,
I strode to the sink, squeezed the cool berries in my hand, felt the juice coat my
fingers, and planted my hand on his upper arm.

“You own me now,” he’d said, and he grabbed the bottom of my shirt, balled it up,
and pulled me toward him. It was stained now, I was sure. I squirmed away from him,
because his mother was
right there
, and also because he was ruining my shirt.

I turned my back to him and washed my hands in the sink. And then I felt him beside
me, sharing the same water.

Then a boy in nothing but boxers barged into the room. “What the
—
”

Paula spun around, cutting his sentence in half. “Dylan, this is Brian’s friend, Mallory.”

“Yeah, I know who it is. I’m just wondering why my lab partner from chemistry is in
my kitchen at nine in the morning.” And there was another question lingering in the
air as he cut his eyes from me to Brian.

Paula narrowed her eyes. “Your lab partner?”

I looked at the floor, not because of his mom’s question, but because of Dylan’s look.
And because Dylan was in his boxers. With Brian standing right there. Like Brian might
see something in the way Dylan was looking at us, or he might see something in the
way that I was looking at Dylan. I leaned into Brian’s side, hoping it hurt Dylan
to see.

It did. I could tell. “Seriously?” Dylan said. And I was worried he wasn’t going to
stop there.

“Brian,” Paula said, “a word, please?”

Brian laughed and ran a hand through his hair. “Don’t worry, Mom. She’s eighteen.
Right, Mallory? Tell my mom so she’ll get off my case.” I liked Brian. I liked Brian
in the way that girls like boys when they see them surfing. And the way girls like
boys slinging their arms over them in front of their friends. And I liked the way
he reminded me of Dylan, only he was Dylan times two. More outspoken, easier to read.
And best of all, he didn’t already have a girlfriend.

Maybe I’d come to like him more than that, but I didn’t know him well enough yet.
We’d never crossed paths when we were in the same school, and he’d been away at college
this past year. He’d be going back there soon enough. I was still New Girl, and he
was still a little intimidating, which was something I wasn’t used to.

“Eighteen,” I said, my breath coming too fast. “I’m just pretty bad at science.”

Brian laughed at the lie and Dylan cringed, while Paula’s eyes moved from me to Dylan
to Brian to me again. Like she was assessing my age, holding my face next to each
of her children for comparison. I knew she could tell. I should’ve been with Dylan.

“I didn’t realize you guys knew each other,” Brian said.

“Just a little,” I answered, because after that first lie, the next came easy.

“Yeah,” Dylan said, like he was trying to mock me, but it didn’t come out right. I
couldn’t understand how Brian didn’t notice. Probably because he didn’t pay that much
attention to his little brother. Or maybe I had just spent way too long paying way
too much attention to Dylan, trying to pull meaning from every shift of his expression.
I was still doing it right then, trying to decipher his words: was there an inflection
where there shouldn’t have been? Was he secretly directing his words at me? Was there
meaning just below the casual phrase? I’d always thought there was. But maybe I’d
been imagining it.

Brian planted a kiss on his mother’s cheek and pulled me down the hall again. And
when I said good-bye, her mouth was a tight line. Her eyes creased. Her shoulders
tensed. It was like, even then, she knew I’d somehow ruin his life.

She was right.

I’d marked him with my handprint. And two weeks later, he was dead.

Now she had marked me.

The stain on our door was dry. I picked up a rag from the sink, doused it in vinegar,
and started rubbing. That’s how I got his handprint off my arm later that day. Brian
kept his on. It took three days to fade.

“Stop,” my mother said as I scrubbed the back door. “Stop. The fingerprints. You’re
ruining it.”

Seemed to me like I was fixing it.

Semantics.

Dad helped me scrub, but the stain wouldn’t budge. And the whole time, I felt this
prickly feeling along my back, the kitchen charged with this energy, and it grew and
grew until it felt like the entire room would burst from the tension.

I threw the rag on the floor and retreated to the living room. Dad said, “I’ll take
care of this,” like it was up for discussion or something, and disappeared into the
garage. He returned with a bucket of leftover white paint and applied a thick coat
over the entire door before he left for work. I watched from the safety of the living
room.

We had to leave the door open for the paint to dry, so Mom sat at the kitchen table,
staring out the open door.

Mom used to fight to keep the doors open as soon as spring hit. “Let the outside in,”
she’d say.

Dad would position himself in the entranceway, like he was doing the door’s job, and
say, “The bugs, Lori.”

She’d turn to me and mouth
the bugs
, and I’d smile. “They won’t stay forever,” she promised. But Dad hated bugs. Stomped
them with his work shoes, using twenty-thousand times the necessary force. Or he’d
chase them around with a flyswatter, stalking them from room to room.

But he always caved to her. We both did. Everyone did. I think maybe it was her smile.
Or maybe the way she’d laugh at you, but also kind of with you. Or the way she’d just
declare something and expect that that would be the end of it.

But now she was terrified of what might come through open doors. Or open windows.
Even unlocked bedroom doors.

The new version of my mother had two gears. One where she sat still and stared off
into the distance, like now, and another where she fluttered unpredictably around
the house, never making eye contact. She fluttered when she woke
—
paused through the middle of the day
—
and fluttered again before bed. She darted from window to window, diagonally across
the room and back again, with no real pattern. She revisited the same window two,
three times. She flipped the locks, open, closed. She turned the deadbolts, unlocked,
locked. She checked the upstairs windows.

And three nights ago, I waited in the hall outside my bedroom door. I waited for her
to finish and retreat into her room. I held out my hand to steady her, to ground her
again. To make her look at me. I touched her elbow and she flinched. I drew back my
arm.

Then she locked eyes with me for a fraction of a second and said, “Good night, Mallory,”
backed into her bedroom, and shut the door.

And then she turned the lock.

That’s when I learned that hate is a funny thing. It can manifest out of nothing in
an instant. It can jump from there to here. Like how Dylan taught me in chemistry,
electrons jumping from cloud to cloud, never passing through empty space. It doesn’t
take time to grow. It’s just not there. And then it is. Effortless.

So I backed into my bedroom, bubbling with hate, and turned my own lock.

After the paint on the back door was dry and my mother shut and locked it, she settled
into her lifeless state. She was perched on the edge of the white sofa, staring through
a crack in the lace curtains. Every time a car drove by, she’d suck in a breath and
stare out the window even harder. I tried to see what she saw, but everything was
muted by the white curtains. Filtered somehow. A little more abstract, a little less
real.

There’s nothing ominous about white. White walls, white tiles, white furniture. It’s
clean, pure, innocent. Nothing hides in white. Except sometimes when the sun is directly
overhead, nothing casts a shadow. And it’s hard to tell where the wall ends and the
floor begins. Like there’s just this expanse stretching outward, curving back around.
Like there’s no depth perception. It feels like the opposite of claustrophobia.

“She’ll stop when I leave,” I said, standing behind her.

“I don’t . . .” No smile. No laugh. No declaration. Just this uncertainty. Half a
sentence. I hated her for it. And suddenly I couldn’t stand the thought of seven hours
in the car together. Of Mom staring out the window or maybe fidgeting with the lock,
and Dad telling all these stories about his time at Monroe, hearing about so-and-so’s
son or daughter, or so-and-so’s second cousin twice removed. Of saying these formal
good-byes
—
all fake smiles and fake words and fake everything.