by Nancy Holder
I needed downtime, desperately. Maybe everyone else had forgotten that I’d come to Marlwood shortly after having a nervous breakdown, but I hadn’t. I was a master at disguising my anxiety, but at dinner, I’d come close to having a full-blown panic attack. In the din, no one had heard my shortness of breath. No one had seen my quivering lip and shaking hands, wrapped in a napkin underneath the table. But I was in serious danger of losing it, and I had to burn off the adrenaline in my system. Dilute the stress hormone known as cortisol.
So I began my run, listening to myself pant, watching my breath puff like a steam engine. I heard the rhythm of my footfalls. I began to feel grounded again. I had come a long way from the days when my panic had overwhelmed me to the point where I was lurching from the ice cream case to the frozen vegetables in our local Vons.
Mandy. I listened to the cadence of her name as I jogged. Man-dy. Man-dy.
I felt myself disengage from all my worries. My footfalls changed to Lind-say. Lind-say. Lindsay Anne Cavanaugh, starting over in the middle of the weirdest weirdness on the planet. Hitting reset. Putting myself back together with superglue. Finding myself in the maze that was Marlwood, all the other little rats and me.
Don’t think that way, I thought, and then I blinked and looked around.
I caught my breath. I was standing outside the door to the admin building storage room. I turned and looked back, recalling nothing about running up the path, past the porch, around the wall. I had lost time, and I was shivering with cold.
Equally icy and aware, Celia shivered inside me. She had taken me over and brought me here.
My hand was on the doorknob and I knew she wanted me to go inside. Someone must be having a session with Dr. Morehouse.
I cringed at how excited that made me feel. But I had a good reason. I had to know if any of them were after Mandy. I doubted they’d come out and confess to our shrink, but he was good at pulling things out of people. And maybe I’d figure it out, even if he didn’t.
I went in and pulled the door closed. On the balls of my feet, I crossed to the dumbwaiter and crawled inside. As before, I winced, afraid my weight would snap the rope, but stubbornly remained.
“I don’t know why I like to eat dead birds,” someone was saying.
“Oh, God,” I blurted, revolted. I covered my mouth and pushed on the door. I was going to be sick.
I flew out of the room.
BUT I WENT back again. I was just so astonished that someone (Claudette Hurst) could eat dead birds that I had to find out more. Maybe after I bolted, she confessed to destroying Mandy’s possessions, and I had missed it. Maybe Claudette was the Marlwood Stalker, killing small animals for her own twisted needs.
So I went back again. My stealth was rewarded, but not in the way I expected. Instead of discovering what I wanted to know, I listened in on Charlotte Davidson’s admission that she tried to shrink her feet by wrapping them in Ace bandages every night. Then I heard elegant Susi Maitland’s confession that she was a bed wetter. In on the secret, her housemother stripped and washed her sheets every morning, with no one else knowing.
I learned that when Gretchen Cabot was home, she spent nights folding and refolding all her clothes. She hated to touch anything that was pink. When she touched any hue of blue, she tasted citrus.
Maeve Spitzer was contemplating a sex change operation.
I still didn’t find out what I wanted to know, but my own weirdness was that I got kind of addicted to spying on my fellow Marlwoodians. Each time I eavesdropped on someone else’s misery, I somehow felt better about myself. As if I didn’t have to work so hard to feel normal, because being normal wasn’t all that common. The other girls were as haunted by their obsessions and quirks as Celia haunted me. Maybe one of them was unhinged enough to murder Mandy and me, just because.
I was shocked. Marlwood was still an asylum for wayward girls. I just hadn’t known it until now. Even though they had everything they could want—emphasis on thing—they really were under enormous pressure to live up to expectations. Their moms were PhDs or trophy wives. Their fathers were movie stars or billionaires. How could they hope to measure up to that? To surpass it? But they had better do it. Their parents were paying for private schools, enrichment camps, tutors, mentors, nutritionists, stylists, and therapists. And because they paid, they made their children pay it all back in accomplishments, awards, and Ivy League acceptances. These girls had to be the best that money could buy.
Dr. Morehouse seemed to know how to turn on the safety valve and help them let off steam. It worked on me, too. While I collected secrets and Dr. Morehouse soothed tortured psyches, Celia would grow calmer during each and every session that we spied on. He was a great shrink.
I had battles of conscience, but I had to know what else I could find out. Who else was gripped by a neurotic need to binge and purge (Gigi Martinez), or an obsession with collecting the entire fall collection of Manolo Blahnick heels (Mia Thomassen). And the more I listened, the quieter Celia got. Maybe he was healing her. Maybe she knew it. Besides, if I let too much time lapse between observations, Celia would force me to walk up the hill, open the door, and climb into the dumbwaiter. If I continued to eavesdrop, maybe she would leave me alone, resting in peace at last.
But of course, my own sessions were the best. We spoke of inconsequential things, mostly small talk, but they reminded me that I wasn’t alone. We ended each “chat,” as he called them, with a walk along my geranium-strewn path. I left refreshed and joyful, and each time, hope bloomed that Celia had left for good.
A week went by, then two. Mandy and I got together to compare notes, but we had nothing. There were no more stories about the Marlwood Stalker. And I hadn’t seen Miles in all that time, despite his claim that he was living on campus. It was as if he had dissolved into thin air, literally. I couldn’t say that I missed him, because it would be way too twisted to miss Miles Winters. But when I finally broke down and asked Mandy where he was, she said he’d gone back to San Francisco. But I had the feeling that she didn’t really know; that it would be embarrassing for her to admit that she’d lost track of him.
Maybe it didn’t matter. Now that she and I were air-quote friends, perhaps we could fix whatever there was left to fix. If anything.
Dr. Morehouse had to have a session with every single student at Marlwood—the damage control that Dr. Ehrlenbach had ordered. And speaking of Ehrlenbach, why didn’t she come back? How could she monitor our wellbeing, see if we were accomplishing all the things the glossy school brochure had promised? I could write up my findings, I thought sarcastically. Let her know that beneath the surface, most of her star pupils were suffering from too much pressure. They were buckling beneath the weight of clutter, their many layers more like debris fields from battles they hadn’t really won. They just pretended to be winners.
One night, I eavesdropped on a girl named Barbara, who had confided in Dr. Morehouse that her mother was having an affair with her stepbrother. Lightweight stuff, compared to other things I’d heard. Dr. Morehouse worked his magic, soothing her and helping her decide if she should tell her stepfather or not.
I headed back to my dorm feeling oddly lighthearted, given the agony I’d overheard. The night, though cold, was clear. It hadn’t rained in days. I heard cheering from the illuminated soccer field. Team captain Julie would be over there, giving the Red team hell.
I let myself into Grose, saluted the statue that was blessing our mail, and wandered down the hall. The TV was on in Ms. Krige’s housemother apartment. I smelled microwaved popcorn. Normal life. My normal life.
I pushed open the door to my room and flicked on the light.
The white head was lying faceup on my bed. Except . . . it didn’t have a face. It had been smashed in. The nose was gone. The mouth, shattered.
And it lay on my bed.
My heart skipped beats as I walked across the room. Tingling, I peered down at it, holding myself stiffly, braced for... what?
�
�I’m glad,” I whispered to it, half expecting it to move. In my world, that wasn’t crazy. I had hated it for so long, feared it for longer.
Then I noticed that something was glinting inside, among the porcelain shards. I didn’t dare reach in, but I turned on the lamp on the nightstand and raised it slightly to get a better look.
I gasped.
It was the silver crescent moon that had been missing from my black silk knitted choker.
Fear flooded through me. Whatever calm we had been blessed with, it was over.
I went back outside, meaning to rush over to Jessel and bring Mandy to show her. But when I snapped back into awareness, I was inside the storage room again as someone else poured out her heart to Dr. Morehouse.
“I—I didn’t mean to take it,” a girl whispered, weeping. “I was going to pay for it.”
There was a pause. “We found quite a few things, Lara. From the school store, and . . . things that belong to other people. Your classmates.”
I was agog. Lara was a thief. Was she the thief? The person who had taken our things?
Of course. She would have easy access to Mandy’s room. She went in and out of there all the time. She might even have a key that Mandy didn’t know about.
“I—I was... I needed them,” she said. She sniffled.
“You have every possession you could possibly want. This is actually a problem with impulse control.” He stopped speaking, and Lara cried even harder.
“I . . . I start thinking about it.” She sobbed, hard. “I think about what it would be like to be caught. I’m so nervous by the time I do it. “
“Yes.”
“And then, when I get away with it, the relief is . . . ”
There was a silence. It stretched out over several seconds.
“It’s the best drug there is,” Lara said finally.
“So you do it for the pleasure that the relief brings you.”
“I guess. I don’t know. I get so scared when I’m getting ready. So I tell myself I won’t take anything else. It’s usually little stuff, but . . . but I know I won’t get in trouble for that. People just look the other way. Because of who we are. Y’know, rich and all.
“So sometimes I steal bigger stuff. It’s riskier.”
Trashing Mandy’s room was past risky. It was suicidal.
“We think such impulse challenges may be genetic. Meaning that it’s not your fault. We’ve also found that it can be combined with some other sort of impulse situation. Such as bingeing.” He paused again.
“I don’t do that,” she said in a rush. “That’s disgusting.”
“Or depression.” His voice was soft, low, coaxing.
“I’m not depressed. I don’t have anything to be depressed about.” She was shrill. Defensive.
“You have an older sister at Yale. She’s a world-class fencer.” Another beat, and then he added, “Depression can be defined as anger turned inward.”
“No sibling rivalry here.” She blew her nose. “I’m not mad at Linette. She’s away at school. I never even see her.”
“Lara, I’m here to help you. Some kind of stress is manifesting itself as kleptomania. Is there a secret that you have, something you haven’t been able to tell anyone?”
Like, you’re possessed? I thought. But I didn’t think Lara herself knew.
“No,” she said firmly. “I just do it, okay?”
“You know you have to have six sessions with me, or the school board will be notified and you’ll be asked to leave.”
“My parents already said they’d pay you guys off. And nobody even missed that stuff. It was just little crap.”
“Claire mentioned to me that Lindsay Cavanaugh lost a ring that belonged to her mother.”
I went on alert. What else had Claire mentioned?
“Probably some piece of cheesy junk.”
I jerked.
“It has value to Lindsay. Her mother is dead.”
“I don’t know why you people let her in here. If you want to talk crazy, Lindsay’s picture is beside the definition in the dictionary.”
Nice. But I had a thought—she could have easily taken my choker and left the black silk beside Mandy. Then smashed in the head and dropped the moon inside.
“Celia,” I thought, talking to her, “did one of them force Lara to take my choker and break the head?”
She stirred inside me, but she didn’t answer. I took that to mean she didn’t know.
“Let’s look at this light on the wall,” Dr. Morehouse suggested. “Now, clear your mind, and imagine yourself walking along a path.”
I saw the glow through the crack in the wall. I listened to his gentle voice. And I smelled geraniums. I really smelled them.
I drifted.
Celia grew still.
“Ten,” he said.
I DIDN’T KNOW how much time had passed when I opened my eyes again. But I felt refreshed, if stunned by what I’d learned. I had to tell Mandy right away.
I crawled back out of the dumbwaiter and headed across the room. Without looking where I was going, I opened the door.
And slammed hard into someone’s chest.
“Lindsay,” Miles said warmly, putting his arms around me. “Fancy meeting you here.”
NINETEEN
“MILES,” I SAID, trying move out of his arms as he smiled down on me. But he held me tightly against his chest.
“Come here often?” he said, looking meaningfully from me to the door and back again. “Peekie, peekie, peeping Tomette?”
“Wh-what do you mean?” I asked, but even I could hear the lie in my stammer. I knew exactly what he meant.
“Getting dirt on all the girls.”
“Researching,” I shot back.
“Yeah. Okay.”
“Did you leave me a present on my bed?”
The warmth from his body was seeping into my cold bones. He smelled like cigarettes and cinnamon. There was a dimple in the center of his chin that I hadn’t noticed before, and his blue eyes were beautiful. He was wearing a black hoodie and slouchy jeans, not the suave Euro-model of times past, but almost a regular guy. Except that there was something about him that made him different.
Something I responded to.
“I didn’t leave you a present on your bed,” he said, walking me backward. My back touched the side of the building. Flattened. “But I could. Or in it.”
He cupped my chin and smiled down at me, his lush, long lashes brushing his cheeks. My stomach clenched and little chills fanned out from the small of my back. I tried to remind myself that this was Miles Winters, who had, speaking of beds, been seen in bed in the Lincoln Bedroom at the White House with his own sister
—that could just be gossip—
and who had been in rehab centers all over the world—
—not his fault—
—and who might have staged an accident to kill me.
Maybe he was in on it with Lara. What if he’d heard about our visit to Lakewood and trashed all Mandy’s stuff with Lara’s help in an act of mutual revenge? Mandy loved to hint around that Lara was gay. Maybe she and Miles were pissed off at her for going to see Troy.
I had assumed being a lesbian would be the deep dark secret that she might one day reveal in a shrink’s office, if it even bothered her. Not that she was a kleptomaniac.
Maybe he was possessed. I looked at his ice-blue eyes. Not black. Not possessed at the moment. So warm, and I was so cold. And he was a guy who was, what? Coming on to me? After Thongboy had just so thoroughly dissed me that I still couldn’t believe it?
“C’mon, Lindsay,” he whispered. “Haven’t you had enough swimming in the baby pool? The world’s an ocean. Let me show it to you.”
“I would drown,” I said unsteadily.
“I’ll breathe for you,” he promised.
He leaned down. He was going to kiss me again. I tried to remind myself that the first time had been very unpleasant. But that wasn’t true. As brief and surprising as it
had been, it had been a great kiss.
“We’ve teamed up, remember?” He rubbed the sides of my chin with his fingers. His thumb pulled down on my lower lip.
“Miles, stop, okay?” I said. “This kind of stuff doesn’t work on me.”
“You haven’t had very good luck with guys,” he said. “Wily Riley hooked up with someone else at your party. Troy the Boy Toy, well, let’s just say you two should have taken me with. I’d have helped you dump his T-bird in the lake.”
That was so unexpected that I guffawed. Right in his face. He made a good-natured show of wiping nonexistent spittle off his nose.
If he knew about that, maybe he knew about Mandy’s trashed room. So I told him. He was completely caught off guard. She hadn’t mentioned a word of it to him.
“Maybe she didn’t want to worry you,” I said. Then I added, “Where have you been?”
“Sorry, I had business.” His voice was tight. “Probation meeting.”
“Must have gone well. You might have mentioned it.”
He relaxed a little, his shoulders coming down. Lines in his face softened. He was incredibly good-looking, in a quirky way.
“You missed me.”
“I just couldn’t keep tabs on you. ”
His smile was triumphant. “But I didn’t come back empty-handed. I’ve got something for you.”
What was this, hitting on Lindsay round two? I couldn’t back away; he had me pressed against the wall. He was tall; he loomed over me, smiling like he knew the best secret. His body heat seemed to be melting me. The warmer I got, the more aware I was of how cold I had been.
“Something you will like,” he murmured.
He lowered his head toward mine, and I felt my lips parting. I was going to kiss Miles Winter. I actually wanted to.
Then Celia roared to life inside me. I felt her thrashing, her coldness washing over my bones. Her screams echoed in my mind: “Not him! Not him!”
I grunted.
“Not him!”
As he sighed against my mouth, Miles brought his hand around my neck. I flared with fear. He put his other hand around my neck and eased his weight against me.
