Would be, not is, I think. Because people who die are gone. Because there is no such thing as ghosts. I can feel the cold sweat pooling at the back of my neck. The hair on my arms prickles as if the room has dropped ten degrees. The air feels charged with electricity. This is what I get for thinking things were getting better. My psyche is rebelling on me. God, if only Dev were here! He has a way of making me feel grounded, of making the strange go away.
The doctor is busy jotting something on his legal pad, but when he looks up, his brow stitches with concern. “Mariana? Are you all right?”
I could say no. I could say, “I see someone standing behind you.” I could say, “I heard a voice.” I could say what I’m really thinking, which is, “It’s happening all over again.” Dr. Sterling would call my mother, who would cry all the way back from Mexico—if she could bring herself to come back at all. He would put me back on the medication, maximum dose, and then he would send me to Westgate again, where they would assure me that I would never see people who aren’t there again.
Except I know it won’t work. I know the things I will see at Westgate are a thousand times worse than what I’m seeing now. I know the only thing they’ll keep me from seeing is my friends. No more Delia. No more Dev.
“I’m fine,” I lie. “It’s just…hard to talk about.”
Dr. Sterling gives me a sympathetic nod. “Of course. But that’s often a sign we are getting at the heart of the thing, so let’s back up and come at it in a different way. Describe Enrique to me—physically, personality, anything you want.”
The girl sits in the extra chair off to one side of Sterling’s desk. It’s facing away from us, so she straddles it backward, her arms resting on the chair back. She’s watching me with soft gray eyes. “Who is Enrique?”
“He was my brother.” I answer her without thinking.
Dr. Sterling picks up his legal pad again. “Good. Start with the basics. What else?”
I hesitate. I really can’t talk about this.
“Just tell me,” the girl says. “Ignore him. Therapists are kind of a pain in the ass.”
“What do you want?” Again, I say it out loud without meaning to.
“Anything you want to give me,” Dr. Sterling says patiently.
“I want to talk to you,” the girl says. “I’ve been looking for you. It’s important. But I don’t want to interrupt your session. Go on.”
“Mariana?” the doctor prompts.
“Ummm…” I can’t bring myself to look at Dr. Sterling, so I focus on the girl instead. It feels strange to talk to someone who isn’t there, but she’s clearly listening intently. “He wanted to be an artist. I mean, he was an artist, really. He was always drawing. He was very smart, but some of his teachers didn’t believe it because he didn’t do his homework, or even take tests most of the time. He didn’t believe in standardized tests, so he just drew all over the test sheets.”
“So, a rebel. A troubled student.” Dr. Sterling writes something down.
“A non-conformist.” The girl smiles. “What all did he draw?”
“He wanted to be a tattoo artist or a graphic novelist. He drew tattoo designs all the time, on paper for his friends or on his arms in sharpie. It freaked my mother out. She thought tattoos were for gangs.”
“And was he involved in a gang?” Dr. Sterling asks.
The girl rolls her eyes behind him. “Did he have any real tattoos? I’ve always wished I got one.”
“No.” I say. “I mean, yes.”
Dr. Sterling looks at me quizzically. “He was or wasn’t involved in a gang?”
“No, of course not. I mean, yes, he got a real tattoo, but no, he wasn’t in a gang.”
The girl smiles apologetically. “I’m sorry, I’m messing you up.”
“And how did your mother feel about the tattoo?”
“She was angry.” I look down at my feet. “He was too young to get one without a parent’s permission. He snuck out and got his first one god knows where, then got his second when he visited my dad after my parents broke up. My dad gave him permission, I think just because he knew it would freak my mom out. It was like he was getting some sort of revenge on my mom, which is ridiculous because he was the one who had wronged her, you know? He was the one who cheated on her and left her for someone else.”
The girl shakes her head sadly. “Bastard.” She turns to the doctor. “Write that down: B-A-S-T-A-R-D.”
I smile a little in spite of myself.
Dr. Sterling catches the smile. “What are you thinking?”
“Nothing.” I wipe the smile off my face. “I was actually thinking I was mad at my dad—about the tattoo, I mean. I felt like he let Enrique get it to hurt my mom. I felt like Enrique rose to the bait, like he let himself be used to get at her.” I remember yelling at him about it. That was actually the beginning of the end, in some ways. The beginning of the fights that would drive a wedge between us. It was certainly the reason my mom wouldn’t let him visit my dad any more, but I’m pretty sure my dad knew that would happen. He didn’t want us to visit. This was just his way of making it my mom’s fault, not his, so he could disappear. “He got more tattoos after that, on his own. He did some of them himself with a needle and ink. My mom wanted him to have them all removed.” It was actually kind of a miracle she didn’t get them removed somehow for the funeral, the way she had the mortician take out his piercings. She was so insistent about them dressing him in long sleeves to hide them.
“What did he get?” The girl is watching me curiously.
The doctor would probably be delighted if I told him the truth—that Enrique’s first tattoo was of a Rorschach test he found in our psych textbook, you know, one of those ink splotches they use to test you in therapy. You’re supposed to tell them what you think it looks like, and whatever you see says something about you. It was right across the top of his chest, and Enrique said he used it to vet people in, to find out who was worth knowing. I told him it looked like a mutant, two-headed bunny, or someone making a shadow puppet of a crow. He said it was two hands throwing peace signs, like somebody saying “Peace out!”
“It was a rabbit,” I say.
The girl tilts her head. “A rabbit?”
Dr. Sterling jots it down. “And his others?”
“He had a lot. Across the knuckles of both hands he had H-A-L-F F-U-L-L.”
“Half full?” The doctor looks confused.
“Like the glass is half full?” the girl says.
“Like the glass half full. He was an optimist.” I know it sounds ridiculously ironic to say that now. Enrique killed himself, after all. How optimistic could he be?
“Depressed people are often optimists, in a way,” the girl says thoughtfully. “Or, you know, not optimists, but idealists. I mean, we have trouble being in the world because we want it to be better. It doesn’t live up to our ideals.” Her gray eyes look distant. “At least that’s what I heard in a psych class.”
Has she guessed what happened to Enrique, I wonder?
Of course she has. She isn’t real. She’s in my head, so of course she knows what happened.
“Mariana,” the doctor says, “what are you thinking.”
“I’m wondering why you assigned me The Tell-Tale Heart.”
Dr. Sterling smiles kindly. He can tell I’m dodging the question, but he lets me get away with it. “Why do you think I suggested it?” he asks in true therapist style.
“I don’t know,” I say. “There’s no clock in it.”
“Yes.” He strokes his chin. “But the beating of the heart is a similar motif.”
“Okay,” I say, “but the story is about guilt. He hears the heart because he feels guilty for what he has done.”
He nods. “His actions come back to haunt him.”
At the word “haunt,” I glance involuntarily at the girl. “I guess when someone is under stress, their mind plays tricks. It’s easy to imagine things.” I look her in the eye. “Things that aren’t re
al.”
The girl gets up from her chair and goes to stand beside Dr. Sterling, so close she’s almost touching him. As I watch, she reaches past him and, with a look of intense concentration, pokes the perpetual motion sculpture on his desk.
Immediately, it starts moving: click clack click clack…
A chill goes through me. She must be here. She made it move.
The girl straightens, a look of satisfaction on her face.
The doctor glances at it distractedly. “I’m sorry. Must have bumped it. About The Tell-Tale Heart…”
“But I don’t feel guilty about anything,” I say quickly.
“It’s very normal to feel guilty when someone dies”—the doctor’s voice is meant to be soothing—“not only for things you have done, but for things you didn’t do or say when they were alive. Particularly in cases where a person takes his own life, survivors often feel they could have done something to prevent it. They sometimes feel guilty simply for being alive.”
Survivor’s guilt. That’s what he thinks the dream is about. I let Enrique pass through the door, and I didn’t follow.
“It’s not my fault he died. I know that.” My voice comes out louder than I mean it to.
Click clack click clack. The little silver sculpture keeps ticking. The girl is watching me, serious now, her eyes full of compassion.
It’s that look that puts me over the edge. That look of compassion, on the face of someone who doesn’t even exist.
“I didn’t mean you should feel guilty, Mariana. I simply meant to say it is common to feel a whole range of emotions when a loved one dies: guilt, anger—”
“I’m not angry! And I don’t feel guilty for being alive.”
Dr. Sterling reaches out and stops the statue from moving.
Click clack—silence.
“Why don’t you tell me how you do feel?”
How do I feel? Like I’m seeing a girl who isn’t there, watching her eyes fill up with tears for me. And if I tell you that, it’s over. I will go back to the hospital.
And maybe I should.
I must look like I’m about to cry, because the girl steps toward me. She lays her hand over mine, and I feel it like an icy mist.
I snatch my hand back and stand in the same motion.
Dr. Sterling stares at me in surprise. “Our time isn’t up.”
But mine is. My time is very much up.
“I just remembered something I have to do.” Namely, leave.
I am up and out the door before Dr. Sterling can stop me. I rush through the lobby, past the bewildered secretary, and straight for the ladies’ room. As soon as I’m in there, I turn and bolt the door.
Only when the girl walks through the door behind me do I realize the mistake I’ve made.
Because now it’s just me and her. Alone.
Chapter 12
Jesse
“You’re not real.” Mariana’s voice is barely a whisper. “You can’t be real.” She seemed to be getting used to me in the therapy session—I even saw her smile!—but now that it’s just me and her in the bathroom, I’m clearly freaking her out.
I hold up my hands, palms out, and keep my voice steady. “I’m not going to hurt you, Mariana.”
“How do you know my name?” She takes a step back, bumps into the sink and jumps a mile.
“Hey! Hey! It’s okay. I know your name because someone told it to me, that’s all.”
“No.” She shuts her eyes like she can block the thought out. “You know my name because you’re in my head, because I’m imagining you.”
This is not going the way I pictured it. I had hoped she would be as eager to make contact as I am. Instead, she looks so pained, I almost wish I could just say yeah, that’s true, I’m all in your head and leave it at that. Maybe that would be the kind thing to do—just leave her alone. Maybe I’m being selfish, trying to talk to her like this.
But I’m not just here for me, I remind myself. I’m here to warn her, too. “Really,” I say gently, “I heard your name from another gho—”
“Don’t say it!” She claps her hands over her ears. “I don’t want to hear you say it. That isn’t what you are. You’re hallucinations.”
Does she really not know? “Another girl, then,” I say carefully, “A girl named Charlotte.”
“I don’t know a Charlotte.” She keeps her eyes tight shut.
“You’ll know her if you see her,” I say. “Pale. Long, coppery-brown dress. Red-blond hair…”
Mariana opens her eyes. “In ringlets,” she breathes, “Down her back…” She shakes her head like she’s trying to clear it. “That doesn’t prove anything because she is in my head, too, in my dream. The fact that you know what she looks like doesn’t make you real.”
“In your dream?” A nervous feeling prickles up my spine. “How did she get in your dream?”
“How did you walk through that door?”
“Totally different thing.”
“So you can’t get in my dreams?”
The thought makes me blush. I hope she doesn’t notice. “No. I mean, I’ve never tried. I wouldn’t try. No!”
“Good.” She’s still looking at me shrewdly, her body stiffly defensive. “Pretending for a minute you are real, was it you who came after me in the warehouse?”
“What warehouse? I don’t know anything about a warehouse.”
“What about the fortune cookie? Or at the library, with the fairytale book?”
“I don’t know anything about fairy tales or fortune cookies.” I hope she can tell from the desperation in my voice that I’m telling the truth. “And I can’t even leave campus, so I couldn’t go to any warehouse.”
This piques her attention. “Why can’t you leave campus?”
“I don’t actually know. Some of us are tied to where we died and—”
“Forget it,” she says, “I don’t want to talk about this.” Pushing away from the sink, she heads for the door so quickly I have to dodge out of the way to keep her from stepping right through me.
I panic. This is it, my one chance, and I’m blowing it completely. “Wait!” I say. “I didn’t just come to chat. I’m trying to tell you you’re in danger!”
She freezes, her hand on the doorknob, her back still to me. “Are you threatening me?”
“No,” I say, “But someone is.”
She turns to me, eyes wary. “Who?”
“I don’t actually know,” I admit, “but that girl, Charlotte, was looking for you. She knew your name and what you looked like. She knew your boyfriend Deveraux’s name, too.” I hesitate, wishing she would correct me on the boyfriend thing. Although what does it matter to me if she’s dating him? I’m sure she’s straight—and, more importantly, she’s alive and I’m not.
And I’m here to make sure she stays alive, right? I take a deep breath. “She said she and her sisters were trying to find you because they wanted to warn you about something.”
“Warn me? About what?”
“I don’t know. She didn’t say. It was like she couldn’t say.”
She frowns at me, confused. “Like she was… sworn to secrecy or something?”
I don’t know how to explain the feeling I got talking to Charlotte. “More like something was physically stopping her from talking about it. Like she literally couldn’t say the words. She said she was trying to warn you by other means.”
“By other means? What would that—oh!” She bites her lip nervously.
“What?”
“Nothing. It’s just, the dreams…I thought before that they felt like a warning. Is she trying to warn me through my dreams?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.” For someone who actually is a ghost, I’m not exactly feeling like an expert on all things ghostly right now.
“And the other things?” she asks quickly, “The music in the warehouse? The words in the fortune cookie? The pages turning in the book? Was that her trying to warn me, too, or was that whatever she was trying to warn me abo
ut?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t know.” I really hate to say the next part, because I know it’s going to freak her out, but I have to tell her. “But we’re going to have to figure it out because she said if they couldn’t warn you, you would die.”
“What?” Mariana’s eyes fly open. “You mean to say it’s a matter of life and death and she can’t—”
Bang bang bang! There’s a sudden knock on the door. We both jump. “Who is it?” Mariana calls shakily.
“It’s me.” A woman’s voice comes through the door. The receptionist, I’m guessing? “Miss Santos, are you okay? Dr. Sterling said you looked like you weren’t feeling well. Would you like me to call someone?”
“No!” Mariana says. “I mean, yes, I wasn’t feeling well, but I’m okay now. No need to call anyone.” She turns back to me and whispers through clenched teeth, “Where is she? When did you talk to her?”
I feel like an idiot, but time is so vague for me, I can’t really say. “Days ago. The day after the first day you saw me.”
She looks confused. “When did I see you before? I mean, I know I’ve seen you, but…”
I try not to feel hurt that she doesn’t remember. Why would she? “Outside the student union. I stepped in front of you on the path.”
Her eyes widen. “Yes! But I had no idea. I thought you were -”
Another rap on the door, more insistent this time. “Miss Santos?”
We’re running out of time. My words come out in a rush. “I wanted to talk to you before this, but I lost time.”
She looks at me, confused.
“Sometimes I disappear and when I come back, time has just passed without me. I found you as soon as I could. I’m sorry I interrupted your session. I didn’t mean to freak you out.”
“Yeah,” she mutters. “Nice job with that.”
“But I had to warn you! This girl Charlotte was serious. She and her sisters want to find you, and she said there were hundreds of them.”
“Hundreds?” She says it too loud, then quickly lowers her voice to a whisper again. “If there are hundreds, why haven’t they gotten me yet? Or why hasn’t whatever they’re trying to warn me about? Why aren’t I dead?”
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