Hysteria

by Megan Miranda

  “Be right back,” I said, off to the bathroom to check for sesame seeds in my teeth.

  I walked to the back of the diner, past the front counter where people sat on barstools. Back toward the kitchen. And then I paused. Because right there, right past the bathroom, was a chopping board. A chopping board covered in sliced tomatoes, one left mid-cut. And a knife. Not a big one. Not like the one missing from my kitchen. But big enough. Big enough to scare someone off. Big enough to protect myself.

  Everything else faded away. The promise of Reid kissing me. The smell of ground beef, the sound of bacon sizzling. The smoke from the barstools. Just me, two feet of emptiness, and the knife.

  I took it.

  CHAPTER 10

  I grabbed the black handle, the blade still dripping with tomato juice, and shoved it deep into my bag. I spun around, back to the bathroom. And Krista stood there. In front of the bathroom door, which was still swinging behind her. Her mouth was pressed tightly together. I didn’t know how long she’d been standing there.

  So I readjusted my ponytail to keep my hands busy and said, “What’s wrong with Bree?”

  She didn’t blink. “Something of very little consequence, I’m sure.”

  “Doesn’t look like it.”

  She plastered her fake, preppy smile on and said, “But it is.”

  Reid didn’t kiss me outside the diner. I didn’t give him a chance. I pulled on the door handle over and over until he gave in and pressed the unlock button on his keychain. Then I stared out the window.

  Reid kept glancing at me on the way home. He drove with one hand on the wheel and one on the center console, like he was thinking of reaching out and taking my hand, but wasn’t sure how I’d react. To be honest, I wasn’t sure how I’d react either. I was too preoccupied with the fact that I could feel the blade through the fabric of my bag, wedged between my body and the car door.

  Reid flipped the headlights on, even though it was late morning, bordering on early afternoon. The sky had grayed, and the air had that heavy feeling, like it was about to bust. Like something big was coming.

  The way it feels before a storm. Just like it felt when I was racing through the alleys that night. I was walking and I heard footsteps and then my name . . .

  “Mallory?” Reid said.

  “Hmm?”

  “Did you hear me?”

  “Sorry, what?”

  “Remember after the funeral, when you came in my room—”

  “Yes, Reid. Seriously, you can stop asking that. I remember. And, unlike you, I remember all of it.” I didn’t know why I was acting so angry, but I couldn’t stop the way the words came out with bite.

  “No,” he said quietly. “I remember too.” A fat drop fell on the windshield, and then another. “That’s what I wanted to tell you. It was my dad’s funeral, you know? I wasn’t supposed to be smiling. I wasn’t supposed to feel . . . I wasn’t supposed to feel anything. Just hollow.”

  And then the sky burst open, and Reid turned on the windshield wipers. He pulled into campus and parked behind the student center. I couldn’t see anything, and the car was still running, like we could go anywhere still. Like we were unfinished.

  I heard Reid unbuckle his seat belt, so I unhooked mine. But he didn’t move, and neither did I, because everything still felt unfinished. An inevitable, unalterable sequence of events. I turned to look at Reid, and he was looking back at me, like he was thinking the exact same thing.

  Light off, light on.

  I met him halfway, twisting unnaturally in my seat to get there, and my mouth found his before his arms pulled me tighter. And the rain pelting down outside made it seem like we were the only people in the world, and the thickness in the air made it feel like what we were doing was not at all dangerous, like we were being pushed together, like it was the only decision, like it was logical.

  I kissed him without thinking. Of all the reasons I shouldn’t, of all the reasons I couldn’t. And it felt like he was doing the same thing. So I crawled across the center console, and Reid seemed surprised but not at all upset, because I felt the corners of his mouth turn up.

  And Colleen’s voice in my head was saying Do what you want to do.

  And it turns out what I wanted to do at that very moment was smile. So that’s exactly what I did. And Reid was doing the exact same thing.

  A blue car pulled up beside us, and doors slammed. Someone giggled outside our window—it sounded like Taryn. And then that someone tapped on our window, which made me think it wasn’t Taryn, because Taryn didn’t seem like the type to do anything.

  I slid off Reid’s lap and sat on my side again, and we both stared out the front windshield. He turned the engine off, and the voices faded into the distance, swallowed up by the rain.

  He left his hand on the key, like he was wondering what to do next. “I can drive you around the back entrance. It’s closer to your dorm,” Reid said.

  “No,” I said, grabbing my bag. “I’ll run.”

  I backed out of the car, gripping the blade through my bag. I wiped the rain from my face, smiling, as I raced across campus. I wasn’t sure if was supposed to be smiling, if I was supposed to feel anything at all—other than hollow.

  Three days after Brian died, I heard a scraping sound out back. Through the kitchen. Which I had been avoiding. But I thought maybe it was Colleen sneaking over to see me.

  But when I opened the back door, I saw Brian’s mom standing on a garbage can, looking through the kitchen window. She saw me and stumbled—the garbage spilling around the patio. She crawled out of the middle of it, her fingers digging into old food and paper and dirt. She looked up at me and she screamed, “You!” I froze. My legs wouldn’t move.

  She stood up and pieces of trash clung to her—a napkin on her leg, yesterday’s dinner on her elbow. I cringed. I was embarrassed for her—no, I wanted her to be embarrassed. But she didn’t notice. And that was terrifying. She didn’t notice anything but me. She walked toward the back door. Toward me. I focused on the napkin clinging to her leg.

  “You took him from me! You took him!”

  I could see the blood flowing under the surface of her skin through her neck. And I just stood there, shaking my head. I walked backward and she walked forward until she was at the back entrance of the kitchen, and finally she yelled, half delusional, “Where is he?”

  Then my dad was there, pulling me back. He was talking real low to Brian’s mom, and then he was yelling for my mom. Then my mom was there, but she was just shaking, staring past me at Brian’s mom, who wasn’t making any sense. “Where is he?” she yelled again. Dad let go of me and placed his hands on her arms. He kept talking real low and calm, even though nothing about this felt low or calm. He eased her back through the door and turned the lock, and then he called the cops. That’s how we got the restraining order.

  Right then, with Brian’s mom in the backyard and Dad on the phone and Mom shaking behind me, that was the first time the kitchen started pulsating.

  And I knew she had come to the right place after all. Because he was here.

  In my dorm room, I changed out of my dripping-wet clothes. Then I took out the knife. I wiped the blade with a tissue, careful not to snag my fingers. I cleaned off the leftover flesh from the tomato. And then I pushed it into the back of my bottom drawer. Behind my binders and office supplies. I slammed the drawer shut.

  I booted up my computer, prepared to write this Lord of the Flies essay, but I couldn’t concentrate. The cursor blinked on the Word document until the screen went to sleep. I stared at the bottom drawer, imagining the knife laying idle inside. So close. Too close.

  I retreated to my bed, but I could smell it still. I could. Ripe and acidic. Full of possibility. Good and evil and offense and defense and life and death.

  Lights out. The whole room was beating, and I stood in the middle of it, willing it away. Mallory, it whispered. I turned toward my bed, where I thought I’d heard it. No, I saw it out of the corner of
my eye, by the desk. The dark shape. I whipped my head toward it, but it shifted again, to the closet, just at the edge of my vision. And then the room started to blur, like my vision couldn’t keep up with what I was trying to see.

  Wait, it said, like it was right behind me.

  “No, no, no,” I mumbled. Because I knew what was coming next. The hand, pressing down on me. It’s only real if you let it be, I thought.

  Two hands pressed down on my shoulders. I shrugged them off violently and yelled, “Get away!”

  “Whoa, sorry.”

  I turned around, the beating of the room now only in my own head, in my own chest. I tried to slow my breathing. Reid had his hands held up in the air. I looked around my empty room, then at him. I took slow breaths, and I heard the beating of my heart return to normal.

  “You scared me,” I said, once I trusted myself to speak again.

  Reid tilted his head to the side. “Who were you talking to?”

  My face was hot, and I willed my eyes to stay on his. “No one.”

  “You look terrified.”

  I looked away—at the closed door and the open window, at the shades hanging in front of the window, alternately blowing inward and slapping back against the window frame. “How the hell did you get in my room?”

  “Your window. Sorry, I knocked first. You didn’t hear. And you . . . you were . . .”

  “I locked it.”

  “No, it was open.”

  I couldn’t keep my eyes still. They searched the corners of the room, the space behind me. I’d locked the window, I was sure of it. Almost sure of it. “I thought something was wrong,” he said.

  “I thought I saw . . . I thought I felt . . .” I glanced down to my shoulder and back at Reid and shook my head. “Never mind.”

  “You thought you felt what?”

  Things I didn’t want Reid to know about. My shoulder burned where Reid had touched the bruises. I pulled on the collar of my pajamas to make sure they remained covered.

  Then I realized I was still in my pajamas, and Reid was in dark sweats. The carpet felt cold under the soles of my feet. “What are you doing here?”

  He pointed to my laptop. “I sent you a bunch of e-mails. Like, a ton. But you never responded.”

  I kept my eyes on him as I backed toward my desk, unsure why I didn’t trust him. Why couldn’t I just choose to trust him, like he chose to trust me at the diner? He didn’t move, didn’t say anything at my lack of trust. Instead he watched as I booted up the computer and scanned my e-mail. Reid Carlson: we good? Reid Carlson: hey, can you just write back? Reid Carlson. Reid Carlson.

  “I didn’t want to just . . . leave things. Again.”

  I instinctively put my fingers to my lips, remembering. Watched as his eyes followed my hand. Watched as his eyes stayed there, even after I pulled my hand away.

  Now I didn’t know what he expected from me. And he needed to know why he shouldn’t expect anything, really, at all.

  “Sometimes I think I can feel him,” I said. “Hear him, even. I mean, I do. I do feel him. I do hear him. Like he’s right here . . .” I shuddered, imagining him watching me even now.

  Reid sat on my bed, ran his hand across my blue comforter, like an invitation. I wondered if he knew where he was sitting—what he was doing. “I guess things . . . happen after a trauma,” he said, looking somewhere beyond me.

  “Things like this?” I waved my arms around the air, like Brian was somewhere in the emptiness.

  “I don’t know. Maybe.” He shrugged and scooted farther onto my bed. I stayed where I was, my back against my desk. “When my dad died—I mean, after we found him, my mom completely lost her vision. She couldn’t see anything. But it was all psychological. There wasn’t anything physically wrong with her.”

  “You mean like hysterical blindness?” We’d watched a movie in history class last year about World War II, and some guy who just stopped seeing, for no real reason at all. I mean, other than the fact that everyone was dying around him.

  “Yeah, like that. The real term is ‘conversion disorder.’ I guess so it doesn’t sound so . . . hysterical. Therapy veteran,” he confessed.

  “She couldn’t see because she was upset,” I said, like an accusation. Because I could see just fine. Not the same type of thing.

  “But that’s not how she explained it. It was more like she couldn’t not see. Like she couldn’t see anything but my dad . . .” I imagined what Reid was seeing in that pause. His father, on the ground? In the snow? Or did he see his mother first, see her face, as she saw her husband? Which was worse? He ran his hand through his hair one, two, three times. And on the third time I crossed the room and took his hand and sat beside him on my bed.

  “It’s like she was stuck,” he said.

  “For how long?” I whispered.

  “I’m not sure. I had to go stay with my grandparents, but by the time we got home for the funeral, she took one look at me and told me to change my tie. Two or three days, I guess.”

  “Brian’s been dead for two months,” I said.

  “Brian,” he said. And I realized he’d never heard his name before. I wondered if it made it more real. If he understood that he used to be a person and now he wasn’t—because of me.

  And just in case he didn’t understand, I said, “He was my boyfriend.”

  His hand slipped away, and mine immediately felt cold. “Mallory,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

  Then I stood up because I couldn’t breathe. And he pretended not to notice that my breath shook each time I exhaled. Instead, he slid down onto my bed, against the concrete wall, and said, “Do you want me to leave?”

  I thought of what Colleen would tell me. Say yes, she’d say. Or maybe, Say no. Maybe something else. I didn’t know anymore.

  Reid was looking at the ceiling, like he didn’t care either way. But he was holding his breath, I could tell. Which made my decision for me. I slid into bed beside him, hovering near the edge, and miraculously, given the width of the bed, we did not touch. I closed my eyes, found his hand again, and laced my fingers together with his.

  And when I squeezed his hand, his grip tightened around mine as well. I stared at my desk, thinking I could probably take a sleeping pill now. I could sleep without worrying about someone sneaking into my room. Slashing my shirts. Coming for me.

  The tension left Reid’s hand, but his fingers still lay between mine. I shifted so I was on my back, a little closer to him. I ignored the vial of pills in the drawer. I didn’t want to take them.

  Turns out, I didn’t want to miss this feeling.

  I slept.

  Somewhere in the night, I must’ve slept, because I woke. And you can’t wake without sleeping first.

  The sound of Reid’s light snoring woke me early. My arm was hanging off the bed, and I didn’t know if I should just lay there, hovering near the edge, or move closer to Reid.

  So instead I got up.

  I turned on my computer and typed conversion disorder into a search engine and began to read.

  Loss of hearing, loss of speech, paralysis, numbness with no physical cause. Hallucinations.

  Hysterical blindness: Loss of sight of a psychological nature.

  Hysterical pregnancy: Clinical pregnancy symptoms when the person is not pregnant; most often mental in nature.

  See also: Somatoform disorder. Hysteria.

  Reid slept on while the words seared themselves into my brain. Psychological. Hallucinations. Hysteria.

  I walked to the mirror hanging from the back of my closet door and tugged the collar of my shirt down. Maybe I was doing it to myself, in my sleep, in some other plane of existence. I raised my right arm across my chest and tried to line up the fingerprints. But my thumb was in the front, and the thumbprint was on my back. No matter how much I twisted, I couldn’t get the prints to line up. I tried my left hand instead, bringing it up to the same shoulder. I could line it up—sort of—but couldn’t get enough force to leave a mark.
Not these deep bruises, which were now so black they’d started to look purple again.

  “Hey.” Reid stretched his arms over his head and violently rubbed at his hair, which then miraculously fell into place. Stupid hair. “Been up long?”

  I spun so my back was to the mirror, making sure my shirt was covering the marks. “Not too long. You snore,” I said.

  He paused at the edge of the bed and hopped down. “What time is it?”

  “Six.” I didn’t look at him when I answered. Because now there was light, and I was too nervous to look at his face. To see if he regretted knowing about me. If he thought I was crazy.

  “I need to get back before Durham’s morning run.”

  “That’s how it works? You have a whole routine about sneaking into people’s rooms?”

  “Hey. It’s just common knowledge. Go after Perkins’ light goes off, which, by the way, is not an exact science. Be back before Durham’s run. It’s just things you know after a while. This isn’t something I do a lot.” Which meant it was something he had at least done a few times before. I hated that I felt jealous. Hated it. It’s not like I’d been on my own waiting for him, just like he hadn’t been waiting alone for me. We had lived, for two years. Made choices and mistakes, had good days and bad days.

  And then he was taking these long strides to my window. One, two, three. Changed his mind, walked back to me. Didn’t even slow down when he reached me—he walked me back until I was against the wall, and he kissed me. Like he’d been waiting all night to do it. Then he rested his forehead against mine for a second before walking away. He straddled the sill. “Mallory,” he said, like he meant something more, but then he was gone. The absence of him felt like a tangible thing.

  That morning I realized I didn’t have any red polos to wear. Just the one shirt from Friday that was still in the hamper, and I hadn’t done laundry. I’d have to make a trip to the school store after class. In the meantime, I found a reddish T-shirt that I thought might blend in a little.