Hysteria

by Megan Miranda

  Stop the blood.

  Stop the blood. Stop the blood. The words echoed in my head, like they were mine, but I wasn’t thinking it. Stop the blood, I heard it again.

  My hand shook as I pressed down harder. By the time the blood stopped dripping from the wound, people were starting to come into the bathroom, half-awake, carrying shower caddies. I waited until they all went to class before stripping the sheets from my bed and running everything down to the laundry room.

  Another unexcused absence would land me an additional violation, according to the handbook. I wondered what the consequence would be this time. What could they possibly take away from me now?

  After I remade the bed, my first instinct was to find Reid and show him my shoulder. Tell him what was happening. Ask if he knew what to do. Or maybe ask nothing. Maybe just seek some sort of comfort with him.

  But we were starting over. He made me think I actually could. So when I saw him briefly after class, before practice, I tried to mirror the smile on his face.

  “Good day?” he asked.

  “Great day,” I said. All these people were milling by us, smiling at Reid.

  One of his teammates hooked an arm around his neck, dragging him down the hall, laughing. I turned around, toward the other exit, and then he was beside me again, spinning me around. Really close. His hands were on my upper arms, and he was staring at me, like he was willing me to say something. But I didn’t. When he finally spoke, he said, “You know what tomorrow is?”

  “Saturday,” I said. He was smiling as he backed away, and was smiling still as the crowd swallowed him up. I turned and bumped directly into Bree.

  “Hey,” I said, but she tried to move around me without looking.

  I stepped to the side, stood directly in her path, and said, “Bree.”

  She froze, and there was something not quite right about her. I realized she was holding her breath. Waiting.

  “You okay? I mean, the sleep?”

  Her shoulders relaxed and she let out her breath. She nodded rapidly, like she didn’t want to really talk. “I’m good,” she said.

  I was so used to Colleen, who I could read. Most of the time, at least. But now I felt like I was squinting at Bree, trying to decipher the meaning. “You’re good,” I repeated slowly, almost to myself.

  “That’s what I said.” Bree’s eyes locked onto something over my shoulder, and she kept moving.

  Friday night. Two hours until it was technically Saturday. Eight hours until I could say it was Saturday and mean it. Eleven hours until breakfast opened and I had a legitimate excuse to look for Reid. Eleven hours.

  I could sleep through eight of them, easy. Then I could get ready. Maybe even call Colleen beforehand.

  The room was pulsating. Just like the kitchen used to. Except my shoulder was throbbing along with it. Like I was a part of it now. Like it had claimed me, or claimed part of me, and it was yearning for the rest. Like it had its talons in and wasn’t about to let go now.

  Boom, boom, boom. I started to fade. I thought of Reid, telling me to go back. Boom, boom, boom. It was getting louder. Coming closer. Right outside my door. But I couldn’t see anything.

  Go back. Think, think, think. I heard my name, and the word “wait,” and I thought Wait. And I felt that hand reaching for me, but instead it was hovering. In the moment before.

  Think.

  But I was fading.

  Think.

  But I felt someone—something?—no, someone, standing over me.

  Think.

  But I was gone.

  Brian stood over me, as I lay in the remains of the china cabinet, tiny pinpricks of glass sticking out of my skin. He shook his head, like he was trying to undo it all. It was like he realized, even in his out-of-control state, how out of control the situation had gotten. But he didn’t stop. He reached for me still. “Why are you doing this?” he screamed, which made no sense, like this was all somehow my fault. “How could you do this?” he yelled again, like this was his house and I was destroying it.

  I crab-walked backward through the glass, and pieces pierced my skin again, this time into my palms. And I thought, No, no, no, but he kept coming anyway, crunching the glass under his shoes.

  Then he stopped and looked around the room and he winced, paled. And he said, “Can you just wait one goddamn second?”

  And in that pause, I righted myself, scrambled to my feet. Then I ran. I sprinted into the kitchen, and he ran behind me—I could feel him, right behind me. I looked to the door, and it felt important, that look, like I was willing something to happen, but I couldn’t remember what. And when nothing happened, I made a choice. Because he was right behind me and he wouldn’t stop. So I darted left at the granite island and I grabbed a knife. “Mallory,” he said.

  I spun around. So he would see the knife. So he would stop.

  “Wait,” he said.

  Because he couldn’t. But I couldn’t, either. There was no time.

  I turned my head away, toward the door, but I still felt the resistance. The pressure. The shock. I looked back at Brian, like maybe I was imagining it, but I wasn’t. Brian was looking down. And then he looked up at me, and his mouth formed the word “no.” A long exhale. Like the word was dying along with him.

  I woke up choking. Like something was sitting on my chest, constricting my lungs. I stared at the ceiling, suffocating, trying to remember how to breathe. Breathe. And finally, I sucked in a horrific, wheezing breath. I squeezed my eyes shut and breathed deeply through my nose. And then I smelled it. Something faint, metallic, acidic.

  I opened my eyes. The room felt full. I pushed myself up on my elbows.

  There was a person on the floor. Face up. And there was blood. A lot of blood. Two static bloodred puddles, stretching out from the arms. Both wrists were slit halfway up the arm. And the knife, just beside the body. Taunting me.

  “No.” I scampered down from the bed. “No!” I yelled.

  I couldn’t see, even though I could look. And in a brief moment of clarity I thought, Hysteria, even while the rest of me refused to process. I couldn’t see his face, just a blur. I could look, but I could not see.

  And my brain whispered, Brian, Brian, Brian.

  I stumbled past my desk, and my foot slipped in the stickiness, but I caught myself on the edge of the desk and kept moving for the door. My fingers scratched along the door and fumbled with the handle and then it flew open and there was light, there was so much light. I ran down the hall, and the word in my head fought its way out. “Brian!” I shouted.

  And for a moment, all I could see was him, and I heard his name being shouted, but I couldn’t tell whether it was then or now and it didn’t matter anyway because this couldn’t be real.

  This was not real.

  Brian was in the ground. I saw them lower the wooden box into the hole in the earth. I heard somebody wail for him as I cowered behind the pickets of a fence.

  I spun in the hall, and there were footprints on the floor, made of blood, leading from my room, directly to me.

  Crazy. I was crazy.

  “Help!” I cried. And a door creaked open. And then another. Because I kept screaming for help. But nobody helped me. People crept along the path of bloody footprints, tracing it back to its source.

  And I knew it was real when the screaming started.

  There was too much screaming. So much. Until it didn’t even sound like screaming anymore. More like that ringing I’d hear in my ears when there was nothing making a sound at all.

  People came. People in authority. The screaming around me turned to crying, and there were questions, but I couldn’t speak. I was still sitting, silently, in the middle of the hallway.

  A name was being passed around, in whispers, underneath the crying, just out of earshot.

  And then it reached me, the word. Jason, I heard. Jason Dorchester. Jason Dorchester. Jason Dorchester.

  Then the cold hands came. Maybe the presence. Maybe a new one. Maybe s
omething else.

  Maybe this is how it ends. With a dead body and cold hands, reaching for me.

  CHAPTER 15

  There were fluorescent lights. Starchy sheets. White walls. And people in scrubs moving their mouths. My ears were ringing, then stopped. And then the voices came. Light off. Light on.

  “Mallory.” A woman with wisps of red hair falling into her face was leaning over me. She turned her head to the side and said, “Run a full tox screen.” When she stepped back, I saw there were other types of uniforms in the room. The dark-blue kind, with gold shields. She cleared her throat and said, “You’ll have to wait your turn.”

  A man started to protest but she raised her hand up, palm out. “First of all, we make sure she’s lucid. Second of all, and you should know this already, you wait for her parents.”

  I started to feel sick, thinking of my parents. Then thinking of the cops. And then thinking of the body on the floor. Jason. So I didn’t even wince when the doctor slid a needle into the crook of my elbow, drawing the blood out.

  I felt the pull as blood seeped out, drawing more along with it. Then she left, and I waited, alone.

  Like before: I waited, I waited, I waited. I waited for hours, maybe even longer.

  The door swung open and my parents barged in, the doctor with the red hair right behind them.

  “What’s going on?” Mom asked. She ran to my bed and put a hand on my side. “I don’t understand. Is she hurt?” Then she turned to me. “Are you hurt?”

  I stared back.

  The doctor cleared her throat. “Your daughter was at the scene of a crime, and, apparently, she was unresponsive.”

  “Unresponsive?” Dad said. “You mean unconscious?”

  “No,” she said. “I mean unresponsive. She didn’t respond to verbal questions, and she didn’t seem to know where she was.” She held up the clipboard in her hand. “Tox screen results are back. Everything normal, except—did you take a sleeping aid?”

  “Yes,” I said, which I guess was my first response since they brought me in.

  “Okay, otherwise, she’s clean.”

  I guess they couldn’t detect the orange fire I felt inside, like nerves twitching on overdrive.

  My parents stared at me. Dad was looking back and forth between me and the doctor, like he was trying to put together the pieces to some puzzle. “I don’t think I understand,” he said. “Scene of a crime?”

  The doctor looked toward the door and knocked twice, almost like she was asking to be let out. A man and a woman in police uniforms entered the room.

  Mom sank into the seat beside the bed. “She’s okay?” Dad asked.

  The doctor smiled stiffly. “According to this,” she said, jabbing a finger at her stack of papers. She left the room.

  The two cops stood at the end of my bed. The woman licked her lips, like she was preparing to devour me. The man cleared his throat. “I’m Officer James, and this is Officer Dowle. Why don’t you start by telling us the events of last night.”

  “I was sleeping,” I whispered.

  Officer Dowle bounced a little on her toes, like she was ready to pounce. I kept my eyes on Officer James when he spoke again. “Okay, before that, then. What is the nature of your relationship with Jason Dorchester?”

  “I have no relationship with Jason Dorchester.”

  “You don’t know him?”

  I sighed. “I know him.”

  “Would you consider your encounters positive?”

  “Not really,” I said, and I felt Mom tense beside me.

  “Care to elaborate?”

  “He doesn’t like me. Didn’t. Well, he did at first. I wasn’t interested, so now he hates me. Hated me. Hates me.” The dead can still hate, I was sure of it.

  “Interesting,” said Officer Dowle, and I didn’t know whether she was talking about my story or my shift in tenses.

  “Okay, so last night,” Officer James continued.

  “I took a sleeping pill. Like every night.”

  “And why,” Officer Dowle said, staring at my face, “do you take sleeping pills?”

  “To sleep,” Dad cut in. The look he gave Officer Dowle made her look away.

  She cleared her throat and raised her eyes back to Dad. “Yes, well, I assume I know the reason why.”

  “Then you should also know that she wasn’t charged. It was self-defense.”

  “Was this self-defense?” Officer Dowle asked, but she was still looking at Dad.

  “I didn’t do it,” I said.

  They stared each other down. Officer James cleared his throat. “Did you hear anything after that, Mallory?”

  “No. Nothing. I was sleeping and when I woke up . . .” The ringing in my ears was back, and Mom gripped my arm.

  I could barely hear Officer Dowle over the ringing. She leaned forward and placed her hand on my left leg through the sheet. “Sometimes when people take sleeping pills, they don’t really sleep. They think they do, but they don’t. They just don’t remember. My brother took a sleeping pill once. He got up for work the next morning, packed a lunch, got into a fender-bender on the way. But he didn’t remember any of it.” Then she placed her other hand on my right leg and said, “Do you think that could’ve happened to you?”

  I thought about it. I thought about what I was capable of. My parents must’ve been thinking about it too. Because nobody said, Oh, Mallory wouldn’t do that, or Mallory’s not capable of that. Instead my father turned to me and said, “Don’t answer that.”

  Officer Dowle squeezed my legs and grinned. They both turned to leave, and then Officer Dowle turned back. “Oh, I almost forgot. The knife. Any idea where it came from?”

  The room seemed to hold its breath. I closed my eyes and said, “It’s mine.”

  It was hard to explain why I’d have a knife without going into the reasons why I would want a knife. I told them someone stole it. And then I added, “My old roommate. Brianne Dalton. She knew I had it.” Then I repeated, “Brianne Dalton,” slowly, hoping someone would write it down. But nobody did. The cops weren’t buying it, I could tell. They took my fingerprints and left the room. Dad looked at me in that way where he’s asking a question without actually saying anything.

  “I was scared,” I said, my voice breaking. “I thought I saw . . .” Dad shifted his eyes quickly to Mom.

  “You thought you saw what?” she asked.

  I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. “I thought I saw Brian’s mom.”

  “No. No. That’s not possible,” she said.

  “I know. That’s why I said I thought I saw instead of I saw. It was foggy, but I was—” And then I stopped talking because I wasn’t sure exactly what I was.

  It sure seemed real. Just like the hand on my shoulder, which was definitely not real.

  Dad whipped out his cell, even though there was a sign in the room that said no cell phones, and I could tell it was the lawyer on the other end. And then Mom started talking to me about absolutely nothing, trying to distract me from the other conversation.

  We stayed at the hospital that night, because we had nowhere else to go. And the next day people asked me the same questions over and over, and I said the same thing, over and over, which all amounted to absolutely nothing except me trying to reason out how Jason ended up dead on my floor. By the end of the day, it was clear I was not going to be arrested. But I might be in the future. Something about circumstantial evidence. Something about the knife. Something about my blood. Something about Jason’s blood.

  Officer James came back and said, “You’re free to go, but you’ll need to stay in this jurisdiction.” And it felt like this weight lodging in my gut. Like I had been waiting for something to happen. Just something. But nothing happened. I was stuck in the in-between, which somehow felt worse than being accused or arrested or something.

  So we drove back to campus for a meeting. Well, my parents had a meeting. I had a date with the backseat of their car.

  We were parked be
hind the main building, wedged between the back of the bleachers and the Dumpsters behind classes.

  There was a shape under the bleachers. Hunched down in a ball. Motionless. I got this sick feeling in my stomach, like I was a magnet for dead bodies.

  I pushed my door open, shattering the silence. The shape didn’t move. I walked across the pavement and crunched a leaf under my shoe. Fall coming early. Things dying. And then I stepped into the soft grass, and still the shape did not move. Light hair fell across her arms and knees. I cleared my throat and said, “Hello?”

  Bree’s head shot up. And then she started rocking back and forth a little. “Bree? Are you okay?”

  She glanced around at the emptiness. Then she stared at me and tightened her arms over her knees and said, “This is where Jason kissed me.”

  “I’m—I didn’t know you were together.”

  “We weren’t together,” she whispered, like she was saying something important, a secret, which was as important as it got here at Monroe. And then she laughed, loud and sharp, like maybe she was making fun of me. Like maybe she thought I was a prude or something.

  And then I didn’t feel bad for her anymore. “Did you take the knife, Bree?”

  She stopped laughing and recoiled.

  “Bree,” a voice came from the other side of the bleachers, and I saw Krista and Taryn through the metal slats. Just pieces of them, here and there, as they moved. Like fragments of my imagination when I used to wake up in a half dreamlike state.

  She scrambled to her feet and brushed the dirt from her pants. “No, I didn’t take the damn knife, you fucking psycho.”

  She ran to the other side of the bleachers and joined the girls. And as I saw them move together, broken fragments, pieces of each tied up in the other, it seemed like there was an answer there. It was there, just on the other side of the bleachers.

  How Bree wasn’t acting scared of me because she knew I hadn’t done it. And I knew it, right then, standing next to a discarded chip bag under the empty bleachers: one of them did.