He just smiled with them. His friends were trying to steer the conversation away from the eight-hundred-pound elephant in the yard, and he appreciated that. It did sound kind of stupid in bright daylight, even if the bright daylight was the overcast gray of winter. “Nah,” he replied. “I couldn’t see her face.”
“Maybe she had a butter face,” another friend said, “and your dream’s trying to take pity on you.” The others laughed. Richard went along with it, but the more he did, the colder he felt. A crazy worry entered his mind. What if the girl could hear them?
After a while, the bell rang. His friends started heading inside. Richard followed behind them, half listening to their conversation. He didn’t want to say anything, but the strange weight on his chest had returned, and he felt as if his friends’ chatter was coming from somewhere far away, muffled from behind glass. He grimaced and rubbed his neck. Poor night’s sleep, he thought again. He glanced out across the schoolyard.
Something in the corner of his vision . . . beyond the white fence and across the street. It was the girl. She was just standing there, her back turned to him. Her pale hair untouched by the breeze.
Richard stared. His breath rose in a cloud of condensation. It took him a long moment to glance back at his friends. “Hey,” he called to them. “You guys see that?”
They didn’t hear him. Richard turned back to where the girl— But she was gone already. He blinked. She’d been there. Right there. Yet the sidewalk was empty, swept clean of leaves by the breeze. His eyes scanned the entire street in both directions, following it until it wrapped around the block and disappeared from view. No sign of her.
He swallowed his words. Suddenly he was glad that his friends hadn’t heard him. They would have made fun of him all day for being stupid and seeing things.
He stayed in a fog of thought for most of the afternoon. Each class bled right into the next. It took several hours before the pressure on his chest finally began to lighten. Of course he hadn’t seen anything. Did he really believe that something he’d seen inside his dreams could creep into reality? He almost chuckled out loud in class. Hallucinations: He could definitely use more sleep.
Still, a feeling lingered in the back of his mind. It distracted him enough that he walked home in a daze, crossing streets when he shouldn’t and bumping shoulders against passersby. Cars honked at him at the crosswalks.
There were an awful lot of cars on the streets, actually, when he forced himself to pay attention. He stared at the trail of neon red taillights as he went, letting them blur into a line across his vision. It looked like traffic was being diverted away from his street. He frowned, his mind sharpening again, and then quickened his pace. Unease settled into the pit of his stomach, like he had swallowed something heavy and cold.
When he turned onto the street leading home, he saw the police lights.
The sight sent a familiar ripple of panic through him. There were two cars, both parked outside his parents’ home, and the officers were talking to his mother. Richard noticed that one of the cars was a police car, while the other was an animal control truck. His mother’s shoulders looked hunched as the men asked her questions. She was still in her suit; the cops must’ve asked her to come straight from work.
“Richard!” His mother finally saw him. She waved him over frantically as he approached.
“What’s going on?” he asked. His eyes darted to the police officers. They stared back at him, expressionless. He bristled. Why did cops always look so damn severe? It wasn’t like he did anything.
“Are you Richard Dukaine?” they said.
“Yeah.”
One officer motioned him over to a blue tarp laid out on the road. He pulled it aside.
Richard fought back the urge to gag.
It was a deer. At least, it used to be. Someone had gauged both eyes out and snapped all of its legs. Bone shards protruded out of the hide, exposing tangles of sinew and muscle. Blood stained the cement under and around it. It was as if a car had hit the deer—except too perfectly.
Wonder where the car went. Richard didn’t know why that was his first thought.
The officer pulled the tarp back over the body. Then he turned to Richard. “We’ve had two witnesses tell us that they saw you doing this.”
“What?” Richard almost choked on the word. “I was at school today. All day.” At the pause, he looked from the officers back to his stricken mom. “This is sick. I wasn’t here. This—somebody’s idea of a twisted joke.”
The officer looked at his partner and sighed. “Look, kid,” he said, his voice weary. “If it were me, I wouldn’t blame you. We all know your old man.” He nodded respectfully in Mom’s direction. “And your mother. We don’t want to give you more trouble in your senior year.” He shrugged. “Only wanted to hear your side of the story, see if some kid might’ve been giving you grief, setting you up.”
His mother stepped in before Richard could sputter out an answer. “This is ridiculous,” she snapped. “I had to leave work early for this? My son’s afternoon, disrupted, over this? He’s had a rough enough time. I want to know the names of those witnesses.”
“Now, ma’am, I’m afraid I can’t give out those names—”
“I want them. Do you hear me? I will escalate this to . . .”
Richard’s confidence grew as his mother went on. Of course they had no proof that he did anything—because he didn’t. He lifted his head and looked the closer officer in the eyes. “Tell us who the two witnesses were, and my father will talk to them personally.”
The officer hesitated. “No need,” he finally said, shaking his head as if he wanted to be done with the whole thing. “I don’t want to get everyone all riled up over this. It’s just a deer.”
Richard’s mother narrowed her eyes. “And if you’d stop wasting your time harassing my son, you might find whatever sick child in the neighborhood left this.”
They talked for a few more minutes. But soon the cops left, the animal control people removed the corpse, and the evening settled into silence. Richard thought, as he and his mom went back into the house, that some of their neighbors were watching them through the slits of their window blinds. It brought out a strange rush of rage in him. What did they know?
Before he could step into the house, he saw her again. The girl was walking away on the opposite side of the street, her hands in the pockets of her coat, her back turned, her pale hair limp and dull. He paused on the steps and stared. He didn’t dare blink. His eyes started to water. He had a sudden urge to run over there and shake the girl violently.
But he didn’t. All he could do was stand there and watch until she disappeared into the evening, amid the dark tree trunks and lampposts. He moved only when his mother called him back into the house.
Nothing would come of it. Nothing ever came of anything. Richard knew he was protected; the son of a congresswoman and a lawyer, valedictorian of his old high school, multi-million-dollar trust fund, legacy admission into Harvard. He was a good kid. I’m a good kid.
The police let it go, and they didn’t hear anything more.
Two nights later, Richard was fast asleep when the door of his closet suddenly swung open with a loud bang.
He screamed. His parents came rushing in, and he tried lamely to explain it—but his words sounded slow and dumb. This time, it wasn’t a dream. The closet door stayed open, revealing an empty space inside. His parents listened to him with confused frowns, but Richard could tell that they thought he’d simply had a nightmare, that he’d opened the door himself. Dad even walked over to test it several times, as if to prove to Richard that there was nothing to fear. Embarrassing. An eighteen-year-old guy screaming at monsters in the closet. His parents calmed him down. His father promised to have the door locked back up, if he preferred. As if he were a child.
Richard waved them off. No big deal. Maybe somethin
g had kept the door stuck and now the winter air had simply loosened it. After a while, he went back to bed, but instead of sleeping, he kept his eyes locked on the closed closet door until morning finally came.
“God, you look like shit,” his friend whispered to him when he arrived late to class. “What the hell did you drink last night?”
Richard ignored him. He slouched in his chair, tie rumpled and blazer askew, staring blankly at the whiteboard while their teacher droned on. His mind wandered in a murky swamp of thought.
They had moved across town to get away from it all. His parents had gone through great pains to make sure he could still attend a private academy where some of his friends went. It had seemed like a great idea at the time—maybe it was still a great idea, actually. But Richard sat and felt the weight return to his chest, the awful and oppressive heaviness, until it seemed like he could barely breathe. The teacher’s voice faded to a hum, and the world gradually started to look like it was underwater, the walls dark and ugly and rusty green-blue, the light through the windows faded and old, the desks peeling. His classmates continued listening to the lecture, the shadows on their faces cut into sharp angles. The sound of pen against paper grated on his nerves.
Richard’s head nodded. He jerked himself awake. It wasn’t even noon yet—he really had to get more sleep.
The room looked faded now, the sounds and people far away, identical rows of dark uniforms. His eyes went back up to the whiteboard. He just had to get through his senior classes. Then he was free.
The lights flickered overhead. Richard blinked, looked up and then around. No one else even stirred. His friend sitting beside him just kept on writing into his notebook, his eyes obscured by the shadows that fell across his face. Richard turned his attention back to the teacher.
She looked different somehow. Did she always have light hair? Why did Richard remember that she was supposed to be a brunette? He frowned as she continued to write on the whiteboard. She looked shorter now too, her shoulders more delicate, her body nearly lost inside a chunky, bleak-colored sweater. Her hair spilled down to the middle of her back, loose and limp, dull under the green-yellow light. He started to take notes again. He could barely keep up.
Why was she writing so fast?
Slow down, Richard snapped in his mind as he tried to keep up. But the teacher kept scribbling faster and faster, words and sentences that Richard could no longer even understand, lines and lines of jagged symbols from one end of the whiteboard to the other. He paused, bewildered. She was putting all of her weight into it, her shoulders hunched up, her writing arm jerky with motion. The cold, uneasy feeling seeped back into his stomach. He looked around—everyone else still seemed completely unperturbed. Could they even understand what she was writing? Faster and faster she wrote. The room turned darker, until Richard felt like he was the only one still sitting in there. The girl wrote and wrote and wrote, the marker screaming against the board. Richard tried to cover his ears, but it penetrated right through his skin. It was the girl, of course, the girl was his teacher and she couldn’t stop scribbling, scribbling so hard into the whiteboard that she was carving deep grooves into the surface. The nails of her writing hand had started to bleed.
Richard couldn’t take it anymore. “You have to stop,” he called out. No one listened to him. He raised his voice. “Stop. Stop!” He stood up. His chair squealed against the floor. “Stop writing so fast!”
The girl didn’t listen.
Richard spit out a curse and hurried up the empty aisle. Who the hell are you? Why are you following me? He reached her at the whiteboard, grabbed her shoulders, and spun her around.
He couldn’t see her face. Where it should have been, he could only see a heavy film, a blur of skin, like he was staring into a thick sheet of opaque glass framed by pale hair. He shook her as hard as he could. “Stop it,” he hissed through his teeth. His shaking turned violent. The girl without a face began to shriek.
Then hands were on him, and somehow he was being pulled off, pulled away from the grotesque creature. He had the dull sensation of being thrown back to the ground. Somewhere, someone kept screaming.
“Stop!” They were screaming at him. The world suddenly brightened, and when Richard blinked, he was staring up at the ceiling of the room and his classmates were gathered around him in a wary circle. Two of his friends sat next to him, their hands still wrapped tightly around his arms, both breathing heavily. In front of them, a group of students were comforting a shaking girl, who sobbed uncontrollably.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” one of them yelled at him.
Richard stared numbly back at the girl. She sat in front of him in class. Now she trembled and cried in her friends’ arms. Even when the teacher rushed back into the room with security officers at her back, he couldn’t move.
But he hadn’t grabbed his classmate. He had grabbed the girl without a face. He was sure of it.
Another round of police conversations at home, another emergency work-leave for Mom. They all sat together in the living room while the police interrogated Richard, their eyes weary and unfeeling. This time, a psychiatrist sat with them. Richard answered their questions one after the other.
“And you attacked Miss Evans today because you thought she was someone else?” the officer asked.
What in the world was he supposed to say to that? Richard shrugged in frustration. “I don’t know,” he muttered. “I must have had some sort of nightmare in class. I didn’t sleep well last night. I must have fallen asleep.”
He hated the psychiatrist’s penetrating look. She peered at him over her glasses. “Have you had any dreams lately, then?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Do you still find yourself dreaming about Lillian Stephens?”
Richard’s mother straightened, her posture tense. “I’d prefer we not discuss that,” she said. “We’ve gone to great lengths to help Richard forget about—”
“Let him answer the question,” the psychiatrist replied calmly.
Richard tightened his jaw until he thought it might break. If the police weren’t here, he might insult the psychiatrist right to her face—but with the cops sitting next to him, he had to behave himself. “No, ma’am,” he said, keeping his demeanor innocent and confused. “I’ve been doing better since we moved here. We’ve put the whole thing behind us and tried to move forward.”
“He’s graduating in a few months and heading off to Harvard,” his mother interjected. “Top grades in all his classes. Isn’t that right, honey?”
Richard just wanted his mom to be quiet.
The psychiatrist smiled, but somehow, her smile didn’t seem to touch her eyes. “How lovely to hear that you’re doing so well,” she said.
The questions went on for a while longer, until finally the police officer seemed satisfied with his answers. They didn’t leave him alone, though, until he agreed to start seeing the psychiatrist once a week, at least until his graduation. Richard had to play along. So he did.
That night, he lay awake in bed, turned in the direction of his closet, and tried to stop thinking about Lillian Stephens. The whole thing had been so stupid, anyway. It bothered him that the psychiatrist felt the need to bring it up. Did she have any idea how hard it’d been for him to push it all behind him? For him to move on?
Richard grunted and flipped around in bed, turning his back to the closet. Just a weird couple of weeks. He was tired, was all. Screw this. Screw everything.
Slowly, his eyelids started to droop.
A strange noise woke him up. It sounded like a girl, someone crying. He blinked, then sat back up in bed. Was this his house? It took him a long moment to realize that he wasn’t in his room at all, but a stranger’s. No, not a stranger’s. The decorations on the wall had changed, his trophies and plaques replaced with paintings and portraits. Now he remembered; this was his friend’s house,
and the only time he’d been in here was during a party at the end of last year. He hesitated, then got out of the bed and made his way across the room. Red party cups littered the floor. He had to get out of here and back to his own home, he thought groggily, before his parents found him gone.
The hallway was dark. He couldn’t seem to turn on the lights. He stumbled down the corridor, kicking red cups out of the way. As he went, he thought he could still hear the sounds of the party going on around him. People dancing. The bass of the music. People were still here, drunk and laughing, beer and vodka spilling out of their cups. He saw a group of people he recognized stumble past him, laughing hard at something he couldn’t understand. The light was green and blue, cutting sharp angles on their faces, turning them into hideous creatures. A lightbulb somewhere kept flickering like it was about to go out. Everything wavered in and out of focus. Maybe all the booze was what made it so hard to see straight. He looked away. Better go downstairs.
Before he could, though, he caught sight of someone he recognized. It was himself, junior year, laughing with a bunch of his friends. A girl was with him. As he looked on, his younger self filled up the girl’s cup with another round of vodka, and she nearly dropped the whole cup as she leaned against the wall. Lillian Stephens. The memory looked different from this distant angle. He saw himself grab her arm when she tried to leave. He shouted something in her face while his friends jeered. Then he started dragging her toward a nearby closet. She laughed with a wild, unsteady lilt, and she tried to pull her hand away. She was so drunk. She couldn’t even walk well enough in the opposite direction. Just shut up, he remembered thinking that night. Then he opened the closet door, shoved her in, and locked them both inside the darkness.
Richard tried to recall exactly what happened afterward, but the memory was too hazy. There was her nervous laughter, and then some shouting. Someone clawing weakly at him. Wet streaks on her cheeks. His sudden, searing irritation with her. They were just having some fun. Oh, come on, he said. Then you can go. Promise. He remembered her fists pounding on the door. Her crying. He could barely hear her through the bass of the music.
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