The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer

by Michelle Hodkin

  Noah answered with a slow, arrogant grin. I had to concentrate to prevent myself from melting in the plastic-covered seat.

  “Do you speak anything else?” I asked.

  “Well, what level of fluency are we talking about here?”

  “Anything.”

  The waiter returned, and brought two empty, frosted glasses along with dark bottles of something. He poured the caramel-colored drinks for us, then left.

  Noah took a sip before answering. Then said, “German, Spanish, Dutch, Mandarin, and, of course, French.”

  Impressive. “Say something in German,” I said, and took a sip of the drink. It was sweet with a spicy, sharp finish. I wasn’t sure I liked it.

  “Scheide,” Noah said.

  I decided to give the drink another shot. “What does that mean?” I asked, then sipped.

  “Vagina.”

  I almost choked, and covered my mouth with my hand. After I composed myself, I spoke. “Lovely. Is that all you know?”

  “In German, Dutch, and Mandarin, yes.”

  I shook my head. “Why, Noah, do you know the word for vagina in every language?”

  “Because I’m European, and therefore more cultured than you,” he said, taking another swig and trying not to smile. Before I could smack him, the waiter then brought a basket of what looked like banana chips accompanied by a viscous, pale yellow sauce.

  “Mariquitas,” Noah said. “Try one, you’ll thank me.”

  I tried one. And I did thank him. They were savory with just a hint of sweet, and the garlic-burn of the sauce made my tongue sing.

  “God, these are good,” Noah said. “I could snort them.”

  The waiter returned and loaded our table with food. I couldn’t identify anything except for the rice and beans; the oddest looking were plates of glistening fried dough balls of some sort, and a dish of some white fleshy vegetable smothered in sauce and onions. I pointed to it.

  “Yuca,” Noah said.

  I pointed to the dough balls.

  “Fried plantains.”

  I pointed to a low bowl filled with what purported to be stew, but then Noah said, “Are you going to point, or are you going to eat?”

  “I just like to know what I’m putting in my mouth before I swallow.”

  Noah arched an eyebrow, and I wanted to crawl into a hole and die.

  Shockingly, he let it slide. Instead, he explained what everything was as he held the dishes out for me to take from. When I was full to bursting, the waiter arrived with the check, setting it down in front of Noah. In an echo of his earlier gesture with Alain’s number, I slid the check my way as I dug in my pocket for cash.

  A look of horror dawned on Noah’s face. “What are you doing?”

  “I am paying for my lunch.”

  “I don’t understand,” Noah said.

  “Food costs money.”

  “Brilliant. But that still doesn’t explain why you think you’re paying for it.”

  “Because I can pay for my own food.”

  “It was ten dollars.”

  “And, wouldn’t you know, I have ten dollars.”

  “And I have an American Express Black Card.”

  “Noah—”

  “You have a little something right here, by the way,” he said, pointing to the side of his scruffy jaw.

  Oh, how horrible. “Where? Here?” I grabbed a napkin from the dispenser on the table and rubbed at the location where the offending food bit seemed to be lurking. Noah shook his head, and I rubbed again.

  “Still there,” he said. “May I?” Noah indicated the napkin dispenser and leaned over the table at eye level, ready to wipe my face like a food-spattered toddler. Misery. I squinted my eyes shut out of shame and waited for the feel of the paper napkin on my skin.

  I felt his fingertips on my cheek instead. I stopped breathing, and opened my eyes, then shook my head. How embarrassing.

  “Thanks,” I said quietly. “I’m completely uncivilized.”

  “Then I suppose I’m going to have to civilize you,” Noah said, and I noticed then that the check had disappeared.

  One look at Noah told me he’d taken it. Very slick.

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “I was warned about you, you know.”

  And with that half-smile that wrecked me, Noah said, “But you’re here anyway.”

  30

  A HALF-HOUR LATER, NOAH DROVE UP TO the front entrance of the Miami Beach Convention Center and parked next to the curb. On top of the words NO PARKING emblazoned on the asphalt. I gave him a skeptical look.

  “A perk of being Baby Warbucks,” he said.

  Noah withdrew the keys from his pocket and walked over to the door like he owned the building. Hell, he probably did. It was pitch-black inside, and Noah felt for the lights and flipped them on.

  The art took my breath away.

  It was everywhere. Every surface was covered; the floors themselves were pieces, geographic patterns painted beneath our feet. There were installations everywhere. Sculpture, photography, prints; anything and everything.

  “Oh my God.”

  “Yes?”

  I smacked his arm. “Noah, what is this?”

  “An exhibition funded by some group my mother’s on the board of,” he said. “Two thousand artists are being shown, I think.”

  “Where is everyone?”

  “The show doesn’t open for five days. It’s just us.”

  I was speechless. I turned to Noah and stared at him, mouth agape. He looked deliriously pleased with himself.

  “Another perk,” he said, and grinned.

  We walked the labyrinth of exhibits, weaving our way through the industrial space. It was like nothing I’d ever seen. Some of the rooms were art; walls twisted with metalwork, or entirely crocheted in a walk-in tapestry.

  I wandered over to a sculpture installation, a forest of tall, abstract pieces that surrounded me. They looked like trees or people, depending on the angle, copper and nickel mingling together, towering over my head. I was amazed at the scale of it, the amount of effort it must have taken the artist to create something like this. And Noah brought me here, knowing I would love it, arranging the whole day for me. I wanted to run over and give him the hug of his life.

  “Noah?” My voice bounced off the walls in a hollow echo. He didn’t answer.

  I turned around. He wasn’t there. The giddiness I’d felt slipped away, replaced by a low buzzing of fear. I walked to the far wall looking for a way out and registered the soreness of my calves and thighs for the first time. I must have been walking for a while. The vastness of the space swallowed my footsteps. The wall was a dead end.

  I needed to go back the way I came, and tried to remember which way that was. As I passed the trees—or were they people?—I felt their faceless, misshapen trunks twist in my direction, following me. I stared straight ahead, even while their limbs reached out to grab me. Because they weren’t reaching. They weren’t moving. It wasn’t real. I was just scared and it wasn’t real and maybe I would start taking the pills when I got home later.

  If I got home later.

  I escaped the metal forest unscathed, of course, but then found myself surrounded by enormous photographs of houses and buildings in various stages of decay. The images stretched from floor to ceiling, making it seem like I was walking on a real sidewalk beside them. Ivy crept over brick walls, and trees bent and leaned into the structures, sometimes swallowing them whole. The grass might have edged on to the concrete floor of the Convention Center, too. And there were people in the pictures. Three people with backpacks, scaling a fence at the border of one of the properties. Rachel. Claire. Jude.

  I blinked. No, not them. No one. There were no people in the picture at all.

  The air pressed in on me and I quickened my pace, my head pounding, my feet sore, and rushed through the photographs, detouring at a sharp corner to try and find the exit. But when I turned, I faced another photograph.

  Thousands of poun
ds of brick and concrete rubble were strewn along the wooded grounds. It was a picture of destruction, as if a tornado had hit a building and all that was left was a pile of rubble and the vague sense that there were people beneath it. It was reverent—each ray of sunlight that filtered through the trees cast a perfect, distorted shadow on the snow-covered ground.

  And then the dust and bricks and beams began to move. Darkness pressed in on the edges of my vision as the snow and sunlight receded, leaving dead leaves in their wake. The dust curled back in on itself and the bricks and beams flew and towered and reassembled themselves. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see. I lost my balance and fell, and when I hit the floor, my eyes flew open at the shock of the impact. But I was no longer in the Convention Center.

  I was no longer in Miami at all. I was standing right beside the asylum, right next to Rachel and Claire and Jude.

  31

  BEFORE

  RACHEL HELD OUT THE MAP SHE’D PULLED from the Internet, which showed a detailed blueprint of the facility. It was huge, but navigable if you had enough time. The plan was to enter through the cellar door, make our way through the basement storage area, and climb up to the main level, which would bring us to the industrial kitchen. Then, another staircase would lead us to the patient and treatment rooms in the children’s wing.

  Rachel and Claire were giddy with excitement as they pried open the basement door with a groaning creak. The Laurelton Police Department had mostly given up securing the place, beyond some cursory CONDEMNED notices, which suited Rachel perfectly; she was itching to write our names on the blackboard inside one of the patient rooms. It bore the names of other thrill-seekers—or idiots, flip a coin—who had dared to spend the night.

  Claire was first to walk down the steps. The light on her video camera cast shadows in the basement. I must have looked as freaked out as I felt, because Rachel smiled and promised, again, that everything would be fine. Then she followed Claire.

  I walked behind them down to the lowest level of the asylum and felt Jude loop his finger through the belt hole in the back of my jeans. I shivered. The basement was covered in debris, the crumbling brick walls peeled and cracked. Exposed, broken pipes jutted from the ceiling, and evidence of a rat infestation was pronounced. As we walked through the skeletal remains of some kind of shelving system, our lights pierced random columns of steam or fog or something that I tried vainly to avoid.

  At the opposite wall of this section of the basement, a full stairway with a rotten wood banister twisted up to the main floor. On the first landing, only five steps up, was a random, high-backed wooden wing chair. It was placed like some kind of eerie sentinel, blocking access to the second floor of the stairs. Snap. The flash on Rachel’s camera went off as she took a picture. I shivered in my coat, and my teeth must have chattered because I heard Claire snort.

  “Oh my God, she’s freaking out already and we’re not even in the treatment rooms yet.”

  Jude rushed to my defense. “Leave her alone, Claire. It’s freezing down here.”

  That shut her up. Rachel pushed the chair out of the way and the sound of it as it scraped against the hard floor set my teeth on edge. We wound our way up the staircase, which groaned under our weight. The climb was steep, the stairs felt loose, and I held my breath the whole way. When we reached the top I almost collapsed with relief. We stood in an enormous pantry now. Claire kicked decades-old insulation and garbage out of her way, careful to avoid the obvious sections of rotting wood floor as she walked through the institutional kitchen and open cafeteria. Snap. Another picture. I felt dizzy as I followed Rachel, and imagined stern-faced nurses and orderlies doling out bland mush to drooling, twitching patients from behind the long counter that stretched from one end of the vast room to the other.

  An impossibly large and imposing pulley system announced our entry into the hall that led to the first floor of patient rooms. The levers that controlled it were on the right, the hulking weights that balanced them visible behind the desk of the nurses station. The system’s cables ran up to the ceiling and stretched down the hall, deviating at the entrance of each individual room. Culminating in thousand-pound iron doors. Don’t mess with the pulley system, the website had warned. A kid exploring alone got trapped on the wrong side. His body was found six months later.

  Of course, I didn’t need the warning. My father had told me and my brothers plenty of times how dangerous the old building was. Before he switched to criminal law, he’d sued the property owners and the township on behalf of the boy’s family, and he should have won; his files overflowed with evidence. But inexplicably, the jury found against the boy’s family. Maybe they thought the boy should have known better. Maybe they thought the town needed an example.

  But all I thought about was what it must have felt like to hear the slam of those doors—to feel the reverberations in the rotting floor, in the walls, as thousands of pounds of iron separated you from the rest of your life. What it must have felt like to know no one was coming for you. What it must have felt like to starve.

  Rachel and Claire’s delight reached a higher pitch as we passed the roped cables and levers. Snap. The flash illuminated the cavernous hall. Jude and I walked together behind the two of them, sticking to the middle. Patient rooms flanked us, and I didn’t want to go anywhere near them.

  We followed slowly, the beam of Jude’s flashlight bouncing over the walls as we advanced toward the impenetrable black hole that yawned in front of us. When Rachel and Claire disappeared behind a corner I sped up, terrified to lose them in the labyrinthine passageways. But Jude had stopped altogether, and lightly jerked the waistband of my jeans. I turned.

  He grinned. “We don’t have to follow them, you know.”

  “Thanks, but I’ve seen enough horror movies to know that splitting up is not the best idea.” I started forward again, but he didn’t release me.

  “Seriously, there’s nothing to be scared of. It’s just an old building.”

  Before I could reply, Jude grabbed my hand and tugged me behind him. His flashlight illuminated the number on the room in front of us. 213.

  “Hey,” he whispered, as he pulled me in.

  “Hey,” I grumbled.

  Jude cocked an eyebrow at me. “You need to take your mind off of this place.” I shrugged and took a step backward. My foot hitched on something, and I fell.

  32

  I TRIED TO OPEN MY EYES. THEY WERE WET AND swollen, and the dark blue-black world rocked around me. I could see only pieces of it. Somehow, I was very warm, but my body was curled up.

  “Mara?” Noah asked. I was inches away from his face. My head rested on his shoulder in the crook between his neck and his ear. He was carrying me. Not inside the asylum. Or the Convention Center.

  “Noah,” I whispered.

  “I’m here.”

  He folded me into the passenger seat and brushed a few strands of hair out of my face as he leaned over me. His hand lingered.

  “What happened?” I asked, even though I knew. I passed out. I had a flashback. And now I was shaking.

  “You fainted during my grand gesture.” His voice was light, but he was obviously rattled.

  “Low blood sugar,” I lied.

  “You screamed.”

  Busted. I leaned back against the passenger seat. “Sorry,” I whispered. And I was. I couldn’t even go on a date without crumbling into pieces. I felt like a tool.

  “There’s nothing to be sorry about. Nothing.”

  I smiled, but it was hollow. “Admit it. That was weird.”

  Noah said nothing.

  “I can explain,” I said, as the fog in my brain receded. I could explain. I owed him that.

  “There’s no need,” he said quietly.

  I barked out a laugh. “Thanks, but I’d rather you didn’t think that’s my typical reaction to art shows.”

  “I don’t think that.”

  I sighed. “Then what do you think?” I asked, eyes closed.

 
“I don’t think anything,” he said. His voice was even.

  It didn’t make sense that Noah was so nonchalant about my little episode. I opened my eyes to look at him. “You’re not at all curious?” It was slightly suspicious.

  “No.” Noah stared straight ahead, still standing outside the car.

  Not slightly suspicious. Very suspicious. “Why not?” My pulse raced as I awaited his answer. I had no idea what Noah was going to say.

  “Because I think I know,” he said, and looked down at me. “Daniel.”

  I rubbed my forehead, not sure I heard him correctly. “What? What does he have to do with—”

  “Daniel told me.”

  “Told you what? You just met—”

  Oh. Oh.

  I’d been set up.

  Which was why Noah never once asked about my old school. My old friends. Not a single question about the move, even though he was relatively new to Miami, too. He hadn’t even asked about my arm. Now I understood why; Daniel told him everything. My brother would not hurt me on purpose, but this wouldn’t be the first time he’d acted like Mom’s little henchman. Maybe he thought I needed a new friend and he didn’t think I’d make one on my own. Self-righteous ass.

  Noah closed my passenger door and climbed into the driver’s seat, but didn’t start the car. Neither of us said anything for a long time.

  When I found my voice again, I asked, “How much do you know?”

  “Enough.”

  “What kind of answer is that?”

  Noah closed his eyes, and for a split second, I felt guilty. I looked out the window at the inky sky instead of at his face. Noah lied to me. He should feel guilty.

  “I know about—about your friends. I’m sorry.”

  “Why didn’t you just tell me?” I asked quietly. “Why lie?”

  “I suppose I thought you’d mention it when you were ready.”

  Against my better judgment, I looked at him. Noah’s legs were stretched out languidly in front of him. He cracked his knuckles, completely unfazed. Unmoved. I wondered why he’d bothered with any of this.