Teen Hyde

by Chandler Baker

  “I…” I took a deep breath and prepared to tell somebody something I hadn’t had the guts to tell anyone, at least before now. “I’m having trouble remembering certain … things. There seem to be gaps. Chunks of time that have just vanished. And I want—I mean, I need—to know what’s happening in those spaces that I can’t remember. I want to know why this is happening to me.” I wondered if this was a normal problem for a hypnotherapist or if I sounded certifiably insane.

  “When was the last time you noticed one of these ‘gaps’ as you called it?”

  I swallowed. “Two nights ago.” I avoided glancing at my arm. The skin around the black line on my wrist was raised and angry. If I was being honest, last night would be the last gap in my memory. But instead I chose the missing space two nights ago because that was what I most needed to know.

  “When approximately in your day do you think you lost this memory?” I could hear scratches on Dr. Crispin’s notepad.

  “At night,” I answered.

  The scratching stopped. “At night. When you should be sleeping. What makes you think your memory is misplaced at all?”

  “I’ve … well … I’ve woken up in places, seen evidence that I’ve been places at night that seem impossible if I weren’t awake.”

  “So you’re sleepwalking.”

  I clenched my fists. At first sleepwalking had seemed like the most logical explanation. I’d even hoped for that to be all it was. A childhood habit brought out by some weird form of stress. I felt my mouth shift into a crooked grin. “Is there such a thing as sleep driving?” I asked.

  Dr. Crispin let out a puff of air. “I would say not.” He paused for effect. “Jessica, how much do you know about hypnosis?”

  There was a second delay in my response as I was forced to remember that Jessica was the name I’d given him. “Only what I’ve seen on television.”

  “Allow me to enlighten you then. The conscious mind,” he began, “is what you’re used to thinking about. It’s what you think of when you think of yourself. Who is Jessica Faire? That’s the conscious mind. The unconscious mind is everything else. The unconscious mind processes two million pieces of sensory information every second. The reality of which you’re aware is the product of what was sent to you by the unconscious mind. The conscious mind is more logical, rational, analytical, but it can only operate based off what the unconscious mind has chosen to give it.”

  “So, you’re trying to tell me that my unconscious mind could choose not to send me all the information. It could be holding out on me?”

  “Exactly. Have you ever gotten a bruise or a cut and not remembered how it got there?”

  I thought about this. “… Yeah, I suppose so.”

  “That’s because your unconscious mind decided not to share that piece of information with your conscious mind even though something clearly happened to cause it. Something capable of being remembered. Only you didn’t remember it.

  “Have you ever smelled something that you didn’t even know was familiar and suddenly been flooded by a random memory seemingly long forgotten?”

  “Yes.” I nodded more fervently, thinking of my grandmother and the smell of cinnamon gum.

  “The job of hypnosis is similar to that of the familiar smell. Hypnosis is intended to make the unconscious mind cough up additional bits of information that it’s been hoarding for itself.”

  The pulse thudded in my wrist and at the base of my throat. I felt as though I was walking closer and closer to the edge of a cliff and very soon I’d be looking over to see what lay at the bottom. “Okay,” I said. “I think I understand.”

  “Good.” Dr. Crispin snapped the cover of his notepad closed and rested it on his knee. “You’ll be able to remember everything that happened here today, and in your altered state, I will not ask you to do anything that you don’t want to do. You understand?” I nodded again. “I’ll need you to listen very carefully to my voice. Using only my voice, I will lull you into a heightened sense of relaxation, a technique known as induction by suggestion. My sentences will be in time with your breaths, my words repetitive. Boring, even. Keep your breathing steady. Gradually, I will move from suggestion and begin making commands. There we’ll enter into the hypnotic state to explore the last time you can’t remember. From two nights ago. Are you ready, Jessica?”

  My mouth went dry at the same time that my palms needed to be wiped once again on my pant legs. “Ready.”

  “Okay, then. I want you to imagine a happy place. Perhaps a vacation from your childhood. Maybe at the beach or on a cruise or near a mountainside.” I chewed my lip, fighting back skepticism, and conjured up an image of me, lying in a hammock at the Atlantis resort in the Bahamas a few years ago. “Let your feet relax … and your toes relax. Consider letting your hips relax … your waist.” I nestled into the sofa, doing my best to release the tension that I’d been clinging to over the past few days. “What if you were flying? Imagine that the wind is whipping through your hair. No worries, no cares, no stress.” I continued to listen. The rise and fall of my chest evened out. My limbs went heavy with relaxation. “Sinking down and shutting down, sinking down and shutting down.” The sound of Dr. Crispin’s voice became more distant, like he was speaking to me from the other side of a pane of glass. “Return to the time two nights ago. You are there now. You can envision what you’re wearing.” An image came to me. I was changing out of my yoga pants and sports bra from practice that night. I was changing not into pajamas but into jeans and a tank top and a black hoodie. “Follow your own steps. Stay in the moment. The deeper you go, the deeper you are able to go.” I measured my breaths by his methodical intonation.

  It was late. My house was dark. I was in the driveway, turning the key in the ignition. Driving. Driving toward Dearborn. In the direction of the university.

  “Every word I utter is putting you faster and deeper into a state of deep, peaceful hypnosis. Where are you now?”

  “I’m … at the end of a row of large houses. It’s nighttime.”

  “Good. Continue walking down the street. Explore your surroundings.”

  In my memory, I saw myself stopping in front of a fraternity house. Going in. The music was loud. The lights flashed, blinding me, even in my mind.

  “Sinking down, shutting down…,” Dr. Crispin murmured.

  I was looking for someone. My pulse sped up. In the present, I felt my fingernails dig into the leather.

  “The deeper you go, the deeper you are able to go…”

  My fingers relaxed. In my trancelike state, I was able to find the face I was searching for. I seemed to know him, though he didn’t know me. We were outside. I was thankful to be free of the merciless beating music and the attacking strobe. I sank into the shadows, coaxing the boy after me. Enticing him. Egging him on. Hatred hatched inside me, reached across the divide of time and space, and grew roots in my veins.

  Deeper, deeper, sinking, shutting.

  A blade was in my hand. A blade was in his face, his chest, his throat. And it was glorious, beautiful, exquisite.

  It was red.

  And I was in love with it.

  Somewhere in the distance I heard a snap of fingers and a command to wake up and then I was hurdling through nothingness, falling upward back into myself, back up to where gravity could grasp on to my arms, legs, back, and shoulders. I was there. Gasping. Sucking thin air and not finding enough oxygen.

  I sat up pin straight, my back rigid.

  “What did you see, Jessica?” Dr. Crispin’s voice hit me like ice water to the face.

  I stared at him, wild-eyed. “I—I—” My tongue felt around for words other than the truth, which was difficult with the truth pinging against every molecule in my gray matter. “I remembered a fight with my sister,” I said. “I don’t know how I forgot. Or why. But, yeah, just a stupid fight. It was dumb.”

  Dr. Crispin adjusted his glasses. “Really?”

  And I could have been imagining it, but I thought fro
m the way that he was looking at me that Dr. Crispin didn’t quite believe me. Had I said something while under hypnosis? Cried out? Screamed? Or could he see deeper than that. Did he know, like I now knew, that the eyes he was looking into were the eyes of a killer?

  * * *

  I STROLLED INTO the gymnasium exactly one minute before the official start of cheer practice wearing my biggest pair of sunglasses and feeling even worse than I looked. I took pains to keep my arms pinned to my sides, resisting the urge to scrape invisible coats of blood off with my fingernails.

  I kept feeling it on me. Reams of red spilling over my hands.

  “See, told you she’d show up.” Ava jabbed Paisley in the ribs.

  Paisley rolled her eyes and gave me an unenthusiastic wave hello.

  “Haters gonna hate,” whooped Erica from her straddle position on the floor.

  My heart squeezed with longing for them.

  “Wow, though”—Ava stretched to the side with one arm arcing over her head—“you really do look sick.”

  “She always looks sick,” added Paisley.

  “I’m not sick.” I pushed the sunglasses into the bridge of my nose.

  “Oh my god.” Erica jumped up, her eyes wide. “Are you pregnant? You are, aren’t you? That’s exactly how my cousin looked when she found out she was pregnant.”

  The word pregnant flashed through my head like a migraine. I squinted in discomfort. After the night in Dearborn, I woke up feeling sore and impossibly stupid. I hadn’t been able to look up from my wallet when the pharmacist slid the packet of morningafter pills across the counter. Every achy cramp that day and the next felt well-deserved as I hoped and prayed for the medicine to wash away every scrap of the night before. “I’m not pregnant,” I said, which was true. “I’m fine.” Which wasn’t.

  “All right, all right.” Erica held up both palms like I had a gun trained on her. Then again, maybe she was right to be afraid of me. Oh god. “Then are you sure you’re going to be okay?”

  My abdomen was rigid. It had to be to hold all the panic inside. “Of course,” I said curtly. “We have a game in two days.”

  I wanted to stamp out the shared glances from the squad. More than that I wanted to be a part of them again. I wanted to press rewind and erase the last six months of my life. The images that had been resurrected this afternoon thundered around in my skull. The migraine that had been triggered was busy exploding in short bursts like the Fourth of July.

  A blade in his face, his chest, his throat. Glorious, beautiful, exquisite.

  I wanted to push my thumbs into my temples. The other girls were all staring at me, waiting expectantly. “What are you all waiting for?” I pushed the words out slowly and deliberately. “Are you all warmed up? Because it doesn’t look like it. Ten laps around the court. This isn’t the freaking chess club, ladies.” I clapped twice and the noise felt like something snapping inside me, but it got the squad moving.

  Fifteen ponytails took off around the baseline. I excused myself into the locker room where I made a beeline for the farthest bathroom stall. I dropped my gym bag onto the tile beside me and collapsed onto my knees.

  My breaths were coming in great, heaving puffs that blew my cheeks out and sucked them in tight.

  Coughs of crimson. Deep maroon that oozed from holes that shouldn’t exist. Torn shirt, torn skin, torn face. The smell of iron. Hot and pleasant like bathwater.

  I thrust my head over the toilet and vomited the contents of my stomach into the bowl. Mouth still dripping, I retched again. Yellow mucus ran from my nostrils.

  From outside the stall came the sound of footsteps. “Cass?” It was Ava.

  I turned and lowered my backside onto the cool tile and leaned my back against the stall. “Yeah?” I tried to force my voice into a normal octave.

  “Are you coming back out?” She sounded like she felt awkward asking. “We finished our laps a few minutes ago.”

  My hands were shaking. My stomach was still spasming. “Uh-huh,” I said. “I’ll be right there. Why don’t you lead them in the first cheer?” I knew she’d take this as a compliment. Honestly, I meant it as one.

  “Okay.” I didn’t hear feet shuffling away. “Are you sure you’re all right in there?”

  I closed my eyes and felt for the zipper on my gym bag. I pulled it open and started rummaging. My fingers found what they were looking for. I retrieved one of the plastic baggies I’d stashed. It contained only one pill. “Yep, don’t worry,” I said, emptying the drop of Sunshine out into my hand. “I’ll be fine.”

  TWELVE

  Marcy

  I’ve always heard that if you want to bring the hurt, you’ve got to hit them where they live.

  Unfortunately for the “them” in question, I happened to take things very literally.

  I checked the time on my watch as I slipped through the door to Graves Hall on the tail of a legitimate student with a key card. Lena followed closely after.

  I had the urge to sniff the air. Like a bloodhound. I was that close. My skin tingled with it. A step through the door and I had landed on Mick’s former turf. The blood in my veins began coursing, pushing the valves of my heart to work overtime.

  Short One. That was what I’d called him, the one who’d watched through the lens of his video camera.

  He wouldn’t be watching anymore. He wouldn’t be doing anything. A pleasant warmth rose in my gut at the unintentionally conjured memory.

  But the dozens of campus activity flyers plastered to the walls of the dormitory snapped me back. If Short One had watched, that meant someone else could, too. The recollection of the blinking red light taunted me.

  A recording. A vestige of the night.

  That would never do.

  A girl, not much older than me, sat on a rolling chair with her feet propped up on a half-moon desk. She looked up from her copy of Vogue and gave us a distracted smile before returning to the glossy photographs in the magazine.

  I moved without hesitating toward one of the hallways on the first floor, searching for a flight of stairs.

  “What if someone recognizes us?” Lena’s breath was hot on my neck.

  “I thought I told you to be quiet,” I replied through gritted teeth. I lifted my gaze to peer up the stairwell. “And there should be no ‘us.’ I asked for the dorm number; I didn’t ask you to come along.”

  As far as I was concerned, an extra body was an extra liability and an extra witness, neither of which were items I’d included on my revenge registry.

  My boots pounded the steps. Lena trotted after me. With her purple fishnet stockings under a black moto skirt, not drawing attention seemed too much to hope for. “You need me,” she said. “Besides, it’s only fair considering I did the bulk of the work.”

  I wanted to tell her that this wasn’t some kind of game. And that I didn’t need anyone, especially not a high school girl with a hero-worshipping complex. “You can be the lookout. But that’s it.”

  I found the stairwell. Room 255. That was the number Lena had gotten when she’d called the school asking how to send a care package to her cool collegiate cousin, Mick Holcolm. At least she was proving useful for something. I wondered if she’d feel as cooperative if she knew that her pretend collegiate cousin Mick was dead.

  “So are you going to tell me what we’re doing yet?” The clang of our soles echoed. We turned onto the second landing. The faint scent of marijuana lingered in the cramped stairwell.

  “Again with the ‘we,’” I said coldly, and drew a hood over my ears to mask my dark hair. Near the exit a fire alarm blinked red to show that it was ready. Another taunt. This time the charged memory that resulted brought with it more—torn clothes, ugly tears, a girl too weak to stand. The reason I was here.

  I scanned the numbers on the doors of Graves Hall’s second-floor dorms. Every step was purposeful. Efficient. Competent.

  A girl squeaked down the hall toward us in shower shoes and a towel. My muscles tensed before she ve
ered off into one of the rooms without sparing us a second glance.

  Music trickled through a few of the shut doors and I could imagine the students who lived inside. A studious music major listening to classical. A stoner with his Bob Marley.

  “What if Mick’s home?” Lena’s head was on a swivel. For someone else, her nervousness might be contagious. For me it was just incomprehensible.

  “He won’t be.”

  “How do you know?”

  I cut my glance sharply over to Lena. “Because I know, okay?”

  “But what about a roommate? He could have one of those.”

  I stuffed my hands in my pockets and hunched my shoulders, wishing that I was alone. “That’s what you’re here for.”

  “I thought you said you didn’t need me.” Her tone held a hint of triumph.

  My finger rubbed the dull side of the unfamiliar blade stowed in my pocket. Now that my knife was hidden and buried in the mud, I’d had to snatch a smaller version with a curved, irregular blade that looked like it was used to peel the skin off things. “I don’t. But you’re here and this way’s easier.”

  I located Room 255 three doors from the end of the hallway closest to the boys’ showers. It was an unremarkable door with no hint of the person that had lived inside. I knocked three times and waited. I knocked again and pressed my ear to the wood. When no sound came from the other side, I turned the handle and, to my surprise, it twisted easily underneath my grip. “That was simpler than I planned,” I said. Funny how safe these boys felt, how untouchable. But they weren’t safe now and I’d already proven that they weren’t untouchable.

  They’d created a monster.

  Beside me, Lena’s breath smelled like a Fruit Roll-Up. “Now what?”

  I was already pushing open the door and poking my head inside. My fingers twitched, ready to get ahold of the last scrap of evidence. It was important that they didn’t have the pleasure of owning my misery. Instead my misery would become theirs.

  “Watch for anyone coming this way. Three knocks for me to get out.” I stared hard at Lena to make sure she wasn’t wavering. “Got it?”