Hysteria (16 page)

The alley had been dark as I walked home from Brian’s house. And Colleen had the pepper
spray, back at the party. I heard these footsteps, faintly, over the sound of my breathing,
and I started moving faster.

I kept my eyes on the light at the other end. The moon was low in the sky, and there
was this halo around it, from the clouds. The air was thick, about to burst. Humidity
and something else crawled along my skin.

“Mallory,” I heard.

And I started to run.

I dug my fingernails into my clenched fists and pumped my arms harder as I sprinted
through the grass toward the roar of the crowd. To the sea of red. Where I joined
the mob.

I found a spot on the top row of the bleachers, near the very edge. I stood when they
stood. And clapped when they clapped. And watched what they watched. Which was Reid.
Because he was good. Like, really, really good. He weaved between people, glancing
up and to the side and down the field and moving his feet like he knew where the ball
was at all times even though he wasn’t looking. Like he could sense it.

Like I could sense that thing, even without looking, the way I could feel it in my
room, picture it in semisolid form, hovering. I never had to look. Just like Reid.

Reid kept his eyes on the open field as he dribbled around people. He took a shot
on goal, and of course he scored. His mouth turned into this giant smile, and I felt
the corners of my mouth turning up with his.

He scanned the crowd, which was on its feet. They sat as one, a rogue clap or cheer
escaping, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away from his smile. So when he scanned a second
time, he saw me, because I was the only one still standing. And then it occurred to
me that I was the only one still standing, and I ached to sit, but I worried I was
just doing it because everyone else was doing it, and I didn’t want to be like everyone
else.

Reid’s smile, if possible, stretched wider, and then I had this horrifying thought.
I shook my head, just a bit, and I thought,
Please don’t wave.
Then Reid raised his hand and waved. I quickly sat down. But people had noticed.
People on the field followed his eyes into the sea of red, and they saw me. I knew
they saw me, because I knew what the weight of eyes felt like.

It felt like knives.

At the sound of the final whistle, I ran down the steps of the bleachers, the sound
of my feet hidden under the sound of everyone else’s feet. Reid was talking to the
coach on the sideline, a bunch of players huddled around them. He was smiling. He
caught my eye as I passed, and he smiled some more. I kept moving, but a soccer player
in a scarlet shirt skipped off the field and ran up to me. Jason.

“Got yourself a boyfriend, Mallory?” Jason leaned close; warm smile, but his voice
was ice.

“I don’t do boyfriends.” I yanked my arm back.

Jason reached his hand out and ran his fingers through the hair framing my face. “I’m
a pretty good nonboyfriend.”

I swatted his arm away and jerked my neck back. Now others were noticing. The people
surrounding us fell silent. “Don’t touch me,” I said.

Jason laughed, like we were joking around, even though I wasn’t and he knew it. He
chucked me under the chin, like he thought I was cute. “I can’t help it.”

“Where’s your girlfriend?” I asked, scanning the crowd for Bree.

Jason laughed. “I don’t do girlfriends.”

Reid was walking toward us, his smile completely gone. Last thing I needed was a scene
with the two of them. Again. Jason reached for my shoulder, the one with the bruises,
and I jerked back. “Don’t fucking touch me.” I took off across the fields.

I saw Bree as I passed the baseball field behind the main building, sitting under
the bleachers, not doing a very good job of hiding if that was her purpose. As I got
closer, I noticed she wasn’t smoking or anything, she was laying on the ground, staring
up through the slats of the bleachers, twirling a blade of grass above her face. Then
I realized she was probably waiting for Jason. And I remembered the girl under my
window the night before.

So I slowed down and walked toward her until she noticed me and propped herself onto
her elbows. Her head was cocked to the side like she was trying to play it cool, but
her hands were clenched, ripping up grass by her sides.

I stopped at the edge of the bleachers and said, “Jason’s a scumbag.”

She didn’t do anything for a long pause, then she let out an extra-loud laugh. She
said “Jealous much?” and leaned back into the grass.

Someone had been in my room. The door was unlocked. Nothing inside was out of place,
but there was a feeling that only a person could leave. Nothing specific, but something.
Like when Bree left the sticky tack behind, or the scent of my grandma’s perfume,
a reminder of what used to be. We leave footprints. When we leave.

When we die.

I sat on my desk chair and swiveled back and forth, the chair creaking under my movement.
I was looking for anything out of place. Then I jumped up and stared back at my chair.
It was warm. Worn. Someone had sat in it recently.

I sat back down and opened my desk drawers, and sure enough, everything was a little
off. Papers were stacked too precisely. Pens were lined too neatly, where they had
been scattered before.

My heart beat in my ears, like it was filling the room. Like when the feeling came
at night. But underneath that, there was another noise. I strained to separate the
two.

Knocking. Someone was knocking on my door.

I didn’t open it. “Who is it?” I called.

“Reid. Hurry up or I’m gonna get in trouble.”

I raced for the door and swung it open. Reid slipped inside and eased it quickly shut
behind him. He hadn’t showered since the game. I took a step back.

“Sorry,” he said. “I know I reek. But I had to check on you.”

“Check on me?” I breathed through my mouth.

“Yeah. I saw you with . . . is Jason bothering you?”

I sucked in a long breath through my nose and looked up at Reid, who had creases in
his forehead from worrying. Then I realized that feeling in my room when I first came
in, it was gone. I couldn’t sense it, not even a little. All I could feel was Reid,
and okay, he was kind of gross at the moment, but the room was just so decidedly him
and nothing else, and it felt safe.

My eyes drifted back to my desk, to the papers stacked too neatly. I stepped closer
to Reid, whose forehead creased even further.

“Someone was here,” I whispered.

“Who?” He looked around the room quickly, from the closed window to the closed door.
“Who was here?”

“I don’t know. Everything’s just a little . . . off.”

Reid’s shoulders relaxed. “Happened to me when I first moved here. Every time I’d
walk into my room it felt like someplace new. It’ll grow on you.”

“No. My door was open. Someone was in here. Who has keys?”

“Bree?” he said, looking at her empty bed.

But I had just seen her, and she’d clutched at the grass beside her when I passed.
She was terrified of me. “Who else?”

Reid stepped closer and everything that wasn’t right about the room faded away. “The
deans, I guess. And the housemaster for emergencies, I think.”

“I don’t think Ms. Perkins likes me.”

“She’d be risking her job. And for what? Why would she care? I mean, yeah,
I’m
nosy like that . . .” He grinned, like he thought he was making me feel better. He
didn’t know about the red paint. Or Brian’s mom.

“And how else would you increase your social standing than with more secrets?”

He pressed his lips together. “I’m not like that.”

And then he was even closer and I meant to say something like
everyone’s like that
, or maybe roll my eyes at him, but I wondered how he had changed since his dad’s
death
—
he had to be different, and not just his hair. So I moved my hand to his arm, which
was hot and damp, and I said, “What are you like?” Bold, like he remembered me.

He looked down at my hand on his arm, and I was frozen again. Indecisive. And so was
he because he left his arm exactly where it was. Neither of us pulling back, but neither
moving closer.

“Come to breakfast with me tomorrow morning and you can see.”

“You can’t just tell me how you like your eggs cooked?”

“No, I mean off campus.”

And I realized he meant on a date. I didn’t respond, but he didn’t seem to notice,
because that arm I’d been touching made its way to my side, and I didn’t think we
were any closer, but we must’ve been because I swear I could feel his heart, beating
hard, like he was still recovering from his game.

“The door,” I said, and I backed away, until all I felt was the empty space where
he used to be.

Reid looked stunned, and he shook his head to get his bearings again. “What door?”

“The closet door. I left it closed.” And now it wasn’t. Now it was cracked, just enough
to see a wedge of blackness. To feel that someone could be in, looking out. To know
it could swing open or slam shut, just something, full of possibility. Undecided.

Reid ran his fingers through his hair, which was a little bit matted to his head from
sweat. “All right, I’ll check.” Though I could tell from the way he walked across
the room that he didn’t believe me. He pulled the door open and his knuckles turned
white on the door frame.

“What? What is it?” I rushed across the floor and pushed past him and saw.

No one was there.

But someone had been.

Everything hanging in my closet, including all my scarlet shirts, had been slashed,
leaving scraps of fabric hanging from each other by threads. Jagged edging. A mess
of strips and string covering the dresser and the floor.

Not like a joke.

Like hate.

Chapter 9

W
hat the fuck?” Reid asked. Then he whispered in my ear but I couldn’t hear him because
there was a buzzing, white noise, my memories short-circuiting. Everything about him
fell away.

All I saw was Brian’s mouth screaming “What the fuck?” and his mouth moving, shouting
at me, not making any sense. And then I heard that buzzing again, where I couldn’t
make sense of anything else. I reeled backward and I was completely disoriented, like
I wasn’t sure whether it was then or now, or now or then, or whether it mattered at
all.

And the next thing I knew I was in the lounge and Reid was pacing in front of me and
the campus police came through the double doors.

“It was Jason Dorchester,” I heard him say. “He’s been bothering her. He harassed
her at the game. Everyone saw it.”

I shook my head. It wasn’t Jason. He was still at the game. He didn’t have time to
beat me back here, slice my clothes up, and leave again.

“Okay,” said a man with a blue button-down shirt. “Mallory, tell me what happened
with Mr. Dorchester.”

“Nothing. I told him to leave me alone and then I came back here.”

“So you came straight back?”

“Yes.”