“God, this is hideous,” he said. He flipped a textbook open, stuck a pen behind his ear, and said, “By the way, I’m helping you with math.”
“I don’t need help with—”
And then Ms. Perkins was standing in the entrance to my room. “I wasn’t aware you were taking senior courses, Mallory.”
“Oh, I’m not.” Reid was giving me a Look. I opened the top drawer to my desk and pulled out my calculator. “Reid’s helping me with math.”
He smiled at Ms. Perkins, dimple and all. “That’s very generous of you, Reid.”
He shrugged, like it was no big deal. “Yeah, well, we used to be friends.”
Ms. Perkins left and I stared at the blank screen of my calculator. Used to be friends. Is that what we were? Were we ever anything, really? “Mallory, I didn’t mean—”
“Why are you here, exactly?”
He glanced toward the hall again, where Ms. Perkins was making the rounds from room to room, and scribbled absently in his notebook. Or maybe all those letters and numbers meant something to him.
“How was your first day?” he asked, without looking up.
“I already failed my first quiz.”
Reid smiled and put his pencil down. “Durham, right?”
I nodded. “And I eat lunch at eleven.”
“The horror.” He looked down the hall again. Empty. “So, here’s the thing.” Reid lowered his voice so I had to lean forward off my chair, and I still could barely hear him. “Tomorrow night—”
“Knock, knock.” Chloe stood in my doorway, something clutched to her chest. Her eyes moved from me to Reid to me again, and she grinned. “Am I interrupting something?”
“No,” Reid said, before I could even open my mouth. He went back to scribbling intensely in his notebook.
“Oh good,” Chloe said. She stepped inside the room and pressed her back against the wall, out of view of the hallway. “I come bearing gifts.” Apparently whatever she was clutching to her chest were the gifts. Looked like a stack of yellow books. Then she turned them around so they were facing out. CliffsNotes for all the summer reading.
“Oh my God,” I said.
Reid glanced up. “Prep-school porn.” He laughed to himself and started packing up his stuff. “I can’t indulge this behavior. It’s appalling. What would your parents think?”
Chloe was shaking with laughter. “Leave already so we can close the door.”
“I’d rather be caught with a girl in my room than that,” he said, hands held up.
“You mean Mallory?”
I looked at the floor, so unlike the version of me he remembered. As far as I could tell, Reid ignored the question. “Hey, I need to talk to you tomorrow.”
“I have e-mail, you know.”
“Oh no,” Chloe said, “that doesn’t really belong to you. Don’t send anything you don’t want them knowing.” She pointed to the ceiling, like they were all-powerful, all-seeing.
“Will you be here tomorrow? Same time?” Reid asked.
“Not like I can be anywhere else.” I pointed to the Monroe handbook on my desk. “I think every hour is regimented.”
Reid smiled as he backed out the door. “Nah, Mallory. Those are only suggestions.” It sounded exactly like something Colleen would say. And before I could stop myself, I was grinning ear to ear.
Chloe closed the door behind him and threw the books on my desk. “I suggest we get to work.” She pointed to the CliffsNotes for The Grapes of Wrath. “This. This is a particular brand of torture I can’t let anyone endure. Start here.” I searched for a pen. “And Mallory? Write fast.”
When Chloe left with her books at the end of study hall, the emptiness of the room was overwhelming. I started to see things, like I used to at home. Brian’s shadow on the dark window. A handprint on the wall.
Ms. Perkins came around to give the lights-out notice, and I held the vial of sleeping pills in my hand, thinking about the hand on my shoulder when I was half conscious. I started to worry that maybe someone had been in my room—someone real. I tilted the vial back and forth, listening to the pills fall against one another. Then I threw them in the bottom drawer of my desk and slammed it shut.
My mind raced with possibility. That green car. The red door. The restraining order. Was it only good in New Jersey?
The alarms on the outside doors were armed at night, at least.
But the window. Crap, the window. I checked it and double-checked it, like Mom would do at home.
I sat on my bed and stared at the door, the window, the door again. The dorm settled into silence.
And then it started, in the distance. Even though I wasn’t sleeping. Even though I wasn’t in the in-between. I was wide awake. Sitting upright. Staring at the door. And it started.
Boom, boom, boom.
I stared at the light framing the door, which seemed to pulsate brighter with each beat of his heart, coming closer.
I used to have nightmares when I was a kid. The kind where you wake up, but you still see the dream. Back then, I used to close my eyes from it. Remembering what Mom always told me—it’s only real if you let it be. So I’d close my eyes until it passed.
The air changed in my dorm room. It started throbbing with the slow and steady beat. And because I was a coward, I ran for the desk. I threw open the bottom drawer, snatched the vial of sleeping pills, and took one.
I buried myself face down on my bed and covered my head with my pillow, but sleep didn’t come quickly enough. I felt something taking shape behind me. And this time, I swear I could hear it laughing.
I felt the hand on my shoulder, fingers digging in, as it held me down.
There were marks the next morning. I saw them in the shower. Red and thin, like fingers. I thought of Mom sitting by my bed, stroking the hair away from my sweat-drenched forehead, saying, It’s only real if you let it be. I looked away from my shoulder. If I didn’t see it, it wasn’t real.
Mr. Durham perched on the edge of his desk and took out his tattered copy of Lord of the Flies. I’d read most of that one on my own yesterday. And not the CliffsNotes version. Everyone took out their crisp copies and placed them on the tables in front of them.
“So,” he began, licking his finger and thumbing through the pages, “I think we’ve already established that Golding was saying, underneath it all, that without civilization, we are essentially savages.”
I opened my notebook and wrote, We are savages.
Mr. Durham stopped flipping pages and smoothed down a corner. “They stop thinking for themselves. When they kill Piggy, do they know it’s Piggy? Do any of them know?”
Krista spoke. “They had to know. How could they not? It’s pretty unrealistic.”
“Is it?” Mr. Durham asked. “You’ve all witnessed herd behavior.”
I wrote, herd behavior. Yes, I had witnessed it. At the ice cream shop.
Everyone leaned forward a little over the tables. Everyone but me. This wasn’t news to me.
“It can be as benign as shopping on Black Friday—haven’t you heard of people stampeding to get the cheap televisions? Trampling others? And when you cheer at a sporting event, would you get up to shout or cheer or boo on your own? Or do you only do it because everyone else is doing it? Because you are part of something greater?”
Silence in the classroom.
“And trends,” he continued. “I mean, really, who thought mullets were a good idea?”
A few of the guys laughed.
“Or blue eyeshadow,” Chloe said.
“Or bell-bottoms,” another kid said.
“Exactly,” Mr. Durham said, nodding his head and smiling.
“But it starts somewhere,” Bree said. “Right? I mean, blue eye shadow didn’t just appear from nowhere. Someone had to start it.”
“Yes, the idea comes from somewhere,” Mr. Durham answered. “Is that person more culpable than the followers? Less? If one person says, ‘Pull that person from the car and beat him to death,’ and twenty people oblige, who’s at fault?”