Wait, it said, like it was right behind me.
“No, no, no,” I mumbled. Because I knew what was coming next. The hand, pressing down on me. It’s only real if you let it be, I thought.
Two hands pressed down on my shoulders. I shrugged them off violently and yelled, “Get away!”
“Whoa, sorry.”
I turned around, the beating of the room now only in my own head, in my own chest. I tried to slow my breathing. Reid had his hands held up in the air. I looked around my empty room, then at him. I took slow breaths, and I heard the beating of my heart return to normal.
“You scared me,” I said, once I trusted myself to speak again.
Reid tilted his head to the side. “Who were you talking to?”
My face was hot, and I willed my eyes to stay on his. “No one.”
“You look terrified.”
I looked away—at the closed door and the open window, at the shades hanging in front of the window, alternately blowing inward and slapping back against the window frame. “How the hell did you get in my room?”
“Your window. Sorry, I knocked first. You didn’t hear. And you . . . you were . . .”
“I locked it.”
“No, it was open.”
I couldn’t keep my eyes still. They searched the corners of the room, the space behind me. I’d locked the window, I was sure of it. Almost sure of it. “I thought something was wrong,” he said.
“I thought I saw . . . I thought I felt . . .” I glanced down to my shoulder and back at Reid and shook my head. “Never mind.”
“You thought you felt what?”
Things I didn’t want Reid to know about. My shoulder burned where Reid had touched the bruises. I pulled on the collar of my pajamas to make sure they remained covered.
Then I realized I was still in my pajamas, and Reid was in dark sweats. The carpet felt cold under the soles of my feet. “What are you doing here?”
He pointed to my laptop. “I sent you a bunch of e-mails. Like, a ton. But you never responded.”
I kept my eyes on him as I backed toward my desk, unsure why I didn’t trust him. Why couldn’t I just choose to trust him, like he chose to trust me at the diner? He didn’t move, didn’t say anything at my lack of trust. Instead he watched as I booted up the computer and scanned my e-mail. Reid Carlson: we good? Reid Carlson: hey, can you just write back? Reid Carlson. Reid Carlson.
“I didn’t want to just . . . leave things. Again.”
I instinctively put my fingers to my lips, remembering. Watched as his eyes followed my hand. Watched as his eyes stayed there, even after I pulled my hand away.
Now I didn’t know what he expected from me. And he needed to know why he shouldn’t expect anything, really, at all.
“Sometimes I think I can feel him,” I said. “Hear him, even. I mean, I do. I do feel him. I do hear him. Like he’s right here . . .” I shuddered, imagining him watching me even now.
Reid sat on my bed, ran his hand across my blue comforter, like an invitation. I wondered if he knew where he was sitting—what he was doing. “I guess things . . . happen after a trauma,” he said, looking somewhere beyond me.
“Things like this?” I waved my arms around the air, like Brian was somewhere in the emptiness.
“I don’t know. Maybe.” He shrugged and scooted farther onto my bed. I stayed where I was, my back against my desk. “When my dad died—I mean, after we found him, my mom completely lost her vision. She couldn’t see anything. But it was all psychological. There wasn’t anything physically wrong with her.”
“You mean like hysterical blindness?” We’d watched a movie in history class last year about World War II, and some guy who just stopped seeing, for no real reason at all. I mean, other than the fact that everyone was dying around him.
“Yeah, like that. The real term is ‘conversion disorder.’ I guess so it doesn’t sound so . . . hysterical. Therapy veteran,” he confessed.
“She couldn’t see because she was upset,” I said, like an accusation. Because I could see just fine. Not the same type of thing.
“But that’s not how she explained it. It was more like she couldn’t not see. Like she couldn’t see anything but my dad . . .” I imagined what Reid was seeing in that pause. His father, on the ground? In the snow? Or did he see his mother first, see her face, as she saw her husband? Which was worse? He ran his hand through his hair one, two, three times. And on the third time I crossed the room and took his hand and sat beside him on my bed.
“It’s like she was stuck,” he said.
“For how long?” I whispered.
“I’m not sure. I had to go stay with my grandparents, but by the time we got home for the funeral, she took one look at me and told me to change my tie. Two or three days, I guess.”
“Brian’s been dead for two months,” I said.
“Brian,” he said. And I realized he’d never heard his name before. I wondered if it made it more real. If he understood that he used to be a person and now he wasn’t—because of me.
And just in case he didn’t understand, I said, “He was my boyfriend.”
His hand slipped away, and mine immediately felt cold. “Mallory,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”
Then I stood up because I couldn’t breathe. And he pretended not to notice that my breath shook each time I exhaled. Instead, he slid down onto my bed, against the concrete wall, and said, “Do you want me to leave?”
I thought of what Colleen would tell me. Say yes, she’d say. Or maybe, Say no. Maybe something else. I didn’t know anymore.
Reid was looking at the ceiling, like he didn’t care either way. But he was holding his breath, I could tell. Which made my decision for me. I slid into bed beside him, hovering near the edge, and miraculously, given the width of the bed, we did not touch. I closed my eyes, found his hand again, and laced my fingers together with his.
And when I squeezed his hand, his grip tightened around mine as well. I stared at my desk, thinking I could probably take a sleeping pill now. I could sleep without worrying about someone sneaking into my room. Slashing my shirts. Coming for me.
The tension left Reid’s hand, but his fingers still lay between mine. I shifted so I was on my back, a little closer to him. I ignored the vial of pills in the drawer. I didn’t want to take them.
Turns out, I didn’t want to miss this feeling.
I slept.
Somewhere in the night, I must’ve slept, because I woke. And you can’t wake without sleeping first.
The sound of Reid’s light snoring woke me early. My arm was hanging off the bed, and I didn’t know if I should just lay there, hovering near the edge, or move closer to Reid.
So instead I got up.
I turned on my computer and typed conversion disorder into a search engine and began to read.
Loss of hearing, loss of speech, paralysis, numbness with no physical cause. Hallucinations.
Hysterical blindness: Loss of sight of a psychological nature.
Hysterical pregnancy: Clinical pregnancy symptoms when the person is not pregnant; most often mental in nature.
See also: Somatoform disorder. Hysteria.
Reid slept on while the words seared themselves into my brain. Psychological. Hallucinations. Hysteria.
I walked to the mirror hanging from the back of my closet door and tugged the collar of my shirt down. Maybe I was doing it to myself, in my sleep, in some other plane of existence. I raised my right arm across my chest and tried to line up the fingerprints. But my thumb was in the front, and the thumbprint was on my back. No matter how much I twisted, I couldn’t get the prints to line up. I tried my left hand instead, bringing it up to the same shoulder. I could line it up—sort of—but couldn’t get enough force to leave a mark. Not these deep bruises, which were now so black they’d started to look purple again.