And there was this feeling now. A presence. Not quite a ghost. But something.
It was that same something my grandma tried to tell me about before she died, but after she knew she was dying. I’d sat on the side of her bed, looking anywhere but at her, and she snatched my hand and pressed it into her bony chest. “Do you feel that?” she asked. I didn’t know whether she was talking about her heart or her soul, but all I felt was knobby bone, riddled with cancer. And then, below that, a weak pulse. “That has consequence.”
I glanced to the door, hoping Mom would come in soon. I never knew what to say when the medicine took control of her mouth. She squeezed my hand tighter and said, “Mallory. Pay attention. That’s real. It lives on. It has to.” Then she released me. “It’s not the end,” she’d said. “This cannot be the end.”
She died anyway. All of her. But sometimes when I’d walk by her room, I’d catch a whiff of her perfume, feel a fullness to her room. I’d think about what she told me, and I’d stand at the entrance, staring in. Not sure what was left behind. But it was something. And sometimes I’d turn around and find my mom standing behind me, watching me, watching the room.
But I didn’t stand at the entrance of the kitchen contemplating what that something was. I didn’t really want to know. This one time I was supposed to meet Brian on the boardwalk after lunch, which was infuriating because he wouldn’t specify a time. Summer was supposed to be timeless, he’d said, which usually meant I ended up waiting so I wouldn’t miss him. I found Colleen hanging out with a group of guys from school and joined her. We were both in the usual dress code for the shore: bathing suit tops and short shorts, and some guy had his hand on my bare back when Brian walked up behind me.
He’d wrapped his arms over my shoulders and said “Hey” into my ear, and I could tell he was smiling. Then he pulled me backward and tightened his arms and said, “Sorry, guys, this one’s mine.” I smiled and mouthed the word “Bye” to Colleen, and walked with Brian’s arms around me, smiling because he had called me his.
But now when I walked in the kitchen, the fullness to the room was suffocating. Like his arms, wrapped around me, squeezing and squeezing until I was short of breath and then out of breath. I felt the word whispered throughout the room, grazing the exposed skin on my arms, my legs, my neck. Mine, it whispered. This one’s mine.
I shivered and grabbed a slice of pizza from the dining room table and took it to my room. I packed a second suitcase. My flip-flops and shorts and frayed jeans. My toothbrush and cell phone charger and sleeping pills. The essentials.
Then I swallowed a sleeping pill and waited. It sucked me down into the mattress, my limbs heavy and sluggish. And as I waited, I stared at the ceiling fan, same as every night. I looked straight upward so I wouldn’t catch a glimpse of his shadow beside my closet door, his outline on the curve of my dresser. I kept the comforter pulled up to my chin so I wouldn’t feel his breath against my neck. The word “mine” whispered onto my skin.
I heard it coming, same as every night. Far away at first. Downstairs somewhere.
Boom, boom, boom.
Coming closer. Slow and steady, in that place between sleep and wake. Like I was half hearing, half imagining.
I couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer. I didn’t want to, anyway.
Because it was here.
Boom, boom, boom.
My whole room throbbed with it.
The beating of his hideous heart.
And then there was nothing but the dream. Same as every night. One moment, stretched out to fill the hours. A breath. A blink. Infinity in a heartbeat.
Amber eyes clouding with confusion. A raspy voice pleading, “Mallory, wait.” The word “no” dying on his mouth.
The blood on the floor, the blood on my hands.
The door as I pushed through it, staining it red.
The dark. The night.
Even in my dream I ran.
I always ran.
Chapter 2
There were voices downstairs. Familiar, but not. It took me a second to place them. The new tightness in my mother’s voice, the way she squeezed her words out of her throat. And my father, who spoke too deliberately. Like every line had been rehearsed before he released it for consumption.
I swung my legs out of bed and jerked myself upright, steadying myself against the wall. Then I tiptoed into the hall and waited at the top of the stairs.
“Call the police, Bill.”
“And tell them what exactly? We can’t prove anything.”
“She’s supposed to stay two hundred yards away. Two hundred yards. That’s what the restraining order is for.”
“You don’t know it was her.”
Her. The word lodged in the base of my skull, sent chills across my shoulders. I gripped the stair rail and ran down the steps, feeling the wood grains bite at my palm. I stood at the kitchen entrance, back door swung wide open. Open, so I could see the outside of the door. The weathered white now stained a mottled purple, tiny globs of flesh clinging to the smears. Near the edges, the smears spread out in distinct lines, like being dragged by fingers.
My parents noticed me hovering in the entranceway, and Dad moved his body in front of the door so I couldn’t see.
“Don’t worry, Mallory,” Dad said. “It’s not what you think. It’s not blood.”
But I already knew that. It looked nothing like blood. It looked like blueberries. Which was how I knew it was her.
I’d met Brian’s mom before. Just once. She didn’t really like me. Well, she liked me at first, and then she didn’t. I’d met Brian at sunrise that June morning so he could teach me to surf. That’s where I met his friends Joe and Sammy for the first time. They liked me at first too. More than his mom. They liked me all the way up until the day I killed him.
So we surfed. Or they did, anyway. Turned out Brian didn’t really want to teach me. He wanted me to watch him surf. And then he wanted me to lie on his board while he floated next to me, tracing circles on my back.
“New Girl coming to breakfast?” Joe asked when we were all back on the sand. Joe and Sammy both had this dark hair that got impossibly darker in the water. They were twins, but easy to tell apart. Joe was bigger and his nose was crooked from a fight.
“We’ll meet you there,” Brian said, snaking an arm around my waist. “Gotta swing by home to get my wallet.”
“I hope New Girl likes grease,” Sammy said. “New Girl doesn’t look like she eats bacon.”
“New Girl loves bacon,” I said. As long as it was chopped into microscopic pieces and sprinkled on a salad. Except for today. Today, I’d eat it, swallowing my nausea along with the grease.
And with that, Brian led me to his home. At the time I thought maybe it meant something. But it probably only meant he needed his wallet.
Brian’s house was more like mine than Colleen’s. Big, open, airy. White. Everything echoed. The grinding blender echoed through the hallway, then wound down to silence. “Who’s there?” someone called from down the hall.
“Just me, Mom.”
He walked toward the kitchen, pulling me behind. Brian’s mom was scooping blueberries into the top of the blender. She was blond and kind of stocky, and she’d probably been pretty when she was younger. But now she poofed her hair too much and slathered foundation on too thick, which settled into the lines in her face. She reached out to hug Brian but kept her hands out to the sides. “Careful,” she said, “it’ll stain.”
Her palms were a mix of purple and blue swirls. “And who’s this?”
“Mallory,” I said.
“Mallory. I’m Paula. Nice to meet you. Would you like a smoothie?”