“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 from 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.