The Dead Girls of Hysteria Hall

The Dead Girls of Hysteria Hall by Katie Alender

 

 

 

For Eve, a true friend

 

 

 

 

OBSERVATIONS MADE AFTER THE FACT

 

 

Every fairy tale starts the same: Once upon a time.

 

Maybe that’s why we love them so much. We all get to be part of that story. Just by existing, you get your once upon a time. It’s part of the deal.

 

What’s not part of the deal, it turns out, is the happily ever after.

 

 

 

 

 

You know that feeling when someone’s eyes are on you—watching you, studying your movement, your breathing? And how it gives you this whole new awareness of how much effort it takes to just stand there like a normal person?

 

Well, that’s basically how I’d felt for the past three months. Like I was being watched. Stalked …

 

By my own parents.

 

Even at a gas station in the middle of nowhere, Pennsylvania, Mom hovered about three feet away from me, her eyes constantly darting in my direction, as if at any second I might decide to run for the hills. But every time I glanced up, she whipped her gaze to something else—a can of Spam, a magazine about crocheting, a package of tropical-fruit-flavored candies.

 

It was almost like a game. Could I catch her? Tag! I got you! You’re it! I never caught her. But I still knew she was looking.

 

A sinking, suffocating feeling came over my chest.

 

They were never going to trust me again.

 

I hunched over my phone and typed SAVE ME, then held my breath as the “sending” bar made an agonizing crawl across the top of the screen. Finally, the text went through, and a few seconds later, my best friend Nic’s reply popped up: <:(

 

A clown-hat sad face. The saddest kind of sad face there is.

 

EXACTLY, I replied, but this time the message failed. I felt a shock of anxiety. I was intellectually prepared to be entering a cellular dead zone, but I hadn’t prepared myself emotionally to be cut off from society for two whole months.

 

Mom leaned toward me, holding up a can of bean dip. “Does that say partially hydrogenated corn oil?” she asked. “I left my reading glasses in the car.”

 

“Mom,” I said. “You’re a million miles from Whole Foods. Everything here is made of toxic waste. Get used to it. Embrace it.”

 

She suppressed a shudder, then reluctantly tucked the bean dip into the crook of her elbow.

 

“You wanted to do this,” I said, an edge of accusation in my voice. I wasn’t going to let her class herself in my category—in the victim column.

 

Unintentionally, her eyes flicked over to my father in the next aisle. “I guess just get whatever you want,” she said. “We’re not going to make it to the grocery store tonight.”

 

I gave her an aloof shrug and went to troll the aisles, where I passed my little sister, Janie, jittering around with a month’s supply of sugary cereals in her arms. Perfect. Just what she needed, more unnecessary energy. In a family of academics, Janie stood alone. My parents were professors, and I hoped to major in some Romance language (I just hadn’t decided which one yet) and become a scholar of obscure European literature.

 

Janie’s dream? To someday have her own reality show.

 

Even her looks set her apart—willowy, with white-blond hair and crystal-blue eyes, where the rest of us were average height, with dirty-blond hair and eyes ranging from gray-blue (Mom) to blue-gray (Dad), with me in between, sporting a color you could probably call “dishwater,” if dishwater had a few redeeming qualities.

 

Janie was a performer. She was the prettiest, wittiest, most sparkling complete twerp of a human being you ever wanted to backhand on a daily basis. And with all that sugar to fuel her, she’d be insufferable. But what else was new?

 

Continuing through the aisles, I came across my father, studying a can of chicken. He shook his head. “How can they legally call this food?”

 

“Spare me,” I said, grabbing a bag of Doritos and a jar of bright-orange queso dip.

 

My parents were welcome to pretend this was some grand family adventure, but I knew better. We all knew better. I was the only one of us willing to admit it.

 

Mom, Janie, and I converged on the register, Mom’s cheeks flushing pink as the clerk, whose name tag read TOM, surveyed our purchases.

 

“We just drove up from Atlanta,” she said. “That’s why we have all this junk.”

 

The clerk looked up at her, blank incomprehension on his face.

 

“Mom, Tom doesn’t care,” I said. “As long as you don’t try to steal anything.”

 

He grunted gratefully in my direction.

 

For some reason, my mother assumes strangers are interested in our lives. Maybe because her students spend all their free time kissing up to her and pretending to care about insignificant details of her existence. Mom never met a situation she couldn’t kablooey into an awkward overshare.

 

“We’re actually going to be staying the whole summer near here,” she went on. “In Rotburg.”