The Dead Girls of Hysteria Hall
By: Katie Alender
It started back in January. I was hanging out at Nic’s house, along with my then boyfriend, Landon (more on that particular disaster in a moment). It had been cold and rainy for about two weeks straight, and we were going stir-crazy from being inside.
“Where would you go right now, if you could go anywhere?” Nic asked.
“Hawaii,” Landon said.
“Hogwarts,” I said.
Landon poked me in the ribs. “Dork.”
“I’d go to the beach,” Nic said. “Any beach where it’s warm. I haven’t seen the ocean in like three years.”
“Me neither,” I said. And that was fine with me. I’m not the beach-going type. The thought of being crowded into an endless sea of sun worshippers was the opposite of tempting—give me wizard school any day.
“You know what we should do?” Landon said. “We should go someplace for spring break.”
“To the beach!” Nic said, sitting up.
“Or to Orlando … ?” I said. “You know there’s an entire theme park—”
“Yes, Delia,” Nic said. “We know.”
“Not Orlando,” Landon said. “Daytona.”
“Okay, and which one of our moms is going to be willing to come with us to Daytona?” I asked.
Landon flipped his floppy blond hair to the other side of his head. “Um … why would we invite someone’s mom?”
I was puzzled by his lack of understanding. I mean, a lot of my geekiness went over his head, but I thought this was pretty cut-and-dried. “Maybe … so we’d be allowed to go?”
Nic was sitting on the edge of the bed in deep contemplation. Then she brightened. “Hey! My church does a youth group trip every spring break. We could tell our parents we’re going on that, and then just fly down to Daytona. They don’t have to know about it.”
Oh. So I was the one who hadn’t understood. This trip was supposed to be sans parental units. My stomach lurched. As far as child-rearing styles went, my mother and father leaned pretty far into the “over-watchfulness” category. If I snuck off to another state—without so much as a grown-up in the group—and they found out … ? I’d be grounded until forever.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Nic said, leveling me with her dark-lashed gaze. “You’re thinking about Brad and Lisa.”
“Specifically, about the heart attacks they’d have if they found out,” I said.
“But they don’t have to find out!” Nic said. “The youth group goes to the Bahamas. They don’t have cell service. So we send an e-mail every couple of days and say we stopped in at an Internet café. You’ll come back with sand in your shoes and a sunburn. They’ll never even know.”
I closed my eyes for a moment to think about it—about the epicness of it—and as I did, I felt Landon’s warm hand on my forearm. A straining sensation pulled at my heart.
“Just consider it, Delia,” he said softly.
Landon McKay wasn’t the quarterback of the football team or anything, but I’d never quite gotten past feeling like I was the lucky one in the relationship and he was doing me some sort of undeserved favor. Because of this, he held the upper hand in negotiations of every sort.
“Yeah, but why do we have to go to Daytona?” I asked.
Nic shrugged. “Because that’s where cool people go. And we’re nothing if not incredibly cool.”
I was silent.
“All right, we can spend one day in Orlando at your Hogwarts theme park,” Nic said. “Deal?”
“Deal, deal, deal,” Landon urged, smiling at me.
He flopped his floppy hair again, and I knew resistance was futile.
“Deal,” I said, the sound of the word settling uncomfortably in my ears as Landon’s hand closed tightly around mine.
It’s definitely fair to say I had a bad feeling about the whole thing from the beginning. When the time came to siphon money from my savings account to pay for the plane ticket and my share of our fleabag motel room, even Nic seemed to be having second thoughts. The problem was, neither one of us was willing to admit it.
The morning of March 8, I hugged my parents good-bye, commanded Janie to stay out of my room, and ran out to Nic’s waiting car with a suitcase full of sunscreen and bathing suits, reminding myself that statistically, 99 percent of the things we worry about never occur.
Except two things happened.
One, I accidentally left my cell phone on the kitchen counter.
Two, Landon texted said cell phone three minutes after I’d left for the airport to say he changed his mind and thought maybe it wasn’t an awesome idea so he wasn’t going to go. And OH, by the way, last night he ran into a girl he’d gone to summer camp with and realized he had feelings for her and thought it was fair that we take this week apart to explore the idea of not being a couple anymore. And OH, double by the way, he still loved me and cared for me and wanted me and Nic to be super careful in Daytona because he’d heard it could get a little wild.
So after five months of being a couple, the boy I kind of in the back of my head could picture myself eventually marrying (I know, I know, but I couldn’t help myself) not only sold me out but also dumped me … over text.
Too bad I wasn’t there to see it.