“You wanna ride up there?” Beau asks.
“That’s okay. It’ll feel good to walk.”
He pulls out his phone, which is two models older than mine and looks like it got caught in a lawn mower, and passes it to me without a word. I type my number in, save it, and pass it back. “Thanks again,” I say, then hurry to add, “for saving me from that party. I’m sorry you missed it.”
“I told you why I went,” he says.
Neither of us speaks for a minute, then I awkwardly say goodbye and turn to walk up the hill to Megan’s car.
“Bye, Natalie,” Beau says, and I turn around one last time and wave.
As soon as I get in, Megan begins to apologize again, but as we turn around and drive off, she falls silent then says, “Okay, so he was pretty faraway and tiny from where I was parked, but wow.”
“I know.”
“Wow,” she says again. “I can’t imagine what Summer Incarnate looks like up close.”
“You really can’t.”
“Oh my God,” Megan says. “I’m shaking I’m so giddy right now.”
“And what about you and Brian?” I demand.
“Eh,” she says. “We kissed. Then I fell asleep. Bad sign?”
“Not necessarily.”
“I didn’t say bye to him this morning. What about that?”
“That doesn’t mean anything,” I say. “You probably just felt awkward.”
“I guess.” She looks over at me, scrunches her nose up. “He tasted like Cheetos.”
“Ugh, I’m going to be sick.”
“I know,” she groans.
“The literal kiss of death.”
“Exactly,” she says. “I’m dead. My body just hasn’t gotten the memo.”
“Those Cheetos probably had some kind of reanimation spell on them,” I suggest.
She drops her forehead against the steering wheel for a second. “I liked him so much. There, I said it. How could this happen?”
“Is it possible he just, I don’t know, ate Cheetos?”
“I mean, I’m no forensic investigator, but I would say there’s roughly a one hundred percent chance that’s exactly what happened.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You’re sorry? I abandoned you to make out with a Frito-Lay product.”
“Honestly, Meg, if I needed you, I would’ve found you, mid-cheese-powder make-out or not.”
“I die,” she says. “I die a thousand deaths every time I think about it.”
“I think you should give him another chance.”
She looks at me, utterly aghast. “That’s just because you’re all moony! Because you obviously just kissed someone who didn’t taste like the floor at Derek Dillhorn’s fourth-grade birthday party!”
“I would bet money Brian’s mouth doesn’t always taste like that.”
“We’ll see,” she says. “I may just be too scarred. Hey, do you want Waffle House? I’m starving. Starving for details. Starving for waffles and starving for details.”
“That sounds good, but I think I need to sleep for ten hours first. Maybe reconvene for dinner?” We’re driving past the Presbyterian church now, which is back to normal—the additional wing vanished, and the parking lot too big for the small Sunday crowds. “Hey, does anything about that building seem different to you?” I ask.
Megan peers out the window. “Just the haze of flaky, cheese-flavored orange hanging over everything, but that could be my imagination.”
We pull up to the curb in front of my house, and Megan presses the heels of her hands into her eye sockets and drops her head back into the headrest, groaning again for good measure.
I pat her arm. “This too shall pass.”
She straightens up and sighs. “From your mouth to Grandmother’s ears.”
I get out of the car, legs wobbling from fatigue, and wave goodbye as Megan pulls away. I turn back to the house just as Gus comes running through the front door and across the yard. “Jack!” I shout, annoyed. He’s always leaving the front door unlocked, and half the time it pops open and Gus takes a jaunt around the neighborhood. I lunge to grab hold of his collar before he can take off, but as my fingers curl around the leather, it happens again.
One second Gus is there, the next he’s gone, and I nearly let out a shriek as the collar drops limp in my hand. I turn in circles, searching the abandoned block. “Gus?” My dog is gone, and I don’t know what to do. I turn in circles, calling his name more loudly. “Gus! Gus!”
And then he’s back. Like it never happened, wearing his collar and trying to pull me up the street to where a decidedly terrifying standard poodle lives. I dig my feet in and try to yank him back toward the front door.
My mind is reeling. My stomach roils. I drag Gus across the yard and run up onto the porch, but I come up short. It feels like my heart just slammed into a wall. And now Gus is gone again. The door and the shutters are red, not green like they should be. I’m so freaked out that for some reason, I still try to jam my house key into the lock, but it won’t work. My insides are screaming, I can barely breathe, and I fumble with the key, panic filling me up like a flood of acid. “Gus,” I say again. Then, “Grandmother. Grandmother! Are you there? Please!”
The key finally slips into the lock as the door turns green again before my eyes, and Gus reappears in the same moment.
I run inside, hauling Gus in after me, and lock the door behind us. I slump against it and slide to the ground, wrap my arms around Gus’s neck as tears stream down my cheeks. I nuzzle into his fur and wait for the fit of trembling to pass.
11
My first session with Alice is eerily similar to every appointment I’ve had with real therapists, as long as you completely ignore the Hoarders-esque state of her office and the way she keeps snapping her gum and the fact that she occasionally rolls her eyes when I say something she disagrees with. I have this sense that she’s assuming the pose, role-playing the whole thing like we had to do in A.P. Psychology.
It’s like we’re playing doctor until we get to the bits that might actually be useful, when she sits forward abruptly, drums her lips, then jots something down haphazardly in her notebook.
“Are you sure there’s no faster way to do this?” I ask. “Maybe if you told me what you’re writing down.”
“There’s no faster way,” she says, scribbling furiously. “I’m following my gut. Some things may seem mundane to you, but they might hold the key. Other things may seem really big and have nothing to do with it. I just want you to keep talking.”
And I do. For ninety-five straight minutes, and I don’t leave a single second empty. And I feel productive, like I’m getting something done and need to keep plowing ahead.
I tell her about my tantrums and how dance seemed to get them out of me, and how Mom thought that meant maybe I’d had ADHD. I tell her the night terrors started out as dreams, then spread to the visitors at my bedside and I’d scream until they disappeared and Dad would come running in with the baseball bat he kept under the bed. I tell her things I’ve never said aloud, not even to the other counselors, because the words themselves make me feel weak, and when I feel weak, I cry, and when I cry, I feel out of control. I tell her how, when I was little, I thought Debra Messing and Isla Fisher and Amy Adams were the very definition of beauty and how, when the twins turned three and their baby-blond hair started darkening toward Mom’s reddish color, I was secretly heartbroken, as if I’d lost something, no matter how stupid or self-absorbed that sounds. They were going to look like our parents, and I was going to keep looking like a stranger.
But I tell Alice the truth, because for the first time, I want the counseling to work more than I want to hide the parts of me I’m scared of.
At some point we bounce toward the present. “The Wrong Things,” Alice says. “The changes or flickers. Tell me about t
hose again.”
So I talk, telling her about the most recent events with Gus and the buffalo and the renovated church. But the more I talk, the more the piercing headache behind my eye swells. “I don’t understand what’s happening,” I gasp.
“You’ve come to the right place,” Alice says, without looking up from her notebook. She has the voice recorder I traded her this morning balanced on her lap. “I mean, maybe. Hopefully. In an ideal world, yes, this is the right place. Look, you may have been having these extended conversations with one of Them for your entire life, but what you’re experiencing now is much more common. I mean, typically they’d only be happening on your way in or out of a dream state, but the gist is the same.”
“Well, what are they?” I ask.
“Too soon to say. What I do know is that most people only experience very brief visitations, like the flashes you describe. You wake up and you’re not in your room, but as soon as you scream you’re back. You fall asleep on the bus and when your eyes open someone’s staring at you—you jump up and they’re gone. You hear someone talking downstairs, so you go see a couple having dinner at your table. When you flip on the light, they vanish. Usually, they don’t even see you. When they do, witnesses describe the Others as seeming just as surprised as they were. I don’t think they’re fully aware of us.”
“Grandmother is.”
“Grandmother, like you, my dear Natalie, is different. And that’s why this is so important.”
“She is God, isn’t she?” I say.
Alice exhales. “I’m a scientist who studies nighttime hallucinations under the primary assumption that there’s something supernatural about them. I’m the last person prepared to make a statement about what God is and if it exists. I personally have never really bought the idea of a higher power, but then again, as far as the rest of the faculty’s concerned, I might as well be the chairperson of Leprechaun Studies. All I know is that Grandmother and all the visions that came before her are something. God, ghost, or something in between, we’re going to find out who Grandmother is. I believe that, Natalie.”
The next morning Jack and I are walking out to the Jeep when it happens again. The shutters and door flash red. The basketball hoop in the driveway and my baby brother vanish. I stand in the middle of the front yard, the whole world frozen and congealed, feeling like I’d have to cut through gelatin to move another step.
Just as quickly, though, a blast of sound tears through the stillness, and I jump.
“Hurry up!” Jack calls from the car. He’s leaned across the seat to hit the horn, which wouldn’t be so alarming if I had any idea how he got there. I shake myself out of it and climb in beside him.
“Sorry,” I say. “Thought I forgot my phone.”
Jack chortles then tries to play it off like he’s clearing his throat, a trick Dad frequently employs when Mom disapproves of whatever he’s laughing at. “Nothing,” Jack hurries, before I even get a chance to glare. “You just checked it, like, three times between the kitchen and the porch.”
My cheeks burn at his observation, and I start the car, devotedly pretending not to have heard. It’s been four days since Matt’s party. I’m still actively fuming over what happened with Matt that night, but it’s Beau who has me wavering between giddiness and obsessive, all-consuming overthinking. It seems like the Wrong Thing incidents and the thought of Megan leaving for Georgetown in a couple of days are the only things that make me stop wondering why he hasn’t called.
As I drive toward the school, I do what I’ve done every time I didn’t want to deal with or think about something for the past two years: I imagine myself at Brown, with new friends who don’t know about Matt or care about why I quit the dance team, a place where I can start over. But the daydream gives me no relief. I’m too angry at Matt, too embarrassed about whatever happened with Beau. It felt right while it was happening, sweet and genuine and so intense that I’d been sure he was feeling the same thing. Now I’m forced to replay all the highly personal details I shared with him and cringe at my own vulnerability.
When we pull up to the gate outside the field house, Jack springs out of the car, calling, “Later!” but I don’t drive off right away. Instead I watch my brother sprint across the field. He’s blipping in and out of view—just like Beau did at Senior Night—and then I see his teammates in the distance buzzing with the same strobe-light effect. Only those guys aren’t disappearing like Jack is. They’re shifting, rearranging with impossible speed, on the left side of the field one second and the right the next; mid jumping jack one instant and jogging along the far side of the track the next. I watch one boy in particular, T.J. Bishop, whose hairstyle keeps oscillating between a close shave and a pathetically short ponytail, his body bulking up and slimming down in steady, alternating beats.
“The Wrong Things,” I say aloud to myself. I still have no idea what they mean.
12
Thunder crackles overhead, but it’s distant and soft, like a bass drum covered by a towel. Megan and I are sitting in my garage with the door cranked open so we can watch the thick spray of rain slap the driveway and the blue-green foliage framing the yard.
We’ve storm-watched like this for as long as I can remember, and it’s always given me a sense of peace. We don’t need to talk to feel happy or understood. The rain flooding the cul-de-sac is enough. Our eleven years of friendship tell me so. We may be different, but in this moment we’re feeling the exact same thing: the sad kind of bliss where you realize, suddenly, how perfect your life really has been all along. So perfect it hurts, and you could let yourself weep if you wanted. So perfect that even though everything you know is ending, you truly believe life will continue to be beautiful, even—or maybe especially—in those pure moments of loss.
We sit there for hours. When the rain finally lets up, we stand, brushing the dirt and leaked car oil smears off the backs of our thighs.
Goodbyes have always been as natural for us as silence, unspoken agreements between us nine times out of ten. There’s no I should go or look at the time. Megan just smiles and squeezes me tight in a hug. “Love you,” she says.
“Love you back,” I say. “Get home safe. Get to school safe.”
“I’ll see you so soon, Nat,” she says, and I nod, unwilling to doubt her. She pulls up the hood of her thin sweatshirt and darts through the drizzle back to her black Civic parked at the curb.
The headlights flick on, and Megan pulls away. As soon as I shut myself in my room, I see the cardboard boxes spread around the room and break down and cry. When the tears are all used up, I pull out Alice’s recorder and tell another story about love and pain.
“There once was a young man who believed he was in love with a beautiful woman,” Grandmother said. “So he went to the woman’s father, who was the Chief, and told him that he wished to marry his daughter.
“‘Bring me many horses,’ the Chief answered, ‘and you may marry my daughter.’ So the young man set out into the wild in search of horses to please the Chief.
“While the man was away, the tribe moved on, and though the man caught several beautiful horses for the Chief, when he returned his tribe was gone. The man planned to go in search of his lost tribe, but the sun was very low in the sky, so first he decided to rest. He went to a lodge nearby but could find no doors, no matter how many times he circled it. Finally, he dug his way through the sod surrounding the lodge and made his way inside, where he found a burial bed supported by four high posts.
“On the burial bed lay a young woman in clothes decorated with the teeth of elk. The woman turned and looked at him. He recognized her right away as a member of his tribe, who must have died while he was away. But the woman sat up and greeted him by name, for she remembered him, too, from her life.
“The man stayed with the Ghost Woman for many nights. As time passed, he thought less and less of the Chief’s daughter and more and more
of the Ghost Woman bound to her burial bed, until finally she became his wife.
“Though the man loved his wife and their lodge and the land where they lived, he awoke one morning, hungering for a buffalo hunt, something of which he had not taken part since before he left to find the Chief’s horses. He said nothing aloud of the hunt, but the Ghost Woman knew his thoughts. She told him, ‘Mount your horse and ride to the bluffs. There, the buffalo await you. When you see the herd, rush into the center and kill the fattest bull to bring home. Roast the meat and bring me a share before you eat yours.’
“The man followed her commands. When he brought the roasted meat to her, he found her standing in the lodge, which startled him. ‘Please don’t be afraid of me, my husband,’ she said, because she knew his thoughts.
“His heart was calmed, and he knew his wife better than he had before he saw her ghostly form standing there. They shared the meat and spoke freely of everything, living and dead, making plans for the things they would like to do. ‘Let us pitch our tent by day and travel by night,’ the Ghost Woman said. ‘In this way we can see the world.’
“And it was as she said: The Ghost Woman floated ahead of her husband, her head covered and her mouth silent. Whenever the man thought something, the Ghost Woman heard it clearly, until eventually, the man became a Ghost as well. Then they passed their thoughts back and forth to one another like water poured between bowls with no drops spilled, and they knew each other as they knew themselves. Their tribe never found them again, and the Chief’s daughter often wondered what had become of her young love, though in the end she married someone else.
“The Ghost Woman gave up her rest, and the brave gave up the world of the living, and they loved one another well. And that, Natalie, is your happy ending.”