The Evolution of Mara Dyer

  “Money.”

  “What about . . . stuff?” Didn’t want to be too obvious.

  “Only the emerald earrings,” she said. “And some clothes.”

  And the pendant I left with Noah, that my mother didn’t seem to know anything about. “No letters or anything? Notebooks?”

  Another head shake as she stared at the road ahead of us. “No.”

  “What about pictures?”

  “She hated pictures,” my mother said softly. “She never let me take any. The one in the hall is the only one I have.”

  “Of her on her wedding day,” I said, an idea dawning.

  “Yes.”

  “When she married my grandfather.”

  A pause. “Yes.”

  “Did he really die in a car accident?”

  My mom inhaled sharply. “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “When I was little,” she said.

  “Did you have any aunts or uncles?”

  “It was just my mother and me.”

  I tried to imagine what that would be like. Lonely was the word that came to mind.

  It was strange, realizing how little I knew about my mom’s life before us. Before Dad, even. I felt guilty for having never really thought of her as anything but Mom. I wanted to know more—not just because of the weirdness with my grandmother, though that was the catalyst.

  “We’re strangers who happen to live in the same house,” Noah had said about his family.

  My mother felt a bit like a stranger too. And right now, I didn’t want her to be.

  But when I opened my mouth to ask her another question, she cut me off before I could.

  “It’s been a long day, Mara. Can we talk about this stuff another time?”

  “Okay,” I said quietly, then tried changing the subject. “What did you think of Noah’s stepmother?”

  “They’re . . . sad,” was all she said, and left it at that.

  I was impossibly curious, but she was clearly not in a sharing mood. The obscenely heavy New Theories in Genetics crushed my lap; I tried to start reading it in the car, but grew nauseous. It would have to wait, but that was okay.

  Everything felt okay, oddly enough. Yes, Katie was rude. Yes, the necklace thing was weird. But Noah and I kissed.

  We kissed.

  He wouldn’t spend the night, but I’d see him tomorrow after Horizons. And then it would be the weekend, and we could spend it looking for answers together.

  And also maybe kissing.

  When we pulled onto our street I almost missed John walking a terrier mix down the block. Seeing him made me feel even lighter.

  Jude wanted to scare me, and he had, but that was over now. He’d have to find something else to occupy his second life.

  32

  OKAY, EVERYONE,” BROOKE SAID, CLAPPING HER hands twice. “We’re finally going to finish this round of sharing with Mara, Adam, Jamie, Stella, and Megan. Let’s all take out our fear journals.”

  The unenthusiasm among my Horizons compatriots was palpable, but I was the queen of apathy today. Noah was theoretically roaming Little Havana in search of answers and digging through his mother’s things. I wanted to be with him but instead I was here, and it annoyed me.

  Some students withdrew composition notebooks from small bags they had with them. Others walked over to the bookshelf to retrieve theirs. Phoebe was one of the walkers. She sat down next to me.

  I felt the urge to move.

  “Who wants to go first?” Brooke asked, glancing at each of us in turn.

  Don’t make eye contact.

  “Oh, come on!” She wagged her finger. “You’re all going to go eventually.”

  Resounding silence.

  “Mara,” Brooke said. “How about you?”

  Of course. “I’m still . . . unclear . . . about the . . . parameters of this . . . exercise,” I said.

  Brooke nodded. “It’s a lot to process, I know, but you’ve been doing great these past few days! Don’t worry, I’ll walk you through this. So what we’re going to do is make a list of situations that make us anxious or fearful. Then we rank them—one for things that make us very slightly anxious, and ten for situations that make us extremely anxious.” Brooke stood up and walked to a low bookshelf in the corner of the room. She took out a composition notebook. “And with exposure therapy, we confront our fears little by little. That’s why we keep journals with us, to write about our feelings and anxieties so that we can see how far we’ve come from where we started, and to find common ground with our peers during Group,” Brooke finished. She looked at my lap, then at the messenger bag beneath my chair—freshly combed for contraband and not found wanting. “Where’s your journal?”

  I shook my head. “I never got a journal.”

  “Of course you did. On your first day, don’t you remember?”

  No. “Um.”

  “Check your bag.”

  I did. I rummaged through it and saw the small sketchbook I kept with me for art therapy along with a few spiral notebooks, but not a composition one.

  “Are you sure?” she asked me.

  I nodded, looking through it again. Nothing was out of place, except a stray piece of paper at the bottom.

  Brooke sighed. “Okay, well, take a blank notebook for today,” she said, and handed me one along with a pen. “But do try to find it, please?” Then she turned back to the group.

  “All right, guys,” she continued, “I want you to flip to the most recent page in your fear journal. Mara, since you aren’t sure where yours is, just start listing some anxieties and rank them the way I described, okay? In fact, let’s all take five minutes to look over our lists and see if we can find anything else we want to say.”

  Adam coughed, and it sounded a lot like “bullshit.”

  “Was there something you wanted to say, Adam?”

  “I said this is bullshit. I did it at Lakewood. It’s stupid.”

  Brooke rose and tipped her head, indicating that Adam should get up and follow her. He did, and they moved off to the side. Brooke spoke quietly and patiently, but I couldn’t make out her words.

  I wished Jamie was sitting closer so I could ask him what Lakewood was. Sadly, he was on the opposite side of the room.

  But Stella was right beside me.

  “She could almost pass for normal,” Jamie had said about her.

  Which made her more normal than me. Maybe I could make a new friend.

  I leaned over to her and asked, “What’s Lakewood?”

  “A lockup,” she said, cracking her knuckles.

  I stared at her blankly.

  “A secure residential treatment center?”

  Still nothing.

  She sighed. “You know how this place is a feeder for the Horizons inpatient program?”

  “Kind of?”

  “We’re assessed here, in the day program, and then they tell our parents whether they think we’re sane enough to hack it out here or whether they think our issues are serious enough to need inpatient treatment.” She twined a strand of curly hair around her finger. “The Horizons RTC is inpatient, but you get to move around, to come and go from your room and stuff—the retreat’s coming up, you’ll see. Anyway, that’s a normal RTC. At the secure RTCs, you’re basically locked in your room unless they come get you. You’re followed everywhere. Lakewood’s in the middle of nowhere—practically all RTCs are—but without the good food and counselors who actually care. It’s pretty much the last stop before state institutionalization.” She cocked her head to the side. “You’re new to this troubled teen thing, aren’t you?”

  I looked over at Adam with new eyes. “Apparently.”

  “Veteran,” Stella said, and shrugged.

  I was curious what she was in for, but she didn’t volunteer and this wasn’t exactly prison.

  “Well, Adam,” Brooke said loudly. “If you don’t want to participate, I’m going to have to let Dr. Kells know and you’ll have to do it with her.”

&nb
sp; “He doesn’t belong here,” Stella said quietly as Adam and Brooke walked back into our circle. I wanted to ask her more, but Brooke was ready to move on.

  Back to me.

  I successfully avoided mentioning any of my real (and valid) fears of the Jude and supernatural varieties by rattling off a bunch of benign, normal ones like bugs and needles. Jamie attempted to ruffle Brooke’s patience with answers like “intellectual bankruptcy,” and “sea monkeys,” while Megan earnestly volunteered every phobia I’d ever heard of and several I never knew existed (“Doraphobia” is the fear of fur).

  This earned an obnoxious comment from Adam, who Jamie then accused of having a fear of “physical inadequacies” of a very private nature, which resulted in what I thought was an unjust scolding from Brooke and also caused another Jamie-Adam confrontation. I was rooting for Jamie to land a well-deserved punch to Adam’s brutish head but the face-off ended before it got too exciting. Stella managed to get by without participating at all. Lucky girl. I unintentionally caught a glance at her fear journal but saw only one word (“voices”) before I quickly looked away.

  Hmm.

  When we were finished, we all handed our notebooks back to Brooke and she then asked for volunteers for a “flooding session.” Megan’s hand went up, bless her, and I had the non-pleasure of watching the poor girl’s big, brown eyes go wide with terror as Brooke talked her through scenario after scenario in which she would encounter and then be confined in small spaces. Brooke talked her through it; first Megan sat there and imagined approaching a closet. Then she imagined walking next to it. Then in it. Then Brooke guided her closer and closer to one in real life. When the fear threatened to overcome her, she said a word that told Brooke she couldn’t take it anymore, and then they backed up. Megan was committed, though; a True Believer. She really did seem to want to improve. Admirable.

  When the session ended, we all applauded and offered our encouragement: “Way to go!” “Great job!” “You’re so strong!” Exclamation points included.

  We broke for snack time then—just like kindergarten!—and I pulled out my sketchbook to work on an asinine project I’d been assigned: pick an emotion and draw it. I wanted to draw a raised middle finger, but I would draw a kitten instead. Normal people love kittens.

  But when I reached inside my bag for my sketchbook, my hand closed over that stray piece of paper.

  I withdrew it. Unfolded it. I read what it said as the hair rose on the back of my neck:

  I see you.

  33

  JUDE, MY MIND WHISPERED, AS MY VEINS COURSED with fear.

  I whipped around; my eyes searched for him of their own volition.

  He wasn’t here.

  He couldn’t be. And he couldn’t have been in my house last night—not with John watching it.

  Then I remembered my first day at Horizons. Phoebe stealing the picture from my bag. Blacking out my eyes.

  She’d sat next to me in Group today.

  Jude didn’t write the note. It was her.

  But why?

  Scratch that. She was insane. That’s why.

  I took the note and shoved it angrily in my back pocket, and waited for Group Part II to resume, leaning back in my chair and pressing the heels of my palms into my eyes. My life was screwed up enough without adding Phoebe’s bullshit to the pile. Wayne came around with meds for some of us—myself included—and I downed them in the little paper shot glass. The aftertaste was bitter but I didn’t bother washing it away. I just watched the clock and counted down the seconds until I’d get the chance to confront her.

  Brooke breezed back in with a mug full of what was probably organic, fair trade coffee and a stack of worksheets. She began handing them out as we all found our chairs, Phoebe included. She eyed the room and pointedly sat as far away from me as she could.

  I took the paper from Brooke just a tad too fiercely. It had rows of ridiculous cartoon faces on them, contorted into various exaggerated expressions and, I supposed, their corresponding “feelings.” A squinty kid sticking his tongue out of one corner of his mouth as he smirked, with an unruly spike of hair to connote “sneaky”; a placid-faced, blond-pig-tailed girl with closed eyes and folded arms above the word “safe.” There was a preponderance of stuck-out tongues and googly eyes. Brooke began handing out markers.

  “I want you all to circle the face and feeling that best describes your mood today.” She looked at me. “It’s called a feelings check-in. We do this twice a week.”

  I whipped the cap off of the marker and started circling: mad, suspicious, furious, enraged. I handed her back the sheet.

  My feelings must have been evident on my face because I was the focus of over a dozen stares. Not Phoebe’s, though. She was staring at the ceiling.

  “It seems like you have a lot of interesting feelings right now, Mara,” Brooke said encouragingly. “Do you want to share first?”

  “I’d love to.” I lifted my hips and pulled the note out of my back pocket. I handed it to Brooke. “Someone put this in my bag this morning,” I said, speaking to Brooke but staring Phoebe down.

  Brooke opened the note and read it. She maintained her calm demeanor. “How do you feel about this?”

  I narrowed my eyes. “Wasn’t that the point of the feelings check-in? Why don’t you tell me what you think about it?”

  “Well, Mara, I think it’s something that has clearly upset you.”

  I laughed without humor. “Yes, clearly.”

  Adam raised his hand. Brooke turned to him. “Yes, Adam?”

  “What’s it say?”

  “I see you,” I said. “It says ‘I see you.’”

  “And what do you think about that, Mara?” Brooke asked.

  If Phoebe wasn’t going to admit to it, I would call her out and let the chips fall as they may. “I think Phoebe wrote it and put in my bag.”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “Perhaps because she is batshit crazy, Brooke.”

  Jamie slow-clapped.

  “Jamie,” Brooke said calmly. “I’m not sure that’s productive.”

  “I was applauding Mara for her extraordinarily appropriate use of the term ‘batshit crazy.’”

  Brooke grew annoyed. “Do you have anything you’d like to share, Jamie?”

  “No, that pretty much covers it.”

  “My elbow hurts,” Adam chimed in.

  “Why’d you write it, Phoebe?” I asked.

  She looked as squirrely as ever. “I didn’t write it.”

  “I don’t believe you,” I said.

  “I didn’t write it!” she shouted. Then she dropped to the floor and began rocking back and forth.

  Fantastic. I rubbed my hand over my face as Brooke moved over to the wall and pressed a button I’d never noticed before. Phoebe was still rocking on the floor, but when Brooke’s back was turned, she glared at me.

  Then smiled.

  “You little shit,” I whispered under my breath.

  Brooke turned. “Did you say something, Mara?”

  I narrowed my eyes at Phoebe, who had covered her ears now. Ponytail Patrick had appeared and was trying to coax Phoebe up off of the carpet.

  “She’s faking it,” I said, still staring at her.

  Brooke glanced down at Phoebe, but I could tell she didn’t believe me. She looked up at the clock. “Well, we don’t have much time left anyway. Patrick,” she asked him, “will you take Phoebe back to Dr. Kells?” And then in a lowered voice, added, “I can page Wayne if you think she needs to relax.”

  And look at that. Phoebe was off the floor. Magic.

  “Everyone else, grab your journals and take a few minutes to write about your feelings. We’re going to talk more about what happened today later, all right? And don’t forget—tomorrow’s family day. You should all be working on your list of ten things your family doesn’t know about you but you wish they did.”

  And with that, everyone stood and retrieved their journals to write. I only prete
nded to. I was still furious. Phoebe could fool Brooke and Dr. Kells and the rest of them—I knew from experience it wasn’t that hard—but she could not fool me. She wrote the note, and I would make her admit it.

  And just before the end of the day, I got my chance.

  I found her in a small lounge area, writing something in her journal with robotic, bloodless focus.

  I looked around. There was no one in the hall, but I didn’t want to be too loud. I kept my voice low. “Why’d you do it?” I asked her.

  She looked up at me, all innocence. “Do what?”

  “You wrote the note, Phoebe.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Really,” I said, my temper flaring. “You’re really not going to cop to this? I don’t even care—God knows you have enough problems—I just want to hear you say it.”

  “I didn’t write it,” she said robotically.

  I grabbed the door frame with one hand and squeezed it. I had to go or I’d lose it.

  “I didn’t write it,” Phoebe said again. But her tone had changed; it made me face her. She was staring directly at me, now, her eyes focused and clear.

  “I heard you.”

  Phoebe dropped her eyes back to her journal. A smile inched across her lips. “But I did put it there.”

  34

  MY BLOOD RAN COLD. “ WHAT DID YOU JUST SAY?”

  Phoebe began to hum.

  I walked right up next to her and crouched so that I could look her in the eye. “Tell me what you said. Right now. Or I’m going to tell Dr. Kells. Right. Now.”

  “My boyfriend gave it to me,” she said in a singsong voice.

  “Who’s your boyfriend, Phoebe?”

  “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine, you make me happy, when skies are gray,” she sang, and then reverted back to her humming.

  I wanted to smack her head off of her spine. My hands curled into fists. It took everything I had right then not to hit her.

  I almost, almost wanted to kill her.

  I closed my eyes. After a minute of paralysis, I turned around and walked away. Let’s call it progress.

  I was very ready for the pointless day to be over. When I got home, I wanted to try and decipher New Theories in Genetics, and also see if Noah had any luck scouring Calle Ocho on his own. But Joseph roped me into a video game war before I made it to my room, and when I called Noah after I lost thrice, he sounded strange.