Mirage (13 page)

I have the strongest urge to pull his face closer. Even as I'm wondering why, I'm tilting my head and brazenly grazing his lips with mine. When I open my eyes, his are narrowed, perplexed. His dancing has slowed to a sway. I press against him and kiss him again. His mouth is stiff, unresponsive to my lips. The walls of our teeth clank together awkwardly.

Joe recoils, stunned. “You
meant
that!” he yells over the music. “Why would you do that?” There is accusation in his voice, in his eyes, which flash with anger and confusion.

“I don't know.” I shrug. I really don't. But the feeling was so strong, I
had
to obey it. “Because . . . because I love you!” I yell over the music.

His head cocks to the side. “I love you, too, but it doesn't mean I want your tongue in my mouth. Jesus, Ryan!” Joe takes a couple of steps away but stops when he realizes I'm following him. He holds up his hand. “You're going to mess with my man magnetism.” He shimmies a couple of feet away and melts into the mob of bodies glowing neon from the swirling lights.

Keep moving. By myself. Like an idiot. Dancing will keep me from feeling stupid and rejected. What I did was impulsive, but I followed an uncontrolled inner drive. I try to make sense of it. From the moment I woke up in the hospital, Joe was the one who made me feel some peace, belonging. He loves me. I love him. It seemed natural to show it, I tell myself. But the urge was beyond my consciousness. I keep dancing to forget the look on his face when I kissed him. I'm sticky with sweat and embarrassment.

The music thumps in my head, but I can still hear her voice as if we're alone in a dark cave.
Stupid bitch.

An enormous disco ball rotates above the dancers. Blackness curls its fingers around my vision for a moment before letting go. Leaning forward, hands on my knees, I wait for it to pass. When I can focus, eyes are everywhere I look, swirling on the floor, ceiling, walls, spinning on the sweaty skin of other people. Everyone is tattooed with the eyes of Death.

“Hey!” snaps a girl when I grab her shoulder to steady my wobbly legs. The face is even behind my eyelids. I can't shut it out by closing my eyes like before. This, whatever this is, is getting worse. My body rebels, shakes violently; the saddle slips sideways even without medication. I don't have a hold on myself; I could fly out of this body into the darkness right here in the middle of this pulsing nightclub.

Louder than the music, I hear her laughing.

M
Y KNEES AND HANDS
slam into the gritty dance floor. It's an enormous effort to keep from passing out. Someone steps on my fingers. I force my eyes open. Her reflection,
my
reflection, sweeps over the floor in circles, over the shoes around me, over my hands as I try to push myself to standing.

This kind of thing can't happen, especially not in public. They'll size me for a crazy suit for sure. I crouch self-protectively with cold hands around my knees.

Swimming out of quicksand would be easier, but I finally manage to make it to my feet. I've done it. I'm stronger than she is. But my victory is short-lived. Joe sees me and begins his own swim against the crowd to reach me. He slides my arm over his shoulder and half drags me out into the tepid air of the night.

“This is all my fault,” he says, putting me into the car. “You weren't ready.”

I slump in my seat. “Am I ever going to feel normal?”

He squeezes my thigh. “It's okay. It was my grand dumbassery to push you. You'll come around.”

Maybe this is what they mean by the phrase
bleeding heart
. My heart bleeds to hear Joe's longing. He shouldn't blame himself. He just wants his best friend back.

“What happened in there anyway?” he asks. “You looked like you were going to faint. Were you seeing things again?”

I rub my hands over my nearly bare scalp and hide my lie with a smile. “No. A little dizziness. It's been a big day.” We're silent during the drive home. What is there to say, anyway? How I don't know who I am, and how no one else does either?

Joe motions toward my house when we pull in the drive. “Whoa. What's going on here?” The headlights illuminate my grandmother stooped over in front of the house. With one hand she is using the wall of the house to guide her as she walks the perimeter. Her other arm is swaying back and forth rhythmically, as if she's sprinkling seeds on the ground. Her dress snags on a cactus, and she impatiently tugs it away, ripping the hem.

“Does she normally garden at night?” Joe asks.

“Gran does a lot of weird things, but from the looks of it, I don't think she's gardening.”

My mother is clearly trying to coax her inside. She motions for help when she sees us running over, but soon her face morphs into baffled shock. “What in God's name have you done to your hair?”

Realizing Joe's mother's scarf is gone, I open my mouth to answer.

“Never mind. Help me get your grandmother in the house,” she says, as if we have superpowers or are supposed to jump Gran and manhandle her inside. I see now that it's not seeds Gran is sprinkling along the edges of the stucco walls but grains of white rice.

“Why are you throwing rice on the house, Gran?”

“Is there even an answer that will make sense?” Joe whispers. “I think it's a little late in the season for rice planting.”

Gran's head snaps up at this. “Don't talk like I'm soggy in the brain. I'm not planting rice, fool. I'm protecting all of us!”

“From?” I barely utter. My heart contracts like it's hiding.

“The
duppies,
” she answers with a dramatic urgency that makes my hairs stand on end. Summer wind whips her nightdress, wraithlike, around her calves. “The spirits who roam at night. They have to count all the grains before they can enter the house. I'll put down so many they can't finish counting before sunrise.” The lines in her face are etched into a map of determination as she flings my mother's restraining hand off her arm.

Joe throws up his hands. “I was totally wrong. That makes perfect sense.”

I stomp on his foot. “Is there a dimmer switch on your blurting button?” I whisper back to him. “Gran, are you afraid there are bad spirits trying to get into our house?” I attempt to keep my voice as steady as possible.

At my question, she stops sprinkling rice against the base of the house and shuffles toward me. Her hand arcs in a half circle around each side of me. Rice pellets my sneakers. She answers with her dead eyes fixed on me. “Child, I'm afraid they already have.”

Shivers roll down my arms. An exasperated sigh escapes my mother. “Go on in,” she tells Joe and me. “It's no use. I'll stay with her until she's finished.”

Joe grabs my hand and we jog to the front door. Gran's absolutely right: spirits have already penetrated these walls. The first thing I see upon entering the hall is a mirror. Shining back at me is the tortured spirit who haunts my reflection. Her face undulates in the glass, rippling against an unseen wind. Her eyes bore into mine with ferocious determination.

I've had enough. Joe calls after me as I run down the hall to the linen closet. I heap sheets and towels into my arms, run back to the entryway, and fling them onto the floor. I take one white towel and drape it over the mirror, covering her malicious face.

How will you stare at me now?
I ask her in my mind. She's clever, though. Mirrors are just one way she imposes on me. It's like she's tethered to my body by an invisible cord, following me, part of me, always. I want to cut her out, excise her forever.

“Ryan?”

Joe's voice sounds far away. I run to the couch and stand on it to reach the upper corners of the mirror above it, carefully covering it with a large sheet. The world is a maze of carnival mirrors with her face always watching. I'm sick of it. Now my father's voice funnels in from behind me. He's asking in the same panicked tone as my mother about my shorn hair. I ignore both of them, because I'm sure if I don't find a way to stop her from stalking me, I really
will
go crazy.

“Did something else happen?” I hear my father ask Joe.

“No. I mean, she got dizzy when we were out, but . . .”

I run to the piano and throw a blanket over the varnished, black surface.

“Why is she covering the mirrors? Is she seeing things again?” my dad asks.

“I​—​I didn't know you knew about that,” Joe stammers.

“Of course. She's been seeing things ever since she overdosed. That's when this all started.”

There is a pause, substantial enough to stop me. I remember telling Joe about seeing the faces before the LSD. He
can't
tell my father that. It's the only thing keeping them from medicating me: the idea that, with time, the effects of the drug will fade away and I'll be normal again. I give Joe a warning look and toss a tablecloth over the glass dining table. Joe will keep my secret.

“No, sir. No, that's not right.”

I swing around. “Joe!” When he looks at me, I know I can't stop him from saying what he's about to say. “Please.”

“She was hallucinating before the LSD.” He's speaking to my father, but his eyes never leave mine. “She told me about it before she ever did the drugs.”

I mouth the word
Why?

“Because I love you. And because you taught me how to be brave, and sometimes that means that I'll have to piss you off. It doesn't help you for me to lie. Your parents should know the truth.”

“I'm not crazy! A ghost is stalking me, trying to possess me!”

“Oh, 'cause that's sane!” Joe yells.

“You're only doing this because I tried to kiss you!”

My father rubs his face with both hands. “
Why
would you try to kiss Joe?” he asks as if this is the craziest thing he's heard all night.

I'm whirling with thoughts, some mine, some from an unseen place I can only assume she inhabits. “I don't know!” I scream. “I thought, I mean, love . . . I've been numb to every good feeling, but I feel love with him.”

Nolan takes a big swig of his drink. “You want to love a guy romantically who loves guys, Ryan? That doesn't make sense. He's gay.”

Joe steps toward me, his hands curled into hard balls. I have no memory of him ever looking so livid. “You think your feelings override who I am? Override
gay?
”

“But gay is an abomination!” As soon as I've said it, I feel inside like Joe looks on the outside, as if we've both been punched in the gut. I cover my mouth. Somewhere within me, I knew. But it's like I forgot the truth about Joe in the midst of my confusion.

I don't believe what I just said.

Joe's jaw is clenched tight as he responds. “You expect parents to be ignorant asses, their visions of the perfect child dashed by our annoying tendency to be different from them. But you . . . you turning on me now hurts worse.”

My father is background scenery as Joe and I stare at each other. I feel as though I should avert my eyes, but he's the only person I've felt any real emotion for since I reentered this world. I don't know how I got it so wrong. I feel like I've spoken someone else's words.

Finally Joe says, “This you . . . and me . . . we'd have never been friends.”

His words slice right through me. He's out the front door and gone. Like that, my best friend is gone.

A hurricane of fury blows through me. Beneath my hands, under the white cloth, the table fractures like a gigantic slab of ice. Glass and my heart shatter to the floor. I stagger back. “I didn't do that,” I say to my father, who's rushed over. “I swear I didn't break it. How could I? It had to be
her
. You have to believe me!”

“I believe you need serious help, and​—​like I was​—​you are too damn sick to know how badly you need it.”

“If you've decided I'm sick, then nothing I say has any credibility. Nothing I tell you matters.”

I take a step toward him, but glass crunches under my shoes and I halt. His eyes snap down to the fractured table, then back up to my face.

“Nothing you tell me will matter more than what I can see with my own eyes.”

“What about what I see with mine?”

Nolan doesn't answer me. My question hangs in the air before dropping to the floor with the other broken pieces.

“A
FEAR OF REFLECTIONS
often reveals that there are things you don't want to see about yourself, hence the covering up of all the mirrors in your house. Spectrophobia is the fear of mirrors. It's possible that you may be suffering from this phobia, Ryan. Therapy and medication have proven useful to overcoming it.”

I don't respond, just openly scribble in my journal, which I've begun to carry everywhere because I'm assaulted by random images and daydreams that feel more like memories. The night dreams are worse. Five nights of hell since the fight with Joe. Days and days battling a ghost only I can see. Gran's rice didn't manage to stop that.

Writing in front of Dr. Collier without showing it to him is a statement. My thoughts are my own. Besides, I have to capture the dreams I had last night before I forget them. It's always the same. People want me dead. People I love but do not recognize. In the dream I always feel utterly abandoned.

Except for my pen moving across paper, the room is so quiet the carpet makes sounds, rustling like dry wheat.

“Is there anything that you feel ashamed of? Anything about yourself that you'd rather not look at?”

I glance up from my journal. “In your opinion, is everyone crazy who believes in ghosts?”

“Does your scar trouble you?” Dr. Collier asks, pointing toward his own cheek with his pen.

“I'm alive and happy to be so. I care more about that than the scar on my face.” I realize my fingers betray me by tracing my raw scar, and I stuff my hand in my hoodie pocket.