Page 59 of Some Kind of Haunted

I force myself to laugh, like I would back home. “Who among us hasn’t taken a few involuntary menty-b vacations? It’s a rite of passage. A spa experience for the extremists.”

There is no laughter. No knowing looks. No relieved little sighs that I’m in on the joke, because mental health crises are so entertaining if I’m careful to perform them for the group.

Not this group.

Nora’s eyes are wide with concern. Cleo’s gone into a full scowl.

“Lexi, that’s a very sad and scary story,” Nora says quietly. “Why do you think it’s funny?”

Cleo nods emphatically, her dark gaze on mine. Direct and sure. “It’s called trauma.”

I blink at that. Trauma? They don’t understand.

I didn’t explain it right or deliver it right, clearly. Maybe there’s regional humor that doesn’t translate. “Oh, no. It’s not. I just—”

“She’s right,” Nora says gently, cutting me off before I can explain anything. “I feel better myself when I acknowledge it. Sure, I don’t remember being left at some creepy clock tower in the rain as a baby, but why wouldn’t that mess with my head and have lasting effects? Being abandoned like that and never knowing who left me there. Of course, it does. Pretending otherwise doesn’t make what happened to me go away. It makes it the monster under my bed, just waiting for a chance to bite.”

My heart is kicking at me, and for a lot of reasons. Monsters under beds being the least of them. “I don’t blame you, but I wasn’t abandoned. I had my dad and Logan. I didn’t even know any of this was real. Neither did they, so, of course, they were concerned about my sanity.”

“Yeah, but you saw it,” Cleo says, as if she’s the one who’s explaining me. To me. “They were dreams you woke up from, sure, but they affected you.”

When I open my mouth to argue, she shakes her head, still with that direct, unflinching gaze. It should alarm me, but it doesn’t. The very certainty of the way she’s looking at me and talking to me makes me feel something like safe.

And she’s not done. “Spending your whole life thinking it was all something you just made up in a broken brain is fucked, Lexi,” Cleo says. “It might as well be torture. At least when we see crazy shit, we know it’s real.”

This lands on my chest like a heavy weight. I feel my eyes water and I’m sure I see a sheen in Cleo’s, too, like she can feel what I feel in this moment. That helps.

I’ve been trying to think of my dreams as a gift, or at least not a curse. But it never occurred to me to consider the whole thing traumatic.

Just like it never occurred to me that none of it was my fault.

I caused so much worry and pain in the people I loved, over and over again, that I accepted long ago that had to be my fault. No one said it, but they thought so. They despaired of me. They couldn’t understand why I couldn’t be stronger.

Saner.

Why I could never just pull it together.

And yet, these two women who know all about my dreams—and the reality behind them—are standing here telling me what I experienced all of those years, all of my life, was fucked.

Unfair.

Not something I should have been able to endure better if I just put in the effort.

It’s hard to catch a full breath.

They seem to recognize this at the same moment. This catastrophic reaction going on inside me, and how close it is to reducing me to rubble. I’m not the only one looking damp around the eyes, and I love them for it.

I kind of also want to disappear into a hole in the ground.

Cleo and Nora look at each other. Then they make a big deal out of not making it a big deal.

Nora wraps her arm around my shoulders. She nods toward the wineglass I forgot I was holding. “Time for some dirt now that it’s just the three of us. Cleo, I want to hear about the flight school student who asked you out.”

Cleo rolls her eyes. “He’s twenty-three.”

“So?”

“So I’m not going out with a child.”