Page 67 of Play Nice

Thankfully, she’s not around. My exit is quick and uninterrupted.

My walk down the street is a funeral march.

I catch myself playing with my necklace again, my snake charm with its bright diamond eyes. It occurs to me that maybe the reason why I’m so attached to it is because I received it the night Mom died.

It’s not grief, I told Austin just hours ago. But it could be. I’ve never grieved before. Maybe I’m underestimating it. Maybe I wrote that response on the sketchpad. Maybe I didn’t really see big pale eyes in the dark. Maybe I’m worrying about the wrong demons.

I imagine my mother drunk, walking toward me up Edgewood. Seeing her like Dawn saw her for the final time. Disheveled, rambling, slurring. It’s not hard to picture—her three sheets to the wind, making no sense—since she’s inebriated in about half of what memories I do have of her.

And I was stoned out of my mind last night.

My fear of the uncanny dissipates as I make it to the house, as I make amends with logic, as I swear off self-medicating.

I punch in the code, and the front door swings open.

I climb the stairs slowly.

The air in the house is stagnant.

With every step I take, the dread creeps back in. The fear. My neck prickles. I shiver, even as sweat drips from the thick nest of my hair, as it pools in the small of my back.

I reach the top step, and I’m suddenly disoriented, like I’m being held upside down. The world has capsized, turned on me. Nothing makes any sense. My hands slap to my face to hold it together so my jaw doesn’t fall loose.

What am I looking at? What am I seeing? How?

There’s paper scattered everywhere. Pages ripped out of my sketchpad.

I trip, land hard on my knees.

It’s the same word scribbled on all of them, on all the pages.

Hello

Hello

Hello

Hello

Hello

Hello

I crawl forward, start to gather them up, crumple them. I want to set them on fire. Pretend this never happened. I want to scream, so I scream. I scream until I can’t anymore.

Until I find the sheet with a different message, that shuts me up.

Remember?

I go down the hall to Leda and Daphne’s room. I grab my suitcase and I call a car to take me to the train station.

I wait outside.

It wanted my attention, and so it got my attention.

It’s real.

It’s real.