Chapter 4
Playlist: Pastel Melodies for Rotting
“Youth” by Daughter
What is happening to me? I’ve fallen out of my body before, but I’ve never fallen asleep, tumbled into some other life, some other time.
Shoulder braced against the cool, white tile walls, I inch down the hallway. Every footfall drags a mountain behind me. An oily smoke lingers on my tongue. A distant drumbeat echoes in my ears.
Some kind of band practice. Must be. Ignore it.
Concentrating so hard my teeth squeak with the effort of biting back my errant soul, I navigate the stairs, picking a careful path to the nurse’s office.
The halls sit empty, bigger somehow without the rush of teenagers all trying to get somewhere.
Trapped behind shut classroom doors, the murmuration of living bodies barely reaches me.
No tangled hydra of mean girls lurks guarding the stairs.
Even my boots make no sound, each step swallowed by the thin, mossy mist seeping out of the linoleum. Everything is empty. Silent. Dead.
Is this what ghosts feel like? Wandering a living world without being truly in it? Watching the world go on without them through a frosted-over window?
I blink hard, rub a fist over my eyes, count my breaths with forced steadiness. By the time I open them, the mist evaporates—was it ever even there? My hazy vision clears. I feel… not right, exactly, but better. Steadier. With my head almost on straight, I hesitate outside the nurse’s office.
In another room down the hall, someone bellows loud enough entire words escape under the door—respect, poor attitude, gratitude, juvenile delinquency.
I can’t see in, blinds firmly shuttered on the room’s only window, but I know who’s in there.
I know the way his lips curl, the flash in his eyes.
I feel the pauses in the thunder where he responds, worsening the storm with every brief reprieve, and his rebellion kindles something in me.
Worse than the mist, a crossroad cracks open under my feet, spilling out possibilities.
I… don’t want to do this anymore. I don’t want to be the tolerant girl, sullen but obedient, doing what I’m told and going where I’m sent.
Two new schools a year, always playing catch-up, never making friends.
And for what? I know where this road leads—college after college, bachelor’s, master’s, doctorate, all of Mom’s choosing.
Staring down the barrel of another eight years, I flinch. The hall pass slips from my numb fingers, its oaken clatter drawing the nurse’s attention. A chair squeaks. A moment later, she pads around the corner.
“Did you need something, honey?” she asks. “Don’t be shy, you can come on in.”
Her voice startles me, loud in the cotton wool quiet of the hallway. I jerk my forehead away from the wall. Feeling returns to my hands, air to my lungs. Cheeks burning, I stoop, gathering up the wooden brick I dropped.
“Sorry, I was just—the tile felt nice,” I fumble, holding the hall pass up so she can see the classroom number, its faded decorative flowers. “Mrs. Wilson sent me down here.”
She tips her head. Fluffy brown hair spills from her haphazard pink alligator clip. One dangling cat earring hangs crooked, caught in an errant strand.
“Well, come on in,” she says. “Let’s see if you’ve got a fever.”
The nurse steps back from the door, gesturing me over to one of her comically oversized orange armchairs.
The plastic farts as I sit down, smelling weirdly like the ’90s, but comfortable.
It half swallows me, deep enough my feet dangle, and I sit there like a toddler while the nurse bustles around the room, scrounging up a disposable cover for her thermometer.
Something about her messy hair and fun scrubs—cartoon crocodiles in rubber clogs—makes my body ache.
My throat squeezes closed, sick with nostalgia for a thing I never had.
She’s just so… mom-shaped. Not like my actual mother, with her hard edges and clean lines, but like a TV mom. The kind of mom you could actually make proud if you tried.
She slips the thermometer under my tongue. The butterfly brush of her palm against my clammy forehead sears me to the bone. Peering down at me with worry in her blue eyes, she asks, “Do I feel warm to you?”
Warm? She feels like a crematorium. Like one wrong move will burn me down until only a pile of ash remains, my body on the pyre and pine tar sticky in my abandoned mouth. But as a rule, I don’t share my thoughts unless I have to. I force a smile.
“I think that’s supposed to be my line.”
My half-hearted joke falls flat. The worry on her face doesn’t shift an inch.
“Let me just check something,” she says, unhooking her stethoscope from the wall.
I know the drill. Brace for cold, breathe in, breathe out, rinse and repeat.
My mother puts me through these paces often enough.
Two schools a year means she signs off on a lot of mandatory school physicals—apparently one perk of a doctorate is “never paying a copay for things that aren’t the government’s business anyway”—but the nurse hesitates.
She lingers, frowning more with every inhale.
After a minute, she steps back, tests the stethoscope against her own wrist, and snags a blood pressure cuff off the wall.
“A little squeeze,” she murmurs out of habit, distracted, digging the stethoscope hard into my arm.
She moves it twice, even presses her fingers to my pulse, but whatever she hears creeps her out.
A professional mask slams down and wow, would you look at that—now she really does look like my mom, her eyes an abandoned building with no life or softness left inside.
“Do you know if you have any medical conditions, dear?”
“My mom wouldn’t tell me if I did.” I scoot forward, the plastic chair farting the whole way. Whatever’s coming, I want my feet on the ground. “What’s wrong?”
“Oh, nothing.” She smiles like faulty electricity, a flicker fizzling out, and looks me dead in the eyes. “We just have to ask.”
Liar. Just like my actual mother—only meeting my eyes when she cares if I believe her.
Biting my cheek, I hide all emotion, dig my fingernails hard into the plasticky arms of the chair to keep my soul in its socket.
Something is wrong. She heard something, knows something—I don’t know what, but I recognize that mask, that lie.
Testing it, I force a smile. I ask, “So can I go back to class?”
She fake smiles right back. “Actually, why don’t you hang out with me awhile?
” Returning the blood pressure cuff and stethoscope to their hooks on the wall, she walks around her desk, back to her computer.
“Your pulse is a little low; I think flu season is probably catching you early. The first week at a new school is always the worst, huh?”
The hairs on the back of my neck prickle. I’ve been at a lot of new schools, but the nurses never knew who I was and how long I’d been attending before I even got to their offices. That’s weird. I don’t know what it means, but I don’t like it.
“Yeah.” Inching forward, I creep my fingers around the handle of my carpetbag. “They suck.”
But the nurse has no attention left for me. Whatever she heard in the stethoscope immediately switches her into high gear. Moving so quickly her Crocs squeak on the old linoleum, she machine-gun types something into her big, boxy computer and scribbles down a note.
“I’m new too. We can hide together,” she says, flashing that awful, empty smile totally at odds with her sudden hustle. “I just have to make a quick call first.”
With a goofy little wave, sticky note clinging to her fingertip, she picks up the office phone from her desk and, trailing the cord behind her, steps into her supply closet.
As soon as the door closes, I lunge, swiping her stethoscope. Something is super wrong. Whatever it is, it’s bad enough she doesn’t want me overhearing. And who is she even calling? It should be my mom, right? That’s probably protocol when something goes weird with a kid?
So, what’s important enough that I can’t hear it, yet too dire to risk leaving me alone?
The only thing I can think is, she heard something. Something weird in my chest, bad enough she had to hide it. Like, what, am I dying?
Vise-gripping my head between the pinching earbuds, I shove the stethoscope’s listener to my wrist like she did.
It’s hard to concentrate with one ear perked for the sound of the door opening, her muffled conversation from the supply closet.
What am I supposed to be listening for anyway?
Can you even hear a heartbeat this far from someone’s actual heart?
All I hear is an ocean arguing with itself, a slow kiss of water against a distant shore.
I put the thing on my breastbone, but I don’t hear anything different. Maybe it’s not strong enough to hear through my sweater? Lifting up my collar, I shove it underneath, branding cold metal to my clammy skin. Water swallows me.
(A black river, vast, oceanic. It whispers in a thousand discordant voices, pale faces pressed to wave tips, and every gasping mouth shapes my name.)
Startled, falling, I jerk the stethoscope away, scrambling up and out of the plastic orange chair.
What in the entire hell was that?
“Hey,” somebody says from the entrance, “if you want to play doctor, I enthusiastically volunteer.”
Whirling around, I find Sebastian hunkered in the doorway, crouched down around the corner, out of sight and beneath eye level.
Relief hits me so strong I can taste it, as almond sweet as a cyanide- laced sugar cookie.
I stumble a step back out of sheer self-preservation, clutching my stolen prize to my chest. I don’t know this kid and I don’t make friends easy.
His face in the doorway shouldn’t feel like a compass swinging unerringly North.
“Why are you always on the ground?” I hiss.