Reese
Someone is awake when I come back to the cottage.
The shape is a silhouette, a black, featureless outline on the edge of my bed, which I see from just inside the front door.
My hands shake and I start hatching excuses like that I couldn’t sleep and decided to take a walk or that I was sleepwalking,
that I went to bed and the next thing I knew, I woke up in the woods.
As I step out onto the screened-in porch, I make out Wyatt’s smug face. He turns slowly to me in the darkness and I feel my
heart beat faster, my temperature rise.
I slur in a whisper, “Get the fuck off my bed, loser.”
He says, smirking in the moonlight so that I want to slap the smile off his ugly face, “It’s not your bed.”
“Yes it is.”
“No it’s not. It’s the lady who owns the resort’s bed.” It’s such a stupid thing to say. Still, he stands up like I asked.
He hovers at the side of my bed, asking, “You want me to go?”
“Yes, you idiot. Get out.”
“For twenty dollars, I’ll go.”
“Fuck you. I’m not giving you anything.”
He shrugs. “Suit yourself,” he says, stepping past me for the open door. He stops just before it and turns to face me. “I’ll go, if that’s what you want. But I’m sure Mom and Dad will love to hear about this in the morning.”
“Hear about what?” I ask. “About you breaking into my room in the middle of the night like a creep?”
“No,” he says. “About you sneaking out in the middle of the night to hook up with some rando.”
I feel my whole body tense up. Heat fills it so that I could explode. My mouth is dry as I spit my words at him. “I’ll tell
them you’re lying. That you’re a fucking liar. That you’re making it all up.”
“Yeah,” he chuckles, his sangfroid triggering as hell so that I clench my jaw, grind my teeth, curl my hands into fists beside
me. “I’m sure they’ll believe that,” he says, and it makes me rage to know he’s right, that they would believe him over me,
even if it was only his word against mine.
But it’s not only his word.
Because he has proof, on his phone. He holds it out so I can see, scrolling through pictures he’s taken of Daniel and me together.
They’re blurry, but that doesn’t mean they’re not good enough to make out our faces. There are pictures of us standing close,
smoking weed and standing in the cemetery together.
“It was you,” I say, incredulous, taking in the dark, shadowy headstones in the background. “At the cemetery. You’re what
we heard.”
Wyatt sneers. “They say it’s haunted,” he says, mocking Daniel, and I picture him crouched down in the trees, taking pictures of us. What I imagined as a ghost
with long, flowing hair like cobwebs, a gaping mouth and hollowed-out eyes was actually Wyatt.
He followed me out of the cottage.
He followed us through the woods and to the cemetery.
He saw everything. He heard everything.
I feel sick. Embarrassed. Mad.
No, more than mad. I feel enraged.
When he plays it, the video is so much worse than any of the pictures.
How do you know? Daniel asks from behind me. We’re dark, shadowy, but undeniably there on the phone’s screen.
Know what? I ask, staring into the woods, almost directly into Wyatt’s camera lens, my voice sounding different than the way I hear
it, higher in pitch.
Daniel says, That there’s no such thing as ghosts.
I tell him, I just do.
Then what are you looking for, if there’s no such thing as ghosts? Don’t be scared, he says after a second, coming up and wrapping his arms around me from behind. I don’t want to watch Wyatt’s stupid video,
knowing what comes next. I try to look away, but he only brings the phone closer, shoving it in my face, saying, “You don’t
want to miss this, Reese. This is the best part,” and I think how much I hate him. How much I fucking hate him.
They’re not going to hurt you, Daniel says on screen, his own voice mellow and cool. They’re harmless. They’re just lonely and looking for someone to vibe with, like me. He turns me around. Shame seizes hold of me as I watch Daniel cup my face in his hands, as I watch him kiss me, as—even worse—I
see myself kiss back, the wet mouth sounds loud as Wyatt slides the volume higher.
“Can I kiss you now, Reese like the candy?” he mocks, laughing hysterically, and then he makes kissy faces that make me literally
want to puke. I feel dirty. Violated. Every special thing about tonight has been destroyed by him.
My mind homes in on only one thing in that moment. I ignore everything else.
I think only about obliterating the smile from his ugly face.
It happens before I know it’s happening. I lunge across the room at him, grabbing him by the shirt, thinking how much I want to hurt him. How much I want him dead.
Wyatt loses balance. He stumbles and falls. It’s not a fast fall. He tries catching himself, but he can’t. When he goes down,
I go down too, falling on top of him. Wyatt is bigger than me. He’s stronger, an athlete, but I use my rage to my advantage.
With him on his back, I climb on my hands and knees onto his chest, my knees digging into him as he squirms, not able to get
out from under my body weight.
I see it in his eyes, fueling me at first: the fear.
Wyatt is scared.
Just beside me, on the floor, is the glass from the broken lantern. I reach out for it, snag a long, slender chunk of it in
my hand, its edges digging into my own palm, the end of it razor-sharp and pointed, and I think of the relief I will feel
as it perforates his skin. As it slips into his organs. As he bleeds.
I don’t think about the repercussions.
I think only of what he did to me.
I raise the piece of glass above my head. I watch as he flinches and writhes beneath me, the scar above his eye still visible
from last time. When anyone asks, Emily tells people it was from a baseball injury, but that’s not true. It’s from me. I did
that to him.
All of a sudden, Wyatt gets a second wind. He fights back, pushing me off him so hard that I fall away. He jumps to his feet
before I can get up, calling me names, saying stuff like, “This is why you have no friends,” and, “This is why no one likes
you,” as he runs his hands through his messed-up hair and fixes his dumb shirt.
I lie there on the ground, gasping for air.
“The price just went up,” he says, standing out of breath above me, looking down. “Forty dollars. Forty dollars or I tell, not just about this,” he says, reaching down to scoop his phone up from the ground, “but all of it,” meaning not just about Daniel, but that I tried to stab him too.
After he leaves, I lie there on the floor, my heart racing, wild thoughts filling my mind.
I wouldn’t really have stabbed him with that glass. At least I don’t think so.
I’m not capable of that, of murder, I don’t think, though Emily made me see that therapist for a while because of poor impulse control.
Because of intermittent explosive disorder, as the therapist called it in my diagnosis.
Because of the angry, racing thoughts that would make me rage and slam my bedroom
door and break things and say things that hurt.
That was when I was twelve. She said that, with therapy, I’d grow out of it. We talked about other ways to control my anger,
like deep breathing and going to my “happy place” aka this hilltop I remember from when I was a little kid, where I picture
myself lying on the soft grass at the top of the hill with nothing visible but the endless blue sky.
The therapist said the tantrums and outbursts would lessen over time and in severity.
I don’t think they have.