Chapter 2
The rest of the week goes by in an overwhelming flurry of info sessions and mixers.
At orientation, I meet two girls, Charlie and Naomi, who are from the Boston area and went to high school together.
I hadn’t realized before coming here that Payen is kind of a hidden gem; most of the student body seems to be Massachusetts locals, and I’m very much the out-of-state outlier.
Still, Charlie and Naomi ask for my number and invite me to get dinner in the cafeteria with them.
It’s Sunday and I’m sitting underneath the oak tree on the grassy quad beside Coupland Hall, facing the dorm’s front door.
It’s been drizzling all day, but I’ve learned to always have my rain jacket with me.
I don’t mind sitting out here in the fog.
It never mists like this in California, with that grating perpetual sun.
It’s strangely validating, this moody, wet weather.
My phone buzzes. My mom, requesting a FaceTime. Crap. I need to answer this. Other than a few texts, I’ve been holding out on talking to them until I have more updates to share. I take a deep breath, roll my shoulders, paste on my sunniest smile, and answer the phone.
“Hi, Mom!” I beam at the screen.
“Rosie! Your dad’s here too.” Mom’s face fills the camera. “Are you sitting outside?”
“The campus here is so beautiful. I can’t get enough of the…the trees and weather.”
“We have a weather alert for Fairford, pumpkin.” Dad’s spectacled face shoves into view. “Why are you out in the rain, Rose?”
How do I tell him that the worst sound in the world has become Remy’s keys in the door?
I can’t stand sitting in the room with her barbed silence, but I’ve since learned that sitting alone, not knowing when she might return, not knowing when that jingling sound might happen, is somehow worse.
I hold up my ratty copy of Frankenstein, grinning sheepishly.
“For atmosphere?” I say.
“Haven’t your professors already given you your reading list?” Dad groans. “College texts are no Mary Shelley, Rose. It takes most of my third-years weeks to cut through a single Heidegger—”
“Stop, Tom. It’s her emotional support book. Remember how many times I read Death on the Nile that first month at Irvine?” Mom gives me a kind smile. “Sweetheart, how are you?”
“Fine,” I say, too quickly. Uncertainty flashes in Mom’s eyes, so I try again, slower this time. “It’s…an adjustment. Like you said it would be. But I’ve met a few people. Um, Charlie and Naomi.”
“Oh. Oh, Rose, that’s fantastic. And did you happen to stop by—”
“Yeah, I checked out the counseling center on the second day. I’ve got someone I can talk to.”
Technically, nothing I’ve said is a lie.
I did walk by Payen’s Center for Mental Health on the second day.
I know that inside, there is a counselor I could talk to, if I felt so inclined.
I’m exhausted just thinking about it: starting from the beginning, telling some psychology graduate student my life story, only for them to ask if I’ve ever tried melatonin or chamomile tea before bed.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve suffered from vivid, gruesome nightmares where I die in different, terrifying ways.
Imagine being a five-year-old at a sleepover and explaining to the other kids that the reason you woke them up with bloodcurdling shrieks was, well, because you’d just felt your actual blood curdle.
I tried to explain every death to the kids at school, to my parents, my teachers, and how the worst part of all was how real it all felt, more real, even, than when I was eating my Cheerios in the morning or sitting in the back seat of the car while Mom listened to Ira Glass’s nasal voice on NPR.
I tried to explain that somehow, horribly, in my nightmares, my deaths felt more vivid than my actual life.
It did not, as you could imagine, gain me very many friends.
But it did gain me very many therapists.
My poor parents tried to help, tried to understand why their little girl was so strange and haunted when her life was simple and sunny.
When I started middle school, I couldn’t take the disappointment in their eyes when another treatment didn’t work, so I told them that the therapy was working and the nightmares had gotten better, but it was a lie.
All that had changed was I’d finally stopped talking about them.
“That’s great, pumpkin,” Dad says. “To tell you the truth, we’ve been so worried, especially on today of all days.”
Everything inside me goes very hot, then very cold. I had forgotten. Today is the anniversary of the accident. I stand up suddenly, scrubbing my face.
“Right,” I say thickly. “Of course. No, no, I’m…I’m all good about…that.”
“Are you?” Mom peers shrewdly into the camera. Even across three thousand miles, I can’t meet her gaze. “You haven’t had any…episodes?”
“Jeez, of course not!” My laugh feels and sounds manic. “No, no, it’s— I’m all good. Haven’t thought about him in a long time.”
“Him, Rose?” Dad says.
Shit. Right. He is not a him because he does not exist.
“That, I meant. The accident. I promise I haven’t been thinking…” I shake my head so hard, the tail of my braid whips my cheek. “I’ve been too busy, too much new stuff. Like, did you know they serve banoffee pie at the dining hall on Fridays?”
“Hey, that’s your favorite!” Dad crows, like he’s thrilled he’s finally gotten something right about me.
“Yeah, it is!” I make a show of stretching and checking my wristwatch. “You know what, Dad? I think I might take your advice. Go grab some dinner, then head to the library, get a head start on my reading for lit. Thomas Hardy,” I add, throwing him a bone.
“Oh yes, yes, go do that—”
“Sweetheart.” Mom grabs the phone from Dad, filling the screen with her furrowed brows.
“Don’t go anywhere alone after dark. Ask your roommate to walk you anywhere if you have to go to the dining hall or something.
Just last week a junior girl at Boston College vanished without a trace.
Snatched just outside her apartment building.
All they found was her phone and wallet. ”
“That’s forever away, Mom,” I say through a grimace.
“It’s not that far away. I’ll send you the article.”
“Please, please don’t. I’ll be fine,” I plead.
“She’ll be fine, Nancy. You’re always reading headlines,” Dad says. “Leave the girl alone. She has a date with Hardy!”
We say our goodbyes. As soon as they hang up, I shove my phone into my pocket. A few seconds later, it buzzes. Mom’s murdered college girl article. A chill skitters down my spine, but I pull up my hood and make my way across campus toward the library, hunching against the wet wind.
The main library is easily my favorite building on campus.
It’s huge, at least five floors tall, with gorgeous Gothic spires.
It made me feel like I could be in Paris the first time I stood in front of the magnificent stained-glass windows in the atrium.
I longed for a ladder so I could climb up and press close against the candy-bright reds, oranges, and blues.
I wanted to run a finger along the colorful mosaic clouds, the great landscape of trees and grass, the enormous sky of blue shards.
I notice none of that right now. I hardly register my walk across campus. Don’t notice who I flash my student ID at as I stride past the ancient front desk and slump into a table in the far corner on the first floor, hidden in the stacks.
All I can do is think about him.
A year ago today should have been my death day. The only reason it wasn’t—the boy who saved me—apparently does not exist.
I push the heels of my palms into my eyelids until I see bursts of color and my eyeballs ache.
When they asked me how I survived, I told them the truth: I was rescued by a boy who mysteriously disappeared from the scene of the accident.
No one believed me. The only eyewitness said there was no one else on the bridge that night.
But there’s no way I could have saved myself.
The truck was swerving too fast; I was about to be crushed when someone pushed me out of the way.
For my candor, my reward was exploitation from local churches and paranormal groups. Social media posts made the rounds. Podcasts and local news stations reached out, but by then it was clear I was just a sideshow.
“Then how did I survive?” I screamed one night, scraped raw by the fact that everyone in my life, including my parents, thought I was batshit.
“A miracle, Rose,” my mother, who has two PhDs and never raises her voice, screamed back. “It was a miracle. Accept that and stop talking about him. You sound—you sound crazy.”
She’d never said that word before. Crazy. It was almost a relief to finally hear her admit it. Not that it didn’t sting. Tearfully, I’d marched to the bookshelf and yanked out a dictionary. I’d torn my way to the Ms, ripping a few tissue-thin pages in my fury.
“ ‘Miracle,’ ” I spat, reading from the book.
“ ‘A welcome event not explicable by nature or scientific laws.’ ” My lip trembled as I glared at my mother’s red, shiny face.
“ ‘Therefore, considered to be the work of a divine agency.’ A divine agency? How is that any crazier than—than what I…” My voice had gotten very small. “Don’t you believe me, Mom?”
My mother’s bottom jaw shifted from side to side, like she was trying very hard not to cry. “Rosie,” she finally said. “You’re alive. The how doesn’t matter. We need to move on. You need to move on.”
I never mentioned the boy to my parents, or anyone, again. I told them I’d stopped thinking about him. That they had been right. He’d just been a near-death hallucination. He wasn’t real.
But tell that to my bones, which still carry the memory of his voice. His eyes, the color of blue jacaranda during a California thunderstorm.
“It is now eight fifty,” announces a voice over the intercom. “The library will be closing in ten minutes. Please begin making your way to the exit now.”
Crap. I blink down at my unopened copy of Far from the Madding Crowd.
I forgot the library closes early the week before classes.
How is it already almost nine? I can see through the giant arched windows that the sun’s already set, probably a long time ago.
I shove my stuff in my bag, zip up my rain jacket, and hurry out the front door.
It’s raining harder now. I look up at the building behind me. In the foggy dark, this library feels different. All I can see are the gargoyles now. Have they always had pointed teeth? I pull my hood tight over my head and jog down the front steps, searching for a cluster of students to glom on to.
I know my imagination is wild. I pay for it every night in lurid nightmares and bone-deep fear. But I did not imagine that boy. I know it.
But it’s such frigid comfort when I’m the only person in the world who does.
Well, maybe, except for him.