Chapter One
I paced the length of my cell (they called it a room, but I prefer to name things what they were, and it was cold and damp and the door was locked and there were bars on the window, so it was a fucking cell), rubbing the spot on my arm where they’d injected me. It had taken me some time to realize that if I didn’t bite the nurses, they’d ease up on the drugs and I’d get my mind back to myself.
For a while, at least.
We just want to help you, Hazel,they said as they shot me up with something that made my head spin and tiny invisible bugs crawl under my skin.
Poor thing. You don’t know how sick you are. But we’re going to make you better.
I hoped so. Because I couldn’t stand the me they’d brought in here. I’d thought I was someone who knew right from wrong, who would fight tooth and nail for what she believed in and for the people she cared about. But I didn’t know how to go to war against myself.
I might have been losing that battle for longer than I realized. Maybe that was why everything and everyone I cared for went up in fire and flames.
Trey. Quinn. Ayaz. Greg. Andre. Dante. My mom.Their faces flashed in front of my eyes, wreathed in a halo of fire. They were all lost to me now.
I was lost to myself.
I turned up the cuff of my grey hoodie and rubbed the spot on my wrist where I’d once worn a tattoo of the Elder Sign. Only I’d never had that tattoo. But it felt so real – I could recall perfectly the tearing sensation as Ayaz dragged the needle over my skin. Like a cat’s claws gnashing into me.
Only it wasn’t real. I’d hallucinated the whole thing. The tattoo, the teachers sacrificing students on behalf of the shadowy Eldritch Club, the cosmic god waiting in his prison of shadow, awakening from an eons-long sleep beneath the school where I was supposed to be getting the finest education.
And the Kings of Miskatonic Prep – I thought they meant something to me, that we shared a bond deeper than anything I’d ever felt before. But I invented that, too. Everything else I could believe was psychosis – my garbled account of the god invading my dreams and the cavern beneath the gym and the shadows that chased me sounded pretty damn crazy. But everything I felt for those three guys still coursed through my veins. All the moments we shared when they’d let down their defenses and shown me pieces of their souls… all of that was too powerful, too raw and painful to be fake.
But it was fake.
Dr. Peaslee wanted to get to the bottom of what caused my psychosis, but I didn’t need inkblots and drugs and therapy to know what had fucked me up. And it was all of my own doing.
It all went back to the fire at my Philly apartment.
But maybe I’d imagined that, too. Maybe the fire that tore my life apart only happened inside my broken mind. Maybe the unforgivable thing that haunted my soul was simply a nightmare made real by my subconscious.
Ayaz said we were never together. He said he’d never degrade himself to be with someone like me. But I recalled every touch, every word, every caress, as though it had happened yesterday. I could still feel the ghost of his arms around me, his teeth digging into my shoulder, his lips brushing mine. How could I have invented something that still burned in my body and turned my heart to mush?
And how could I remember something that never happened so vividly and yet have forgotten the horrible things they said I did?DidI torment Courtney and her friends? I know I used the superglue and exchanged their beauty products with chemicals that peeled their skin, but that was a pale shade of what they’d done to me, to Greg and Andre, and especially to Loretta.
I felt nothing but satisfaction for those two acts. For months, I lived in fear of the monsters of Derleth Academy, of the bullies who hated me because I wasn’t like them. Now I knew that they were right – I was different.Iwas the only monster.
Full fucking circle.
There was a knock at the door. I didn’t move from the bed as Nurse Waterford entered, balancing a tray piled with styrofoam cups. Behind her stood the orderly with the beefy arms they always brought to deal with me since the biting incident. Just in case I didn’t cooperate. The orderly took his place at the end of the bed while Nurse Waterford plucked a cup from the tray and handed it to me. I shook the cup, listening to the pills inside clatter against each other. She passed me a bottle of water with no lid and stood back to watch while I swallowed.
I peered inside the cup. Today I had one red pill and two pale blue. I hated the blue pills the most. They turned my brain to sludge. The world stretched around me as I slid through time like an elastic band stretched too tight.
The orderly’s eyes narrowed. He reached his giant flipper hand toward me. I tipped the container into my mouth, catching the pills on my tongue as they went down. I swallowed a mouthful of water and fog – but it was the fog that was supposed to make me see clearly.
“Fifteen minutes until lights out, Hazel.” Nurse Waterford backed toward the door. I didn’t need a reminder – I’d been counting the minutes. There wasn’t anything to do in my cell. I wasn’t allowed to interact with other patients (inmates) in the TV room and I didn’t have library privileges yet (and likely wouldn’t get them. Dr. Peaslee seemed to think even a paperback could be a weapon in my hands. He wasn’t wrong.) so there was nothing to do but stare at the cell walls and pore over the remnants of my life, wondering what was real and what I’d invented.
Was it the fire that pushed me over the edge? Did the fire even happen? Are my mother and Dante still alive somewhere? Why haven’t they come to save me?
My cell door slammed shut – the echo clattering through the bare room. I dropped back against the sheets, tucking my knees to my chest and curling into a ball, angling my face toward the bathroom to capture the faint breeze from the vent. The fresh air feathering my face made me think of Ayaz’s kisses.
Ayaz cupping my cheeks in his hands, bringing my face to his to sear me with his kiss. His body pressing against mine, desperate to close the space between us, to press hot skin to skin. My nails scraping his back, clawing for purchase as we slid together, trying to crawl inside each other’s fire…
No.I squeezed my eyes shut, waiting for the fog of the drugs to pull me under.You’re not real,I told the vision of the Turkish boy with the dazzling smile. I imagined myself wriggling out from beneath him, pushing him away, grabbing my clothes and pulling them on. I pictured him biting his lip, his dark eyes sweeping over me in concern. He reached out to grab me again, to pull me back into my delusion. I shoved Ayaz out of my room and slammed the door in his face.
Dr. Peaslee said now that I understood my delusions, I had to confront them. I had to force myself to kick Ayaz out again and again, as many times as I needed to until I rewrote the memory into something that approached the truth.
Because it couldn’t be true. Not if Ayaz was in Ms. West’s office, violent eyes focused on me, shoulders tense as he told me I was nothing to him.
