The door opens. “Cass asked to sleep with us. She’s scared. Jesus,” Elliott says, coming up from behind me in the bathroom, looking up and really seeing my face for the first time.
I turn to him. “I just... He was scared. I scared him. It’s my fault. I should know better than to wake someone who’s sleepwalking.”
His expression changes. His head slants and his eyes widen. “Did he hit you?” he asks, astonished.
“It’s not his fault,” I say, rather than answering Elliott’s question directly. “I think he thought that I was an intruder and that I was trying to kidnap him. He was protecting himself. After everything that’s happened, you can’t blame him.”
There are tears in my eyes. In all my life, I’ve never been hit like that. My cheek smarts and I wonder, if it’s already starting to bruise, what it will look like come morning and if by then it will be the full imprint of his hand.
Elliott steps closer to me. He sweeps a gentle thumb across my face and I wince, pulling back. “Does it hurt?” I nod. “Let me see if I can find some ice to help bring the swelling down.”
I leave the bathroom for the bedroom, where I climb into bed beside Cass. Elliott goes to the kitchen, returning with a cool washcloth because there isn’t any ice in the cottage; he leans over me and lays it gently on my face.
“Do you want me to close the door?” he asks, standing beside the bed before getting into it, lying on the other side of Cass like another defensive wall.
This time I don’t hesitate.
“Yes,” I say. “And can you lock it too?”
Reese
The thing about intermittent explosive disorder that people don’t always get is that it comes out of nowhere and goes from zero to sixty just like that. Like one second I’m fine, and the next I’m throwing shit and screaming at people and it doesn’t matter who sees or hears.
The other thing people don’t get is that I feel guilty after, like when I wake up the next morning and think about how close I came to stabbing Wyatt with that glass, I feel bad. Embarrassed. Sometimes scared.
Sometimes it’s just thoughts. Like when I’m driving through the school parking lot and kids are walking real slow right in front of me, blocking the way, being assholes, and I think about stepping on the gas, about running over them. I wouldn’t do it. At least I don’t think I would.
But there are times when it’s not just thoughts. When I act on it. When that happens, it’s like my body is on fire, burning from the inside out, spreading out of control across my chest, up my neck and down my legs and arms like wildfire. Or like when the Hulk transforms from Bruce Banner into the Hulk and goes all scorched-earth on everyone. That’s how I feel. Like I’m not myself. Like I’m someone else, someone I have no control of. And then it’s over and I shrink back down to Bruce Banner size, left with the guilt and shame of what I’ve done, knowingyou can only say sorry so many times before no one believes it, before no one says,It’s okay, Reese, anymore. Which is what happened with Skylar. I said sorry one too many times to count and she can’t forgive me this time. Because swearing and kicking over a garbage can in the middle of physics on the last day of school with everyone watching—all because your friend made plans with a different friend and not you—is not cool.
It didn’t help that someone in class got a video of me kicking over the garbage can on their phone. That they posted it to TikTok. That it was viewed thousands of times by the end of the day, so that even if Skylar wanted to forgive me, she couldn’t. She couldn’t be friends with me anymore, because by then everyone knew I was a freak.
When people saw me in the hall after that, they called me Robbie Gould, which, under different circumstances, would have been a compliment (greatest Chicago Bears field goal kicker of all time, according to Nolan). But they didn’t mean it like that. It wasn’t a compliment. They were making fun of me, referring to the way I kicked the garbage can, the way it went airborne, flying across the room, trash going everywhere.
They pointed at me and laughed.Hey look, there’s Robbie Gould!
Some kids stopped me in the hall and asked for my autograph.
I almost felt sorry for Robbie Gould, that he would be associated with me.
Incandescent with rage. Seeing red. They’re real things, not just idioms or metaphors or whatever. They’re real. Because when I get mad enough, I feel hot, like I actually glow, a redness creeping into the periphery of my vision until everything I see is bloodred.
When I’m mad, I actually explode. Relief—release—comes first, followed by guilt, regret, humiliation, shame. Thinking everyone would be better off if I was gone. If I was dead.
Which is how I feel when I wake up in the morning and remember what happened with Wyatt last night, knots forming in my stomach as I lie there in bed, think about kneeling on his chest, about holding the chunk of glass above my head, and hoping something like that never, ever happens again.
Everything would be so much better if I was dead.
I leave the cottage before anyone else is awake. I go outside, dragging the door closed behind me, careful not to make any noise. I turn around, looking out at the world, which looks different today, and I think it’s because of Daniel. Because I kissed a boy last night.
I smile without meaning to, without really knowing that I am.
Our cottage sits on top of a hill so that it overlooks everything else. Down the hill from us there are other cottages, which are quiet now, everyone still inside for the night. The sun is just coming up. It sits low in the sky, a giant glowing red orb on the horizon, surrounded by wispy gray clouds that I see over the lake, the light pouring sideways like spilled paint, turning the lake red.
The morning air is numbing. I jam my hands into my pockets to keep warm, and then I head into the woods, following the same path I took last night, trying to go back over my steps, to remember which way Daniel and I went to the cemetery, wanting to see what it looks like in daylight.
I thought finding it again would be easy. But the woods are different during the day. Even with the sun coming up, they’re disorienting, almost as disorienting as they are at night, but for different reasons. Instead of seeing nothing like last night, all I can see are trees, though there are so many of them and they’re packed so closely together that it feels like the trees are moving. There are no markers and no landmarks. There are only trees, which all look the exact same to me, tall and brown, the barkcovered in moss, the roots exposed and lying on the ground like a disembodied hand, like Thing fromThe Addams Family, some of which I trip over, swearing as I lurch forward and then catch myself before I can fall.
The path is wide at first. It’s easy to navigate. But over time it narrows, closing in on me until it’s almost the exact same width of my feet and I wonder if it’s a path at all or if it’s just what happens when the grass gets worn down by enough people’s feet. There are noises in the woods, which makes it feel like the woods are alive, like they have eyes. Rustling leaves. Falling pine cones. Squirrels.
