Chapter Three
Tess the Freak
I wake up to the hushed voices of Mom and Dad and another I don’t recognize. My head pounds as I open my eyes to a blinding white box—white walls, white floors, white sheets, white bed. The brightness is so sterile and shocking, I throw my arm over my face.
Where am I? What happened?
“Her tests came back clean,” the unfamiliar voice says. “We didn’t find any traces of drugs or alcohol in her system.”
“None?” My mom sounds deflated, like the no drugs or alcohol is bad news.
“No, I’m sorry.”
He’s sorry?
My temples throb around the response. Why would he be sorry? I slide my arm away and this time, I understand why the whiteness is so bright. Sunlight filters inside an open window. I turn my head on the pillow and spy my parents and a man in a white coat huddled together in the corner, near the door. My mom presses her fingers against her lips and shakes her head. “I don’t understand.”
“We’ll know more when your daughter wakes up. We can hear what she has to say about …” the doctor frowns, “the episode.”
“My daughter is not crazy.” Mom’s words come out sharp and vehement. And with them, comes clarity. It floods back into place with a vengeance. The party at Sydney’s. The Ouija board and the voices and the screams. My stomach churns. I should be afraid, maybe even terrified. But all I can feel is humiliation. Abject humiliation. Because what must I have done to end up in a hospital? The churning turns my stomach to rot.
“I’m merely following protocol, Mrs. Ekhart.”
The doctor leaves and I close my eyes, feigning sleep. I cannot face my parents or their worry. I cannot face anybody ever again. I want to hide behind my closed eyelids forever. I want to avoid whatever repercussions lay beyond this bed. The seconds tick into minutes. The silence in the room crackles with tension.
“What are you thinking?” It’s my father’s voice.
“You know exactly what I’m thinking.”
“I’m sure there is a perfectly logical explanation for what happened.” These are classic my dad-isms. According to him, logic explains everything. And if it can’t, he dismisses it altogether. His world makes no room for the unexplainable. “Tess is sensitive. We’ve always known that. She probably got spooked and the other kids exaggerated.”
“You think Pete is exaggerating?” Mom’s voice wobbles. “James, our son said she was hitting and scratching herself. He said she was screaming for something to get off her.”
I sink further into the bed, fear expanding inside my lungs. Never mind the humiliation I will face upon returning to school, I could be committed for this. I could be locked up in a cell and never let out again.
“What do you want me to say?” Dad asks.
“I want you to promise me she’ll be okay. I want you to promise that we won’t lose her. I want you to promise that our daughter won’t end up like your mom.”
My heart pounds into the silence, joined with the erratic breaths escaping my lips. My grandmother is dead. She died of a heart attack years ago, when I was too young to remember. So what is my mother talking about? Why is she afraid I’ll end up dead?
“Tess is not my mother,” Dad says in a voice so low I have to strain to hear it.
“But we’ve always suspected—”
“That’s enough, Miranda.” The sharpness of his words slice through the air. “We can’t talk about this. Not here.”
I open one of my eyes. Dad has ahold of Mom’s arm, their panicked expressions mirrored on each other’s faces.
“It’s not safe.”
A chill ripples through my bones.
“She’s going to have to speak with a government-mandated psychiatrist,” Mom whispers. “Nothing about this is safe.”
News about my freak-out spreads like pink eye. Another disadvantage of these small towns my mom is so fond of. At school, Pete is guilty by association. No matter how cute the girls think he is, there’s only so much high school students will tolerate. Apparently, having a whacked-out older sister isn’t one of them.
So everyone except Elliana ignores Pete. She must have it bad to risk being ostracized by the entire student body. The two of them stick to each other like double sided tape.
Me? I’m not so much ignored as overtly avoided. Students hurry to the other side of the hall when they pass by, as if I have leprosy instead of an overactive imagination (this is the story I spun for the psychiatrist and I’m sticking to it). Part of me wants to run around touching people, just to see how they’ll react. Instead, I hide behind my veil of dark hair and try to make myself as small as possible, which isn’t very hard, considering my build.
None of this would be so bad if my nightmares weren’t getting worse. Sleep offers no escape. Neither does home. As soon as I returned from the hospital, my parents sat me down at the kitchen table and asked me the same questions as the psychiatrist, only this time, they wanted the truth. My attempt at an explanation turned their faces to the color of ash. They don’t bring it up again. Instead, they tiptoe around me like I’m made out of glass. Like the wrong word or the wrong volume will shatter me to pieces. Or maybe they’re the ones who will break. Maybe I’m the one who’s dangerous.
Their whispered conversation from the hospital clings to my thoughts like a stubborn dryer sheet. Jude High has its first football game tonight and Mom hasn’t even tried talking me into going. She lets me hide in my room. I lie in bed, trying to make sense of my growing confusion. I understand their concerns about the psychiatrist. I understand why they warned me to be careful about what I shared. What I don’t understand is why they’re worried I’ll end up like my dead grandma.
When my brain tires from trying to tease it all apart, I grab my worn copy of I Know This Much is True by Wally Lamb—one of the many banned books I’ve come to own—and thumb to the place I earmarked the night before. The book’s about this dude with a schizophrenic brother. It’s not good for me. It makes me wonder. But I can’t stop reading. It’s nice to lose myself in somebody else’s messed up problems for a change, even if those problems are fictional.
I’m about to start another chapter when Pete pokes his head inside my room. For a kid whose life has been ruined all because I’m a freak, he doesn’t hold a grudge. He doesn’t walk around me like I’m made of glass. Instead, he’s grown curious. Like all of a sudden, I’m the most fascinating person on the face of the planet. Apart from Elliana anyway.
“Hey,” he says.
“Is dinner ready?” My family has had dinner together since the dawn of time. It doesn’t matter if Dad has a late meeting at work. We will eat dinner at nine o’clock at night if it means eating together.
“Dad just got home.”
“You going to the football game after?” I ask.
“Ellie’s picking me up.”
“Ellie, huh?”
He tosses a pillow at me. “Shut up.”
“What? I think it’s cute.”
Pete plops on my bed. I close my book. It isn’t normal. This. Us. Hanging out. We’ve never been close siblings. I love him. I’d do anything for him. He’s the only kid close to my age who I can talk to without breaking into hives. But we’re too different. And those differences have always created a wall between us.
“You can tag along if you want.”
“No, I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“C’mon, Pete. You know exactly why not.”
“So people think you’re weird. Who cares?” This is why Pete has always been popular. He really doesn’t care. He has this laid back way about him that doesn’t fit the average fifteen-year-old. He can be in a room full of super popular seniors and his heart rate will remain completely steady. At times, it makes me want to judo chop him in the liver.
I hold up my book. “I’d rather spend the evening with Wally.”
Pete rolls his eyes, then picks at my comforter. “You know, Ellie and I were tal
king …”
“About?”
“That night.”
“Why?” The word comes out with jagged edges.
“We’re intrigued.” He continues his picking, then looks up with Dad’s dark brown eyes. I inherited Mom’s navy blue ones. “We Googled Ouija boards.”
“Pete …” His name escapes on a sigh.
“No, listen, Tess. We found some really crazy stuff. Elliana thinks what you saw could’ve been real.”
Now it’s my turn for the eye-rolling. “Do you have any idea what Dad would say if he could hear you?”
“Who cares what Dad would say.”
“I was tired, Pete, and I have an overactive imagination. That’s all.” Lately, I’ve been contemplating the possibility that somehow, I fell asleep during the séance. That would make the most sense. Especially considering my nightmares. It’s a better option than being crazy. And it’s definitely better than Elliana’s theory. The thought makes me shudder. I don’t want any of what I saw to be real. “Just forget about it.”
The curious gleam in his eye doesn’t bode well. But before I can convince him to drop it, the door opens and our parents walk in. Mom wears that false, familiar smile she dons every year or two, whenever she and Dad sit us down in the living room to tell us the news. I know what they’re going to say before either utter a word. So does Pete. Because he flops back on my bed and groans.
We are moving.