Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe the stress of the pictures, of the interview, triggered the fainting, which triggered my hallucination of a disobedient reflection in the mirror. Maybe the truck behind us was just an ordinary truck.
I checked the side mirror again. I could’ve sworn the headlights were closer.
Don’t think about it. I stared ahead at nothing in particular, listening to the hypnotic, mechanical swoop of the windshield wipers. My father was quiet. He reached to turn on the radio when we heard a squeal of tires.
Our heads jerked up as we were bathed in light. My father spun the steering wheel to the left as the pickup truck behind us swung into the right lane, nearly swiping the rear passenger side.
My father was yelling something. No, telling me something. But I couldn’t hear him because when the truck pulled up next to us, my mind blocked out everything but the sight of Jude behind the wheel.
I screamed for my father. He had to look. He had to see. But he was screaming too.
“Hold on!”
He’d lost control of the car. A black wave of panic threatened to pull me down with it as the car spun out beneath us on the rain-slick pavement. The truck cut across several lanes and raced ahead. My heart thundered against my rib cage and I gripped the center console with one hand. Bile rose in my throat—I was going to throw up. We were going to crash. Jude followed us and now we were going to crash—
The second I thought it, we were plunged into silence.
“Asshole!” my father yelled. I glanced over at him—sweat had beaded up on his forehead, the veins in his neck were corded.
That’s when I noticed we weren’t moving.
We weren’t moving.
We didn’t crash.
We sat motionless in the far left lane—the carpool lane. Cars veered around us and honked.
“No one knows how to drive in this goddamned city!” He slammed his fist on the dashboard and I jumped.
“I’m sorry,” he said quickly. “Mara—Mara?” His voice was brittle with worry. “Are you okay?”
I must have looked awful, because my father’s expression morphed from fury to panic. I nodded. I didn’t know if I could speak.
My father didn’t see him. He didn’t see Jude. I was the only one who had.
“Let’s get you home,” he muttered to himself. He started the car and we crawled the rest of the way. Even the retirees in their powder blue Buicks honked at us. Dad couldn’t have cared less.
We pulled into our empty driveway and he rushed to open my door, holding the umbrella above our heads. We hurried to the house, my father fumbling for his key before finally opening the front door.
“I’ll make some hot chocolate. Rain check on the ice cream?” he said, with a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. He was seriously worried.
I forced myself to speak. “Hot chocolate, yeah.” I rubbed my arms as a shudder of rain lashed the giant living room window, startling me.
“And I’ll turn off the air—it’s freezing in this house.”
A fake smile. “Thanks.”
He grabbed me then and hugged me so tightly I thought I might break. I managed to hug him back, and when we broke apart he headed for the kitchen and began to make a lot of noise.
I didn’t go anywhere. I just stood there in the foyer, rigid. I glanced up at the gilt mirror that hung above the antique walnut console table by the front door. My chest rose and fell rapidly. My nostrils were flared, my lips pale and bloodless.
I was seething. But not with fear.
With fury.
My father could’ve been hurt. Killed. And this time it wasn’t my fault.
It was Jude’s.
18
MINUTES OR SECONDS LATER, I PEELED MYSELF away from the mirror and marched to my room. But when I opened my bedroom door, I was highly disturbed to find eyes staring back at me.
A doll sat placidly on my desk, its cloth body leaning against a stack of my old schoolbooks. Her sewn-smile curved happily. Her black eyes were unseeing, but strangely focused in my direction.
It was my grandmother’s doll, my mother had told me when I was little. She had left it to me when I was just a baby, but I never played with it. I never named it. I didn’t even like it; the doll took up residence beneath a rotating assortment of other toys and stuffed animals in my toy chest, and as I grew up, it moved from the toy chest to a neglected corner of my closet, to be obscured by shoes and out-of-season clothes.
But now here she was, sitting on my desk. She didn’t move.
I blinked. Of course she didn’t move. She was a doll. Dolls don’t move.
But she had moved, though. Because the last time I saw her, she was packed away in a box, propped against stacks of old pictures and things from my room in Rhode Island. A box I hadn’t opened since—
Since the costume party.
I reached back to the memory of that night. I saw myself walk to my closet, preparing to slip off my grandmother’s emerald-green dress, only to find an opened cardboard box on my closet floor. I didn’t remember taking it down. I didn’t remember opening it up.
I rewound the memory. Watched myself walk backward out of the closet, watched my mother’s heels fit themselves back on my feet. Watched the water in the bathtub flow backward into the faucet—
The night I saw the doll was the night I was burned.
The skin prickled on the back of my neck. It had been a bad night for me. I was stressed about Anna and felt humiliated by Noah and I raced back even earlier, to when I first arrived home. I saw myself reach out to unlock the front door but—
It swung in before I touched it.
I thought I was hallucinating that night—and I had. I imagined my grandmother’s earrings at the bottom of the bathtub when they were in my ears the whole time. I assumed I forgot taking the box down from my closet too.
That was before I knew Jude was alive. If he was in my room last night, he could have been in my room that night.
My hands curled into fists. He took the box down from my closet. He opened it up.
And he wanted me to know it. That he was going through all my things. Watching me as I slept. Polluting my room. Polluting my house.
And when I left it, he chased my father and me back.
I was shivering before, but now I was feverishly hot. I felt out of control, and I couldn’t let my father see me like this—he was panicked enough. I bit back my anger and fear and shed my waterlogged clothes, then threw them in the sink. I turned on the shower and inhaled deeply as my bathroom filled with steam. I stepped into the hot water and let it course over my skin, willing my thoughts away with it.