Feral (37 page)

The doctor nodded with a sympathetic expression on his face. “PTSD,” he said. “With hallucinations. Surely brought on by the second traumatic event—the discovery of the girl's body in the woods.”

He stood to assure her. “It's going to be okay. We're going to make sure of that.”

He closed the curtain surrounding her to write on her chart.

Claire fell back on the gurney, clutching to his words like they were a life preserver.

Three days later, Dr. Cain leaned over the front desk, where Claire's checkout was being slowed by the need to make arrangements for ongoing sessions with an on-staff psychiatrist at the same hospital. Craning his neck to view the screen on the receptionist's computer, where she was pointing to available times on her calendar, he fumbled his phone. It slid from the counter, threatening to shatter on the floor.

Claire lunged forward, catching it. She grunted happily at her small victory, and glanced up, expecting Dr. Cain to be smiling at her with gratitude. But the calendar had stolen his complete attention. He didn't know he'd nearly broken his phone.

She sighed, staring into the screen. And the world around her—every noise and smell and sight in the hospital—became a hazy-white distant blur. Because a text had just come in. From Rachelle.

Frowning, Claire read,
Pls, Dr. C. How is she?

Claire's feet started moving, drifting across the tile toward the hospital door as she scrolled through her father's old texts. Outside, in the shade beneath the entrance awning, Claire began to shake. “It was you,” she whispered as she read the sea of Rachelle's messages. “You told Dad. I sent you that wild email by accident—the one I wrote the night of the dance. And you instantly started texting him. That's why he came to the school.” And the rest had been a domino effect—Rich and Rhine racing to the basement after her father. The three of them freeing her from the locker. Without Rachelle, Claire knew, she might not have been found in time. She could have met the same fate as Serena. Rachelle had saved her.

She threw her head back and gasped, like a near-drowning victim breaking the surface of the ocean, taking in her first deep clean breath.

Rachelle had just texted her father. That meant she was still there, near her phone. A single tear raced down Claire's cheek as she fought to gain control of her trembling fingers.

She dialed, raised the phone to her ear. It rang once, twice.

“Hello?” Rachelle said, her voice tight with worry. “Dr. Cain? Please, is Claire—is she—”

“Rachelle,” Claire said softly. “It's me.”

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M
avis sighed a “wow” under her breath, tossing her glasses onto her desktop. “That's quite a brave subject matter,” she said, after hearing Claire's pitch for a new series. “It hasn't been long, though—just over a month since the dance. Is it still too soon to write about all of it?”

In truth, the past month had felt a little like a year to Claire. She'd worked from home, yet again, as she'd attended daily virtual visits with her psychiatrist and her father had driven her to Kansas City for in-person sessions three times a week. She'd learned to meditate; she'd taken up yoga; she'd worked hard at opening up to her father and making emails to Rachelle a semi-regular habit.

Rich had brought her daily assignments, and made sure she'd kept up with everything happening at Peculiar High. His visits, had, in fact, been the only completely non-tedious part of the past month.

“You know,” he'd told her, as they'd shared an afghan on the Simses' old porch swing during a particularly sunny day in February, “no one would have known, without you.”

Claire had frowned, not understanding.

“Maybe some of the things you saw weren't real—but you were right about there being more to the way Serena died,” Rich reasoned. “Without you, Serena's death would have been listed as accidental—and no one ever would have known the truth.”

He'd sat silently beside her, letting her mull it over, before adding, “Never is a bad that's
completely
bad. There's always a speck of good in there somewhere.”

Slowly, Claire began to realize that for the first time since her attack the previous April, she wanted to write—
really
wanted to write. Not because she had always written, and clunking around on her keyboard would give her the appearance of being fine. Not because she wanted to convince herself that nothing had changed, that she was still destined for great things. She had that old ache now to really dig into a new project. And she knew exactly what she wanted that new project to be.

“Are you sure you'd be okay with exposing yourself like that to the entire student body?”

“Look behind me, Ms. Mavis.”

The instructor's eyes landed on Claire's classmates, the clusters of students working at computers scattered throughout the room.

“A couple of them, I'd bet, are staring right at me,” Claire said. “The rest keep sneaking looks, while trying to pretend they're really not eavesdropping. And everyone's avoiding your desk right now—no one's asking for a pass or your approval for a story topic or turning in a paper.”

Mavis nodded slowly.

“There's been an empty circle around me the past couple of days, ever since I came back to school,” Claire informed her. “If it wasn't for Rich, there wouldn't be a soul here who would look me in the eye or talk to me directly. I've got a few teachers—not you—but a few who try not to look my way when they lecture. No one knows how to act around me. I think it'd be harder for me
not
to address the issue. Writing the series would help.”

Mavis tapped her fingers on her desk and cleared her throat. In her best journalism teacher voice—which still cracked here and there—she suggested, “I wouldn't think that recovering from PTSD would happen in a straight line. There are bound to be a few setbacks. Are you prepared to also chronicle those setbacks for your readers as well?”

Claire's eyes grew hazy as she thought of the past few weeks. She remembered a night spent sitting at the kitchen table, wool socks on her feet and a cup of tea steaming beside her. She remembered the sound of rain clicking on the door beside her, the way the taps had crawled up her arms, and the steam from her mug had begun to curl, almost menacingly—like fog. Like a ghostly spirit.

It's just steam, Cain
, she'd told herself.
You know that.
She'd rubbed her eyes, stood, and emptied a can of tuna into a small bowl. She'd thrown open the back door and braved the rain for a moment to place the bowl under the tarp, in the woodpile. Sweet Pea was probably hungry, she figured. Hungry for
food
. After all, Sweet Pea was a homeless cat. She was not a creature possessed by a spirit hungry only to get inside another girl's body.

She'd gone back inside to finish her email to Rachelle. To tell her about the fear that had gripped her, for a moment, and the way in which she'd managed to reason it away.

“Ms. Mavis,” Claire said, “I kept everything that was going on with me buried inside. So much so that I had to finally see visions of ghosts in order to admit to myself what I wished for the most—that the beating in Chicago never happened. I tried to bury my hurt, to cover it, to pretend it wasn't there. That's how I got in trouble before. You're right—I do have good days and bad days. Before, I tried so hard to get control over everything . . .” Her voice drifted off as she thought of the times she could have told Rich about the visions she'd been having in the basement, the cemetery, but held back—as though she knew somewhere deep down that all of it was imaginary.

“I'm not in control of the world around me,” Claire acknowledged. “I have no control of the things that happened in the past. I can't change any of it. But maybe if I own up to it all—get everything that happened out in the open—maybe that gives me all the control I could ever hope for. All I know is, whatever happens in the next few weeks and months, I'm not going to be afraid to look at myself in the mirror. And I think that exposing myself to readers would be the best medicine ever for my own healing process . . . however and wherever that takes me.”

As Mavis took a breath, considering what Claire had just said, Claire turned to find Rich standing a foot from the desk. He raised his hand to give her the thumbs-up.

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“I
t should be out today, right?” Rachelle asked, folding her sleep sweats and placing them back in her suitcase.

Claire stared as Rachelle snapped the suitcase shut and placed it neatly in the corner of Claire's bedroom. Rachelle had arrived in Peculiar the day before with the intention of spending spring break with the Cains. But despite their emails and texts and a couple of short phone calls over the past few weeks, the air was still tense—frosty really—between them. So much had happened—so many bad feelings, resentments—sometimes, Claire thought as she watched Rachelle wipe the steam from the window with her fist, friendships got scarred, too. Healed, but not in the way they'd been before.

“What is that out by the cherry tree?” Rachelle asked, pointing.

“A grave,” Claire croaked.

“Grave?” Rachelle repeated. Even worry could crinkle her face in a pretty way, Claire thought with still a slight twinge of jealousy.

“Sweet Pea,” Claire said simply. “An old barn cat who used to live near the house. Dad and I found her body in the woodpile last week.”

Rachelle sucked in a deep breath. “You really think you're going to stay next year?”

“Dad made some discoveries in his cave,” Claire explained. “I want him to finish his work.”

“It'd be our senior year, though,” Rachelle said.

Claire smiled, nodded as she fell into place beside Rachelle, near the window. She felt the bulge of her phone in her pocket—the same phone her father had left on her nightstand the night of the dance, that Claire had never seen, not after discovering Serena's old phone and mistaking it for her own. She thought about trying to say something about being in touch the whole year, but wasn't sure how. Both girls crossed their arms over their chests as the outdoor air seeped in. Spring still had a chill to it.

A honk in the driveway made Rachelle jump. “Is that him?” she asked.

“Should be,” Claire said, grabbing a yellow cardigan and throwing it on over her shoulders.

The girls' feet thundered against the stairs and through the front door, where Rich sat in his truck.

“Is it out?” Rachelle shouted at Rich, before Claire could even introduce them.

“Let's go see,” he said, motioning for the two girls to climb into the cab.

Spring had only just begun to tug greenery out of its hibernation. As they drove through Peculiar, they passed by the high school, where only half of the building was illuminated by sun. The other half had fallen into a gray shadow, reminiscent of the dark days left behind. While a few trees along the streets had sprouted buds, the woods near the school were still filled with naked branches, black crooked fingers that scratched viciously against the blue sky.

Rich turned a corner, slowing to make room for an animal control van. Two workers were putting small crates into the back of the vehicle—cats who had surely just been snatched by the scruffs of their necks. If they were young enough, they'd be sent out for adoption; if not, they'd be sterilized, as part of a town-wide effort to reduce the feral population.

The truck ambled past a streetlight, bearing the faded, tattered remnants of one of the old yellow “Missing” flyers featuring Serena's school picture.

“Who is
that
?” Rachelle blurted, pressing her face against the passenger-side glass.

Claire leaned around Rachelle to find Chas jogging down the sidewalk, his breath shooting out in a long gray stream, his body toned by long hours of exercise. In the weeks since the Winter Formal, Chas had backed away completely from any kind of social interaction. During lunch, he quickly downed wraps and protein shakes before heading straight back to the weight room. He lived in the gym, using all his free time to train, to talk with the coach about his future as an athlete: next year's football season, scholarships. He was even participating in track and field this year, though Rich said he'd never seemed to have interest before. The thrill of competition, Claire had often thought as she watched him push himself—faster, faster, sprinting—would never disappoint him in the same way people could. The game—any game, any sport—offered Chas a level of comfort.

“Quickest crush of all time, apparently,” Claire finally responded, trying on a tease with Rachelle for the first time since her arrival.

Rachelle shot her elbow straight into Claire's ribs.

Claire's eyes tingled as she realized she may very well have missed the teasing elbow jabs even more than Rachelle's laughter.

Rich pulled into the lot at 'Bout Out; Rachelle popped her door and raced up the sagging wooden stairs. Claire and Rich followed, their group coming together in a small cluster near the latest editions of the nearby town newspapers.

A few of the headlines still stung, months later. Though Serena's death had been an accident, charges were still pending for Owen: involuntary manslaughter, hiding a corpse, obstruction of justice. Today, the banner across the front page indicated that his family had been granted permission to relocate while awaiting his court date. The Martin house stood empty in one of the pictures, the early spring grass promising to grow wild around the fringes of the drive.