Kissing Midnight (4 page)

I’m just about to when the door opens and the girl steps out.

I stare at her like I’m trying to memorize her, like
she’s
the one who might suddenly disappear. She’s wearing a puffy blue jacket and jeans and boots and there’s a book bag slung over her shoulder. She’s walking right toward me, but her eyes are on the ground, and I can’t tell if she can’t see me or if she just isn’t looking.

I smile.

She doesn’t smile back.

My heart sinks. Maybe I just imagined that she saw me before. Or maybe she saw me, but it was a once-in-a-lifetime thing. I mean, once in her lifetime, not mine. Obviously.

But I’m not ready to give up yet.

I take a deep breath and step directly into her path, bracing myself for the strange, warm rush that always happens when a living human steps through me.

But that feeling never comes. Instead, the girl stops short, looking up suddenly so her dark eyes meet mine. She’s standing right in front of me, close enough to touch.

But of course I don’t touch her. If I did, she would know what I am and that would screw up everything.

So I just say, “Sorry.”

“Oh,” she says, “No worries.”

I’m afraid to move, afraid to even blink. Her breath rises between us like smoke in the cold air. I want to say something else—something, anything, just to keep her here for another second, just to bask in the light of being seen. Why did it never occur to me to plan for a moment like this?

Because I had given up hope it would ever happen.

And now I’ve let it go on too long. Reluctantly, I step to one side to let her pass, but she steps that way, too. I shift to the other side—just as she does, too. Like we’re dancing.

We both laugh awkwardly, the way ordinary people do when they do stuff like that. Then I turn to the side and make what I hope is a gallant gesture like
after you, my lady
. She ducks her head with a shy smile and steps deliberately past. The wind whips her dark hair and she reaches up to push it out of her face and I catch a glimpse of something on the inside of her wrist: a tiny black heart.

My own heart is pounding. The whole encounter has taken like five seconds, but it’s five seconds I’ve been wanting for the past twenty years.

I watch her walk away. I like the way her long hair swishes when she walks. God, why am I such a sucker for femmy girls?

Turn around
, I think to her.
Look at me one more time. Let me look at you
. I’m high on her glance, giddy with eye contact. I walk a few steps in her direction, carefully putting my feet in the tracks she left in the snow. I wish she’d lie down and make a snow angel just so I could lie in her print.

Now I’m just being ridiculous. Jesus, Jesse, don’t be a stalker.

I just wish she would turn around and smile.

But she just keeps walking, and in a second I’m glad she didn’t turn around because, if she did, she’d see the guy behind me walk right through me.

Saintly

“Saintly!” Someone grabs me by the shoulders and shakes me hard. I wake up with a gasp, shoving the hands off of me and sitting straight up in bed.

Delia is standing over me, dressed in her nightshirt, the one with the cartoon owl. Her blond hair is sticking out in all directions, and her pink satin sleep mask is perched on the top of her head. She stares down at me, her face full of concern. “You were having a nightmare.”

“Was I?” My mind is fuzzy. My pulse is racing. I try to untangle myself from the blankets wound around my legs like a trap. “Sorry I woke you.”

“No, I’m sorry I shook you, but I heard you whimpering and you sounded really upset and you wouldn’t wake up when I called your name.” She pushes my feet out of the way so she can sit down on the foot of my bed. I tuck my knees under my chin to give her room. She lowers her voice. “Was it about your brother?”

“No,” I say quickly. “It had nothing to do with him. I followed this woman. She wanted to show me a door…” I shake my head. My memory of the dream is confused. I grab at details like threads, but the more I tug at the memory the faster it unravels.

And maybe that’s okay. Maybe I don’t want to remember. The feeling of the dream still hangs around me, like a damp fog, heavy and foreboding. I tug the covers up higher and try to stop the shivering.

Delia bites her lip. “I know it’s none of my business, Saint, but do you think you’re having nightmares because they took you off the meds? Maybe you should talk to Dr. Sterling about it.”

“I’ll talk to him,” I say quickly. “I have an appointment this morning.” I look away from Delia, hoping she’s too tired to read the guilt on my face. The truth is,
I have no intention of suggesting Dr. Sterling put me back on the meds, not after it took me so long to persuade him to take me off them. And I had to go off them, I remind myself. I couldn’t go into finals week wrapped in a haze of medication. I had to be sharp for the sake of my grades.

“You promise?” she says. “You’ll talk to him?” Delia looks exhausted. It’s partly the fact that it’s six a.m. on a Saturday, but I know it’s more than that, too, and it makes me feel even more guilty. Delia isn’t really made for worrying about other people. For most of our friendship,
I
was the one who worried about
her
.

“It’s no big deal,” I lie. “Go back to sleep.”

She watches me, her head tilted to the side. “Are you sure?”

“Sure I’m sure.” I fake a smile. “It was just a stress dream. Anxiety left over from exams. No big deal.”

She nods slowly. “If you’re sure.” She stifles a yawn as she stands. “I’m going back to bed.” She pads across our tiny dorm room and crawls back under her covers. She starts to pull her sleep mask down but hesitates when she sees me swing my feet over the side of the bed. “Where are you going? It’s the butt-crack of dawn.”

“My appointment with Sterling is early.” I don’t bother to point out that by “early” I mean about three whole hours from now. I know there’s no use trying to go back to sleep. “I want to get a shower and breakfast first.”

Delia nods sleepily. “I’ll see you at lunch, then.” She tugs her sleep mask over her eyes and is already drifting off again as I gather my clothes and towel and slip out into the silent hall. “Sweet dreams,” I whisper over my shoulder as I ease the door shut behind me. At least one of us should have them.

I spend the next twenty minutes trying to scrub the dream off of me. Instead, it comes drifting back in fragments, and by the time I get out of the shower, it has more or less reassembled itself in my mind. In spite of the hot water, the memory of the dream makes me cold. I try my best to ignore it as I throw on my sweater and jeans, dry my hair quickly and tug it into a ponytail. The cafeteria is the only place on campus open this early on a Saturday, so my feet take me there automatically.

But I can’t quite make myself eat. My mind is on my meds. I knew it was a risk going off them, particularly so close to the holidays with all their emotional stress, but they were screwing up my concentration, and I couldn’t afford to blow an exam. But what if going off them was a mistake? I can’t risk going back to the way things were.

No, I decide, it’s too soon to panic. By the time I’ve finished my coffee, I’ve decided to forget the nightmare. After all, it would hardly even sound scary to anyone else, and it was only a dream. It’s not like it’s leaking into my waking life.

Not this time.

I dawdle over my uneaten breakfast and by the time I leave the cafeteria, groups of students have started to trickle in. I know better than to look for Delia—she’d never get up so early on a Saturday—but I can’t help looking for Dev.

Which is silly, of course, because it’s not like I’m into him. He’s clearly a player, and I have no interest in being played. Besides, Delia’s into him, and she always gets what she wants.

No, I’m just making sure he has someone to sit with, you know, being new here and all.

Although, who am kidding? A guy who looks like that will always find someone.

Eventually, I decide I’ve lingered long enough, so I pull on my hat and coat and head out into the cold. Campus is the quietest I’ve seen it: Everyone is either gone for the holidays or still in bed. Dr. Sterling’s office is just outside of campus—one of the only things that made my mother agree to me going to Fitzgarren—but I take a round-about route, wandering past the shops with their holiday sales signs posted in the windows and the Christmas lights strung on their awnings. I hoped that seeing the decorations would lift my spirits, but I’m jittery with something more than the coffee and the December cold is starting to sink into my bones. I’m relieved when I look up at the clock tower shining above the rooftops and find it’s almost nine. Time to head to Dr. Sterling’s.

“Mariana Santos?” The receptionist smiles at me from behind the clean lines of her glass-topped desk.

“Yes,” I say, “For Dr. Sterling.” Why do I always talk so quietly here, as if I think I’m in church?

She checks my name off on her computer. “Make yourself comfortable, Mariana, and Dr. Sterling will be with you shortly.”

I nod and go to hang my coat on the silver coat rack and take a seat on the sleek black couch. This isn’t one of those awful waiting rooms like the one at Westgate, with the cracked chairs made of molded plastic that make you feel like you’re in a bus station. Dr. Sterling’s waiting room looks like it has been scientifically designed to induce relaxation, although it never has that effect on me. The furniture is sleek and minimalist, the walls painted a color that’s probably called “Serene Sea” or “Calm After the Storm.” The magazines fanned across the glass coffee table are all The New England Journal of Medicine and Art and Design and Antique America. I have a feeling I am the youngest person who ever comes here.

I bet I am also the craziest. I think most of Dr. Sterling’s clients are what my psych professor calls “the worried well.” I, on the other hand, have problems.

The door to the therapy room opens and Dr. Sterling steps out. Reflexively, I stand, as if he’s the judge at my trial—although Dr. Sterling could not look less judgmental if he tried. He’s dressed casually, a black suit jacket over a grey T-shirt and expensive-looking jeans, his tanned skin setting off the silver of his hair and the blazing white of his teeth. Dr. Sterling’s name fits him so well, I have to wonder if he made it up. Do therapists have
noms de psych
, I wonder, like writers have
noms de plume
? I can just picturing him free-associating to come up with it:
sterling, silver, born with a silver spoon, sterling reputation…
Maybe he did make it up himself. Maybe he needed it so crazies like me couldn’t stalk him.

“Mariana, how are we?” He shakes my hand as he always does when I arrive. He has a confident handshake, warm and firm, and he keeps maximum eye contact. I bet he studied handshakes at a conference. Probably in Hawaii.

Why do I always over-analyze everything when I come here?

“I’m fine,” I say in a tiny voice.

“Good, good.” He steps back and gestures me through the door. “Shall we?”

What would happen, I wonder, if I said, “No we shalln’t” and walked out the door? Would he call my mother in Mexico City? Probably. I’m here under doctor’s orders, after all. My mother let me come to Fitzgarren only because Dr. Sterling agreed to take me as a client. That and the fact she really needed to get away from me.

So I follow Dr. Sterling into his office. It’s painted in the same soothing colors as the waiting room—pale grey carpets, shiny black desk. The only thing that breaks with the pattern is the couch, which is round and deep red and squashy. I can imagine Dr. Sterling advising the decorators. “I’d like the walls done in Tabula Rasa and the couch in Return the Womb—and put it in the center of the room so all the focus is on the client.” I wonder if rounded edges are meant to be less confrontational, if they’ve removed all the corners the way they take sharp things away from you at Westgate. Aside from the couch, the room is furnished mostly in books, lined up neatly by height on the built-in shelves. Artfully interspersed are the artifacts of Dr. Sterling’s travels. Although he doesn’t actually believe in the supernatural (he has made that very clear) the doctor appreciates the symbolic significance of ritual statues and ceremonial vases. The empty eyes of three ebony masks watch me from the nearest shelf.

“So.” Dr. Sterling settles himself behind his desk. He steeples his long tan fingers and leans toward me in a way that clearly says
I’m totally engaged.
“Mariana,” he says, “How have we been?”

“We—I mean
I
have been fine.” Why does he always say we as if we’re conjoined twins? Doesn’t that go against some psychology rule about boundaries? “You know, more or less fine.”

He looks at me expectantly. “More or less?”

I fidget uncomfortably on the womb couch. I should have just said fine. Now he’ll want me to talk about something, probably Enrique. I cast about in my mind for something else I can throw him. “Well…I had a nightmare last night…” I say, and instantly regret it.

Dr. Sterling leans forward another fraction of an inch, almost bumping the silver perpetual motion statue on his desk. Its pendulum sways. “Interesting. Tell me about the dream.” He cycles one hand as if to reel the story out of me. “Please.”

“Well…” I try to sit up straighter, but the couch is too squashy. I take a deep breath. “I’m walking toward a house—no, more like a castle. A manor house, maybe? It’s big and made of stone. It’s dark. I’m following a girl.”

He gathers his legal pad and pen off his desk. “Describe the girl.”

“She has red-blond hair, long and wavy. She’s wearing a copper-colored dress, very old fashioned, like Victorian. Very fancy, formal.”

“Like one would wear to a wedding? A prom?”

“I guess.” The dress was actually much more formal than that, more austere, but I don’t want to make it sound funereal. He’ll read into that for sure. “Yes.”