STEVIE WAS OUT OF BED IN A SECOND, DROPPING ROUGHLY TO THE floor. Her eyes were throbbing slightly, reacting to the sudden wakefulness, the shift from dark to light.
The words were tumbling in her head as she crawled to the window. When she reached it, she huddled beneath it for a moment, her body shaking from the adrenaline. Was there someone there? Would she pop up and be face-to-face? The window was open about six inches. Would someone reach in?
Only one way to find out.
She pushed herself to her knees with one quick movement. Outside was dark and still. She clutched the window, unsure whether or not to slam it down or open it farther to look out. Her grip on the frame tightened.
Another idea: she pulled her heaviest book on criminology from the shelf, the one she had scored at a library sale for three dollars, the one that was her prize possession. She stuck it out the window and let it drop.
No one screamed. She heard the book land in the grass with a thud. She slid over to the closet and pulled out the tactical flashlight that the school had provided and switched it on and scanned the area. Nothing. Just darkness and more darkness and the slight rustling sounds of the night.
She closed and locked the window, pulled the curtains, and tucked her head into her knees. What had it said? Riddle, riddle, on the wall, murder something something something . . .
And then it hit.
Panic attacks are mean little freaks.
First came the speed. Then came clamping in the throat, the lightness in her head, the feeling of blind acceleration into confusion. Then comes the strange wind that blew into her mind, knocking everything over and turning everything into a mockery of reality. Every avenue was blocked off. Every option meant doom. Nothing made any sense. It felt like hands were around her neck. Stevie gulped hard, proving to herself that she could swallow, that her airway was open.
“It’s fine,” she said to herself. “Breathe one, two . . .”
But she couldn’t breathe one, two because the universe was converging to a point. It would be a welcome feeling to pass out, except there was a terror that somehow the merry-go-round would just go on, even in an unconscious state.
People say depression lies. Anxiety is just stupid. It’s unable to tell the difference between things that are actually scary (being buried alive, for example) and things that are not scary at all (being in bed under the covers). It hits all the same buttons. Stop. Go. Up. Down. It’s all the same to anxiety. The curtains said fear and the floor said fear. The dark said fear, and if she turned the light on, that too would likely say fear. She turned the light on anyway. The faces of the murdered Ellinghams looked at her accusingly from the case board. She hurried over to the dresser, pulling open the drawer with shaking hands. She knocked out one Ativan, then hurried back over to her nightstand and washed it down with a gulp of water from the bottle next to her bed.
It would take some time to work, and the universe was still howling in her ears.
She needed help.
She slipped into the hallway, bumping against the door frame as she went. She went to Janelle’s door and knocked. After a moment, there was a sleepy, “Yeah?”
Stevie tried the door and found it was unlocked. She was too muddled to be embarrassed or feel bad for waking her.
“What?” Janelle said, sitting up. “Are you okay?”
“Panic attack,” Stevie said. “Can I . . . can you . . .”
Janelle pushed herself out of bed, grabbed her robe, and put it over Stevie’s shoulders. She guided Stevie to the bed and sat her down, putting an arm around her shoulders.
“Sorry,” Stevie wheezed, “sorry.”
“Here,” Janelle said, taking her hand. “It’s okay. We’re going to do this. Hold my hand.”
Holding Janelle’s hand brought some semblance of reality back.
“Can I sit here for a minute?” Stevie said.
“You stay until it’s over,” Janelle said. “As long as it takes. Did something happen?”
Stevie couldn’t bring herself to explain. Everything was wobbling. She leaned back against Janelle and the wall behind the bed and waited for everything to stop moving, for the words to stop running through her mind, for Truly Devious to leave.
The next morning, when Stevie emerged from her room, Janelle was in the common room, looking amazingly perky for someone who had been up half the night helping a friend. She was wearing a fleecy sweatshirt that said ASK ME ABOUT MY CAT and a pair of yoga pants, and her braids were coiled up under a cheerful red scarf. Stevie, on the other hand, was still wearing the sawdust-covered sweatpants. She had not consulted her hair. It could be doing anything. She had not bothered to wipe her face or crusty eyes or brush her teeth. She just needed to get up and shake off the night.
Stevie was embarrassed looking at her friend. She’d never really had an experience like that before, outside of her parents, where someone actually took care of you like that. Janelle had put her back into bed just before dawn, and Stevie had slept heavily for a few hours. Now she was groggy and heavy and slow.
“How are you doing?” Janelle asked in a low voice.
“I’m okay,” Stevie said. “A little nauseous. Tired. But okay.”
She couldn’t bring herself to say “thanks to you” out loud, but she tried to convey it in her eyes, and then by generally being awkward. Janelle just shook her head in a don’t worry about it kind of way.
Stevie went outside. The morning was fresh and bright—big blue skies and shaggy, happy clouds blowing over the mountains. It was the kind of morning that mocked the fear of the night before. This kind of pleasantness almost made it worse. How could she be anxious when everything was so cheerful?
Very easily, as it happens. Brain chemistry doesn’t care about how pretty things are.
She stepped along the edge of Minerva, through the moist grass to retrieve her book from the ground outside her window. It was a bit damp, but on examination it showed no real damage.
What had happened? She had been reading case materials right up until the time she went to sleep. She was thinking about the kidnapping and the tunnel. She could have easily dreamed that note on the wall. But it was vivid, crisp. She had gotten out of bed. She’d thrown a book out her window trying to catch a stranger.
She watched the sky for a moment and held her wet book and tried to work out what was real, then she rubbed her burning, tired eyes. She still had to go to class. She dried the cover with her shirt and brought it back inside.
As she went to her room, she bumped into David coming downstairs.
It was nothing, really. He just kind of half smiled at her. He had that long mouth with the twisting edges. Just a smile. But something about it made Stevie boil. She blocked him.
“Good night?” she said.
“It’s so nice of you to ask,” he replied, leaning against the wall. “Sure. How about you?”
His tone was neutral but his smile was expanding by just a few millimeters.
“Busy last night?” she asked.
“You have a lot of questions.”
Still neutral, still half smiling. Something in his eyes, though. A flash. It was impossible to tell what was going on, but there was something there.
“This is fun and all,” he said, “but can I go and get breakfast?”
Stevie stepped aside, but turned to watch him go. Could David have put that note on her wall?
She was fairly unfocused during the discussion of Leaves of Grass that morning. She spent most of the discussion trying to remember the words she had seen.
Riddle, riddle . . . something murder, something lake, something Alice. Definitely Truly Devious in there somewhere. But the more she tried to remember, the more the words slipped away and didn’t feel like words at all.
Walt Whitman was getting involved now:
And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken
soon out of their laps.
What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?
They are alive and well somewhere . . .
Riddle, riddle. A woman in a lake, a girl in a hole . . .
She would be a girl in a hole later tonight, when she went into the tunnel.
She went in and out of the explanation of the functions of the axial and the appendicular skeleton in anatomy. Lunch brought her closer to the surface, and by the time she was in Spanish lab, the dread was burning away and she began to focus on going into the tunnel. She felt a flutter of excitement, which carried her through the afternoon.
Stevie hurried back to Minerva in the midafternoon to get her flashlight and gloves, then met Janelle for their first yoga class at five. Yoga was the class she picked from Ellingham’s mandatory physical education selection. It sounded better than Running for Fitness and Clarity, Cooperative Boot Camp, or Perspectives on Movement. At Stevie’s high school, they let you just go on the treadmill for half an hour and left you alone to listen to podcasts, which was literally the only thing she preferred about her old high school.
Janelle met her outside the art barn, a rolled mat tucked under her arm.
“Doing okay?” Janelle asked.
“Yeah,” Stevie said. “I think so.”
“Anxiety dreams are the worst,” she said.
Stevie had, late last night, managed to explain to Janelle what she had seen. She must have made it sound like it was definitely a dream, and not some questionable occurrence that may or may not have been real.
“I guess . . . I guess I dreamed it?” Stevie said. “I don’t know.”
Janelle nodded, as if this was the only answer she had been expecting.
“But,” Stevie said as they walked into the art barn, “let’s just say for a second I didn’t dream it. How hard is it to project something on the wall like that? I guess you’d need a projector?”
“Oh, that’s easy,” Janelle said. “You can make one out of cardboard and tape and a mirror. It’s not impossible, but . . .”
“I mean,” Stevie said. “I woke up. I was in bed, and I saw it on the wall. I threw my book out the window trying to catch whoever was out there. Like, tried to drop the book on their head.”
“Did you catch anyone?” Janelle said. “See anyone?”
“No.”
“If you’re woken up in certain phases of sleep, reality and dreams, they blend together for a little bit. And being up here for the first time, it’s probably going to cause some anxiety dreams. My anxiety dreams are all about how I just never go to class. And it’s the end of the year and I’ve skipped everything. On a good night, I dream about advances in 3-D printing and Gina Torres dressed as Wonder Woman. But here’s the thing . . .”
She stopped Stevie before they entered the yoga room.
“I think we all come here because we have something in our heads we can’t get out,” Janelle said. “We’re all kind of fixated on something. I want to make machines, and you want to solve mysteries, and Nate wants to write—or he doesn’t want to write—and Ellie wants to live in her own art commune. Hayes, he makes shows. I guess David makes games. I see him doing coding, so I know he can. We’re all kind of in our own world. It’s that your world is a real place here. I think your brain is a little busy processing the information. You had an intense dream. Something woke you. You can carry through some of those states and see things and think you’re awake and not really be completely out of a sleep state. Sleep is a funny thing.”
Put like that, everything seemed to make sense.
“How are you so smart?” Stevie asked.
“I read a lot,” Janelle said, smiling. She unzipped the front of her bag, shoved her pass inside and secured the lanyard to a clip, and zipped the bag back up again. Janelle did everything completely, even putting her pass away. “And I’m just amazing.”
The class was in a small studio room. Everyone dropped their bags in the hall and crowded inside. Yoga was popular, and the mats were only inches apart. Stevie used one from the school supply; it was rubbery and purple and smelled a bit like bleach and feet.
The teacher, Daria, had a little accordion-piano thing she played as she made everyone sit on some blankets at the start of class with their eyes closed. They were supposed to be focusing on their breath, but Stevie kept going back to that flickering moment where she had jerked out of sleep the night before and read the words on the wall. She played it back again and again. How awake had she been when her feet hit the floor, when she tried to memorize the words?
It was impossible to know. Sleep had its own mysteries, and Daria was telling them to get into downward facing dog. Stevie was still new at this yoga thing and Daria was soon standing over her and arranging her hands and hips and feet. Stevie had watched a few videos to prepare for this before coming, but in the moment, she was completely lost and whatever move she made was somehow wrong. She was two moves behind at all times, at best. Her knee was in the wrong spot, her arm not high enough, her twist not twisty. Daria hovered and, in a sweet, whispery voice, adjusted her positions again and again and eventually planted herself by Stevie as she guided the class. How did everyone else know how to do yoga?
The one advantage to all of this was that it cleared Stevie’s mind of everything else. She heard exercise did that. Was this what they meant? You were so busy being confused and trying to stop your sweaty hands from slipping on a mat that you couldn’t think anymore?
Stevie did approve of the fact that yoga ended by lying on the floor in corpse pose.
“You’re doing your filming thing tonight, right?” Janelle said at the end of a class, as they went out into the hall to retrieve their things. “Because Vi and I are going to . . .”
She was fishing hard in her bag, poking her hand into the bottom and the pockets.
“My pass,” she said. “It’s gone. I zipped it up. You saw me.”
“I did,” Stevie said. “Are you sure it’s not there?”
Janelle yanked the front pouch open. No pass.
“How the hell did it get lost?” Janelle said. “Did someone take it? I need to find it. I get access to things, and if I lose that . . .”
“We’ll look,” Stevie said, already on the floor, digging around in the pile of other bags as people came out of class and took them away.
“They charge you a hundred and fifty bucks for a new one,” Janelle said. “Crap. Crap.”
“It’s okay,” Stevie assured her. “Someone must have just screwed up.”
“How? By going into my bag and taking it? I have to tell Pix. Who steals passes? Who went into my bag?”
Janelle was getting upset now. This kind of disorder agitated her. And she definitely had put her pass into her bag.
“Maybe it was a prank?”
“To steal my pass?”
Stevie almost said, “Or put a letter on my wall.” But since the jury was out on whether or not that was real, she refrained. It was another weird occurrence in a short amount of time. A letter and a key. It had the feeling of a strange game, and one that filled Stevie with a low, simmering worry.
Games are not fun when you don’t know you’re playing.