Marianna Baer - Frost

I swallowed hard. Nodded.

“If you tell David, I’ll make sure you regret it. Understand?”

“Okay,” I said. “I understand.”

She lay back on the bed, an arm over her face.

I stood and made my way to the bathroom, splashed water on my cheeks and returned the key to the top of the cabinet, although it didn’t seem urgent anymore. Before, when she had threatened to tell David about my pill stash, it had scared me. Now, her threat just made me sad. Like I was witnessing her last, desperate attempt to hang on to power. Power her illness would completely strip away.

We drove onto Barcroft’s campus ten minutes before sign-in, giving me no time to talk to David alone. After Celeste and I dropped him off, the claustrophobic space in the car was filled with a silence more haunted than any house could be.

“You don’t believe me,” Celeste finally said as I parked in the driveway. Her voice was calm now. Frost House crouched in front of us, shrouded by layers of branches and the darkness. Warm orange light glowed in the upstairs windows of Viv’s bedroom. How had this all happened? How was it that I was here in this car, as scared as if I’d fallen into someone else’s open grave, rather than up there, with my friends?

“I don’t think you’re lying,” I said.

“Tactful. You don’t think I’m lying. You just think I’m psychotic.”

Silence returned as I helped her with her bags and crutches. I resisted the urge to run down the path to my room and into the house, resisted the urge to find calm and sanity in my closet as quickly as possible. Instead, I matched my steps to hers, and held open the door when we reached the entrance. Celeste hesitated for a moment. It must have taken all her courage to return to Frost House. She obviously believed she was in danger, regardless of the fact it wasn’t true. To her, it was true.

In the hallway outside our rooms I said, “Do you want me to stay in there with you tonight?” It didn’t feel responsible to let her sleep alone.

“No,” she said. “It didn’t make a difference before. When we were in the same room. It was just as bad.”

“Why haven’t you asked, you know, to be moved somewhere else?”

“What would I say? People don’t just switch dorms with a month left in the semester. What could I possibly say?” Her voice was so tired.

“I don’t know,” I said. “You’re positive you don’t want me to stay with you?” If she were causing the bruises herself, somehow, maybe my presence would deter it.

“I’ve got work to do, anyway. I’ll pull an all-nighter in the common room—it hasn’t touched me in there. Yet.” She reached for her doorknob, then looked back at me. “What are you going to do?”

“Right now?”

“No. Are you going to help me, Leena?”

I smoothed down a flake of paint curling off the wall. “Did you … did you think you might be imagining it? At the beginning?”

“Of course,” she said. “You think it struck me as totally normal to be living in a place like this? To have all this stuff happen? Of course I thought I was crazy. I didn’t know that something like this was possible. I thought … you know, it was made up, in books and movies.”

“And why—I mean, how—did you decide, you know, that it’s really happening?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I can just tell. It’s real, Leena. Don’t you know when something is real?”

How could she be so blind, after seeing her father today? Real was walls and flesh and DNA and brain chemistry. How could she not know that?

I shut and locked the door to my bedroom, went into the closet, and shut and locked that door, too. I sank down on the cushion, opened my cell, and pressed the glowing green buttons. The phone looked like something from outer space, some alien tool. But it wasn’t. It was a cell phone, made in China, with LED lights that lit up the buttons so I could see them here in the dark. Real.

“Miss me already?” David said.

His voice brought everything else about him—his eyes, his goofy laugh, the smell of his skin…. The way he takes care of his family. What was I thinking, doing this over the phone?

“Leena? You there?”

“Yeah, I … I just wanted to say thanks. For inviting me.”

“Everyone loved you,” he said. “And thanks for being so patient with Celeste. I’m surprised she was so upset. Dad was pretty good, all things considered.”

I tipped my head back against the wall. “I’m glad I got a chance to meet him. And your mother. She seems wonderful. Your whole family does. Anyway, I have to go. I just wanted to thank you for including me. It meant a lot.”

“I hope you didn’t think I was too pushy,” he said, “telling you to invite your dad to Thanksgiving.”

I hadn’t even remembered that. “Oh, right. I’ll think about it.”

“Because at the risk of sounding like an after-school special,” David said, “you’re really lucky you have two … healthy parents. And I think, someday, you might regret not … not trying harder.”

I breathed deeply.

“I’d love to get to know your family,” he said. “They couldn’t be all that bad if they made you.”

I smiled. “Thanks. And I’ll definitely think about it.”

After saying good night to David, I picked up Cubby, thinking I should put the new pills in her now. Then I remembered my pills weren’t in her anymore, and reached for the plastic bag. As I did, her voice rang in my head.

He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

More and more, the voice came on its own, without me asking any question. Like a muscle, maybe, my subconscious was getting stronger. This time, I didn’t understand what she—what I —meant.

You’re not the one who should try.

With my family. But … why? Maybe inviting my dad would be a good thing.

Stupid. Weak. Believing what David says. He doesn’t know you.

I’d do it if it made him happy. Did that make me weak?

David’s happiness. What would even be going on in his life at Thanksgiving? Where would Celeste be?

“Hello, spirit,” I said. “Are you there?” I felt like a total idiot the minute the words were out.

No answer, of course. I almost wished there had been—a diaphanous figure appearing next to me, saying, “You called?” Then I could have just convinced it to leave Celeste alone, and I wouldn’t have had to worry.

There was no ghost, though. Not now. Not ever. The whole idea of Frost House as evil was … unthinkable. If there was such a thing as a haunted house, it would be the type of place people write about—where you feel uneasy and scared to turn out the lights. I’d never felt anything but safe and wanted in here. It was that type of house—I’d seen it right away—the type of house that welcomes and protects. You could tell just by looking.

That much I was sure of. And while I certainly didn’t think believing in ghosts meant you were crazy, thinking one was trying to kill you, well … that took it to a whole other level.

I pressed my hand against the wall. I moved it slowly, as if feeling for a pulse. Or reassuring it. Good house. Good, strong house.

Celeste didn’t realize it’s what’s inside us that’s most scary. Nothing in the real world could match what our brains and bodies come up with. It’s all a matter of degrees, what we create as our demons. Some minds create scarier ones. Poor Celeste. And poor David. That sadness in his voice when he talked about losing his father…. Once I spoke to him, he would know perfectly well that he was losing his sister, too.

I WAS TOO ANXIOUS TO SLEEP WELL, felt every spring of the bed frame through the mattress. Even the Tylenol PM didn’t keep me from falling in and out of bad dreams and stretches of lying awake, obsessing over what I was going to say. And in that sort of delirious half sleep, a new worry occurred to me. What if Celeste twisted the story around? What if she told David I was making it all up, that I was the unstable one? She could use the pill stash as proof. If she had that missing paper, maybe he would believe her.