Eighteen

The weekend and the following week pass in a sleepless haze. I skip the Sunday night party, texting Quigg to say I have food poisoning, the only excuse I can think of that will let me stay in my room all weekend.

At some point, my notebook finds its way out of the trash, its torn pages taped back inside, jagged as a living wound. I write, go to class, do my homework. I keep mostly to myself, and Penny doesn't seek me out. She's avoiding me. She lied to me, walked away from me when I needed her, and now she's doing everything in her power to avoid being in the same room with me. Once, I catch her watching me from across the quad, her hair fluttering in the cold wind, but when our eyes meet, her mouth goes hard and she turns away, as if I'm nothing to her.

Maybe this is who she is—a liar, a fake, someone who pretends to care right before she breaks your heart. I thought we had a connection, something special. But I see now that she never felt about me the way I feel about her. It was stupid to throw myself into a relationship with her so fast; stupid to trust her so completely. I won't make the same mistake twice. I won't make the same mistake with anyone.

I eat lunch with the others sometimes and see Wren often enough. But Penny must have told them about our conversation because there's a charged kind of silence between me and the others now. We all know that something fundamental has broken between us. I'm not sure it can ever be repaired. They aren't avoiding me, but they might as well be.

Cicadainches forward, page by dreadful page, its eerie, tense world as real to me as my own. More real perhaps. I spend more time with Eugenia and Coy than with anyone else. I live inside the world that Meredith is creating.

Each morning, when I wake stiff-necked at my desk, my fingers ink-stained and sore, I dutifully type the pages that Meredith wrote with my hand. I correct the typos and supply the missing words. I email them to Dr. O'Connor and Dr. Hendrix.

I go through the motions of being a college student, but there's nothing of me left for anything more. Meredith uses nearly every drop. I feel heavy in my body, my mind dull. I walk slowly, speak slowly. My joints hurt, and my limbs feel like they're filled with lead. I wonder if this is what Penny feels like during one of her flares.

I begin to think that Meredith is doing more than inhabiting my body. I think she's changing it, reshaping it.

Because every time I catch sight of myself in a mirror, just out of the corner of my eye, I have to do a double take. I never look quite like myself. Sometimes my straight eyebrows are too angled, or my mouth is wider than it ought to be, or my hair is a shade darker than its usual dirty blond. Even my freckles seem to fade sometimes, as if the pigment is leaching from my skin. In those moments, I blink at myself until the wrongness disappears, until it's my own face again.

But as the week crawls on, I grow afraid of mirrors and stop looking at all, ignoring my reflection everywhere I go.

I'm afraid that one day I'll look into a mirror and Meredith's face will be staring back at me.

By the time Sunday comes around again, I've realized the enormity of my mistake. The truce I've made with Meredith isn't temporary. I've surrendered to her, body and soul. And it's too late for take-backs. I'm completely in her grip—why would she ever let go?

As the daylight wanes, the house grows restless and tense, everyone keyed up in preparation for the cemetery party. But I lie in bed all day, too exhausted to do anything. I don't even sleep. I lie still while the sun's rays move across the hardwood floor of my bedroom.

Wren brings me tea and water, a few snacks. I drink and eat without tasting anything. They try to talk to me, but the words don't make the transition from sounds into meaning. I feel suspended, as if in a twilight state, the world not entirely real.

I've made my body and my mind a perfect dwelling place for Meredith Brown, so soft and easy for her. Helpless to her control.

When the sun goes down, my body gets up. I don't mean for it to. But it does. It puts on its clothes and brushes its hair and its teeth. Like a plucked string, it hums with the collective energy of Denfeld Hall, all those excited voices, those hurrying feet.

My own feet carry me down the stairs and across the lawn. I pass the black swan statue. The water has been turned off, so the creature's beak points meaninglessly at the dark sky, heavy with gray clouds.

It makes me think of how Meredith looked when she died, her body in the library so cold and so still, the light gone from her eyes. An empty shell.

But she found another shell, didn't she?

I recognize the silhouettes ahead of me—all of the other Magni Viri freshmen, Penny at their center. They walk in a tight group, their heads together, talking. My body quickens its pace a little, as if it wants to hear what they say.

"Look, we knew what this was, when Tara came here. We all knew what we were agreeing to," Neil says.

"But—" Penny starts to say.

"It's not like she has other options," Azar says, cutting across her. "With her background."

"But I just feel—" Penny tries again.

"Hey, no one told you to date her," Neil says brutally.

Penny rubs her face tiredly. "I know. Maybe that was a mistake."

"Well, what about me? I'm the one who has to share a room with her. Do you know how hard that is?" Wren says.

"I'm sorry, Wren—" Jordan says, breaking off, as if he senses my presence. He turns and sees me. "Oh, hey. You feeling better? Wren said you were in bed all day."

I stare at them, some distant part of me curdling at the casual way they're looking at me, as if they weren't just complaining about me, talking dismissively of my background, as if they weren't regretting my existence. As if all along they haven't been pretending. And why? What are they getting out of it?

"Yes," I say. "Yes, I'm better." My voice doesn't sound like my own, too low and somehow old-fashioned, almost monied-sounding. Is that what Meredith sounded like? I can't remember.

Perhaps the others hear it too because they exchange glances I can't read. We keep walking, now in silence, almost at the cemetery. Suddenly, Penny stops and turns to me. "Listen, Tara, there's something I need to say."

"Penny," Azar says. "Not now, not here."

"No, it's time. It has to be time," Penny says. "This has gone on too long." She takes a deep breath, as if she's steeling herself. Is she about to break up with me? In front of all our friends? Her friends, I accept dully.

"Someone's coming," Jordan says, a warning in his voice. He looks over my head and waves. I turn. It's Quigg, dressed to the nines and carrying a bottle of bourbon in either hand. He's smiling hugely, clearly already well on his way to drunk. He lifts up one of the bottles, as if to make a toast, and I half expect him to yell something about partying, as if we're in a nineties teen rom-com. But instead, he starts reciting a soliloquy, his voice deep and resonant. It's mesmerizing, even in my hazy state of mind. I can imagine what he's like onstage, utterly transformed by the magic of theatre. Dimly, I recognize the words from Macbeth.

"Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day

To the last syllable of recorded time,

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing."

At the end of his speech, Quigg lowers the bottle. "Ha!" he says. "Shakespeare was wrong, wasn't he? At least about some of us!" Then he laughs and laughs and laughs. He wraps an arm around me, still clutching the bourbon. Neil snatches it from his grasp and unscrews the bottle, then takes a big swig.

I'm not even sure why, but I grab the bottle from Neil and take a sip. It burns like fire going down my throat, making me grimace, but it's the first thing I've been able to feel in days. I take another sip. The liquor matches my mood: sharp and bitter. It tastes like disappointment and grief and simmering anger. I lift the bottle to my lips once more.

"That's my girl!" Quigg says, leading me into the cemetery. I look back once at Penny, who shakes her head. I don't even want to know what she was going to tell me. I don't want to hear any more lies.

The fairy lights glitter in the trees, and my head swims pleasantly. I wish suddenly that I could leave this body to Meredith and float free in the treetops, free as dandelion seeds on the breeze.

I take another sip of bourbon, and then another.

And after that, I get my wish.

I wake up sometime in the early morning, when the birds are starting to stir but the sky is still blue-black. For the first time in my life, I am hungover. My mouth tastes terrible, and my stomach feels like its lining has been burned away. Everything hurts. I feel a little ashamed of myself.

But at least I can feel.

At least I'm in my bed, and not at my desk. At least I slept. I guess my drunk body wasn't any use to Meredith. Or maybe I washed her away with all that bourbon. My head throbs and my stomach lurches. But I feel less vague than I have in days, more like myself, more like the body I inhabit is my own.

But now that I can feel again, the memory of how my friends were talking about me last night comes rushing back, and this time the pain isn't dim and distant. I feel the betrayal like a huge fist squeezing my heart. Wren said they hated rooming with me. Penny said it was a mistake to date me. All along, they've been pretending. All along, they've been using me for some obscure reason of their own.

My stomach churns with nausea, and I can't tell if it's from the betrayal or the alcohol. But when the nausea reaches its crest, I shoot out of bed, still in last night's clothes, and stagger down the hall to the bathroom, a hand over my mouth.

I throw up three times. When I'm finally able to peel myself off the cold tile, I stick my head under the faucet to rinse my mouth. I wash my face with soap and cold water. But as I pull the towel away from my face, I forget to avoid looking in the mirror.

A strangled scream dies in my throat.

Someone else's face stares back at me.

I blink, thinking it will go away like all the times before, that it's a trick of my tired eyes and the weak morning light. But the same wrong face stares at me from the mirror, a pleased little smirk on its lips. My worst fears have come true, and they are mocking me.

The face's eyebrows are angled up, the eyes are brown, the nose is blunt and small. The mouth is wide, with frown lines on either side of it. There's a funny little divot on the right side of the forehead, as if this girl lifts her eyebrow a hundred times a day.

Except that she's not a girl at all. She's a woman. She must be at least thirty years old, maybe even forty.

I lean toward the mirror, barely breathing, feeling like I might pass out. She leans in too, her eyes studying mine. She smirks again and lifts her eyebrow.

I touch the little divot in her skin with trembling fingers and see the motion reflected in the mirror.

Her face is my face.

My skin goes hot and then cold. Panic courses through me.

Because the woman in the mirror is not Meredith Brown.