The Screaming Season Read Free Page A

was fragmenting beneath the warm spigot of water. I was pressing against the shiny white tile, back flat, head lowered, eyes shut so I wouldn’t see what I was imagining there . . . a pair of hands, pushing me under the water, in one of the huge bathtubs in the bathroom that was in my dorm. I knew it wasn’t happening; I knew it was one more of Celia’s horrible memories, but I couldn’t stop my panic.
    It was the drugs, I told myself. The drugs that had thrown me into one nightmare after another the night before, torturing me with flashes of images like this one and worse—the girls in the forest; eyeless faces laughing; the ice pick; the mallet; and what the girls looked like after Dr. Abernathy finished with them—the living dead. Zombies. The phantoms of Marlwood.
    And all their rage lived on.
    “Lindsay?” Ms. Simonet said, in the curt tone I was beginning to recognize as her What do I do with this girl? voice. Other students at Marlwood had gone bonkers, but they were rich. That was understandable: being able to have what you wanted whenever you wanted it created a lot of pressure. It was less cool for me, a poor girl, to be a problem. I was on scholarship; all I did for the school was use up resources.
    “I’m fine,” I managed to say, clearing my throat. My throat hurt. My lungs hurt. I was tired. I raised my chin and opened my eyes. Just white tile and a spigot. No hands, no drowning.
    “This will keep happening until you stop it,” Celia promised me.
    “Go away,” I whispered fiercely. “I hate you.”
    “I can’t stop it,” she replied. “It’s up to you.”
    Gritting my teeth, I pushed back the shower curtain and grabbed the freshly laundered hunter green towel, burying my face in it as I shook. There would be more drugs if I lost it again, and they might send me home. That was all I wanted to do, but it was the one thing I couldn’t do. It had to end here.
    There was a little cherrywood dressing room off the shower room, and I found my favorite raggedy jeans, my mom’s UCSD sweater, and a black turtleneck sweater neatly folded. I smiled weakly, realizing that Julie had brought me a care package from our room.
    There was also one of my preferred black sports bras and a pair of black boyshort underpants. The boyshorts were a Christmas present from my stepmother, CJ. Freckly, young, strawberry-blonde CJ was more fashion aware than I was. Back when I was in Jane’s superclique, I had been totally fashion conscious. But it was a good thing I had quit the style race before I’d arrived at Marlwood. There was absolutely no way I could compete with the other girls, who truly thought nothing of dropping a grand on a pair of jeans.
    “Now that’s nuts,” I said aloud, feeling a little like my old self.
    I dressed, swallowed down the cold dose of bright pink antibiotic Ms. Simonet left for me, and brushed my teeth. As always, my hairbrush hated my OOC curly black hair. There were matching black smudges around my eyes that gave me a cool, smoky look. For free. Eat your heart out, Urban Decay.
    I went back to my holding cell, aka my room in the infirmary, and found all my dorm mates sitting in a quasi-semicircle on plastic chairs: Marica, Claire, Ida, Julie, and Elvis (whose real name was Haley). It was either a party or an intervention.
    “Good morning!” Julie cried.
    Julie jumped up and crushed me in a hug. She was five-seven to my five-two, with another two or so inches added by her heeled boots. Heeled anything was new for her; she used to hunch over to compress her height. Now she was in love, and that made her feel both powerful and pretty.
    On the gray-metal-and-Formica roll-around table by my hospital bed sat a green plastic tray with covered dishes and a large Marlwood coffee carrier with a lid. Next to it they had positioned the only normal chair in the room, an overstuffed burgundy leather chair.
    “We brought you breakfast,” Julie said, stating the obvious.
    “And homework,”