Hysteria Read Online Free

a little,” I answered, because after that first lie, the next came easy.
    “Yeah,” Dylan said, like he was trying to mock me, but it didn’t come out right. I
     couldn’t understand how Brian didn’t notice. Probably because he didn’t pay that much
     attention to his little brother. Or maybe I had just spent way too long paying way
     too much attention to Dylan, trying to pull meaning from every shift of his expression.
     I was still doing it right then, trying to decipher his words: was there an inflection
     where there shouldn’t have been? Was he secretly directing his words at me? Was there
     meaning just below the casual phrase? I’d always thought there was. But maybe I’d
     been imagining it.
    Brian planted a kiss on his mother’s cheek and pulled me down the hall again. And
     when I said good-bye, her mouth was a tight line. Her eyes creased. Her shoulders
     tensed. It was like, even then, she knew I’d somehow ruin his life.
    She was right.
    I’d marked him with my handprint. And two weeks later, he was dead.

    Now she had marked me.
    The stain on our door was dry. I picked up a rag from the sink, doused it in vinegar,
     and started rubbing. That’s how I got his handprint off my arm later that day. Brian
     kept his on. It took three days to fade.
    “Stop,” my mother said as I scrubbed the back door. “Stop. The fingerprints. You’re
     ruining it.”
    Seemed to me like I was fixing it.
    Semantics.
    Dad helped me scrub, but the stain wouldn’t budge. And the whole time, I felt this
     prickly feeling along my back, the kitchen charged with this energy, and it grew and
     grew until it felt like the entire room would burst from the tension.
    I threw the rag on the floor and retreated to the living room. Dad said, “I’ll take
     care of this,” like it was up for discussion or something, and disappeared into the
     garage. He returned with a bucket of leftover white paint and applied a thick coat
     over the entire door before he left for work. I watched from the safety of the living
     room.
    We had to leave the door open for the paint to dry, so Mom sat at the kitchen table,
     staring out the open door.
    Mom used to fight to keep the doors open as soon as spring hit. “Let the outside in,”
     she’d say.
    Dad would position himself in the entranceway, like he was doing the door’s job, and
     say, “The bugs, Lori.”
    She’d turn to me and mouth the bugs , and I’d smile. “They won’t stay forever,” she promised. But Dad hated bugs. Stomped
     them with his work shoes, using twenty-thousand times the necessary force. Or he’d
     chase them around with a flyswatter, stalking them from room to room.
    But he always caved to her. We both did. Everyone did. I think maybe it was her smile.
     Or maybe the way she’d laugh at you, but also kind of with you. Or the way she’d just
     declare something and expect that that would be the end of it.
    But now she was terrified of what might come through open doors. Or open windows.
     Even unlocked bedroom doors.
    The new version of my mother had two gears. One where she sat still and stared off
     into the distance, like now, and another where she fluttered unpredictably around
     the house, never making eye contact. She fluttered when she woke — paused through the middle of the day — and fluttered again before bed. She darted from window to window, diagonally across
     the room and back again, with no real pattern. She revisited the same window two,
     three times. She flipped the locks, open, closed. She turned the deadbolts, unlocked,
     locked. She checked the upstairs windows.
    And three nights ago, I waited in the hall outside my bedroom door. I waited for her
     to finish and retreat into her room. I held out my hand to steady her, to ground her
     again. To make her look at me. I touched her elbow and she flinched. I drew back my
     arm.
    Then she locked eyes with me for a fraction of a second and said, “Good night, Mallory,”
     backed into