There's Someone Inside Your House

by Stephanie Perkins

She hated the quiet isolation that permeated her house. It was exhausting in its own way.

“Even if we can get the sprayer working,” Brooke was saying, their connection suddenly clear, “I’m not sure enough people will even want to sit in the first three rows. I mean, who goes to the theater to wear ponchos and get drenched in blood?”

Haley’s blood chilled. She rolled over to face the nightstand. Her phone was gone, and in its place, right at eye level, was the egg timer. It went off.

Osborne smelled like diesel, tasted like despair, and was surrounded by an ocean of corn. Stupid corn. So much corn.

This thing—this unbearable weight and pressure—that had been boiling inside Makani for months was about to erupt. Ollie might not deserve her help, but she still felt compelled to try. Maybe it was because she wished someone at her previous school had helped her. Or maybe it was because of Haley, a horrific situation already beyond anyone’s help.

Usually, it felt good to be needed. It had backfired only once.

It had been so long since Makani had felt any amount of genuine, unadulterated happiness that she’d forgotten that sometimes it could hurt as much as sadness. His declaration pierced through the muscle of her heart like a skillfully thrown knife. It was the kind of pain that made her feel alive.

Just as it was rude and invasive to ask him about his genitalia or sexual preference, it was equally rude and invasive to ask her about her ethnicity. It was the sort of information that should only be volunteered. Never asked for.

She wished that she were in Hawaii having a normal senior year. She wished that she could have been the appropriate blend of charming and sad for Chris. She wished that there weren’t psychopaths who killed for pleasure and made the world feel unsafe. She wished that Ollie were her boyfriend, and that she could make out with him again, preferably as soon as possible. And she wished that she weren’t so selfish to wish for a boyfriend when two of her classmates were dead.

Makani was grateful that she didn’t believe in ghosts; she only believed in the ghostlike quality of painful memories. And she was sure this house had plenty.

Makani wondered why discussing a tragedy—consuming every single story about it—was often comforting. Was it because tragedies manifested a sense of community? Here we are, all going through this terrible thing together. Or were tragedies addictive, and the small pleasures that came from them the signal of a deeper problem?

Makani imagined the soft powder drifting onto the memorial at school, dusting the flowers and cards and stuffed lions. Because of classes being canceled, no one had been able to place any tokens on the mound for Rodrigo. It was almost unbearable.

Everywhere. They were everywhere. Those who had left them and those who had been left behind.

Social boundaries were being crossed everywhere. Students still ate with their own kind, but each group sat a little closer to the other groups, and they weaved in and out of one another’s conversations. They were all talking about the same thing, anyway. It was sad that people only got along when everybody was unhappy.

It felt chillingly empty without the tick of the grandfather clock. The heart of the house was dead.

It must be nice to have someone who gives enough of a shit about you to warn you. Must be nice to have been given the opportunity to prepare.

“Everybody has at least one moment they deeply regret, but that one moment . . . it doesn’t define all of you.”

“Well, I know that our regrets change us, and that’s how we grow—for either better or worse.

A sharp knife in one hand, a severed ponytail in the other. A hooded figure lurching out from behind a grandfather clock. She would fight these nightmares for the rest of her life.

David didn’t know her, but Makani knew herself. And neither of them was a monster. She was a human who had made a terrible mistake. He was a human who had planned his terrible actions.

Running away from home didn’t change the fact that a person still had to live with themselves.

Maybe he had a bad childhood, maybe he was born this way, or maybe he just felt trapped. Whatever his plans, whatever his reasons—they didn’t matter anymore. He’d made his decision. And now she had made hers.