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Suburban Psychosis

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            Marble Woods’s front gates might as well have been a portal to another world. The K-through-12 private school was a five minute drive past the town line, at the end of a winding road lined by customized mailboxes adorned with painted flowers, and yards dotted by signs reading ‘WE SUPPORT OUR LOCAL LIBRARY.’ The school was the source of countless whispers throughout our insular community. Rumors that a teacher had been fired for molesting a student. Some said it was connected with organized crime, others said it was a money laundering scheme, or it was a front for a cult. All of that was probably false—Vermont isn’t exactly a hotbed for the mafia, after all. But when Sarah disappeared from our world in her junior year at Marble Woods, people started to shut up. The terror was all too real.

            Our Vermont autumn had turned lifeless. A painting you stare and stare at, trying as hard as you can to decipher its meaning, yet utterly failing. There’s nothing there. Nothing but colors and shapes.

            For the uninitiated, Vermont is supposed to be insufferably stunning in the autumn—a living, breathing ecosystem. The ground crunching with every step. Trees which never seemed to run out of leaves despite the endless rain of crisp, paperlike droplets they generated. The horizon, a canvas of crimson, cut into by masterful brush strokes of green pine needles. The aura of pink sunset which never seemed to end, emanating from the treeline.

        Seeing that, you would look above, stare into that perfectly clear blue sky, and breathe in the unpolluted air—inhaling the ceaseless scent of apple cider, pumpkin pie, honey, and happiness all spun together, so strong you could taste the flavors on the tip of your tongue if you only opened your mouth a sliver.

        Filling your lungs felt like accepting the whole world into yourself.

        To me, it was suffocating.

        The world’s ineffable beauty taunted me.

        Bridge City, Vermont was your average small American suburb, a bit outside the largest city in our state. Dense in both thick-trunked trees and wide two story homes. Connected to a few other towns, separated by small stretches of rural hills to the west, and much larger empty forests to the east. Yes, despite being called Bridge City, it was not a city at all—and didn’t have any bridges. Maybe the people who built the town made the mistake of having too-ambitious dreams for what it would become.

       For most of my teenage years, I went to Bridge City High, a mostly typical public school, and the only high school in the area—apart from Marble Woods. People always said you could tell whether a kid was a BCH kid or a Marble Woods kid. Everyone here was affluent, but you had to be from a certain kind of family to be sent to Marble Woods—the kind that had houses you would get lost in were you to visit, the kind that had driveways longer than the roads they split off from. Marble Woods kids dressed differently, walked differently, and mostly kept their distance. Meanwhile, BCH kids were mostly happy keeping Marble Woods just out of their vision, laughing about whatever rituals the kids there might be up to. We were sheltered, but they were even more sheltered, through a perspective that led to their seclusion from the town’s otherwise generally-accurate impression of ordinary American life.

       Everyone had a different story as to how they ended up in Bridge City—but the clean air and chaotically-arranged high-income homes were enough to drive us all crazy. Waiting for something to happen. Staring with bated breath at Marble Woods, the single source of intrigue.

        As it turns out, things get lost easily in that grid of fragile sticks and stones. A person could be swallowed whole by the sublimity, bones and all.

       All it takes is one incident to shatter the ideal illusion.

       We had been raised to think that nothing could touch our sanctuary of a town. We were isolated on our perch, disconnected from the rot encroaching upon the rest of the country. We made jokes, but until Sarah disappeared, we all thought—we knew—that crime was unthinkable.

Now, while the miserable scent of joy remained suspended in the air, there was something that had been surgically removed from the ether; plucked out like a tumor. A young teenager, wandering invisibly forever, screaming her lungs out but never heard.  

       Locked behind the whims of whatever had taken her heart.

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          Sarah and I had only met once—if you could even call it a meeting.

          It was an ordinary late August morning, a week before the start of eleventh grade. My birthday had been a few days earlier, and my father insisted on taking me into town to celebrate. To him, a ‘celebration’ just meant we’d exist in the same space for a bit and walk around aimlessly in the center of town.

         My father isn’t important to my life, I swear. He’s your average divorced old man, clinging to his one daughter as the memory of a time when he was once happy.

         He still pretends to be happy.

         I had managed to delay his joke of a birthday party by a few days via locking myself in my bedroom and sleeping during the day.

        My room overflowed with my childhood. Posters of bands I used to like, stuffed animals, toys whose meaning and purpose I’d long forgotten. Dust smothered it all like a plague, and I found it fun to watch myself outgrow everything in real time, aligned with the evolution and degradation of nature.

         I kept myself occupied at night by picking through my bookshelf for novels that I was especially invested in when I was younger. Charlotte’s Web, Warrior Cats, The Hunger Games. They all used to make me cry. Reading them now, I only laughed at myself—how stupid I must have been, moved by stories so one-dimensional.

        For most of the year, my father didn’t push too hard for us to spend time together. Just the occasional “Kira, honey? Let’s go out today, okay? You need some fresh air!” I would grumble, and he would leave.

        But around the time of my birthday, he would push harder and harder, and I started to feel a bit bad for the guy.

        I do love my father. The unexpected smiles that would pop onto his face did make me laugh, sometimes. He was like a very large, very dumb, very flightless bird. And I couldn’t help but give him what he wanted. Sometimes. I was indifferent to the idea of celebrating my birthday with him, especially considering it was three days after my actual birthday, but it was hard to resist.

         Often I felt there wasn’t any greater curse than being born in the summer in a small Vermont town. Summer birthdays were truly the worst. None of my school friends could be bothered to ask their parents to drive them into town—let alone anywhere further than Bridge City for a real birthday party. When it came to friends, if we couldn’t do it at school or right after, we couldn’t do it at all.

          The humid air was a struggle to walk through, and I could feel the condensation on my skin. We ended up in downtown Bridge City—which was nothing more than a post office, a bank, a library, and a tiny independent convenience store called Patrick’s that was owned by a 60-year-old man named Greg. There, I caught sight of a girl, about my age, who I didn’t recognize. Despite appearing to be in her late teens, she had a party hat on like a little kid. Brown hair. Sparkling green eyes. A wide smile, ice cream cone in hand.

        Her parents crowded her. It looked claustrophobic. I could only assume that some chemical in the Bridge City air caused parents to want to take their kids into town for their birthdays.

        Or maybe it was just that there was nothing else to do.

       Looking at her then, I saw the ideal daughter of an ideal family. A perfect town. The shield that protected us from the rest of the country, at its most effective. I saw everyone else just outside our periphery, their lives snuffed out by gun violence, natural disasters, and mysterious diseases. The world burned as this family stood peacefully, never to be tainted by any of it.

        At that moment, I felt true rage. The planets had aligned to place me in this space, juxtaposing my meager life with idealized perfection.

        She was in harmony with her environment.

        Meanwhile, I was dissonant with my surroundings. My father. The rough, pine-covered mountains and winding creeks.

        When I looked at her, none of it felt real. She was perfect.

        Watching her in that moment, I understood that the world truly revolved around that girl.

        My father tapped me on the shoulder, breaking my trance for a moment.

       “Happy birthday, baby.” He gave me a wide smile and held out his arms to hug me. As if that was the extent of our celebration. As if this moment was the climax of another year of my being alive. As if it was nighttime, the sky lit up with fireworks, proclaiming to me and me alone that I was now one year older.

        I hugged him back. Looked into the sky, that clear, empty sapphire shield. I wanted to turn around, to look at that girl again, to attempt to understand what was different about her that allowed her to be happy in this moment. Why I wanted what she had, and why I wasn’t able to have it, even though I had a father who loved me and wanted to celebrate my birthday. I still had half the amount of parents she had. Mathematically, that should still be half as good, at the absolute worst. And considering the look on her face that was still seared into my brain—half as good as that would likely be more joy than I’d ever felt in my life.

         I wanted to let go. To ask them. What do you have that I don’t?

        But I remained still, held by my father, staring deep into the emptiness, and never looked back.

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            I spent the months after Sarah’s disappearance reading up on Marble Woods, trying to figure out what could have happened. There was never a suspect. Never much consideration for a possibility other than her wandering off into the fog.

        She wasn’t considered dead. Her parents believed she was alive. There was one interview with them from a state-wide news network. The quote “OUR LITTLE GIRL WILL ABSOLUTELY COME HOME” was displayed as the article’s title.

        She must have had some truly loving parents.

        Looking through the article felt disgusting, as if I was a parasite trying to take hold in the bowels of a body that rejected me. A foreign substance whose purpose was to view someone’s insides. It was, quite simply, an invasion of privacy.

        But how could I not search? My mind refused to get off that track.

        So I did some digging and found her parents’ address. It was easy to find, and they lived very close.

        That’s when I decided to start listening to my father. I began taking daily walks throughout town.

       My route went right past Sarah’s house. I would look towards it, imagining the secrets hidden within its walls. Thinking about what her life could have been like, and what her parents’ lives were like now.

        Her parents usually left the blinds open, so I had a decent view of their kitchen. The room looked straight out of a tacky Christmas movie. Artwork on the walls most likely painted by a child.          A fancy chandelier. A rustic, naked wooden table.

        Sometimes, I would glimpse one of them walking past the window. I would always hope they’d freeze in place, then. Give me a good look at them and their faces. See how they were feeling after something so horrible had happened to them.

        One day, after weeks of passing by the house, I got lucky. Sarah’s parents were standing in the kitchen. Hugging each other in the amber light.

        I stopped and stared. They were crying.

        Watching from across the street, I cried with them. The last time I had cried was years before, when I had gotten into a fight with a friend in middle school. But that was meaningless, that was nothing, and I was practically an adult now. That poor family, broken forever. No closure, no answers, no hope. All they could do was pretend there was still a chance.

        Walking home, I kept wanting to turn around, run back, and feel that grief again.

        After about two months of visiting, I had begun to figure out that I was addicted. This was far more than any novel or film could make someone feel. This was true emotion. The real thing. I had a front-row seat to the greatest show Bridge City had ever known.

        The day after I saw them crying, I stopped at Patrick’s to buy binoculars. I wanted to see their faces up-close. To see what sort of world Sarah had left behind. The damage she had done by going off and disappearing.

         My emotions were the only thing keeping her soul tethered to reality.

        One can make do with a memory. An understanding that someone is there, imprisoned within the mind, a tick latching onto your DNA.

        Yet that memory is also a curse. A specter of a needle in your brain, constantly stabbing your pain receptors.

        I would watch. I was keeping her alive by being witness to the effects of her absence. I was doing something good, surely. It was kindness and empathy. I swear.

        It lasted a few months. I visited Sarah’s house most days. My father seemed to believe that our relationship was improving simply through my going outside. “I’m so proud of you, baby,” he would say. “You look so much happier.”

        When I heard him say that, I almost felt guilty. He wouldn’t have understood—the unremarkable man he was. But his mistaken impression did sadden me. I couldn’t truly live up to the vision he had of me in his mind. I could only make him believe it was true. An illusory presence crafted accidentally.

        But truly, he isn’t important to this, and I’d prefer to stop talking about him. I should stop talking about all of this, really. I’m only embarrassing myself.

        Just a few years later I was away in college, my visits to Sarah’s home a distant impossibility despite still not being too far from Bridge City.

        Sometimes I felt that her loss was the one meaningful lesson I took away from those eighteen years in a paradise above the clouds. I learned that an angel could, in fact, fall. And what were the rest of us angels to do up in heaven, knowing that? The rules of the game were rigged. It didn’t matter what we did. It could take any of us, at any time.

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            My freshman year at UVM went well. The first few months were rough, with my visits to the house still on my mind, and I was left unable to sate my cravings. But I gradually escaped my shell. I met some people that could be considered friends, got along with my roommate, and mostly didn’t hate my classes. After less time than I would have expected, I had mostly stopped thinking about Sarah. The guilt remained for a while—by not thinking about her as much, I would essentially be letting her die for good. She wouldn’t be able to endure in my mind, and if I didn’t think about her, then who would? But, time made me lose track of that, too. It made me forget what it felt like to watch her parents, to wonder what could have happened to her. I was ready to move on. I’d been starting to put myself out there. Researching clubs on campus that interested me. Weighing the invitations to go out that some of my new acquaintances had given me. Finally choosing a major—sociology, after taking an introductory class on a whim. I was excited to continue, looking forward to the future. My future.

         In the first semester of my sophomore year, Sarah almost entirely out of my mind, I walked into my second of two required gen-ed English classes. That’s where I met Emi.

          Emi dyed her hair pink and kept it perfectly straight, letting it cascade down her shoulders like an endless waterfall. Despite it being the last week of August, she dressed like it was the middle of winter—sporting a puffy jacket lined with thick fur.

          The instructor, a stout postgrad with messy hair and a paper Starbucks cup glued to her left hand, had just told us all to introduce ourselves with our name, year, major, hometown, and a fun fact about ourselves.

         “I’m Emi,” she said, twirling a lock of pink around her finger. “Sophmore, majoring in computer science. Umm, a fun fact about me is that I have a twin brother. Oh, and I’m from Bridge City, just a few miles out!”

        Since I didn’t recognize her despite us being the same age, I assumed she must have been one of those other kids. The ones whose families had the disposable income to bless their children by capitalizing on the luck of having a private school right there in town. The ones who spent the majority of their formative years confined within the campus of Marble Woods, from kindergarten to twelfth grade, every experience being filtered through whatever lens had been thrust atop their eyes.

        I cornered her after class, barely holding myself together from the awkwardness. Everything I had felt during my last year of high school came flooding back. This person could have the answers—could let me feel those emotions again. I needed to know, to hear from someone. I wasn’t about to waste my chance.

        I stuttered and managed to blurt out my name. “I-I’m Kira. Hi.”

        Then Emi went for the killing blow.

        She grinned at me and held out her hand. “Woah, it’s so nice to meet you!”

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        A few weeks later, before the start of class, I worked up the courage to ask her about Sarah. I knew she must have been asked that exact question hundreds of times. I knew it was likely the first thing anyone from Bridge City wanted to know from her after they found out where she went to school, and so I braced myself for annoyance; frustration.

        But she lit up. She was happy.

        “Sarah and I were great friends, actually!”

        How does one respond to something like that?

        I expected hesitance, anger, fear. Maybe our ephemeral, barely-begun friendship would crumble right then and there. Horror towards my insatiable curiosity, my desire to know more about the unearthly disaster that descended upon my hometown, the innocence-stealing plague that it was. Not something to smile about.

        And so I was left as the one who wanted to run away.

       “R-Really?” I managed to say.

        She nodded subtly, eyes trapped in a dream. “We met when I transferred, back in the third grade. I went to her house every week, for years.”

        Emi’s face broke for a moment, her smile shifting, her eyes waking back up.

        “After a while, though…her parents didn’t really want me around anymore.”

        She then clapped her hands together as if enacting the world’s shortest prayer, and drowned herself in memory yet again.

        “But even then, Sarah and I would still sneak out together. She’d climb out her window at night and meet me, and we’d walk through the woods with our flashlights, talking into the dead of night. Just us and the cicadas. We never ran out of things to talk about. She was one of those people who would always ask questions, always wanted to know things. She was into psychology. She loved talking about that one guy who analyzed people's dreams and said it told you about their relationships with their parents. She said it was 'probably nonsense,' but that his influence couldn't be denied. She'd ask me to tell her my dreams, sometimes, and we'd try to decode them. She had strong opinions on everything—thought that she knew how society should work. And, at least to me, she was usually right.”

         I realized then that Emi had been waiting for this. For whatever reason, she had nobody she could talk to about Sarah. I gave her a chance, and it all came spilling out. I was the test audience for her soliloquy, a speech I could tell she had recited to herself countless times. She was rehearsed and cautious.

        Yet so full of passion.

        “She sounds really awesome,” I said, navigating the thicket of words as carefully as I could.

Emi only smiled warmly, tilting her head, fluttering her eyelashes.

      “I’m really sorry for your loss,” I continued, landing on a tried-and-true classic. As much as I wanted to weave together perfect kindness, I was too drained.

        “It’s okay,” said Emi, a finger on her chin. “It’s been a while. Marble Woods kinda sucked, but I’m here now. So everything’s alright.”

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        I marched back to my dorm that night, Emi the only thing on my mind. The leaves rained down, the wind blew my hair across my face, and I imagined Emi and Sarah, a few years younger, sneaking out to the forest at night.

        How wonderful it must have been to have someone like that. Someone who is always there for you, ready to rescue you from your home and take you on a tour of the universe of their mind.

        Their hearts beating in tandem, their joys synced. What would that have been like? People speak of best friends as if they are a given fact of childhood. But a true best friend is something more. My vapid engagements with various kids were nothing more than performative social obligations. Emi and Sarah had been the real thing.

        How could the stars align so perfectly? How could someone achieve companionship like that?

It shouldn’t have been possible. Nothing I’d ever experienced had approached their world. Hearing Emi’s story made my life feel even more fake and empty.

        And how could they have had all of that stolen away from them?

        I pulled out my phone while walking, and a pristine auburn leaf fell right on top of it as I powered it on.

        Brushing the leaf aside, I entered Marble Woods's website. Even now, the full address autofilled after typing a single 'm' in the search bar.

        At the center of their website was an announcement. Their annual Autumn Festival, held in late October. I had heard of it before, but of course, it would be weird for an outsider like me to have ever gone.

        But what if I wasn't an outsider anymore?

        Imagining what extraordinary world could be hidden within that school, what dark, horrible secrets I could find—I knew I had to find a way to go.

        I had no other option: I would become Emi's friend.

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close your eyes

 

and you’ll breach the covenant which warned you to stay within your cubic container. Bring yourself mindfully into a lush field of wheatgrass. Find yourself in a new home, a divide between your left and right eyes. See someone on each side—both screaming at you. Blurring into each other.

 

and you’ll devise an understanding that you are an illusory vessel, a nascent idea piloting a chunk of dripping flesh. If nothing is stopping you, transmitting your molecular structure to Nebraska is possible. Speak kindly, as the people there won't trust you. They will view your artificiality as a threat to their sanctimonious quietude. Look away when you draw attention.

 

and you’ll contain yourself within the warm darkness of your eyelids. Look closely, and you'll see fireworks, packed together, bursting as they breach each others' personal space. Identify that, if you cannot see others, their existence cannot be proven. You are alone. You are safe. Nobody can hurt you.

 

and you’ll have returned to a soft bed, teetering over the edge. Your body is not desired; not required. But you are kept in containment. If you fall off the edge, you will never be able to flee again. You hear sounds. You feel warmth. Those sounds and that warmth are not yours. You are nothing more than a witness. You do not feel or hear anything.

 

and you’ll be in an empty classroom, seated at a desk too small for you. You're not sure what you're supposed to be learning, because there is no teacher. No other students. You are all alone.

 

and you’ll wonder why you keep returning, why you keep blinding yourself with the flaps above your sclera, why you can’t seem to stop asking questions when you have specifically been told not to. And you find yourself at home, stuck still in your seat, your neurons traversing the serpentine pathways of the past, as you realize you’ve already long since escaped.