The Love That Split the World(15)

I spilled whiskey all over your school.

I said like ah. I think about him all the way home.

Nice to meet you, Natalie Cleary.

Nice said like nahs. I think about him until I fall asleep.

Three months.





5


I spend all weekend sorting through Alice Chans, without any conclusive results. By Sunday night, I’m still uselessly tossing and turning in my bed, mulling over every last word Grandmother spoke, and replaying the disappearance of Matt and everyone else at school and the appearance of Beau on the football field, in an attempt to make sense of it.

Before the eye movement desensitization reprocessing therapy, I’d had horrible nightmares, several recurring. The worst one involved a vast, shapeless darkness that chased me and Mom down a country road, eventually slamming into us so hard the car spun off the pavement and careened into a tree, folding in half. That dream woke me up gasping for breath sometimes, but it still wasn’t the worst part of nighttime. That would be the hallucinations. I’d had two different kinds, hypnopompic and hypnagogic, but I don’t see how what happened with Matt in the hallway or Beau on the field could be one of those.

Hypnopompic hallucinations happen when you’re sleeping: Your body wakes up—eyes and vision included—before your mind fully does. Thus you may see your bedroom, exactly as it is, except there’s a torrent of spiders crawling all over you, or blood pouring down your walls, or an ancient American Indian woman sitting in your rocking chair. These hallucinations can be a sight, a smell, even a sound or sensation.

Hypnagogic hallucinations are nearly the same as hypnopompic—but hypnagogia occurs when you’re falling asleep instead of when you’re waking up: Your body, eyes, and vision remain awake though your brain’s already dreaming.

You know when you’re drifting off, when you’re nearly there, and suddenly your bed gets yanked out from under you, and you’re falling? You jerk awake and realize you’re safe—you were in bed the whole time.

Congratulations, you’ve just had the most common nighttime hallucination.

You don’t need treatment if you wake yourself up with the sensation that you’re falling. You do need treatment, apparently, if you have insomnia, anxiety, night terrors, and tri-annual visitations from a seemingly omnipotent deity.

The EMDR had put a stop to all that, almost making me believe Grandmother had been a dream.

For the first time ever, I wish she were. Then her warning wouldn’t mean anything. Then I wouldn’t be chasing down one of apparently five billion local Alice Chans. I shove Gus’s snoring snout aside so I can roll over for the millionth time. Tonight even the partial sleep of a hallucination would be welcome, but it doesn’t come.

At two in the morning, I give up on sleeping altogether and reach for my phone on my bedside table, rattling off a few more search word combinations. With a stroke of inspiration, I type a new one into the search bar: Alice Chan Kentucky hypnopompic hallucination.

I hit ENTER, and my heart stops when I see the first result.

Visitations: Premonitions and Other Psychic Phenomena Surrounding Hypnopompia and Hygnagogia by Alice Chan, Professor of Psychology at Northern Kentucky University.

I open the abstract and know right away: I’ve found Grandmother’s Alice.



The first Spirit Week event is the Superlative Parade, the one I’m least excited about, but after last night’s success, I’m jittery with excitement and nerves. The lack of sleep and excess of caffeine surely aren’t helping. When we get to the school, it’s drizzling and thundering. I drop Jack and Coco off at the front doors, then pull around to the back lot, where the Spirit Week Committee is lining up the “floats”—which is, apparently, what you call a pickup truck once you hang a black-and-orange banner on it.

When I spot my assigned float and co-rider, I park as far away from both as I can and wait for Megan, reading and rereading Alice Chan’s abstract over and over again as if I haven’t memorized every word. A minute later, Megan’s black Civic pulls up beside me, and she hops out of her car and into mine, shaking the warm rain out of her hair and hood. “Okay, let’s see it.”

I pass my phone to Megan right away.

“Why does your phone look like it passed through the heavens to fall to Earth?”

“Um, maybe because I was on it for the last forty-eight straight hours, during which I was also making little sandwiches out of spray-can whipped cream and Lay’s potato chips.”

“Ah, brain food.” Megan turns her eyes down and scans the text. “So this is like a light, fluffy, beach read, right?”

I tap the portrait of the severe-looking woman with a bob and a thin-lipped scowl in the top right corner of the screen. “Alice Chan’s the head of the Psychology Department at NKU.”

“And you think she’s Grandmother’s Alice why?”

“Because.” I free the phone from her hands again. “Look here. This is exactly the kind of weird sleep stuff I was going through all those years. Hypnopompic and hypnagogic hallucinations are basically just dreams, but you have them while your body’s technically awake. Maybe that’s what happened to me the other day in the hallway—and at senior night. Anyway, that’s what Dr. Langdon always thought Grandmother was: a nighttime hallucination.”

Megan purses her lips. “But she’s not. She knows way too freaking much to be a product of your subconscious—no offense.”