They approached the back stairs, the night cool with crickets. The moon stretched the dark shadows of trees across the lake. Freeman took Vicky's arm and she didn't stop him; he let her lean against him as they headed up the steps. Freeman felt lighter now, as if some of the world's weight had fallen from his shoulders.
He stopped in his tracks. Realization, big time.
Depression didn't just slink away, even for a rapid cycler. Depression clawed its way to the surface from a spot deep in your guts. Yet Freeman felt something so rare that he had to pinch himself to make sure he wasn't sleepwalking into a good dream.
The feeling wasn't happiness, exactly. He'd known little enough of that in his life, but he could recognize it from a safe distance. And it wasn't joy. And it sure as heck wasn't the L-word. But being with Vicky was starting to feel like a habit. A good habit.
"Don't get weird on me, Freeman."
He smiled in the night. A smile. Yeah, that was weird, all right.
Her hand pressed against his. She was giving him something. He took it and closed his palm around it. A penny.
"Don't make me have to come in there," she said.
The trouble was, she was already in. She was attached to almost every thought he had lately, at least when he wasn't depressed. He could close his eyes and smell her soap, see the freckle two inches below her left eye, feel the fine bones of her fingers. She was in way too deep, and he didn't know how to get her out.
Could you vomit thoughts, clean out your skull and make it all nice and empty? Brain bulemia? Start from scratch, with no past and no Dad and no scars and no feelings? No ESP?
Would God, if the bastard was as real and caring as Starlene made Him out to be, let a boy have a new beginning, this time without playing against a stacked deck?
No.
That was what they called hope, and Freeman knew the word was nothing but a loaded gun in a shrink's arsenal. Hope didn't exist in the real world, where ghosts walked and little kids got shock treatment and barbed wire marked the edges of the universe.
"I'm not thinking anything," he said, squeezing the penny and wishing he had the guts to say something strange, deep, and tough-soft, like maybe Pacino in Scent of a Woman or Sea of Love.
"Don't hold out on me. You know you can trust me."
"I'm thinking we ought to be getting back inside before someone notices we're gone. All we need is for Bondurant to be breathing down our necks. He'd probably sign us up for an extra session in Kracowski's secret little room."
"Or else give us a spanking," Vicky said.
"Spare me."
"Think we should try to get in through the basement?"
Freeman heard a sound from beneath the landing. "I don't think so," he whispered.
Someone spoke from the darkness below them. Freeman barely recognized the voice as Starlene's, it was so shaken.
Starlene spoke again, this time more clearly. "Hey, guys, what are you doing here? It's past Lights Out. You could get in big trouble."
Freeman almost wanted to laugh at that. Dead people coming out of the woodwork, and he was supposed to worry about having his dessert withheld.
"You shouldn't have gone down there," Vicky said.
Starlene came out of the dark hollow beneath the landing. "I just wanted to check out what you guys said."
Freeman and Vicky exchanged glances. A grown-up who acknowledged having doubts? What was the world coming to?
"What did you see?" Vicky asked.
"I'm not sure."
Freeman tried a triptrap on Starlene, but the air was too murky, his own thoughts too cloudy. He only gave himself a headache. If he knew what she'd seen, then maybe he could convince her that he wasn't crazy. Or maybe she had seen something that had her doubting her own sanity.
Nah. No counselor in the history of the human race had ever been less than perfect. Shrinks were the baseline from which sanity was judged. Though Starlene had shown glimpses of being human, when you got right down to it, she was still a hard-headed know-it-all who gave Jesus Christ credit for all good things and blamed her few failures on other people.
"Nobody's sure about anything lately," Freeman said. "What about Kracowski's machines?"
"All I can say is they look expensive. And they put off a lot of strange vibes."
"Listen," Vicky said. "You two can stand out here all night if you want. I'm going inside."
"You might get in easier with this." Starlene pulled a keychain from her pocket. "Unless you already know how to break in."
Vicky gave an innocent look, widening her eyes and letting her mouth go slack. Nothing looked as guilty as feigned innocence.
"Vicky's a saint," Freeman said. "It would never cross her mind to do anything against the rules."
"As if you've crossed her mind lately?" Starlene asked.
"I thought you didn't believe in ESP."
"I'm starting to believe in a whole lot of new stuff." She looked at her watch. "Almost eleven. You guys think you can sneak into your dorms without getting caught?"
"You mean you're not going to report us?"
"No. I'm on your side, remember?"
Starlene led them to the back door and unlocked it. Then she reached inside and keyed the pad deactivating the alarm.
"Whatever you do, stay away from the lake," Freeman said to Starlene.
"I know how to swim."
"I'm not talking about swimming. I'm talking about jumping into the water and looking for an invisible man."
"Hey, how did you… Oh."
"We aren't as dumb as we look," Vicky said.
They slipped down the hall, looking out for the night watch. Whoever had seen them from the upper window might be lying in wait for them. Bondurant was rumored to roam the halls in the middle of the night, paddle in hand. And that wasn't even considering the danger from crazy spooks who dangled from unseen strings and threw weird sentences into your skull.
Wendover itself seemed like a skull, a hard shell housing random and unexplained dreams. Freeman wondered if a building could be insane. If what Vicky said was true and this place had been a nuthouse back in the glory days of psychosurgery, then these walls had absorbed more than their share of screams. Freeman shuddered and wondered where screams went to die.
They slipped past the main offices. No light showed beneath the door, which either meant Bondurant was gone or else was sitting in the dark. Probably dreaming about the next kid he got to paddle. Freeman never wanted to triptrap into Bondurant's head again. He'd rather swap thoughts with a ghost than with something as vile as The Liz.
"Walk me to my door?" Vicky whispered. In the grim fluorescent light, her face was an unhealthy shade of greenish white.
"You scared?"
"No. I'm too dumb to be scared."
"Yeah. You're real dumb all right. So dumb that you play games with the security guards and you've got the counselors eating out of your hands."
"Sorry about that, back there," she said, sweeping her hair from her face, a gesture that made Freeman's heart pause. "When I got all emotional."
"Happens to the best of us."
"I'll try not to let it happen again."
"That would probably make life easier. Even if you have to fake it."
They were silent the rest of the way to the Green Room. The door was ajar, and Freeman thought about all the girls in their bunks wearing nothing but their underwear. The dormitory was dark, and Freeman didn't know if one of the counselors was inside waiting for Vicky to enter. He figured he'd best not hang around, no matter what.
Before he left, Vicky grabbed him and put her mouth to his ear. "Thanks for the walk," she whispered. Then she kissed him on the cheek.