You couldn’t blame him; here we did go. Jade had walked out here, saying she wasn’t going to let it get out of control tonight, they could just watch TV—but that was exactly what she had done. In both hands two iPhone 14 Pros glared at her, one displaying a DIY cooking video and the other displaying a review on the best hoodies to wear this winter season. Over her ears faint pop music escaped from her headphones, telling John that she was listening to Tate McRae. And to put the cherry on top the first episode of their new show was playing, blasting through the living room surround sound system, adding to the already-accumulated noise.
John adjusted on the couch a little and sighed.
This is what he had to go through. Every day, when he came home.
And now, he was done with it.
‘Turn ’em off!’ he yelled, snatching both of Jade’s iPhones. ‘You said just the show today, turn ’em off!’
‘Give them back!’ Jade yelled, fighting over his lap. ‘You know I need those, John, stop it!’
‘And turn this off, too,’ John said, snatching off her headphones.
Jade fought a little more before giving up; she tossed back on the couch. Every movement of hers came off kid-like, immature. John thought it was over, until she started screaming.
‘I need it!’
‘Why?’ he said. And of course the same answer:
‘Because! I just have to do multiple things at once, okay? I get anxious easily, and overstimulation helps. Oh, stop that, John, I know it sounds crazy, but it’s true! And you already know how hard it is for me to focus anyway.’
‘Yeah. So much so that you don’t even talk to me. I mean, we’re supposed to be watching a show right now and here you are in your own little world with all this noise. You’ve got all the time in the world for YouTube and Tate McRae but when it comes to me?’ John scoffed. ‘Oh, you don’t have time for me. Might as well go in the room and call it a night. But you’re occupied out here by yourself, aren’t you?’
And then he kept going. He kept going on about how Jade needed to bring her electronics with her whenever they went out in public; he kept going on about how she needed to bring her headphones to work with her even though he thought being a Target employee was enough; he kept going on about how she always said she would work on it but was never really healing from it and how she said she would never go to a doctor because her family didn’t believe in doctors so she didn’t believe in doctors and even if she went to a doctor the doctor would think she was crazy and so the cycle continued.
Well, well, well, John thought, that was a mouthful—but it was true. And even though Jade told him she would really work on it this time, he knew that wasn’t true. What do we do when people say stuff that might not be true? his dad used to tell him. We pay attention to what they do. And so, yes, because he’d never listened to his father, and because he’d always fallen for Jade’s trap, this time, he paid attention to her actions. This time John gave up.
‘I’m done with it,’ he said, tossing the Beat headphones back into her lap, as well as the iPhones. ‘It’s the same thing every time. You don’t love me.’
Jade looked hurt, as she faltered from putting the headphones back on and clicked an iPhone off. ‘That’s not true.’
‘It is true.’
‘It’s not.’
‘Then prove it!’ He jumped to his feet, staring very intensely into his wife’s face, and that’s when he had to sit back down because it looked like Jade might cry. Anything but that tonight.
‘Oh, John, I hope you do know I want to get better!’ She sniffled. ‘I’m ... I’m trying. It’s just hard. Any time I’m not overstimulated these things, these horrible things, they just show up out of nowhere and I ... I can’t help it! I have to grab my phone! But I already told you, it’s anxiety, didn’t I? That’s all there is to it. You get that it’s just anxiety, John, don’t you? Don’t you get where I’m coming from?’
John looked at her sceptically, because he didn’t. ‘What things?’ he asked cautiously.
‘Oh ... never mind,’ said Jade. She turned her phone back on and winced.
‘You know what.’ She reached across the couch and dumped all of her electronics onto John’s armrest. ‘I’ll get better. I’ll prove to you that I can get better. I promise. I just don’t want to go to a doctor; you know how I feel about doctors.’ She paused. ‘I just don’t know how I’m going to get better? I mean, if I don’t like doctors, mainly being at the doctors, what else is there to do? John ... where else can I go?’
John thought about it, while still in that salty mood at first, but then his face brightened, and there was the distant memory of an old friend now. Where else can I go? There was a man who worked two hours away at the University of North Florida—a thirty-nine-year-old man who worked as the principal investigator—who John Richardson had become well acquainted with at fifteen. That was back in the Yulee High days, the good old days, and when they had sat on the steps, waiting for their parents to pick them up after school.
One day, the man and John had been talking about some cheeky rumour that had been going around about one of the cheerleaders when they’d somehow gotten to the topic of old-school research experiments. ‘Yep, John, I’m actually going to try a research experiment of my own one day,’ the kid had said, chuckling. That’s what he’d always told John: he was going to become a researcher at a college campus.
John had chuckled, too. ‘What’s that?’
Nathan Rutherford had grinned, and the grin had stretched too wide across his lips. ‘White room torture, of course, John.’
It would be an understatement to say that John Richardson had not wanted to get up and walk away from the kid at that moment. But he had listened, and as he talked, the kid had a peculiar way of making stuff that sounded crazy sound ... beneficial. He’d started going into the science about how white room torture might have an ironic effect on people with ADHD; how it might, somehow, cure them. And how he might have had to undergo this experiment all on his own because there was no way a modern research team would let an experiment like that fly....
‘I’ll have to create a white torture room in my own home,’ Rutherford had said, grinning his researcher grin. ‘The only problem is, I need a participant.’
John had said: ‘You’re sick.’
Twenty-four years ago, but he and Rutherford were still good friends today. Maybe—just maybe—he was still looking for that one participant. Maybe, and because obviously Jade had some type of disorder like ADHD, he could get that participant in one phone call....
Her last question came back to him: John, where else can I go?
John grinned at her. ‘I know the perfect place where you can go.’
Jade Richardson wanted absolutely nothing to do with this room.
They were downstairs in Dr. Rutherford’s ranch out in the country, and in front of the doorway to his homemade testing room, she stood still, narrowly managing to avoid the quivering breaths which stopped halfway up her throat. Dr. Rutherford had told them this used to be his study until he’d emptied it and painted over the wallpaper a month ago when John had given him the phone call. It was an all-white testing room now, huge and empty save for a marble bookend in a corner which Rutherford must have forgotten to pick up. Outside, the all-white door consisted only of a keyhole which did not appear on the other side, so once Jade stepped into the room, she would not be able to get out.
Trapped, she thought. I’d be trapped.
She shivered as she turned to face the two men behind her. The bright whiteness of the room had left a glowing afterimage, a momentary torture which made Jade close her eyes instantly.
She said: ‘I’m not going in there.’
‘Jade, you have to.’ John’s voice. ‘Dr. Rutherford already told you the benefits, and you said you were going to give this a shot. “I’ll prove to you that I can get better,” those were your words. You promised.’
‘Okay, but you just took away my phones! And my headphones! And you said I can’t talk in there! Also ... there’s no TV in that room. Nothing. You’re asking me to stay in there, for God knows how long, and do nothing? When I’m used to doing everything? Not even talk to myself? John, I’m telling you, I’m not the type of person you want to lock in that room. It can get ... it can get dangerous!’
‘It’s for the sake of the experiment,’ Dr. Rutherford put in.
She looked at him. His long brown beard ran the length of his chin down to his shirt collar; the door’s golden key glittered in his hand. He kind of reminded Jade of the real Rutherford: President Rutherford B. Hayes but a junior version. Those piercing blue eyes intimidated her. He looked very ... researcher-like.
‘What I like to call, “punishment therapy.” Because you will be locked in this room where you’re not actively interacting with anyone, or anything, your brain will naturally associate the behaviour as a punishment, which then will, in theory, decrease your tendency of desiring too much stimuli. Of course it is not actually called punishment therapy; it is rather a form of operant conditioning—like a child being whipped for bad behaviour. The idea is that the more time you spend in a room like this, the less craving your brain will have for electronics.’
‘But why the colour white?’ Jade asked desperately.
‘Because, white achieves its need in sensory deprivation, Mrs. Richardson. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard the term “white room torture?” That’s not necessarily what this is since the room is not soundproof, but it is based on it: locking someone in an all-white room where they can clearly hear their own organs working. Prisoners are known to receive it. The reason behind it is that the bland colour of white gradually forces the mind to slow down, depriving its need of external stimuli, which is then of course a cure to your desire of too much stimuli. The lack of variation only adds to your brain’s association of the room being a punishment. Do not call it white room torture, though,’ he added, chuckling. ‘That is practically the most brutal torture method in all of psychology. This, Mrs. Richardson, this is not torture.’
Jade’s mouth went agape. ‘And you want him to do that to me, John? To ... to torture me?’
‘He just said he doesn’t want to torture you. He wants to help you. I want to help you.’
‘You don’t,’ she said. ‘You don’t.’
‘If not for yourself then me?’ John asked. His eyes looked very solemn, and he looked so pleading in that# moment. ‘For me, at least, Jade. You promised. And you’re not the type to back out of a promise, I know you. I love you. Don’t you love me? Not going in that room for my own sake, don’t you think that says a lot about if you love me?’
Jade looked appalled. ‘Don’t start saying that again, I do love you.’
‘Then step in the room. Turn around, and step in the room.’
She turned around, and it took everything in her to do so. The door was wide open, basically daring for Jade to take a step in, but it was a doorway to dullness, and dread, and not going in would defy her love.
She took a step forward. And another. And another. Her footfalls stopped echoing as she stood in the centre of the room.
‘How long do I have to stay in here?’ she asked, her voice sounding unnaturally loud in the high echo.
‘As long as you need to,’ John said, and closed the door.
The clicking of the lock sounded very loud.
Two hours had passed since they’d locked her in the testing room.
But had it really been two hours?
She sat in the corner, cold oddly enough, for her body temperature had skyrocketed by a hundred degrees before stepping into the room. She rocked back and forth in that foetal position, and the passage of time forever remained a mystery to her, feeling slow and fast and disorienting all at the same time. Maybe it had been two hours; maybe it had been two days. Oh well. At any rate, time should have been the least of her worries right now.
Her worries should have been on the white wallpaper.
It was everywhere—simply everywhere. Every direction she looked, the white stared back at her, rather than she stare at it, and Dr. Rutherford had been right: it was dull. A dull with no meaning which gradually drained her thoughts, merely making every event preceding this one seem unimportant. She was exhausted; never had she felt so empty. And it was ironic because it was just the colour white; but it was a blinding white that seemed to close in on you the longer you stared at it.
She wanted to go home.
The first thing that had struck her as odd was the fact that she hadn’t had any particular desire to reach into her pocket for her cell phone. Or to pull her headphones from up over her neck. Not that they would have been there anyway, since Dr. Rutherford had convinced John to confiscate them, but perhaps the white wallpaper had drained that overstimulation tendency, too? Perhaps, as Dr. Rutherford would put it, his experiment was working?
Second, she realized that John and Dr. Rutherford hadn’t made a single sound outside the room. The room was not soundproof—Dr. Rutherford had made that clear. So, why would they not talk? Why couldn’t she hear them talk? Were they watching her? She felt the vague sense that she was being watched. Doctor! John! I hope you’re not watching me!
Third and at present, that was when she heard Coby.
She darted up and whirled around, searching if Coby was still there—but he was gone; Coby had left the room. It wasn’t that she’d heard Coby’s voice—she’d felt and heard Coby’s presence. But no one had entered the room in the first place, however, and this was evident, as the door stayed closed. So as she sat back down and wiped the cool moisture off her forehead, she told herself it would all be all right, she wouldn’t think about Coby....
She thought about Coby.
That was a form of stimulation, something to make her mind think, and even though she couldn’t let her mind think, and fill in the blanks, she thought anyway, staring directly into the white wallpaper where a distorted shadow of herself showed.
She leaned toward it. Held out her hand. Took in sharp breaths. She was focusing—chasing something but not knowing what. And the white wallpaper, it was doing all the work for her. All she had to do was wait for it ... grasp it ... fall into that trance ... and ...
Yes! Now she had it: a full projector screen of what had happened that day when Coby was six and Jade was ten. Jade had been trailing behind him, riding her bike, and the digital camera she had been holding had caught Coby wobbling on his, the training wheels still on. Her six-year-old brother had screamed into that summer sunshine. Because that’s just who he was, wasn’t he? A six-year-old boy who only knew how to have fun, and who felt adventurous and safe under his big sister? Yes ... that’s how he should have felt that day. It was the first time their parents had let Jade take Coby with her on these neighbourhood bike rides. Great weather to be riding these bikes in. It wasn’t too hot but the perfect warmth, and the birds had been out and chirping and flying above their heads.
Trailing behind him, Jade had felt that sudden, beyond-level description of love. Love that—even though she already knew she loved him—was a different love. A big sister love. A protective love. That love which meant I’ll do anything for him, and what else counts? And she would. If she still had that opportunity.
When her thoughts had run away and she was dazed at this sort of love feeling, her camera had caught Coby wobbling off too far to the left, and the next instant, he was in the middle of the road. And he was laughing. The camera showed a full and clear image of Coby throwing a last look over his shoulder and smiling that bright white innocent smile under the summer sunshine, and the yellow SpongeBob shirt he had been wearing flapped.
‘COBY, NOOOOOOOOOOO!’ Jade had screamed.
But it was too late.
A red Honda tore right through that bright yellow SpongeBob tee shirt of his, and his bike and body lay sprawled in the road.
He wasn’t moving. Even though his innocent eyes were still locked on hers. Coby wasn’t moving. In fact, the training wheels on his bike were still moving, a disturbing audio playing on that projector screen, and that smile of his had downturned into a frown. That frown told Jade all she needed to know, even twenty-three years later. It told her: You were supposed to be watching me, Jade. Jade, you were supposed to be my big sister.
Without a backward look Jade had run. She’d left her bike and camera in the grass, and her dying brother in the middle of the road, and as she ran, she’d heard the Honda’s engine revving up and leaving him. She hadn’t known what that term was back then, but the three words came perfectly to her now: hit-and-run. The red Honda had committed a crime but she had committed the worst crime because she had left him, she was supposed to be watching him, she hadn’t been there for him when he needed her the most, but she never stopped to think about him because all she knew how to do was to keep on running and when she came back home, that’s when she finally thought about him and when she had told her red-faced parents everything.
They hadn’t whupped her. Instead, they’d acted in a hurry and sprinted out the house. They hadn’t cried when they’d found Coby lying in the middle of the road like that, dislocated like that; shock took hold of them first. And the worst part was, they’d never found that Honda driver. They’d never found Coby’s killer. All he wanted to do was ride his bike in that great, bird-singing summer sunshine, ride his bike like his big sister, and the last thing he’d expected was for her to just leave him like that. They’d never found Coby’s killer.
So ... that made Jade the killer.
Coby had made that known plenty of times. The visions had started coming to her sixth-grade year. They only started at first with Coby appearing in her dreams, then Coby appearing when she swung on the swing set, then Coby appearing right by her teachers when they were in the middle of their lessons. And all the time Coby would be wearing that same downturned frown, that same SpongeBob tee shirt, bruised, bloody, and battered, saying:
‘You were supposed to be there for me, Jade. Why weren’t you watching me?’
Jade had to overstimulate herself. To shut him up. To forget about Coby. And ... what could a psychiatrist know? A doctor know? She couldn’t tell a medical professional that, especially John! They wouldn’t take her seriously. She had to keep to herself, just what she had been doing all her life: she had to run away from that responsibility.
‘That’s right. Just keep running away.’
Jade looked right. It was Coby.
Then she wiped her eyes, and Coby was gone.
I have to get out of here! she thought frantically. I can’t stay in a room like this!
She forced herself to look back at the projector screen, but it had changed. It was still from her fallen camera’s point of view, at the scene of the accident, but Coby’s body was moving now ... rising from the dead.... She didn’t remember things playing out like that....
There were a few seconds of slow, drawn-out suspense—and then, Coby was up, his eyes piercing right through Jade’s.
Jade’s heart sank a thousand feet.
The same SpongeBob tee shirt he was wearing glittered under the summer sunshine; but it was an awful contrast below the stretched-out frown on her brother’s face. Even if Coby had been mad at her, he wouldn’t have looked at her like that, with so much fury. Revenge.... His right shoulder pointed up at an odd, dislocated angle. When he moved, it was zombie-like.
With terrible, vengeful fury, dead Coby began to walk slowly toward Jade’s camera, and the next instant, he was stepping through the white wallpaper.
Jade cried out. It was something straight out of a horror movie like The Ring, where that one girl crawls toward the audience and ripples through the TV. Like that movie her dead brother was doing the impossible. Only this time, it was real.
In a flash the projector screen clicked off, and all there was was that blinding white wallpaper, closing in on her from all four sides of the room. And there was Coby, of course. Stretching his rotten arm out to put her in a chokehold.
Jade did what she had always been doing: she ran.
She ran to the opposite corner of the room, where the door was, tried the knob, which wouldn’t budge, and began to bang on it with wild fists.
‘Dr. Rutherford! John! GET ME OUT OF HERE!’
She went on with the useless banging until Coby’s hand fell calmly on her shoulder.
She jumped around.
Her foot kicked the dead thing squarely in its chest.
Coby fell backward from the blow, clutching its chest and coughing in spite of its deadness, and Jade ran past it, her heart the lead drummer for a marching band in her throat. Everything below her knees felt wobbly but the adrenaline only pumped her and she had to keep going.
She saw the heavy marble bookend in another corner of the room, but now it was a sword, a huge ancient iron sword with a curved handle and fire decorating its steel. Jade bent down and picked it up. The fire coursed through her veins like venom, jolting with a high almighty electrical feel; she felt so powerful with it in this all-white testing room. In fact, this felt like her battleground!
When Coby recovered, and stepped in front of her, it grinned.
‘Stay back!’ she ordered, jabbing the sword so it’d retreat a little. ‘I don’t want to hurt you! Stay back!’
‘Jade,’ Coby said. ‘What’s wrong? I’m your little brother. You can’t keep running.’
‘No!’ Jade said, ‘because you’re not real!’
Coby looked hurt, and a little lost. ‘Wow. All this time has passed and I’m not real enough for you, Jade? All this time since you left me in the road like that and I’m still not real enough for you? Is this not real enough for you?’
Coby snapped, and millions of Cobys began to flood the room. They were exact replicas of him crawling out of the ceiling and across the white wallpaper, where they had been waiting for her all along.
‘No,’ Jade said, and as soon as she saw them, the flaming iron sword almost fell from her hand. They had all landed on the floor at once by now, as if the first Coby had given them a cue, and when they charged it was at that moment that Jade had almost given up. There were simply too many of them.
Then she hopped forward and called out, thinking stupidly to herself, Why didn’t I just give up? and held up the flaming sword.
It was halfway down when she screamed.
They had tackled her before she’d gotten the chance, and now she was a falling figure landing flat on her back, the heavy iron sword being flung from her hands. She tossed and writhed, and stared into that dull white wallpaper which was now the home to millions of dead Cobys, and to them she screamed that they weren’t real but the millions of dead Cobys that were very much real trampled her, scratching her, biting her skin. And Jade Richardson, her last words in that all-white testing room went something like, ‘JOHN! DR. RUTHERFORD! WHY DIDN’T YOU JUST LISTEN TO MEEEEEEEEEE—’
But she couldn’t even finish that sentence because the millions of dead Cobys were clawing the inside of Jade’s mouth ... and Jade was gone.
Well, the screaming had been going on for quite some time, John Richardson noted, but the moment it broke off his skin crawled.
‘It’s time we go in there,’ John said, jumping from the couch. He eyed the hall to the testing room anxiously.
‘Just give it some time,’ Dr. Rutherford said, a pen and clipboard in his hands. ‘She hasn’t even been in the room thirty minutes yet. The first obvious phase for someone in such a condition as hers is panic. So, what is she doing? Panicking. And I imagine she’s realizing she can calm down now. Just take a seat, John.’
‘No.’ John’s eyes had grown wide and wild behind their sockets, and for the first time he was asking himself what had he done to his wife. He took his first step toward the hall, but not before turning back to Rutherford. ‘I don’t know why the hell I brought her here to you in the first place but she’s going to go crazy in there. She needs my help.’
‘John, just wait a minute—’
But John was already in the hall.
He took slow, hesitating steps toward the closed door, then realized he didn’t have the key. Dr. Rutherford rushed in shortly afterward with the key and placed a hand onto John’s shoulder. John cut him short before he could stop him.
‘Give it here,’ he said, without turning around. ‘That’s all I’m going to say. This is my wife in there we’re talking about.’
‘John, I’m not going to—’
‘Give me the key or I’m calling the cops. Then you can explain your experiment with white room torture to them.’
Dr. Rutherford looked slightly betrayed for a moment, then reluctantly handed John the golden key. He stood back and waited anticipatingly in the dark hall.
Without even giving an instant to second-guess himself, John jammed the golden key into the keyhole, twisted it left, heard the lock give way, twisted the knob, and pushed the door into the room.
John nearly fainted.
He was going to faint. He was one step into the room and he was going to faint. His wife—if his wife he could call her—was standing in the middle of the room where she had first been when he’d closed the door. The only difference was—she looked crazy. An animal look of hunger had corrupted her eyes, the lips below them twitching in an eager grimace of pure animal hate. Long red scratches had formed about her skin, her tee shirt and jeans were ripped up from curling long fingernails, blood was smeared about her mouth, she had been biting her lip. In a once-occupied hand which almost always held cell phones, there was now a bookend, a heavy white marble bookend, which John hadn’t even noticed was in the room. When Jade held this bookend up, she looked around the room—and grinned.
‘I really like what you’ve done with this white wallpaper, John.’
John fainted.
Dr. Rutherford remained frozen behind him, thinking: How the hell did I forget to take out that bookend? Everything else I made sure to get out the room, even pieces of hair, but how in the world did a huge marble bookend slip past my mind’s eye?
As these thoughts occupied the mental capacity in Rutherford’s starstruck brain, the heavy marble bookend flew from Jade Richardson’s grasp, and hit him square in the nose.
The next instant he was on the floor, and Jade was standing over him.
She dragged him back into the room, went out and got the heavy marble bookend, stepped back inside, closed the door, turned around.
Dr. Rutherford began to crawl for his life.
‘Wait ... please!’ he groaned, as Jade prowled toward him. ‘Please! I’ll do anything! I’ll get you out of this room! I’ll give you your phones back! Please! Anything, Mrs. Richardson!’
Jade. Richardson laughed an inhuman laugh. ‘I don’t want to leave this room.’
She went on prowling.
Dr. Rutherford crawled, and crawled, and crawled, but realized there was no point. At last he reached a corner of the room and gave up, and that was when Jade Richardson’s shadow loomed above him.
‘It’ll be all right,’ Jade said, and Dr. Rutherford hoped—but it was a false hope—that John would wake up behind her. ‘You’ve done me a favour. You’ve done yourself a favour. You’ve completed your experiment.’
‘Please,’ Rutherford murmured. ‘Please.’
There was the final, diminished echo of his last word please, and then the heavy marble bookend swung full force on his head.
How am I still alive? Rutherford thought comically.
The bookend swung full force again.
And again.
And again.
