Page 15 of Haunt Me

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The school wants to call my family because of my panic attack.

I say it was no big deal and to call no one.

Inside, I think:Who are you going to call? My brother has been having much more serious panic attacks. My mom is grieving and let’s just put it this way: I will murder with my bare hands anyone who dares put an ounce of additional emotional burden on her right now. Including any of my professors. Including myself and my stupid panic attacks.

So who are you going to call?

But I don’t say any of it out loud, so they call home, and in two hours, my grandpa shows up.

What fresh hell.

“Hi, Grandpa,” I greet him.

He smiles, but it comes out as a wince.

“Is mom ok?” I ask Grandpa.

Grandpa folds his tall body on a chair at the principal’s office and I do the same. We have the same height, him and me; we are a few inches taller than my dad. James is slightly taller. It’s as if he’s doing it on purpose—then again, he’s always been an ass, so maybe heisdoing it on purpose.

“She’s fine, son,” Grandpa says. He’s lying. There’s been a lot of that going on lately. But what are we going to say? The truth? “I thought… I thought I’d better come here myself to see what all the fuss was about.”

Grandpa has been staying at our house since the night Dad, his son, died. I don’t know when or how he moved his stuff over from Maine; he’s never once been away from us. Now that James and I are finally back at our respective schools and away from home, I thought Grandpa would move back home. But he didn’t.

“I’ll stay on, Zay,” he says softly, as if he can read my thoughts. “I’ll stay in Boston, even after your mom leaves for her tour.”

If.If she leaves for her tour.

How will she go on tour without him?

How will she play her cello when she can’t stop crying?

“You don’t have to do that, sir,” I try to say past the lump in my throat. “I’m fine.”

“That’s not what they told your mom on the phone,” he says, looking at me carefully. He will never ask me directly about the panic attack. But his eyes… Deep blue, just like my dad’s, just like my own, are seeing everything. He sees me.

He can tell.

“I’m fine,” I tell him quickly. “I really am.”

“Are you going to apply for any schools?” he asks me, changing the subject.

But I know him. He’s not changing it. He’s continuing it. He’s asking me if I’m ok enough apply to Harvard. I swallow. I twitch and sit cross-legged on the leather chair of the principal’s office.

“Harvard,” I choke out. “It’s always been the plan.”

“Well,” he says slowly. Grandpa has always been a man of few words. I don’t remember my grandmother a lot—she died when I was two—but my dad used to say that she was super talkative and loud, like Dad, and Grandpa was the quiet force she would lean on. But I’ve only known him like this. Always a little too serious, a little too sad, a little too quiet. Reliable.

Kind of exactly like James, if you add arrogance to the mix.

But Grandpa isn’t arrogant. He’s smart and he’s strong.

“Would you consider applying to another Ivy? Yale?”

I purse my lips. “Sure, I’ll try for any Ivy I can,” I reply, “but as far as my grades go, I can get into Harvard.”

“Maybe it would help you to live somewhere away from Massachusetts for a bit,” he says.

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