The Dangerous Doors of Shannon Anderson

Chapter Twenty Three

It was a month before the second letter came - the letter I knew had to come because I hadn't offered up an explanation for my grades to NYU. But thanks to my doors and the start of summer, I'd almost been able to ignore this looming inevitability. Almost, but not quite, because as Jessa was getting ready to move to Bloomington (and freaking out per usual), Tucker was busy working as a waiter all day every day to save up money for the fall. So I was left alone most of the time, with plenty of reminders that things had not gone according to plan. But when you're spending half your time in New Switzerland and Oz and the Secret Garden, it's pretty easy to forget the bad stuff.

Dr. Rowe had been a weekly reminder of the bad stuff, but after four sessions it was obvious that I wasn't going to tell her anything I hadn't already told Dad (because if he didn't believe me she sure as hell wasn't going to), and being that I was eighteen, Dad couldn't force me to keep going. We did not mention this to Mom.

After that last appointment, Dad dropped me off at home before taking Aidan to baseball practice and going to the grocery store, and I ran up to my room to meet Fritz. I opened his book, but there was no door. Again.

I closed it and reopened it, but still nothing. What the hell?

I tossed The Swiss Family Robinson aside and with shaking hands tried Dracula instead, but not so much as a door knob appeared. I tried The Wizard of Oz. I tried The Complete Sherlock Holmes. I ran downstairs to Dad's den and tried a bunch of different books from his shelf. I even opened Pride and Prejudice, which I wouldn't have gone into anyway even if a door had appeared, but in the end I didn't have to worry about it. Nothing happened. What the hell, what the hell, what the hell?

I sat on the floor of my room for an hour, opening and closing books, chucking each one aside as they failed to produce an escape route. I refused to believe that my doors had sealed shut forever, or worse, that I really was nuts and I'd just imagined the whole thing as Dr. Rowe and my parents seemed to think.

After another half hour, palms sweaty from anxiety and the exertion of flipping through three thousand books, I tried War of the Worlds. A perfectly round metal door appeared next to my closet with metal tentacles protruding outward from it, wiggling like worms that had been flushed out of the ground during a storm.

"Yes!" I said in a victorious half-whisper. "Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes."

I scooted over to the door, the book still open in my hand. I ran a finger along the cool metal edge, making sure it was really there and I wasn't just hallucinating the thing. I touched one of the tentacles and it wrapped itself gently around my finger, like a welcoming little hug. I was pulling the tentacle to pull the door open just as Dad was coming in downstairs.

"Shannon, come help us carry this stuff, will you?"

I tried to free myself from the tentacle, but three of its friends had taken hold of my other fingers so that I couldn't pull my hand away from the door. The harder I pulled away, the tighter their grip became around my knuckles, like one of those Chinese finger traps my dentist used to give me as a cheap prize for behaving myself while the hygienist tortured me.