Regan

By Shayna Krishnasamy

Former Title: The Grimly Queen.

From the author of the astonishing young adult novel Home comes a haunting tale of identities taken, lost and found, and an obsessive friendship between two young women who have everything to gain from one another and nothing to lose but themselves.

When a shy university sophomore begins to feel that her life is disintegrating around her, she's more than willing to accept glamorous Regan Lathie's offer of an escape - a room in her apartment, away from the campus. But only once she moves in does she understand the true height of Regan's status. As their friendship deepens and she is sucked further and further into Regan's world, she begins to see that being Regan Lathie, the girl everyone desires, isn't all it's cracked up to be, and coming back to herself might be the only way she can escape The Grimly Queen.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Shayna Krishnasamy
• Release date: Dec 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9780981335216

Book preview

Part 1

I have a nervous breakdown at the beginning of my second year, and I find it supremely disappointing. It begins quite suddenly on a rainy afternoon in October when my Ancient History professor mispronounces the word ostensibly. The lecture had been dull from the start—an extensive examination of the units and ranks of the Roman legion—and though the mistake is instantly registered in the back of my mind, it takes me a moment to surface from my note-taking haze and glance up. I lift pen from paper and pause expectantly as the professor squints at the ceiling, the pinky of his right hand taping off an invisible beat. His clothes (a short-sleeved button down and unflattering pleated pants) are wrinkled, and I briefly wonder if he slept in them. (This is the limit of my intellectual capacity mid-lesson. Any pause in the flow of talk leaves me suspended in thought, unable to move on without the lecturer’s guiding hand. I am at his mercy.) Biting on the cap of my pen, I watch curiously as the professor smoothes his mustache with thumb and forefinger, his eyes wandering to the rain pattering on the window, and (zeroing in on the crux of the matter now, the tiny action that changes me forever) skips over his linguistic error without a word.

It all happens in the space of ten seconds (hardly a blip on the radar of the other students, most of whom didn’t notice his mistake in the first place). As the professor’s even lecturing tone once again fills the room, I stare ahead in mild astonishment, still waiting for the embarrassed shrug, the mumbled correction that never came. Then, blinking away my puzzlement, I flip to the next page in my textbook, ready to refocus.

But I can’t.

This minor misstep of the teacher’s (Glen Hinkler, an assistant professor who will never get tenure) grabs my attention like nothing before. I become mesmerized by his quiet oratory quirks (the way he averts his eyes when he tells an off-colour joke, his continual incorrect use of the expression be that as it may). I begin to mentally chronicle each snafu, abandoning my class notes for this far more entrancing form of study.

It’s a project that extends into all my classes as I notice overbites and tendencies to exaggerate, hand gestures and facial tics (though no other professor ever captures me as completely as Glen, my angel in ill-fitting khakis). I continue to bring my books to class, to go through those familiar motions of opening notebooks and uncapping pens, but I never take a single note. I’ve found a new branch of learning, an uncharted territory of academic delights. I’ve never felt so stimulated, my mind alive, my attention riveted. Nothing else matters to me. Nothing comes close.

It lasts no more than a month. The spell breaks abruptly the day Glen comes to class with a cold, his usual drawl replaced by a nasally whine so discordant to my ears that I literally cringe. Slouched in my seat, I gape at the tissues littering his desk, the shake of his shoulders with each damp sneeze. What did I ever see in those beady eyes, that collapsing chin? What was I thinking?

Mortified that someone might see my disappointment (having already suffered the quizzical stares of my classmates as I sat, empty-handed and dreamy, as they scribbled), I grab a pen with trembling fingers and grope for the first line, desperate to throw myself back into old patterns, to feel safe, to feel right.

But again, it’s no good. Unable to stand the sound of Glen’s voice as he drones obscenely about the Second Macedonian War, I stare at the empty page as the slow minutes pass, completely disoriented. All around me the other students are absorbed in the lesson, and I watch them with envy, a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. Twenty minutes before the end of class, when I can take it no more, I grab my things and stagger for the exit.

It’s the same in every class. My hypnosis lifted, I find that my courses (Chinese Buddhism, Macroeconomics I, 19th Century British Prose), so painstakingly chosen only a month before, can no longer hold my attention. I’m distracted, foggy, unable to grasp even the simplest of concepts. I fall into a perpetual state of mourning for the loss of something that was (though never important) everything to me, ever so briefly.

I unravel at a steady unassuming pace. Overnight I develop an aversion to the very campus I once loved (its rolling lawns dipping before me, daunting and impossible to cross). Studying, once my all-time favourite activity, becomes more and more of an impossibility as my eyes refuse to focus on the notes, my fingers fidgeting at the pages until they tear. My disintegration is so silent, so private, that its addition to my life makes me even less interesting than I was. (And that’s saying something.)

I take to spending my days exploring the city, a world beyond the university, where I can grieve without drawing attention. I hop on strange buses and ride them for hours, spending whole nights trying to find my way back. I go to movies one after another in distant parts of town, gorging myself on theatre popcorn and soda until an usher asks me if I’m trying to make myself sick. Incapable of concentration on anything of value, I revel in nothingness, in doing and being nothing (whole hours dedicated to sitting, staring, whole days given over to stillness). I stop eating proper meals, stop showering, stop thinking altogether. I truly believe that if I try hard enough I can make myself cease to exist.

My roommate doesn’t find it amusing. It doesn’t help that Simon, my ex-boyfriend, is stalking me at the time. He leaves long rambling notes of love on the dry-erase board on our door as I finally take to my bed, leaving the room only to snack and pee. It’s left to Trina, the roommate, to deal with Simon, and frankly she’s had it up to here with his sonnets mumbled into the answering machine, his wilted flower bouquets left hanging, as though murdered, from the doorknob.

Squinting through a fog of sleep, I try with all my might to see her point of view. Simon is lanky, freckled, and exasperatingly persistent, all qualities that could easily rub five foot two, foul-mouthed, rugby-playing Trina the wrong way. And it is a little irritating that Simon only fell in love with me after I caught him making out with the brunette at the pizza place, which he accused me of forcing him to because of my needyishness (a word he once made up during a fight, along with fuckabitch and snobockery).

I tell Trina to have a