Take the Fall(13)

“Sonia?”

I blink.

Ms. Arehart crosses the room, brows knit with concern. Beyond her, all eyes rest on me.

My own hand grips my throat.

“It’s okay,” my teacher says. “Do you want someone to walk you to the nurse’s office?”

I open my mouth, turn, and run out the door.

The second-floor girls’ bathroom is just down the hall. I close myself in a stall and crouch over a toilet, shudder and gag, but all that comes up is grief. And guilt. Because once I’m brave enough to face myself alone in the scratched mirror, I have to admit I’m relieved it wasn’t me.

I hate myself for it.

As the pain in my ribs subsides, I wonder things I never used to think about . . . if events in the universe are predetermined . . . if I would be standing here today, alone, no matter what. Or if Friday could have gone differently.

Did it have to be one of us?

When the bell rings, I assume a sluggish pace all the way to my sunshine-yellow locker. Gretchen’s was in the purple row across the hall—I’m afraid if I look over there, I might not make it through the rest of the day. I spin my combination mechanically, adding it to the long list of things that feel lonely to do after your best friend is dead. When I look down the row to my right, I notice Reva Stone. She’s kneeling in front of her locker, shuffling notebooks, long earrings swaying under her short blue hair. She doesn’t seem to be paying any attention to me, but I keep looking at her and after a few moments she peers around the door and our eyes meet.

“Sorry for your loss,” she says.

I lift the latch of my locker, but don’t pull it open yet. “Thanks.”

“You know, Gretchen’s death bumps you up to salutatorian.” She stands. “I guess you’d better prepare a speech.”

I stare at her. Reva and Gretchen have hated each other since middle school, but this seems callous, even for her. “That would make you valedictorian. Guess you must be pretty pleased.”

“I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy.” Her eyes and voice are flat.

I shake my head. “You weren’t paying attention in Chamberlain’s class. Martin Luther King never actually said that.”

“Just offering my condolences.” She picks up her bag and heads down the hall.

My shoulders tense as she saunters away, but my mind immediately locks onto the possibility that Reva might’ve wanted Gretchen dead. She might’ve gladly attacked me too. I add her name to my growing list and turn back to my open locker, the tension in my heart shifting to a dismal ache. Gretchen decorated the inside last September. If it had been up to me, I might have just hung the mirror and dry-erase board, and been done with it, but she spent a ridiculous amount of time lining the door in pink and green construction paper, cutting out frames for pictures she printed of us, and spelling out my name in an acrostic:

Serious

Observant

Noble

Intelligent

Adorable

There are pictures of us on the ski trip to Vail her dad took us on, a couple shots from last Halloween—I was a black cat, she was a witch—and of course Gretchen’s favorite, a selfie she took on an ill-fated hiking trip last summer. In it, our faces are crushed so close together, if it weren’t for my dark eyebrows and her freckles, you’d barely be able to tell where she ended and I began. I made the worst face when she took the picture, so of course she stuck it prominently in the middle of my locker.

“You can’t use that one,” I’d said when she’d finished decorating and showed it to me.

“I can’t not use it. That was the best day ever.”

“We were lost for twelve hours in the wilderness. Did the dehydration affect your brain?”

She rolled her eyes. “Your memory is so selective.”

I tried to remember anything good about what was supposed to be a two-hour day hike up to some cave in the middle of nowhere. We forgot bug spray, ran out of trail mix after an hour, and managed to completely lose the trail. We never did find the cave. After five hours we gave up and hunkered down, waiting for someone to come looking for us. We built a shelter as the sun went down and tried to start a campfire. When that failed, I started to panic, but Gretchen stayed cool. It was her idea to tell spooky stories as a distraction. We scared the crap out of each other for hours. A ranger finally found us because we were laughing so hard he could hear us from Gretchen’s car. Apparently we were only half a mile from the parking lot.

I pull the photo down, staring at Gretchen grinning in full color, and my eyes brim over. I need her here, to reassure me now. As fresh tears spill down my cheeks a gentle hand touches my back and I open my eyes to find Aisha pulling down the rest of the pictures.

She pauses, waiting to make sure it’s okay. I reach out and pull another picture down, then another, and together we make a pile of my face sandwiched with Gretchen’s. When we’re done, I place them on the top shelf. Nearby, but out of sight.

“Thanks,” I say.

Aisha gives me a sympathetic nod. “You need to go home? Or can I walk you to class?”

I wipe my face in the now naked mirror. I really don’t feel up to the whispers and the gossip and the stares, but if I go home I’ll just be proving to my mother I can’t handle normal routine.

“I’ll be okay.”