A Danger to Herself and Others(40)

No. I wouldn’t have forgotten. I would have remembered how greedy she was, taking Jonah when she had Matt back at home.

Selfish. Nothing like the girl who kept quiet so her baby sister could sleep.

Maybe Agnes enjoyed being someone else for the summer. Someone who didn’t have to babysit (she convinced her parents to let her go away for the summer because Cara was finally old enough to watch Lizzy), someone who hadn’t only kissed one boy (Lightfoot said Agnes and Matt had been together since seventh grade, surely Agnes hadn’t kissed anyone before that), someone whose best friend lived in New York City, whose boyfriend lived in Washington State, someone who was going to live someplace else someday.

I’d feel sorry for her if I wasn’t so angry at her.

“Why are you thinking about Agnes?” Lucy asks again.

“I think she might have kept a secret from me.”

“Everyone has secrets,” Lucy says, as though it’s no big deal. I picture her shrugging in the darkness.

“I thought she told me everything.”

I hear Lucy shift in her bed. The sheets in this place are so thin and cheap they crinkle when we move.

“Did you tell her everything?” Lucy asks. I don’t answer.

“I guess nobody tells anyone everything,” Lucy says finally. She makes it sound perfectly normal, as though the things we don’t tell each other aren’t actually secrets; they’re simply pieces of information we happen to leave out. Like accidents.

“I guess not,” I agree.





twenty-eight


Dr. Lightfoot makes a big deal of sitting down for our next session. I don’t mean she sits with a flourish, I mean she takes her time: unfolding the chair, lowering herself into it, crossing her legs at the ankles and then tucking them up beneath the chair, arranging her clipboard on her lap and reaching up to adjust her glasses. Then she must remember she’s not wearing glasses (patient may pose a danger to herself and others), she’s wearing contacts, so she blinks. She licks her lips and swallows.

Apparently my doctor has something to say that she suspects I’m not going to like. I can’t tell whether she’s taking her time telling me whatever it is because she’s dreading my reaction or because she’s savoring the moment, enjoying the fact that she knows something I don’t. I glance at Lucy, who’s watching all this from behind Lightfoot’s back. She winks at me as if to say, Who cares what Lightfoot says anyway?

I hate to admit it, but I care. I care because I need Lightfoot on my side whenever we finally meet with the judge.

The doctor begins. “The boy you mentioned yesterday—Jonah Wyatt?”

“What about him?”

“I reached out to Agnes’s parents last night, and they said they’d never heard of him.”

Jeez, that’s what all her fanfare was about? I mean, how stupid can Lightfoot be? Of course Agnes hid her relationship with Jonah from her parents. She was cheating on her all-American, parent-approved boyfriend back home. Who wouldn’t?

I shrug. “She’s keeping the relationship a secret.”

“Agnes is hardly in a position to keep secrets anymore,” Lightfoot points out. She reaches up to adjust her phantom glasses again.

I bite my lip. Actually, Agnes is in a perfect position to keep secrets now. If she never wakes up (has she woken up?), she’ll be able to keep all her secrets forever. Instead, I say, “I guess Agnes never told her parents about him.”

“That’s what I thought at first too, but then I reached out to a few other students who lived in the dorm with you both. None of them knew Jonah either. In fact, they all agreed that Agnes didn’t have a boyfriend here in California.”

“They’re protecting her. You know, because of her boyfriend back home. Matt.” Wait, but I didn’t know about Matt. (Did I? No. Right?) What are the odds that Agnes told the other kids in our dorm if she didn’t tell me?

“That would make sense,” Dr. Lightfoot says slowly, softly. Like she feels sorry for me. Like she’s building up to sharing something else she suspects I won’t want to hear. “Hannah, I requested the records from your summer program, and there was no Jonah Wyatt listed as living in your dormitory.”

“Maybe he lived in another dorm,” I suggest, even though I know perfectly well he didn’t. He lived right down the hall, on the boys’ side of the floor. That’s how they divided us: girls on one side, boys on the other. Someone told me that during the school year when the real college students live there, the dorm rooms alternate—boy, girl, boy, girl—but since we were all still in high school, they thought it’d be better to space us out more. Not that it kept anyone from bed-hopping.

“I thought the same thing, but then I searched further and discovered that there was no Jonah Wyatt registered for classes at the university this summer.”

“Maybe he was…” Maybe he was what? Auditing classes? Squatting?

Lightfoot nods sympathetically. (They probably taught her that in med school too.) “If Jonah was who you say he was, wouldn’t he have visited Agnes in the hospital by now?”

I shake my head. “Like you said, Agnes’s parents didn’t know about him. So they couldn’t have called to tell him what happened. And I didn’t have a chance to tell him myself before I was brought here either.”