17 & Gone(32)

I shrugged.

“All right,” she said. “We don’t have to talk about it. Just tell me one thing.

Should I be mad at him? Did he do something I should know about?”

“No,” I admitted. “It’s all me.”

She kept the judgment off her face, a skill she wouldn’t even need to practice for when she finished her psychology degree and became a therapist or a school counselor or whatever she decided to do after graduation. She stepped closer to me and reached out an arm to touch the nape of my neck, playing with the chopped pieces of hair back there. “Want me to even out the back a little for you?”

I nodded and let her keep touching me, even though every finger on my scalp and every brush against my neck felt wrong all of a sudden, weird. It wasn’t so much her. Again, it was me. All me.

My

skin

was

tightening

against

intrusions. My body was pulling in on itself like a knot tied over a knot tied over a knot that would never come undone.

It took my mom another ten minutes to fix my haircut, since she insisted on straightening out the sides and finessing the front. By the time she left the bathroom, my hair looked far more stylish than I felt, like I’d gone and gotten it cut on purpose for the first day back from winter break. But beneath the hair, the skin of my face had hardened to ice. I was alone again. At last.

I leaped across the bathroom and did the expected. It’s what you see in the movies when the heroine fears someone is hiding behind the closed shower curtain and pulls it aside in a panicked flurry . . . only to reveal an empty tub and no serial killer lurking with a glinting knife from the kitchen. The heroine will sigh in relief. She’ll laugh at her silly, overactive imagination, leave the room unharmed, and the scene will end.

But the difference was this: When I pulled aside the shower curtain, the tub wasn’t empty. Fiona Burke leaned against the far wall, her legs straddling the faucet, her glossy mouth in a small smirk.

Abby

Sinclair’s

feet—one

muddied and bare, one in a mangled flip-flop—were dirtying up the white bottom of the tub. And the newest girl, Natalie Montesano, was hiding behind a second curtain, but this one was made of her long hair.

I saw them for an extended moment, unable to react, as if my mind had been shoved full of socks. Then I blinked and the tub was empty and clean and the lost girls were gone and my mom was calling from the kitchen that I’d have to eat breakfast, now, or I’d be late for school.

— 23 — I saw Jamie when he got to school, but he didn’t see me. I had AP Lit first period, but when I caught a glimpse of Jamie’s

jacket—that

sludge-green

peacoat I gave him—and his dark mop of hair coming around the corner of the social-studies hallway, I took off up the stairs.

Seeing him, something caught in my throat. Regret maybe. Or confusion. I’d told my mom it was over, but we’d never officially broken up—at least, Jamie didn’t know I’d made it official.

Needing to get away from him, I made my way up the north stairwell—past another junior, who said, “Lauren, what happened to your hair?” and another who said, “It looks awesome!”—and into the safety of the north bathroom, in the hallway near the art classrooms, where I could close myself into a stall and breathe.

When I finally emerged and went to wash my hands, I realized I’d been followed. I was alone in the girls’ room, or thought I was alone, when I heard this:

I didn’t mean to do it.

That’s what I thought she said. Really what I heard were those whispered words slurred into one long word: Ididntmeantodoit.

I doubled back. I checked all the stalls until I came to the third one from the right, the only one that had its door fully closed. I pushed on this door and it didn’t swing open; it was locked from the inside. Most stalls in our school bathrooms didn’t lock anymore. The stall doors had to be held in place while someone was inside with an outstretched leg or a wildly reaching hand.

Here I was now, outside an impossibly locked stall door, reaching to open it.

The stall was as green as a lime left to grow mold in a fridge drawer. It was cold, not warm.

“Hello?” I said against it.

What I heard was . . . a hiss. The hissing wasn’t her breathing. I knew it was only the old radiators against the far wall, the spit of the steam heat.

I tried to push the stall door again, but it held in place. I bent down, but no feet poked out below.

I climbed the toilet in the neighboring stall and balanced up on the point of one toe, bracing myself against the shared wall, to dangle over. No one was hiding inside, though the toilet looked stopped up with paper. I assumed the stall was only locked because the toilet was out of order.

The last bell rang, meaning class had started already, and I should have been in my chair getting ready to discourse on Shakespeare. I hopped off the toilet and grabbed the backpack I’d left on the sink. I was almost at the exit when I heard the voice again. Heard it distinctly. Heard it in my ears and heard its echo through my bones.

Lauren, wait.

I did. The bell stopped ringing. Again I found myself edging closer to the third stall from the right.

“Natalie?” I said softly. “Is that you?”

It was then that she knocked in response. Her knuckles rapped from the inside of the stall in quick succession.