17 & Gone(33)

Even though I’d willed it to happen, it startled me. I jumped backward and almost took out a sink.

She was in that stall—or something was. An entity without visible feet was trying to communicate with me. To let me know she didn’t mean to do . . .

whatever it was she did.

I could sense her inside, willing me closer. I didn’t speak, and she didn’t speak, and when I took two steps in her direction, a foot could be seen dropping down, finding floor. A scuffed snow boot, once pale blue but dirtied and streaked with soot. A second boot followed, more blackened than the first.

Time distended into one long, unbreakable moment that broke anyway when the girls’ room door banged open, slamming against the wall, and a group of three freshmen clattered in, crowding me.

At the same time, the door, third from the right, slowly swung itself open, creaking as it went, revealing an empty stall. No soot-covered snow boots. No girl.

The freshmen tittered a little, bowing their heads and not making eye contact— as freshmen do around upperclassmen and I don’t even know why—and then one of them got brave and spoke up. She was the smallest of the three, brown glowing skin and shiny dark hair held tight against her head with two yellow clips, and she said, “You cut off all your hair.” She flushed when I turned and looked at her, but still stared at my head.

“Rain!” one of her friends said, admonishing her.

“I like it,” Rain said, ignoring her two friends but talking so fast it could barely be made out. “I mean it brings out your eyes or, I don’t know, something.”

“Thanks,” I said. This was the same girl who’d bothered me in the library, but now I had my eyes on the stall. I had my heart lodged in my throat and a whisper of a voice in my ear. The voice wasn’t Fiona Burke’s; it didn’t snap at me, it wasn’t cruel. And it wasn’t Abby —she was staying quiet, giving this new girl a turn to speak. It was Natalie Montesano, whose face had lodged itself over mine just that morning. I was hearing voices, seeing phantom feet. I didn’t care what some freshman thought of my haircut.

“I’m Rain,” she said patiently. “We used to be on the same bus? You look —”

“You should go,” I said. I almost growled it, and I don’t know why it came out that way, like I was one of those bullies who’d demand lunch money or an iPhone and humiliate someone simply because she was younger than me. I fit the part, maybe today, with my asymmetrical haircut that toughened up the angles of my face and my red eyes from the thrashing I’d done in my sleep and the insistence, the deep need, to be alone again because someone was trying to tell me something important.

“Oh, okay,” Rain said, lowering her head.

“The sink’s broken in the art room, so we just needed to fill this up,” another freshman said, and I noticed now that she was carrying a bucket. “Ms. Raicht said we could. She told us to come in here. She said . . .”

“Just do it,” I said, like I ruled the girls’ room and commanded the sinks, “and hurry up.”

They filled the bucket quickly and were heading out the door when Rain turned back and held it open, pausing to say this to me: “Are you feeling okay?

You look like you’ve seen a ghost or something.”

I looked her in the eyes for the first time and wondered if she might be able to see the girl in the stall, too. If I pointed her out.

Then she said, “I had the flu over break and I was so dizzy and I puked and everything. Do you need me to take you to the nurse?”

I was about to tell her I was fine and she should leave me alone when a person shoved past her into the bathroom and said, “Someone said you were up here. Nice haircut.”

Jamie walked in and leaned up against the far sink.

“You’re not allowed in here,” Rain said to him. “You’ll get in trouble.”

Jamie glanced at her, then said to me: “Who is this girl?”

“Nobody.” It was true. She wasn’t even close to sixteen yet, let alone 17, so I didn’t have to bother about worrying over her. I was staring right at her and blanking on her name.

It took her a few moments to sense that she should leave. The door slammed closed, and Jamie stepped closer, as if we were alone, but we weren’t. It was impossible now to be alone with me because I was always being followed.

He stepped close to me, and then I stepped away, and I think that’s when it began to dawn on him.

“Didn’t you see me downstairs?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I admitted, not able to keep it up anymore, not now that the visions were multiplying, now that there were three girls.

“So you’re avoiding me?”

I shrugged. I felt my shoulders make the motion, and I didn’t do a thing to stop them.

“What’s gotten into you?” he said, just coming out with it. “Are you into someone else? Is that it? Who is it?”

“It’s no one. It’s not that.”

“So what is it then?” I now realized we were having “the talk,” and that I wasn’t going to get away with avoiding it today.

He’d retreated back to lean against the sinks. His arms were crossed over his narrow chest and his thick, dark hair was curling down over one of his eyes.

He didn’t reach up to move it away.