“Well, anyway, I have a satellite phone,” said Blond Girl. Curls blinked heavily and shifted her jaw back and forth.
“Early arrivals need to check in with Ms. Perkins. Housemaster.” Curls pointed up to the top of the building with the whipping flag.
“On the roof?” I asked.
Curls cocked her head to the side and pulled her lips into a hideous grin. “Oh look, a funny one.”
And then they left.
I dragged my luggage into the building on the right. A dorm, I guess. But for the money my parents were spending, I expected a little more. Automatic doors instead of the heavy wooden ones that creaked when they opened. Fancy artwork instead of wood-paneled walls. For Christ’s sake, the lobby didn’t even have a television. Just a handful of couches tossed haphazardly around the room. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a moose head mounted on the wall.
Through the window on a thick wooden door, I saw a hallway stretch down to my left, door after door after door. Like some asylum. There was a staircase at the back of the lounge, wall sconces illuminating the way up and down.
I left my bags and went up, my flip-flops slapping at the steps. The stairs ended at the third floor with a single door.
A woman not much older than me in sweats and a ponytail answered when I knocked, looked me over, and pushed her glasses up onto her nose. “You must be Mallory,” she said, with no inflection to her voice whatsoever. I must’ve look surprised that she knew who I was, because she said, “Your father spoke with the dean of students earlier today.” Then she nodded and said, “Very well then,” like she was playing some part and going back to her script. She pulled a blue stretchy bracelet with a key attached off the table along the entrance wall. “Room 102. Do you have a laptop?”
Was I supposed to have a laptop? “No.”
“You’ll get one tomorrow during orientation. And the cellular service is appalling. There’s a pay phone in the hall and vending machines in the basement. The cafeteria doesn’t open until tomorrow, I’m afraid.”
I slipped the key bracelet onto my wrist.
“If you need anything, don’t hesitate to ask.” And yet, as she said it, she slowly closed the door in my face.
My steps echoed throughout the stairwell as I descended. Fresh start, like hell. Like this place could be anyone’s fresh start. Full of snotty people and arrogant buildings and way too many trees. God, there were so many freaking trees.
I entered the barren lobby, void of all sound except the low hum of electricity buzzing from the lights, and I felt it.
It. Him. Here, hundreds of miles from home. Here, in this emptiness. It was here, like a suffocating fullness to the room, humming along with the electricity.
I didn’t understand. There was no reason for his soul or presence or whatever to be here. He’d probably never set foot here in his life. This place meant nothing to him—to us.
And then I backed slowly into the stairwell again. Because I realized that whatever it was—a ghost, a soul, a ripple in the atmosphere—it wasn’t tied to my kitchen. It was tied to me.
I took shallow breaths so nothing could really register in the pit of my gut. Colleen. I needed Colleen. I stumbled down the last flight of stairs, and I kept casting glances over my shoulder but there was nothing there. Except every time I turned back around, I felt something, or this almost something, pressed up against my back, mirroring my every movement as I scampered down the hall past the vending machines.
But every time I looked there was nothing, like it was in my blind spot. Just out of sight. But there.
I ran into the laundry room, where everything smelled like dryer sheets and felt like excess heat, and that muffled the feeling a little, though it was still there.
Everything was coin operated. I ran my bills through the coin machine until my bag was half full of quarters because I had no idea how much it cost to call New Jersey from the middle of nowhere, and the sound of the money sloshing around made me feel a little better, for no reason at all, really.
But not that much better because my hands were still shaking when I inserted half the contents of my purse into the pay phone upstairs. And that feeling was practically on top of me, like someone was pressed up against my back, eyes on the back of my head, arms at my sides, deciding what to do.
The phone rang three times and Colleen picked up, breathy and quiet. “Hello?” she said. And the feeling retreated for the moment.
“Colleen?”
“Oh my God, Mallory?”
“In the flesh. Well, not really.”
“What the crap? Caller ID said unknown caller, New Hampshire. You’re already there?”
“Yes. And I’m on a pay phone in my dorm. A pay phone!”
“They still make those?”
“Are you ungrounded?”
“No.” Her voice dropped lower. “The parental unit is in the shower. Was in the shower.”
“Colleen?” a voice in the background asked.
“Shit. Okay, give me the number. I’ll call it when I can.”
I found the numbers on top of the keypad. “603-555—”
“Colleen Elizabeth, hang up this instant.”
“One sec, Ma. Okay, 603-555 . . . ?”
“23—” And then I heard a dial tone. I listened to the tone for a minute, willing the numbers across the connection.
I went back to the lounge and grabbed my luggage. The feeling was gone. All that was left was me and my luggage and the faint hum of electricity. I pulled my bags down the hall to room 102—the corner room, next to a secondary staircase, narrow and dark. I let myself into my room and I swear I could smell concrete. Because that’s all there was. White walls, two standard-issue twin beds with white linens that blended into the background. White on white, just like home. Minus the home part. There were desks in each corner, a light oak. But with the poor lighting, they almost looked the same color as the rest of the room.
I opened the closet door and found a low dresser shoved into the bottom. Brown and worn. Like the unseemly stuff was hidden from sight here.
I turned on the overhead light, but it was yellow and dim. So I flung open the shades, but the room faced the woods. And all that was out there now were dark shadows against a darker sky. So I propped the door to my room open with my bag and let the fluorescent light from the hall shine in. And even after I didn’t need the light anymore, I kept the door open, waiting for Colleen to call back. It didn’t matter that I couldn’t get the number to her. She’d figure it out.
I knew she’d find me.
She could always find me.
She found me that night, when Brian died. When the cops couldn’t find me, when my parents couldn’t find me. After I’d run. After.
I heard her steps splashing toward me, over the sound of the rain falling into the ocean, where I sat in a few inches of dark water, seaweed, plastic bottles, and remnants of blood.
“Mallory,” she called before she was really close enough to know it was me.
But of course it was me. The first time we hid here was in eighth grade, when Colleen’s mom wouldn’t let her date a boy in high school. We’d camped out under the boardwalk, which was not at all romantic but kind of foul, so we moved back home and Colleen learned to sneak out her bedroom window instead.
“Mallory.” She crouched in front of me. “Oh God, Mallory, I’m sorry,” she said, but I still wasn’t looking at her.
I felt her arm reach under my knees and she grunted as she tried to lift me, but instead she sunk down, tangled up in me. She wrapped her arms around me and said, “You need to stand up.” But the only thing I needed to do was sink farther into the wet sand under the murky water.
There was a shrill ringing down the hall. A second later, I heard it again. Colleen. I ran out of my room and down the hall and skidded to a stop at the pay phone. “Hello?”
“Mallory.” Not Colleen. My father. I plopped in the plastic chair beside the phone.
“Yes.”
“You shouldn’t have left. How could you just leave like that?”