I nod to the laptop. “You want me to read?”
He considers it for a beat, then gives me a sheepish smile. “Yeah, if you don’t mind.”
I don’t remember when we started reading everything for each other, but I like looking over Andrew’s essays. I like feeling needed. As I settle into my corner of the couch, I feel Andrew’s gaze skirt over me. I turn to look at him. “What?”
He cracks a knuckle. “You seem on edge or something.”
A slick of sweat comes to my palms. Could he have heard us sneak out? “I didn’t sleep much last night.”
“Neither did Lauren,” Andrew says. “She didn’t even get up this morning.”
Ugh. I’m selfish and disgusting. I’ve been so busy obsessing about my friends being mad at me that I didn’t stop to think about Lauren—how scared she must have been when the roof caved in. In the middle of a séance, no less.
“I’ll read your essay later. I’m gonna go shower,” I say.
“Good. You stink.”
He says it to me all the time. It’s a running joke between us, what smells worse—his socks after a track meet, my clothes after a day standing around a bacon fryer—but as I turn to head down the hallway, I catch him watching me, still.
—
I’m not going to shower. I’m going to check on Lauren. I can’t get her face, frozen with fear, out of my mind.
That look on Lauren’s face: it wasn’t too different from the way her eyes went wide when I walked through the kitchen the day my father picked me up from the airport and first brought me here. Me, an urchin with punk hair and a busted lip, pale skin. I don’t blame her for being terrified. Because when people in Broken Falls heard that I was moving in with the Markhams, they had a lot to say about me.
They said that I was Russell Markham’s love child from some affair he had in college and he hadn’t even known about me.
That I’d been thrown out of my mom’s house in Rochester, New York, for being a druggie.
That I’d gotten my busted lower lip from a stint in juvie.
That Ashley was going to make me work at her café to earn my keep.
I know that people said all of this because Bailey told me, much later. Murmured in my ear in her isn’t-that-so-funny voice after we’d passed a bottle of Fireball between us at one of Tyrell Long’s bonfires.
None of the shit people were saying about me was true, but it still hurt the way the ones I actually shared blood with—Lauren, and my father—tiptoed around me like I was a ghost. A stranger with their DNA. Lauren took one look at me and ran out of the room.
I know she loves me now, but sometimes I think Lauren was the only one who saw me for what I really am: a stranger wherever I go. Someone with a look in their eyes you just can’t trust.
I was supposed to prove her wrong. Supposed to keep her safe.
I tamp down the guilt and climb the stairs. I still feel like an intruder going up them. My bedroom is on the first floor—converted from Ashley’s office, as if I didn’t feel guilty enough about moving in—and there’s a bathroom across the hall from my room. I don’t come up here unless Lauren invites me to watch a video on her laptop.
The door to her room is shut. There’s a whiteboard mounted on the outside. Scrawled across the top, in Lauren’s handwriting, it says: TODAY’S SEA CREATURE IS THE CLOWN FROGFISH. Beneath it is a smudged blob of a thing, drawn in yellow and red.
The date on the whiteboard tugs at me. Lauren hasn’t done a new drawing in four months. She’s wanted to be a marine biologist since she was a little kid; her love for bizarre sea creatures is exactly the sort of thing Keelie March would sneer at. It’s always made me sad, how showing enthusiasm for anything in eighth grade is supremely uncool. Like once you go through puberty you’re expected to be dead inside and not care about anything.
I raise my fist and knock. “Laur? Are you okay?”
Quiet. I knock again, harder, expecting to hear her whine about how tired she is and tell me to go away. I press an ear to her door. Nothing.
I open the door slowly and slip into her room; the lights are off, and Lauren is a lump on the bed. I step over piles of clothes, my bare foot snagging on something hard. My ankle goes sideways. I grunt and kick aside one of Lauren’s pointe shoes.
I give Lauren’s shoulder a shake. My eyes adjust to the dark; her face is half covered by her comforter and I move it aside. Her mouth is open slack, and she’s limp under my shaking.
My heartbeat stalls out. “Hey. Wake up.”
I put a hand to her chest—wait for the rise and fall. When it doesn’t come, I grab both her shoulders. I yell her name, my voice drowned out by my pulse pounding in my ears.
Footsteps and shouting from downstairs: Ashley, calling for me. My stomach goes into free fall at the same moment Lauren’s eyelids snap open. Her pupils fix on me, and she starts to scream.
“Get off!” The sound is guttural, as if she’s possessed. “Get her OFF ME!”
The bedroom door swings into the wall; Ashley bursts into the room. “What happened? What’s going on?”
I step backward, stumbling over the pointe shoe again. “I don’t know—”
Lauren scrambles backward on her bed, rattling the headboard. Her eyes still have that frantic look in them. When Ashley reaches for her, she starts sobbing. “Don’t hurt me!”
“Hey, hey.” Ashley wraps her arms around Lauren. “You’re dreaming. Shh. It’s okay. You’re okay.”
Lauren blinks. Her expression settles into surprise; she looks from Ashley, to me, to Andrew, now standing in her doorway. Her voice sounds small and far away, like it’s trapped inside a bell. “What happened?”
I swallow to clear my throat. “I think I scared you. When I tried to wake you up.”
Ashley rubs circles into Lauren’s back. “You can’t sleep all day, honey. No wonder you’re up at night.”
A light touch on my shoulder: Andrew. Let’s go.
Before I cross the threshold into the hall, I turn and look at Lauren, still burrowed into Ashley’s shoulder. Her eyes lock on me, her pupils enormous, as if she sees something that terrifies her.
CHAPTER THREE
Lauren won’t come down to eat once the takeout arrives—she insists she’s not hungry—and Andrew takes his food into his room so he can finish his scholarship essay.
I’m not too hungry either, but I don’t like to waste food. I plow through my pile of lo mein and tell Ashley I’m going to do homework.
“It’s Saturday,” she says, as if she’s embarrassed her children are such dorks.
“It won’t take long,” I say. “We can watch a movie when I’m done.”
I shove my leftovers in the fridge and duck into my room, where my cell phone is charging on my nightstand. My screen is still empty.
I sit cross-legged on my bed and inhale. It’s still early; Bailey and Jade won’t be leaving for the party until ten, at least. I suppress the itch in my fingers urging me to text Bailey and tell her about what happened with Lauren.