He’s studying me, and I hurry on to say, “I’m sorry. I had a long day. I didn’t mean to bother you,” and then I start toward the front doors.
“Those are locked,” Owen says. “You’ll need to use the rear ones.”
I nod and head for the back doors. Or I hope that’s where I’m heading. The school isn’t laid out in a simple rectangle. I don’t dare ask Owen for directions – I’ve pestered him enough. I passed the rear doors earlier today. Now if I can remember how to get there from here…
Down one hall. Around a corner.
I hear footsteps. I stop. They stop.
I continue on. So do the footfalls.
“Owen?” I call.
No answer. Again the footsteps stop when I do.
Maybe because they’re actually mine, echoing through the empty building?
Speaking of paranoid…
I shake my head and keep going. Around another corner, and I’m certain the exit is right ahead. It’s not.
I turn, and my shoes squeak, and under that squeak, I hear a voice.
“Hello?” I say.
No answer. I head toward the voice. When I can make out words, the hairs on my neck rise.
“What’s she even doing back here? Isn’t there a law against that?”
“There should be.”
“Lana Brighton is starting a petition, saying it’s disrespectful to the families and friends of the dead kids to have her here.”
“Where is it? I’ll sign.”
It’s the same thing the girls said in the bathroom. Word for word.
It even sounds like their voices.
That’s not possible. It must be different girls talking about the same petition.
I keep moving toward the voices, but they’ve stopped now. So have the footfalls. Then, as I’m about to go, I hear them again… coming from the opposite direction.
“What’s she even doing back here? Isn’t there a law against that?”
“There should be.”
I squeeze my eyes shut and take deep breaths.
I’m stressed and imagining things. I must be. I never have before, but I don’t know of any other explanation.
And the doorstop?
When I think of that, I start trembling. I can accept that I imagined voices, but to imagine that I was locked in the office? That I hallucinated a doorstop that I’d held in my hand?
I break into a jog, my shoes echoing through the corridors.
Jesse
Jesse stands outside the school doors, waiting for Skye. He’s going to talk to her. He needs to, even if he has no idea what to say. He stands slumped against the wall, hood pulled over his eyes, hands in his pockets.
He never used to be able to stand around doing nothing. When he was little, his parents would buy him math puzzle books for even short car rides.
“You know that’s weird, right?” Jamil would say when their parents couldn’t hear. “No one does math for fun. Only freaks.”
“That’s not no one, then, is it?” he’d say, and Jamil would scowl and mutter “Freak,” and Jesse would ignore him, because if being a freak meant he wasn’t like his brother, that was fine by him.
Skye used to sit and stare at nothing. Except she was doing something. She was thinking. Imagining. Creating. Jesse would sit and watch her, and that was as close as he ever came to doing nothing. Except he was doing something, too. Waiting and wondering what she was thinking, marveling at the fact that she could be so busy while sitting so still, her face lighting in a smile or falling in a frown, both too faint to notice if you didn’t know her. Jesse knew her.
The moment she snapped from her reverie, he’d be ready with a casual “What were you thinking about?” and she would smile at him – that smile that made his heart beat faster – and she’d tell him. Whatever crazy, wild story she’d been creating for her own amusement, passing downtime like he did with his puzzles. She would share it with him.
Jesse rubs his face. Skye isn’t that girl now. She probably never was, except in his head.
But whatever Skye was – or is – she doesn’t deserve what she got at school today. He saw her face when she ran from class, and he realized he’d done that and felt like crap. That’s what he’ll tell her now. Apologize for making her feel bad… and then get the hell out of here.
Which will be a whole lot easier if she actually shows up. He checks his watch. Her detention should have ended a while ago. Did she leave through the back?
Or did she see him and duck through the back?
“Yo, Mandal,” a voice calls.
Jesse hunkers down, shoulders raised, one heel against the brickwork. Between the stance and the lowered hood, the message should be clear. Leave me alone.
Three guys stop in front of him. Seniors. That’s all he knows – he hasn’t been at RivCol long enough to put names to faces, and it’s not like he wants to anyway. He’s just putting in time until he graduates, and then…
Damned if he knows what happens then. It used to be so clear, his life laid out in perfect order. He’s blown that all to hell, and he doesn’t care. Hasn’t cared in a very long time.
“Yo, Mandal, you hear us talking to you?”
He lifts his hood, just enough so he doesn’t provoke them into a fight. He can’t afford that. His parents might pretend they sent him to RivCol for a “fresh start,” but it wasn’t like they had a choice. They were only grateful that Southfield agreed to go along with the fiction, keeping his expulsion a secret “out of consideration for his family’s tragedy.”
You can get a lotta mileage from a family tragedy, if it’s big enough and public enough. It’s the public part that does it – Southfield didn’t want the drama of expelling Jesse Mandal, the understandably troubled younger brother of poor Jamil.
“Mandal, I asked you —”
“Hey,” he says. And he nods. Because even being that troubled kid doesn’t erase who he was. He imagines Jamil sneering and saying, You can’t even be a proper badass, can you, freak?
Jesse’s greeting throws the seniors off-balance, but the biggest one bounces back with “Heard you won the track meet last week. Big track star, huh? Like your brother?”
Jamil didn’t do track. He thought it was for losers who couldn’t throw or catch or hit a ball. But Jesse doesn’t correct them. He just waits to see where this is going.
“My brother played football with yours,” the big guys says. “Want to know what he thought of him?”
Jesse remembers Vaughn tapping the trophy glass.
Fine boy. An all-around fine boy.
“Ben thought Jamil was an asshole,” the big guy says.
Then Ben was a fine boy himself, a fine judge of character.
Shame washes through Jesse as he thinks that.
When Jesse doesn’t respond, the big senior leans in. “He thought your dead brother was an asshole.”
“Okay.”
The senior glances at his friends for help. The red-haired one says, “Someone told me you’re Indian. If you want to pull that off, tell your mother to stop wearing a head scarf.”
“Bengali,” Jesse mutters, and he hates correcting them, but there’s still that kid inside him, who must patiently explain, as if people actually gave a damn.
“Bengali,” he says again. “My grandparents are from Bangladesh, which is beside India. I’m American. I was born here.”
“I’ve seen your mom’s head scarf, Mandal,” the big guy says. “You gonna tell me she’s just cold?”
“Half of Bengal is Muslim. My mother chooses to wear the hijab.”
“So you admit you’re Muslim?”
“I’ve never denied it.”
They look at each other. This conversation clearly isn’t going the way they expected. Jesse is new at RivCol, and he came with a rep for fighting, so they want to put him in his place. But they need to provoke him into throwing the first punch. That’s how it works. Whoever hits first is the instigator.
A few months ago, they might have gotten what they want. But Jesse has learned his lesson. When he hefts his backpack, the big guy steps in front of him.
“We want the new girl’s number,” Red Hair says.
Jesse tenses. “What?”
“The new girl. Raine or Sleet or Skye or whatever her hippie parents named her. We heard you and her go way back.”
The big guy snickers.
“No, I don’t have her number,” Jesse says.