The silence was still too oppressive to break. Dad poured what had to be at least six scrambled eggs into the sizzling pan, and I noticed his coffee cup was empty. I couldn’t seem to force myself to speak, so I just grabbed the cup and refilled it for him. As peace offerings went, it wasn’t much, but I figured it was better than nothing.
“Thanks,” he said with a gruff nod.
At least he was willing to speak to me—and make me eggs, because although he was a big eater, I knew all those eggs in the pan weren’t only for him. I tried to think of a way to apologize for the things I’d said last night. Especially the accusations that he had neglected his family in favor of his career—a favorite refrain of my mom’s, even though it was a case of the pot calling the kettle black.
In the end, I swallowed all the inadequate words I came up with. I believe that words have power—as I’d proven the night before, when I’d wounded him with them—but sometimes they just aren’t enough.
“Do you want me to put on some toast?” I asked instead, vowing that when breakfast was over I would go into my solitary confinement with no complaints or delays.
* * *
Piper was waiting for me by my locker first thing Monday morning. It was a rare show of punctuality from her, but I was still too pissed off about our crappy excuse for a girls’ night out to be very impressed.
It wasn’t really Piper’s fault that our Saturday had been so miserable. Since she had no idea how I felt about Luke, she couldn’t have realized how unappealing being a third wheel on her date would be to me, and she really had gone out of her way to make sure I was included. She danced with me, and she made sure Luke danced with me, and I could hardly blame her for the fact that I’d hated the nightclub. How could she know I hated loud, overheated, overcrowded nightclubs when I hadn’t even known that myself? I should just chalk it all up to a learning experience and get over it.
Sometimes, Piper comes off as being totally oblivious to other people, but she was still capable of surprising me. I thought I’d done a pretty good job of hiding my feelings on Saturday night, but the first words out of her mouth when she saw me were, “I’m so sorry about how I acted at the club.”
I wanted to laugh it off, maybe pretend I didn’t know what she was talking about. In some ways, it felt almost ungrateful to complain. But after having spent all of Sunday shut up in my room with nothing to do but work on college applications—my dad hadn’t even let me out to do chores or walk Bob or anything—I was in too brittle a mood to manage it.
“Let’s just forget about it, okay?” I said, staring at the buttons on my coat as if I needed absolute concentration to get them open. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Piper lean against the bank of lockers, letting me know she planned on hanging around.
“I promised myself I’d stop at two beers,” she said. “I should have remembered that once I get a couple of beers into me, I forget all about promises like that. It was selfish and stupid and words can’t describe how sorry I am.”
There was an unfamiliar hitch in her voice that made me look up and meet her eyes. She wasn’t crying, but the remorse on her face was so genuine I couldn’t help but believe it.
I won’t say the anger went away, but its intensity lessened. There were so many other things I had hated about Saturday night, but at least Piper was apologizing for the one thing I could blame her for in good conscience. It was more than I’d expected to get from her.
“I’d suggest you try apologizing to my dad,” I said, “only I’m not sure getting within a mile of him would be a good survival strategy.”
She smiled tentatively. “Are you suggesting your dad doesn’t like me?”
“Shocking, I know.”
I took my coat off and shoved it in my locker. Piper frowned at me.
“You’re out of uniform,” she commented.
I groaned. Shit! “I was hoping no one would notice.”
Thanks to my stint in solitary confinement yesterday, I’d completely forgotten the one Sunday chore that absolutely had to be done: laundry. I hadn’t remembered until this morning, when I’d had to dig through my hamper in search of a uniform. I found a tunic that probably wouldn’t wrinkle if an elephant slept on it all night, but all of my button-down white shirts were a mess. I’d had to settle for a long sleeve white polo, hoping the tunic over the top would disguise its nonregulation placket.
“Maybe no one else will,” Piper said doubtfully.
But if Piper noticed, I would never get through the whole day without at least one of my teachers noticing. “Dad’s probably going to send me to military school if I get a detention on top of everything else.”
Piper eyed me appraisingly, cocking her head, then frowned and shrugged. “Don’t know if it’s going to work,” she said, more to herself than to me, “but might as well try.”
Without another word, she grabbed my arm and tugged me into the ladies’ room across the hall. Then she reached up and started unbuttoning her own shirt, which she’d paired with a uniform kilt that was probably at least an inch shorter than regulation. “Give me your shirt,” she ordered.
I should have had more coffee that morning. It took me a beat or two to realize she was planning to switch shirts with me.
“You don’t have to do that!” I quickly argued, once I figured it out.
“Of course I don’t have to,” she said. “But it’s the least I can do after getting you into trouble with your dad this weekend.”
“But you’ll get a detention for sure!” At least my tunic covered my placket and gave me an outside chance of getting away with it. There would be no hiding the fact that it was a polo shirt instead of a button-down if Piper wore it with her kilt.
Piper already had her shirt off and was handing it to me. “No one’s going to be shocked, disappointed, or pissed off if I get a detention. Can you say the same? Now come on and give me your shirt.”
I looked at her lean figure and then down at my own much more curvy one. “What are you, a size two or something?” I asked.
Piper waved the question off. “Just try it and see. If it doesn’t fit, it doesn’t fit.”
The thought of letting Piper take a detention in my place didn’t sit well with me, even though what she said made perfect sense. I’m not the kind of person who feels comfortable letting someone else take the blame for me. That didn’t stop me from pulling my tunic and shirt off over my head and taking the shirt she offered me. My dad was going to go ballistic if I came home with a detention, and I didn’t need any more drama at home.
Unfortunately, no amount of breath holding was going to make Piper’s shirt button over my boobs. Another half an inch or so of play and I might have made it, but as it was, there was no way.
“It’s the thought that counts,” I said as I handed the shirt back to Piper.
“Sorry, Becks,” she said. “I wish I could have helped make it right.”
I gave her a quick, impulsive hug. “You don’t have to make anything right. All is forgiven, okay?”
And it really was. My irritation had vanished as if it never existed. Piper wasn’t always an easy friend to have, but she was a good one. My life was richer for having her in it, even if my dad was incapable of seeing that.
“Maybe you’ll get lucky,” Piper said. “Maybe I’ll be the only one in the entire school who notices.”
“Maybe,” I agreed unconvincingly.
As it turned out, I was right not to be convinced. I didn’t even get past homeroom without getting the little pink slip of doom.
* * *
My school is small enough that it wasn’t worth having a detention period every day, so everyone got the joy of serving on Friday afternoons. Which sucked, because it meant I had the damn thing hanging over me for the whole week—and that didn’t exactly help the atmosphere at home. I don’t think my dad was capable of getting any more angry with me, but the detention helped prolong my stay in the doghouse. He didn’t force me to stay in my room anymore,
but I was still thoroughly grounded, with no phone, Internet, or TV privileges. And things always felt tense when we were in the room together.
It didn’t help that the city was experiencing a sudden and unexplained crime spree. There were more murders in that one week than there had been in the previous two months, and they weren’t confined to only the bad neighborhoods. Dad told me about some guy who was found floating in the fountain at Logan Circle, which felt uncomfortably close to where we lived. The crime spree meant he had to work even later hours than usual and that everyone was putting pressure on him to somehow fix it. I couldn’t really blame him for being grumpy, under the circumstances.
That didn’t make detention any more fun. There were five of us—four juniors and me, because apparently the seniors had been behaving themselves this week—sitting silent in that classroom, working on our homework or daydreaming. The teacher didn’t care what we did as long as it didn’t involve cell phones, tablets, or talking. Thanks to being grounded, I was already well ahead in my homework, so I decided to work on one of the many college essays I would have to write, grumbling to myself and wishing each application didn’t have a different essay question.
The weather had gotten warmer, the air just chilly now instead of freezing. As I worked on my essay and watched the sunlight fade as sunset approached, a bank of fog rolled in. For the millionth time, I wished my dad would get me a car, even if it was just some used clunker on its last legs. It was going to be almost completely dark by the time I got out of detention, and I knew from experience that the fog would be creepy as hell on this campus even in broad daylight. The streetlights were shaped to look like old-fashioned gas lanterns, and when there was fog, the damn things gave the place a Jack the Ripper vibe.
When detention was over, I hitched my backpack over one shoulder and set out into the fog, following the curve of the long driveway that led past the athletic fields to the school’s front gate. Several cars zipped by me as my fellow detainees were whisked home by their parents, and then there was nothing.
The fog was blocking out what little light was left from the setting sun, and I might as well have been walking through the campus at midnight. Thick as paste, it cut visibility to next to nothing. I knew I wasn’t alone on the campus—there were probably still teachers working, and the school’s beautiful Victorian main building even had faculty apartments for those who wanted the convenience of living close to work. But I couldn’t see anyone. I couldn’t even see the lights from any of the buildings. All I could see were those faux gaslights looming in the impenetrable fog.
It was actually kind of pretty, as long as you could convince yourself there wasn’t some serial killer lurking in the fog on the off chance a tempting victim wandered by. I laughed at the workings of my imagination, though I have to admit it was a little harder to shake off the silliness after my encounter in the alley.
I made it to the biggest of our athletic fields, which is situated at the bottom of a small hill and lined by weeping cherry trees that are breathtakingly beautiful in the spring. However, in the fog the bare branches added just that much more creepiness to the atmosphere. The heavy fog pooled at the base of the hill, making the athletic field invisible, so that it looked like the hill led into the abyss. I willed my imagination to take a break, but it had so much to work with it was having a blast.
Knowing I was being ridiculous, I nonetheless fished my keys out of my backpack. There was an air horn on the key ring, and I felt a little less vulnerable having it in my hand.
The field hockey team must have had a home game, because there was a full plastic trash barrel at the base of one of the cherry trees. Someone had knocked it over, and trash spewed onto the grass and sidewalk all around it. In other circumstances I might have set it upright again—though I’d have left it to someone else to put the trash back in—but tonight I was in too much of a hurry to get to the train station, where there would be other people in sight. I swerved to avoid the spill of empty Gatorade bottles and PowerBar wrappers on the sidewalk and kept right on moving.
I was only a few steps past when I heard a strange metallic crunching noise behind me. I hadn’t realized how eerily silent it was until that noise startled me into an embarrassing squeal. I looked behind me, but all I could see was the trash barrel and its contents. Nothing that would explain the noise. Then again, thanks to the stupid fog, someone could be standing ten feet away, and I wouldn’t have seen them.
I swallowed hard as my neck hair rose, and I was overcome with the same feeling of wrongness I’d felt when I’d started down that alley.
“It’s your imagination,” I reminded myself out loud.
A wisp of wind suddenly swirled through the fog, strong enough to roll one of the outlying plastic bottles back into the rest of the trash.
There shouldn’t have been any wind. Wind and fog don’t go together. And yet, another gust tugged on the edge of my coat as it blew past, swirling into the trash can and emptying the rest of its contents onto the sidewalk and the grassy hillside.
I blinked, knowing it was impossible for wind to act like that. And yet the visual evidence was right there in front of me. Three crushed aluminum cans. More food wrappers. A torn Ace bandage. A broken pencil. An apple core, brown and disgusting, along with desiccated orange peels and a half-eaten banana black with rot.
Wrong, wrong, wrong, my inner alarm screamed.
The wind kept gusting, first into my face, then from behind me, then swirling, and with each gust the trash moved—but didn’t blow away.
A shape started to emerge from the trash. A head. A torso. Two arms, two legs.
Not possible.
I stood frozen and staring, trying to convince myself I wasn’t seeing what I was seeing. It was just darkness and fog and the memory of what had happened in that alley working together to make my mind play tricks on me. I willed the shape to go away, to become just a random pile of trash. I wanted to be able to laugh at myself for making something out of nothing.
And then the man-shaped pile of trash sat up, and I no longer cared if I was imagining things or having a nightmare or just hallucinating. Clutching the straps of my backpack close to me to keep it from thumping my back, I turned tail and ran into the fog, away from … whatever that was.
My pulse was pounding in my ears, but it wasn’t loud enough to drown out the strange rustling and clanking noises behind me. A quick glance over my shoulder revealed a shadowy, fog-blurred figure loping toward me in a ground-eating stride. I faced front and put on more speed, my breath coming in frantic gasps while my mind revolted at the impossibility of what was happening.
This can’t be real, I told myself, but I kept running anyway, because it sure as hell felt real.
The school’s iron gates loomed in the fog ahead of me, and I sprinted for them. I still heard the rustling and clacking, but it didn’t seem to be as close as before. I wasn’t about to pause and check it out.
I made it through the gates but felt no temptation to slow down. Every instinct in my body screamed at me to run faster, even though my legs were burning and I couldn’t seem to get a full breath into my lungs. I would be safe if I could make it to the train platform, where there were other people around.
A car drove by, and the fog was probably so thick the driver didn’t even see me. Which meant crossing the street without a careful look both ways was probably dangerous, but nothing was going to slow my legs down. I was relieved to make it across the street without becoming roadkill, but that relief was short-lived.
A figure suddenly appeared in the fog right in front of me. I screamed and tried to dodge around, but I was going too fast. I crashed into someone, who made a startled-sounding grunt and fell backward onto the sidewalk with me on top.
CHAPTER SIX
I was so panicked by what I’d seen—what I thought I’d seen—that my first assumption was that the trash creature had somehow gotten in front of me and cut me off. I lurched to my feet, expecting an attack,
but my brain finally kicked in and saw that the figure lying on the pavement in front of me was not made of trash.
He looked to be around my age, maybe a little older. He propped himself up on his elbows on the pavement, blinking startlingly green eyes and shaking his head as if groggy. I’d crashed into him really hard. I was going to have bruises from the impact tomorrow, but he’d probably gotten the worst of it, since I’d ended up on top. He put his hand to the back of his head, running his fingers over his short black hair, most likely searching for blood.
I was now rational enough to recognize that I’d crashed into a normal human being, not a monster made of trash, but I still had plenty of adrenaline coursing through my veins. Under my coat I was drenched in fear sweat, and my heart was hammering.
I looked behind me, straining my ears for the distinctive rustling sound the trash man had made as it chased me, but there was no sign of movement in the fog. That gut-clenching sense of wrongness was gone too. I kept watch on the area in my peripheral vision as I turned back to the boy I’d knocked over, feeling like a complete idiot.
There was no monster made of trash chasing me. A short laugh—half hysteria, half relief—escaped me before I could cut it off. It had been my imagination after all.
Oh yeah? whispered an insidious voice in my mind. Why don’t you just stroll on back there and give that trash can another look then?
No way in hell.
I didn’t want to imagine what color my face was when I met the green gaze of the boy I’d knocked over. He’d stopped patting his head in search of injuries, and he didn’t look groggy or woozy or anything. If his head had hit the pavement when we fell, it probably hadn’t hit that hard. At least that’s what I tried to tell myself.
“I am so, so sorry,” I said, wondering if I’d rather face the trash man than this particularly awkward moment. Now that I’d gotten a real good look at him, I could see that the guy was drop-dead gorgeous. Like actor or boy band lead singer gorgeous. Those eyes of his were almost too green to be real, and although he was wearing a leather bomber jacket, it was open and revealed a faded T-shirt hiked up enough to give me a glimpse of washboard abs.