“I don’t…really know what to say. I know what I’ve done…
and I want to fix things. But I don’t know what happens now.”
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“Well, now you’ve seen why you’re here. You should have seen, at least, an explanation for what has landed you here.”
“Where is ‘here?’” I knew I sounded desperate.
Anna shrugged. “Nowhere, everywhere, take your pick.
It doesn’t really have a name.” She gave a small laugh that I didn’t understand.
“Is it like limbo or something?” My heart skipped a beat as I remembered when my father had told me that the real meaning behind J. M. Barrie’s story of Peter Pan was that Neverland was purgatory. I’d always hated that thought. I liked it much better when it was just an adventure.
“In a way.”
“Please just tell me what I have to worry about.”
Anna considered me for a moment. “We’re deciding whether you’re going to go back to that life—” she tilted her head and smiled knowingly “—or not.”
My heart sank. They were deciding whether I was going to live or die. The scenes that had f lashed through my mind during those last few moments in the car were back.
The news of my demise.
The
funeral.
The headstone. It would have my name, and the years in which I’d been alive. The brief elapsed time that encompassed my entire existence. The drama, the friends, the makeup, Liam…
“Please, just wait!” The grenade was on the verge of exploding. “Anna, please, I think I know what might…happen here. And I just…I have to do something.”
“Tell me what you mean.” Anna sat back in her chair and waited for me to respond.
I scrambled to think of what I could do.
“Just…let me go back.”
Anna raised her eyebrows. I shook my head.
“Not, like, permanently or whatever. Just…I can’t leave all 1 8 3
of these people…” I looked at them “…all of you…them…to think this way. It’s not fair to them. I can’t take it all back, or undo what I did, but there must be something I can do.”
Anna paused. She looked slightly more intimidating than I’d originally thought her to be. “Why should we believe that you’d be able to do anything at all?”
“I—” My heartbeat quickened as I realized that I really might not get a second chance. I didn’t just get my way anymore. “Well, take Meredith, for example. She doesn’t think she’d be a good mother anymore, and that’s because of me.
Even if it was just a f leeting thought, she’s already been dis-couraged because of all the failed attempts. If I die—” my voice caught on the word. Death had always seemed such a foreign thing “—If I die and this is how we left things…I don’t know, I think she’d feel even worse. Maybe she’d even think that it was partially her fault. She managed to think the rest of it was, and it just wasn’t. It was all mine.”
I thought, with a stab of guilt, of my last thoughts behind the wheel. Part of me had actually hoped that Meredith would feel partially responsible.
Anna narrowed her eyes.
“What if she feels relieved?”
Her frankness felt like a cheap shot.
“She might.” I knew it was true. There was every chance that Meredith would feel less stress with me gone. I looked down to my lap. “But I have to try. With all of them. Closure, and all that.”
“And if we allow this…breach, you’ll fix what you can, and then come quietly?”
I nodded. “Yes.”
“We’ll have to discuss it.” She and the others stood swiftly, leaving their pads on the table, and walked into a room I was sure hadn’t been there before.
I don’t know how long they were gone, but it felt like a 1 8 4
P A I G E H A R B I S O N
very long time. I didn’t look at the pads, which were filled in now with a lot of things I couldn’t fully read from my seat. I saw my name, and yearned to see what Liam had written.
But I was acting with a conscience now. And I wouldn’t go read them.
Instead, I replayed everything I’d just seen in my mind. Tried to remember why I’d thought my actions were not entirely inconsiderate. Worried desperately about the things they were saying behind the door that had, once again, disappeared.
It was that feeling that happens at night when you’re trying to fall asleep but all you can think about is all of the things you need to do. You can’t do anything about them yet, and it helps nothing to think obsessively about it. Yet you can’t stop and relax.
When the six of them finally emerged from the room, my heart seemed to jump into my throat. I tried to look kind and as remorseful as I felt, though I was sure that the decision was made and that I couldn’t do anything about it.
They took their seats, and Anna looked at me.
“You have until midnight, at which point you will either have completed your task or not. You don’t get any help from…
elsewhere. The consequences of your actions are, as you’ve probably imagined, irrevocable. Do you understand?”
Yes, I understood. And I didn’t care what happened to me anymore. I just had to fix what I’d done to everyone else.
“Midnight,” she repeated firmly. “Then it’s over. Time’s up. Got it?”
I nodded at Anna, and the second I did so, I felt like I’d been hit in the head with a frying pan. My eyes shut, and I felt like my whole body was being squeezed through some sort of wringer.
C H A P T E R F O U R T E E N
The next thing I knew, I was in the bed at the nurse’s office.
I looked around me, and there was no one there. The clock on the wall said it was 12:45. I had eleven hours and fifteen minutes until midnight.
I got up from the leather bed and walked up to the front of the office.
“Ah, Miss Duke, better already?”
“Yes, I’m better.”
“Let’s get you on to class then. I’ll fill out a pass.”
I watched as she filled out the lines on the pink slip of paper.
When she finished, she handed it to me. “Here you go.”
“I’m sorry for all of the times I’ve come in here.”
“Excuse me?” She looked puzzled.
“Just…I’ve come in a lot, and I’m sorry. It’s annoying, I’m sure.”
I closed the door on her puzzled expression and ran to gym class, to the girls’ locker room. Once there, I made a beeline toward Michelle’s and my lockers.
I was only a few minutes late.
I took a deep breath before walking over to her. I didn’t know exactly how to go about this.
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“Hey,
Michelle!”
She turned, and looked tiredly at me.
“Hey.”
This was going to take work. “So,” I started, “we should do something this weekend. I haven’t really seen you one on one too much lately.”
“Oh, yeah. Okay.” She opened her locker and pulled out her gym shorts, looking warily at them as she did so. I pulled out mine, too.
“Did you know that my gym shorts are size extra large?”
I said, dialing the combination to my lock.
Michelle looked at me, and I nodded. “Yep. Last pair left.
And you know what’s bad? I’m able to wear them! But I mean, the gym clothes here run really small anyway.”
“You think?” Michelle’s voice sounded hesitantly hopeful.
I really hoped she kept being this easy to convince.
“Of course, yeah. Size small might as well read ‘six to eight months,’ it’s so tiny. But I mean, you probably didn’t notice that, you’re what, like a size triple zero?”
“Size two.” She said it sadly, like she was telling me that no, in fact, she wore size circus tent.
I cringed
at the idea that I’d contributed to that unhealthy attitude. “Same thing,” I said, my tone casual.
I wanted to wait a few minutes before starting my apology.
I wanted to be sure it didn’t look like what I’d said about the shorts was just a prelude to making myself feel better. Because, really, it wasn’t. The shorts really were ridiculously small for the most part.
We headed out to the track, where we were on our third week of running around it. There were different classes you could sign up for to qualify for a gym credit. This one had been called Dance but so far all we’d done was “become 1 8 7
strong young women, who will have the fortitude to become dancers.” The teacher had then reminded all of us that if we had really been interested in dance, we would have started in our early childhoods, and that we were too late anyway.
Michelle and I ambled behind the rest of the class at our usual pace.
“Hey, so, by the way,” I started, my heart beating hard, “I wanted to apologize to you.”
I looked straight ahead, but I could feel Michelle’s eyes shift to me.
“For
what?”
“Well, I was a bitch the other day when you tried to talk to me. I’m really bad with being told I’m wrong about things.”
“I didn’t say you were wrong about anything.”
“But I was, Michelle, I shouldn’t have ever made you feel bad about yourself. There’s nothing to feel bad about, for one thing, and for another…that’s crappy friend behavior on my part.”
Michelle stared at me. I hadn’t really noticed until that moment that we’d stopped moving. I looked at her, trying to look as sincere as I felt.
“Listen, when we were kids you were always the prettiest girl at school. Everyone loved you, and you were every guy’s first crush. I’ve always been jealous of the fact that you didn’t even have to do anything to get people to like you, and it hasn’t been fair how I’ve acted, but you’ve got to understand that any time I’ve ever said anything mean to you about your looks or anything else…it’s just because I’m totally jealous of you. And I’m just really sorry.”
“Bridget,” Michelle started, looking confused, “I don’t know exactly what I should say, I mean…since when?”
“Like, forever? Look, it’s just that I did hear you the other day when you said you were feeling insecure, and I just want 1 8 8
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to do anything I can to show you that you completely don’t need to be.”
She looked at me intently for a moment, before looking down at her tennis shoes.
“Bridget, there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you.”
I nodded encouragingly, hoping that she would confide in me.
“It’s kind of hard to say, I guess.” She looked at me. “But I just don’t think we can be friends anymore.”
My breath caught in my throat. I had no idea what to say.
I shouldn’t have been so surprised. She was just telling me what she’d probably been advised by any better friends to say sooner.
I remembered how she’d felt watching me at my party. It wasn’t quite admiration, and it wasn’t bitterness. It was more like an entirely objective observation. She had noticed how people felt about me, and she knew how people acted around me. Or used to. She knew about my effect on people, but it didn’t stretch to her.
I also realized that I really was used to things working out the way I wanted them to. It wasn’t that I asked for money and it rained from the skies or anything. Only that things usually went my way. If I needed a favor from someone, I usually got it. I’d been told no before, but it didn’t matter because I always knew I’d get a yes in the end.
But it wasn’t going to work this time. She wasn’t just going to accept my apology and say that she understood. We weren’t going to plop down on the grassy hill we stood on and talk about how to get her through her bulimia. There wouldn’t be any hand-holding. There wouldn’t be any crying. And it looked like there wouldn’t be any regret on Michelle’s end.
1 8 9
I nodded and stood there like my feet were planted in the ground, and she walked away, headed toward the track.
I looked up to see her running her hands through her hair, the way she did when she was confident. She wasn’t standing up with her stomach sucked in and her shoulders in a shrug.
She strode confidently across the field.
I smiled. Maybe I did get what I wanted.
After gym class, which had that awkward post-breakup feel that seemed to give me a taste of how the rest of the year would be if I were to be there, I went to the main office.
“I need to speak to the headmaster. Please.”
The secretary nodded, and picked up the phone. After a brief moment of lowering her tinny voice and looking in-discreetly in my direction, she told me to have a seat in the waiting room and he’d be with me momentarily.
I nodded and marched over to the chairs I was so accustomed to.
Sure enough, Vince, the guy who was always there, sat in his usual seat.
I drew in a deep breath, keeping the words How are you ever in class long enough to get in trouble in my mouth. I smiled curtly and sat down in the seat that I figured gave me the least eye contact with him.
“What’re y’in for?” he asked suddenly.
“Um. I just have to talk to Ransic about some stuff.” I looked at my hands quickly, wishing I’d brought a magazine, and then realized that the boardroom wasn’t exactly lousy with them.
“Gotcha.”
I bit my lip uncomfortably and decided to take another step toward being a more caring person.
“What about you? What are you, um, in for?”
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P A I G E H A R B I S O N
“Oh, I dunno, I f lipped over some kid’s lunch tray.” His voice was gruff, and he sounded almost exactly like my dad’s mechanic friend. He may as well have been saying, “Oh, I dunno, it’ll take y’a couple hundred, maybe a thou.”
“Why?”
“Dumbass walked right in fronna me.”
I thought for a moment of whether I should ask my next question. I decided I should. “So what?”
“So what?” He put his hands on his thighs and leaned toward me. “So what? I hate when people don’t watch where they’re goin’.”
I nodded, as if I understood, and pointed my gaze toward the wall to my left. I heard him chuckle, and turned back to look at him. “What?”
“Well, I dunno, I guess I just think it’s funny. You. Me.”
I let out a derisive snort. “What about—” I hesitated, not wanting to use the word us “—you or me?”
“Well, I guess we’re kinda runnin’ the same game here.
Don’t you think?”
“I don’t know what you mean.” I tried to say it with that
“end of the conversation” tone, but it didn’t work.
“Well, you keep all the girls in line, and I do the same for the dudes. And the freshmen.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Haven’t you noticed what happens when you walk down the hallway? Do people jump outta your way, not wantin’ to mess with you?” He beamed at my blank expression, as if it was what he’d expected. “Yeah, they do, I’ve seen it. “
I gawked at him, not wanting to admit that this guy had me pinned.
“But I still don’t think that makes us alike. No offense, but you just bully everyone. I don’t do that.”
“Hey, you might not take money from ’em, but you do even 1 9 1
more than that.” He leaned back and shut his eyes, signaling that he was finished talking to me.
But I was pulling out the bitch card once more. “Hey, Vince.” He opened his eyes, and I fastened the expression I’d mastered for this sort of thing. “I get what you’re saying. It’s not just the girls who listen to me. So here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to stop. Stop messing with people. It�
�s been pissing me off for a while, and I’ve had enough. If you f lip over any more lunch trays, or steal any more money—”
I smiled as cunningly as I could “—then you’re going to deal with me. ”
“Yeah? What are you going to do to me?”
“Oh, I’ve got a plan. And I know you’re fond of this school, considering how long you’ve been here. So, really, if you don’t stop? You’re going to find yourself repeating your senior year at the local public school.” One last jab. “Plus, you’re just annoying, you’re not even scary.”
I was just winging it, and was terrified he was going to call me out. To tell me I was full of it, and that he wasn’t afraid of me. Instead he just sat back in his chair again and shut his eyes.
But there was the smallest of creases between his eyebrows that told me that just maybe I’d done something right.
But as I sat there, my heart sank as I realized that maybe he was right. I might not take their money, but I did take their self-esteem. My heart sank lower as I thought of Mr. Ezhno and his job—that was unquestionably worse that what Vince did. I was taking so much more from Mr. Ezhno than just his money.
Maybe Vince and I were the same. Only he was even further along than I was—because at least he knew what he was, without being told by some mystical judge in a boardroom.
That thought put everything into perspective, even more than the thought of my life being on the line.
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After fifteen minutes, the headmaster called me into his office. The look on his face told me very clearly that he didn’t want to deal with me anymore.
“Sit.” He spoke shortly, pointing half heartedly toward the chair he was passing.
I sat obediently and waited for him to sit down.
“Listen, Mr. Ransic, I have a few things to tell you. And I don’t really know how—”
“Just say it, Miss Duke. I’ve got things to do here, and I don’t need you quibbling over how to perfectly phrase your newest problem.”
Something in his voice made me picture him getting home from work, throwing down his briefcase and talking to his girlfriend about what a stressful day he’d had. I pictured her asking what had happened. He would sink down into an armchair, and talk about “this girl” at school with all these problems.
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