Freak was gone, though. Instead, there was a weird spiral pattern, covered in thin, snaking lines. The paint had been scraped away in a kind of spiderweb, leaving a network of bare metal that radiated out from what had been one accusatory word inlaid with blood. Some of the areas had been shaded in, black in places and a thick lumpy white in others.
“We fixed your locker,” Danny said, coming up behind me.
Drew nodded and held up a marker and a bottle of Wite-Out.
I studied the tangle of spirals and circles. At the outer edge of the design, correction fluid had been carefully applied over the marker, then scratched away so the ink showed through in ghostly corkscrews. For a project limited by preexisting vandalism and involving only Sharpie and Wite-Out, it was nice work.
Danny leaned his elbow on my shoulder. “We weren’t trying to squash your personal expression or anything. We just thought it might be a bad move to brand yourself too aggressively too early. It might, I don’t know, set the wrong tone.”
They both looked resolutely blank, like they were trying not to look too pleased with themselves. Drew was tossing the bottle of Wite-Out in the air and catching it again. They stood on either side of me and waited for my reaction.
I wanted to do something to show how relieved I was, how grateful, but all I said was, “Thanks.”
Danny punched me. “Don’t thank us. You’re the one who owes the school sixty bucks to get it repainted.”
If it hadn’t been obvious yesterday, Tate Stewart was the new point of interest. She stalked through the halls, past clusters of people who whispered behind their hands. Their glances weren’t the sideways glances of sympathy, but quick, furtive stares, full of curiosity.
They spent whole passing periods watching her and, at the same time, pretending not to. It didn’t seem to matter. She moved through the crowd like she was alone. Like the gossip and the stares couldn’t touch her. Her eyes were closed off, her expression was remote, but something about the set of her mouth made me feel sorry. She didn’t look sad, which made everything a hundred times sadder.
The thing about Tate was, she didn’t have any real interest in what people thought. She never tried to impress them or make them like her. Once, in seventh grade, she joined the boys’ baseball team, even though the baseball team sucked, just to prove that the athletics department couldn’t stop her.
As the morning went on, though, her mouth got thinner. There was a strange feeling coming off her, almost an electric charge. It hung in the air, like she was getting ready to explode, but things didn’t really hit the fan until English.
We were finishing the unit on Romanticism and The Scarlet Letter. Mrs. Brummel was tall and thin, with bleached hair and a lot of different sweaters. She got very excited about the kind of literature that no reasonable person would ever read for fun.
She stood at the front of the room and clapped because she was always clapping. “Okay, today we’re going to talk about guilt and how Pearl’s very existence condemns Hester more effectively than the A. This is most obvious in the fact that some of the villagers believe Pearl is the child of the devil.”
Then she wrote it on the board: Pearl as a concrete manifestation of guilt.
“Does anyone want to expand on this?”
No one did. In front of me, Tom Ritchie and Jeremy Sayers were flicking a paper football back and forth, mock cheering each time one of them got it between the uprights of the other one’s hands. Alice and Jenna were still watching Tate, whispering and then covering their mouths like they’d just said something so shocking it needed to be contained and giving each other significant looks.
Mrs. Brummel was making bullet points with her back to us, waiting for someone to start filling them in.
I watched Alice. When she’d taken her seat at the beginning of class, her skirt had slid up far enough to show the tops of her thighs, and I was enjoying the fact that she hadn’t adjusted it yet. Her hair was loose down her back and looked almost like bronze in the fluorescent light.
She propped her elbows on her desk and leaned forward so she could whisper into Jenna’s ear. “I heard that her mom won’t get out of bed since it happened. Like, not even for the funeral. I can’t believe she’s acting like nothing’s wrong. I just wouldn’t even come to school.”
Apparently, that one was loud enough for Tate to catch some or possibly all of it because she stood up fast enough to send her desk screeching along the floor. Her gaze was hard, sweeping over us, and I couldn’t tell if I was dizzy from the screws and wires in the walls or from the way she was looking at me.
“Oh,” she said, in a clear, challenging voice. “Was this what you wanted? Did you want a good look? Take a good look—I don’t mind.”
And maybe no one had really been excited about Hester Prynne and her illegitimate daughter, but they were paying attention now. I kept my head down, hunching over my desk, trying to get smaller. My heart was beating so fast that I could feel it in my throat and I kept telling myself that everything was fine, that I’d imagined she’d looked at me, because I had to believe that. I had to believe that no one in Gentry would ever hear the words child of the devil and then look at me.
No one said anything.
The room was so quiet that all I could hear was the buzz of the fluorescent light. I had the idea that it was buzzing right over me, like some kind of signal or alarm, but no one turned to stare accusingly. No one whispered or pointed.
Mrs. Brummel stood with her back against the whiteboard and the marker uncapped in her hand, staring at Tate. “Is there something you needed?”
Tate shook her head and kept standing. “Don’t mind me. I’m just waiting for my big red A.”
“This isn’t funny,” Mrs. Brummel said, putting the cap back on the marker.
“No,” said Tate. “It’s not. But we can all agree to smile anyway because it just makes things so much easier.”
Mrs. Brummel retreated behind her desk and waved a box of tissues, even though Tate wasn’t crying. “Do you need some time to pull yourself together?”
“No. Because I’m not unbalanced or grief stricken, okay? I’m pissed off.”
“Would you like to go down to the counseling office?”
“No, I’d like someone to fucking listen to me!” Her voice was loud, unnaturally shrill. Suddenly, she hauled back and kicked the desk so hard that the whole room seemed to ring with the metallic clang of her work boot.
“You’re excused,” Mrs. Brummel said, but not in that wispy, understanding voice that teachers sometimes use. Her tone was no-argument, like if Tate didn’t go, there was a chance that she would be escorted out by the school rent-a-cop. For a second, Tate looked like she might hold out for forcible removal. Then she grabbed the books off her desk and walked out without looking back.
The rest of the class sat in awkward silence. I held on to the corners of my desk to keep my hands from shaking, and Mrs. Brummel did her best to wrench us back to Nathaniel Hawthorne and Hester’s big stupid dilemma until the bell rang.
Out in the hall, Roswell was just being dismissed from his math class and he swung into step beside me. “Ready for some conversational French?”
I shook my head and started in the direction of the back parking lot. “I need some air.”
He looked at me like he was trying to figure out how to phrase something. “I think you should go to French,” he said finally.
“I can’t.”
“You mean, you don’t feel like it.”
“I mean, I can’t.”
He folded his arms and suddenly looked a lot bigger. “No, you mean you just don’t feel like it. Semantically, it’s possible.”
I pulled my sleeve down over my hand and reached for the door. “I have to go outside,” I said, and my voice was low and unsteady. “Just for a little while. I really need some air.”
“No, you need to tell me why you look like stone-cold death. Mackie, what is wrong?”
“I hate this,”
I said, and my voice sounded tight. “I hate the way people are always fixating on things that aren’t any of their business. I hate that no one can just leave it alone. And I hate Nathaniel Hawthorne.”
Roswell shoved his hands in his pockets, looking down at me. “Okay. Not what I was expecting.”
He didn’t follow me.
I stood on the far side of the parking lot and leaned against one of the biggest white oaks, letting the rain filter down between the leaves and land on my face. The bell rang and I stayed where I was, numb and breathing too fast because I wasn’t always the best student when it came to doing the reading, but I knew the book enough to know that maybe Hester goes around with a big red A pinned on her dress, but Dimmesdale’s the one with it burned into his skin. He’s the one who dies.
Behind me, there was the rough idle of a car and then a voice said, “Hey, Mackie.”
Tate had pulled up next to the curb in this absolute monstrosity of a Buick and was leaning across the front seat. Apparently, she’d decided she was done with school for the day. Or, more likely, done being a public spectacle. She put her hand on the edge of the passenger window. “The rain isn’t going to stop. Do you want a ride somewhere?”
The car sat idling against the curb, its wipers flicking back and forth. Long primer-gray body, poisonous fenders. It made me think of a wicked metal shark. “That’s okay. Thanks, though.”
“Are you sure? It’s not a problem.”
I shook my head, watching the rain drip in a wavering curtain off the front bumper so I wouldn’t have to look at her.
Her face was softer and younger looking than normal. I stood under the dripping oak and debated complimenting the way she’d faced down Mrs. Brummel, just to have something to say—tell her I was impressed by the way she could be sad and stared at and still tell everyone to go straight to hell.
After a minute, she killed the engine and got out of the car. “Listen. I need to talk to you.”
When she came across the grass to me, she had this look on her face, like out in the parking lot, in the open, she wasn’t so sure of herself after all. Like maybe I scared her. Her mouth had a bruised look. Her eyes were blue underneath, like you get from not sleeping.
When she came up next to me, she turned so we were standing side by side, staring out at the parking lot. The point of her elbow was inches from my sleeve.
“Do you have a minute?”
I didn’t answer.
“Jesus, why don’t you ever say anything?” She turned and stared up at me with her teeth working on her bottom lip. It looked raw, like she’d been chewing it a lot. Even reeking like iron from the Buick, she still smelled crisp and kind of sweet. It made me think of flowering trees or something you want to put in your mouth. The kind of smell you shouldn’t notice about girls who are covered in tragedy and Detroit steel.
“You weren’t at the funeral yesterday,” she said.
Between us, the current seemed to hum louder. I nodded.
“Why? I mean, your dad seems like he’d be all about ‘pulling together as a community,’ and considering he pretty much organized the whole thing . . . And, I mean, Roswell was there.”
“Religion is my dad’s business,” I said, and my voice had a flat, mechanical sound that showed me for what I was—a bad liar reciting someone else’s lie. “Anyway, a funeral isn’t really an ideal social event. I mean, it’s not like I would attend one for fun or anything.”
Tate just watched me. Then she folded her arms tight across her chest, looking small and wet. Her hair was plastered against her forehead. “Whatever. It’s not like it matters.”
“You’re taking it really well.”
Tate took a deep breath and stared up at me. “It wasn’t her.”
For a second, I didn’t say anything. Neither of us did. But we didn’t look away from each other. I could see flecks of green and gold in her eyes and tiny spots so deep and cool they looked purple. I realized that I hadn’t really looked at her in years.
She closed her eyes and moved her lips before she spoke, like she was practicing the words. “It wasn’t my sister in that box, it was something else. I know my sister, and whatever died in that crib, it wasn’t her.”
I nodded. I was cold suddenly, goose bumps coming up on my arms in a way that had nothing to do with the rain. My hands tingled and started to go numb.
“So, are you just going to stand there looking like a piece of furniture?”
“What do you want me to say?”
“I don’t want you to say anything—I want someone to listen to me!”
“Maybe you should talk to a school counselor,” I said, looking at my shoes. “I mean, that’s what they’re there for.”
Tate stared up at me and her eyes were wide and hurt and, for the first time, full of tears. “You know what? Fuck you.”
She crossed the lawn to her car and swung herself into the driver’s seat. She slammed the door, wrenched the transmission into reverse, and backed out onto the road.
After she’d made it all the way down Benthaven and disappeared around the corner, I let myself slump against the oak tree, sinking to a crouch with my back against the trunk.
I barely felt the rain as it ran down my forehead and the back of my neck.
I hadn’t given away my secret because I didn’t even know how to say the secret out loud. No one did. Instead, they hung on to the lie that the kids who died were actually their kids and not just convincing replacements. That way, they never had to ask what had happened to the real ones. I had never asked what happened to the real ones.
That was the code of the town—you didn’t talk about it, you didn’t ask. But Tate had asked anyway. She’d had the guts to say what everyone else was thinking—that her true, real sister had been replaced by something eerie and wrong. Even my own family had never been honest enough to come right out and say that.
Tate had made herself a loner and an outcast when I was the one who was supposed to be the freak. I’d shied away like she might infect me, but she was just a girl trying to get a straight answer from the most obvious source.
And yes, I was obvious. When it came down to basic facts, I was weird and unnatural, and the game only worked as long as everyone else agreed not to see. If you took all the kids in school and lined them up, it was clear that I was the one who didn’t belong. I was the disease. I crouched under the dripping tree and covered my head with my hands.
I’d treated her like shit because I’d had no choice. This was how the game went, and when you got down to it, what mattered most was staying out of sight. Everything else was secondary. There was no way to fix what I’d done, no way to take it back, because it was just me.
“I’m sorry,” I said to the pale, drizzly sky and the dying grass and the tree. To the empty parking lot and my own shaking hands.
CHAPTER SIX
FRIDAYS AT STARLIGHT
When Roswell picked me up after dinner for our weekly trip downtown to see the showcase of local bands, we didn’t talk much. I stared out the passenger window while he messed around with the radio, trying to find something he liked.
Finally, he switched it off. “So, are you going to tell me what’s wrong?” His voice sounded loud in the silence.
“What?”
He didn’t look away from the road. “You’re not too chipper tonight is all.”
I shrugged and watched the strip malls go by. “Tate Stewart is . . . It’s just, she freaked out in class today. She wanted to talk to me, and I don’t know what to say. Her sister died—she needs a professional.” And because those things were true but not the whole truth, I told him something else, so hoarse and low it was almost a whisper. “Roz, I don’t feel good. I haven’t felt good in a long time.”
Roswell nodded, tapping his palms on the steering wheel in four-four time.
“What’s it like?” he said suddenly. “Being—you know.”
He made it sound so easy, like he was asking about hemophilia or hav
ing double-jointed thumbs. It took me a second to realize I’d stopped breathing. It was hard to describe something you weren’t supposed to talk about. And yeah, maybe my dad liked to call it uncommon—this neutral, sanitary word—but I could tell sometimes, just by the look on his face, that what he really meant was unnatural.
Beside me, Roswell was still ticking his fingers against the steering wheel. Finally, he rolled his head to the side and looked at me.
He wasn’t stupid. I knew that. He’d known me pretty much my whole life, so it wasn’t like I thought I was fooling him. The thing that kept me mute was the chance that if I said it out loud, he’d look at me differently. Maybe it wouldn’t be obvious—he’d try not to let it show—but the difference would be there.
And that was bad enough, but stranger, deeper was the fear that nothing would change at all. He might just shrug and carry on like always, which was somehow worse. The truth was an ugly thing, and I couldn’t stand the possibility that he might be okay with it when it wasn’t okay.
He was quiet, watching me in the pauses at stoplights, waiting for an answer.
I rolled down the window and stuck my head out, letting the rain splash against my face. I knew that if I opened my mouth, I’d tell him. The cold air was helping, a little, but under the car’s fiberglass quarter panels, the frame was carbon steel and I was starting to feel sick. It was getting worse.
Roswell let out his breath in the long, pressurized sigh that meant he had something on his mind. “I’ve been thinking,” he said after a minute. “This is totally not scientific, and maybe it’s not even my business—but do you think you might be depressed?”
I looked down at my hands and then I made fists. “No.”
I knew what it looked like. Lately, I was a mental-health pamphlet, answering questions in monosyllables, avoiding strenuous activities, sleeping too much. I wanted to tell him that it wasn’t as bad as it seemed. I was just doing my part, playing invisible. That when you’re tired all the time and you have to keep your sleeves pulled down over your hands so you don’t accidentally touch a handle or a doorknob and a good day is defined by the fact that no one noticed you exist, that’s pretty depressing. But it’s not clinical.
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