Once safely ensconced in my disinfectant-smelling haven, I sat on the closed lid of the toilet and pulled out my phone. The cold porcelain chilled me through my jeans, and I wrapped one arm around myself as I tapped away with the other. Dr. Spence shouldn’t be here. He shouldn’t know my new name. I was probably just crazy—probably just seeing things—but I would feel a whole lot safer if I knew he was back in Elkton, where he belonged.
Just as I was about to press the green CALL button, to send my voice beaming over the waves or wires or whatever across the state, I laid my phone back on my lap. What if they somehow traced my number? If they—and by they, I wasn’t even sure who I meant—found out where I was?
So I clicked over to the Web and Googled him instead: Atlas Spence psychologist Elkton. I skimmed the list of results. Most were familiar: he’d appeared in a few articles about the shooting (though he never granted an interview), and then there were the general listings for his practice, a boxy brick building at the edge of town he shared with a few other psychologists and one misplaced chiropractor.
Nothing, notably, about a mysterious disappearance. But he didn’t have to have disappeared. He could just be taking a trip.
I sighed and realized my hands were shaking. I had to call. It wasn’t like the police had a wiretap on his phone. It wasn’t like anyone was actually looking for me.
Still, I had to hold my phone against my shoulder as it rang to keep it from slipping through my sweaty fingers.
“Good Help Clinic, how may I help you?”
“Hi,” I said breathlessly. Today was Tuesday. Dr. Spence should be in his office today. Unless his schedule had changed. Everything had changed—why not that? “I’m looking for Dr. Spence?”
“Dr. Spence can’t come to the phone right now. Can I take a message for him?”
“It’s kind of an emergency. Is he with another patient? Or will he be in at all today?”
“Dr. Spence is actually out of the office for a few weeks.” The receptionist’s voice had softened. “If it’s an emergency, I can get you in today with Dr. Fischbach. Do you—”
My finger missed the screen three times before I was able to hang up. I lowered my phone back to my lap, my hands shaking again. Out of the office could mean anything, I told myself. It could mean he was sick. He could be visiting family out of state. He could be reclining on a beach somewhere in the Bahamas, snapping his fingers for someone to bring him martinis.
Or he could be here. In Sunny Vale, looking for me.
But why? It didn’t make sense. Everybody in Elkton had been glad to be rid of my family. Or at least it seemed like everybody. I’d forgotten what my neighbors looked like; all I saw for weeks on end were their silhouettes behind drawn curtains. Reporters were everywhere; so many had popped out from behind bushes I was paranoid my mom would one day peel off a mask and announce she was from the New York Times. And every so often a few people would gather out front and just glare at our house, as if the power of their disapproval would cause it to crumble and trap us inside.
Sometimes I knew them. That was the worst.
A couple weeks after the incident, I’d finally pushed myself to start leaving the house, usually just running—because what else did I have to leave the house for?—and was always mobbed by reporters throwing questions at me. Julia, how are you feeling? What happened in the band room? Tell the world your story, Julia! The world deserves to know! As far as I was concerned, the world didn’t deserve anything from me.
One day, on the way home, I just couldn’t do it. I rounded the corner of my block and I couldn’t face the thought of elbowing through the reporters again, of feeling their hot spit on my cheeks as they yelled. So I jogged a few steps backward and slunk against my neighbor’s fence.
“Excuse me, hi.”
My head whipped toward the voice. All my muscles clenched when I saw who it was—one of the many reporters who’d knocked on my door after it happened. This one was short and curvy in a way that stretched the seams of her pantsuit, and she held her notepad and pen under her arm. A blotch circled the paper where her pit sweat had seeped into the pad. Gross.
“I’m Jennifer,” she continued. “It’s nice to meet you. I hope you’re well. Well—as well as you can be.” She tittered nervously.
I eyed her warily. I could turn and run away, but I was so exhausted. Of this. Of everything. I could stand here and refuse to speak, but that would say more than any interview could. I could jump her and paper-cut her to death with her notepad. No. That was a terrible idea.
“Call me Julie,” I said. Nobody called me Julie.
“Julie,” she said. A savage sort of triumph welled in my belly. Now this would be okay. She might pretend she knew me, she might sympathize with me, but every time she said Julie, she’d remind me she was just some stranger I could paper-cut to death at any time. “Julie, how are you doing?”
“That’s a stupid question,” I said. No, more like spat. The flash of shock in her eyes fanned my triumph into glee. “You don’t care how I’m doing. You want to know what happened in the band room.” The glee or triumph, or whatever it was, was beginning to burn, and I swallowed hard, hoping to quell it. I hoped it worked before I started to cry.
Jennifer pursed her lips and chewed on the inside of her cheek as if she was trying to figure out whether she should take the bait. “Fine,” she said finally, biting so hard the hook jutted through her upper lip. “What happened in the band room, Julie?”
I pulled back my lips, trying hard not to cry. I had to scare her. I had to freak her out so much she’d never come back. “Can’t help you there, Jennifer,” I said. “Or is it Jenny? I’ll call you Jenny.” Her smile tightened. “Jenny, I remember nothing. I remember sitting in the band room, my clarinet on my lap, carving my name into my music stand as the band director worked with one of the freshmen. My brother burst through the door. And then”—I gave a dramatic pause—“nothing. The last thing I remember is blinking and everybody was dead. Is that what you wanted to hear, Jenny?”
“I’m so sorry for your loss.” Her words had a rote, memorized quality to them, like the greeting on an answering machine. “You knew most of the people in the room, didn’t you?”
“Eleven people died,” I said. “One was my boyfriend. One was my best friend. One was my teacher. I knew the others, but not super well.”
“I’m so sorry,” she repeated. I just hoped she didn’t ask me to repeat myself. I’d lied so many times over the course of our conversation I was having a hard time keeping track of all I’d said. My stomach squirmed. “Julie, you really don’t remember anything?”
“Not a thing,” I said. Add another one to the list.
She chewed on her lip again, and she tapped her pen against her notepad. “Twenty-two minutes passed between your brother entering the room and you walking out, alone,” she said. “You’re saying you remember nothing?”
“The doctors say it’s fairly common,” I said. “Some kind of amnesia. Surely you’ve heard of amnesia, Jenny?”
I read the article the next day. She quoted everything I said, and added some tears shimmering in my eyes, sobs gulping in my throat. The implication was that I’d confided in her, that I’d cried on her shoulder. And the conclusion she reached? That I was angry. That I was troubled. That it was only a matter of time before I followed in my brother’s footsteps.
My mother had clucked her tongue, reading it, and talked to my father in a murmur she thought I couldn’t hear. “We have to leave. For Julia. For our child. I’ll tell her it’s for us. For me. That I can’t handle the reporters and the social isolation.”
I became Lucy Black two weeks later.
I don’t remember, obviously, coming into the world with my brother’s hand in mine, or sleeping side by side in our cradle. But I do remember when we got our bunk beds.
There had never been any question about the two of us having our own rooms; it had always been a fact that we’d share, like how the sky is bl
ue or the grass is green. Something we’d never doubted. We slept on twin beds for a while, his bedding blue and mine green, but he was always too far away, all the way on the other side of the room. What about when I had nightmares and needed someone to cry on? It wasn’t like we could depend on our parents for that. When we were six, we decided we needed bunk beds, and our parents said okay.
It took our dad nearly four hours to put them together, sweating and swearing and once, memorably, nearly taking his thumb off with a hammer. This was probably the first time he’d spent this many hours with us in one sitting, and so it felt more like four minutes than four hours. My brother and I stood there rapt, our eyes following each pound of a nail, each of us afraid to speak, as if we might spook him back into the bush like a startled gazelle.
“Julia, Ryan,” our dad said when he’d finally hoisted the second mattress up top. “Who’s taking which bed?”
“I get the top,” we said in unison, then turned and blinked at each other. This was a new thing: disagreement. It tasted bitter on my tongue.
“I really want the top,” I said. I would be like a princess waving down at her subjects from the top of her tower, or an astronaut staring down at the earth from the moon, depending on how I felt that day.
Ryan cocked his head and surveyed our future kingdom. I could see his mind working. His cheek worked, too; he was chewing on the inside of his mouth.
“I really want the top, too.” His voice was even, but I shrank away from it. I don’t particularly remember thinking anything was off, but I must have known even then.
“You can have it,” I said mournfully. “I guess the bottom will be fun, too. I can pretend it’s an underground cave, and every time you move, it’ll be like an earthquake.”
He chewed on his lip. Again, I could see his mind working. Earthquakes and caves were cool. Super cool. “I want the bottom now,” he said. “You can have the top if you really want it, Julia.”
My shoulders slumped. “But I really wanted the bottom.”
I could see Ryan’s thoughts congeal, solidify. “Well, the bottom is mine now,” he said. “But you’ll like the top.”
I sighed and made myself smile. “Okay. I guess.”
And that night I was the princess in her tower on the moon.
—
Somewhere far away, from the land outside my world, which had shrunk to the size of the handicapped bathroom, I heard the bell ring. I took a few deep breaths and stood. I had Spanish second period. Spanish was my worst subject, partially because I had a hard time wrapping my brain around the fact that other people actually put these nonsensical strings of syllables together and they sounded right to them, like proper talking, and partially because I sat next to Michael Silverman, the Michael Silverman of the Greek-god legs and Olympus-blue eyes.
I raised my arms above my head, and my shoulders popped. It had taken a few months for me to be able to stand that sound again. The first time my dad had cracked his knuckles in front of me, a few days after the band room, I had actually passed out and hit my head on the fridge door.
I didn’t like how it felt, popping my joints, but now I did it just because I could. It hurt, but the pain felt like victory. I was strong now. Strong enough to hear popping and not immediately think of gunshots.
Again, I slid into my seat just before the late bell rang.
“Close one,” Michael Silverman said just as our teacher started taking attendance. I looked over to see him smiling at me, but that smile slid off his face as I turned. “You okay?”
I cleared my throat and raised my hand for “Black, Lucy.” “I’m okay,” I whispered. “Thanks.”
“You just look kind of sick. Like you might be coming down with something. There’s a nasty cold going around. Half the swim team has it.”
“I don’t really get sick,” I said. Wonderful. He thought I looked sick. “I hope you don’t get it.”
He smiled at me again, and it was as if the sun shone through his teeth. “I don’t really get sick, either,” he said, and raised his hand for “Silverman, Michael.”
This was my chance. I could turn this into a conversation about the swim team and then what he did for fun, and then transition into him potentially doing me for fun, except for some strange reason the words got stuck in my throat, and then Mr.—excuse me, Señor—Goldfarb was calling attention and talking about tenses or something, and I looked over and Michael was focused on the board. Maybe later.
But I ran out as soon as the bell rang, and without Michael Silverman’s legs there to keep me focused on something, I spent the rest of the day in a daze. Faces blurred around me, and voices all sounded like Charlie Brown’s teacher: Mwah mwah mwah. Mwah mwah mwah mwah. If you’d asked me what I’d learned that afternoon, I would say I’d completed a vigorous study of the colors on the inside of my eyelids: a shifting and strangely beautiful array of grays and purples, with the occasional blast of orange.
Alane finally caught up with me at the end of the day. Well, she didn’t so much catch up to me as find me waiting for her outside the chorus room after she’d finished leading show choir. She was, after all, my ride home.
“Well, well,” she said. “If it isn’t Lucy Black.”
I didn’t have patience for her games, and besides, I wasn’t really Lucy Black. “Let’s just go home,” I said dully, shrugging my books higher in my grip. They felt especially heavy today, pulling me toward the ground with every step.
“We”—Alane slung her arm around my shoulders, pushing me even farther down—“are not going home.”
Alane hadn’t had many friends before I moved here. I remember showing up on my first day, my heart thumping nervously, and surveying the crowds of kids laughing and chatting and judging. I’d braced myself for the inevitable rejection, for them to see my past playing out in my eyes like a filmstrip and back away in horror, but I’d actually been welcomed. Sure, people had their established groups of friends, and sure, it was late for me to try to butt in, but I’d stretched my lips in what I hoped was an approximation of a smile and asked people questions about themselves—it turns out people love talking about themselves—and by lunch, three tables had invited me to sit with them. Violet Norris had even asked me to be her bio partner, and Violet Norris, my new friend Ella assured me in a breathless whisper, was one of the most popular girls in school.
And yet, all of lunch, even as Violet and Ella chattered away in my ear, my eyes kept straying to a table in the corner where a girl sat alone. She nibbled at a sandwich, huge dark eyes trained on the table in front of her. Curls, the most extraordinary I’d ever seen, tumbled down past her waist like doll hair. “Who’s that?” I asked.
Violet rolled her eyes. “That’s Alane Howard,” she said. “Nothing against her—she’s perfectly nice and everything—but she’s just weird, you know?”
“Yeah,” I said, and ate another cafeteria French fry. It was cold. Violet and Ella kept talking, and some boy threw a French fry at some girl and apparently it was a big deal, but I couldn’t stop looking at Alane.
I knew what it was like to be that person sitting all by herself.
I gave it a few weeks, of course. I wanted to be nice, but I wasn’t stupid; I knew I had to take the time to cement my social standing and make sure my relationships with Violet and Ella were solid enough to withstand a little shaking. Once I’d gotten to the point where Violet’s grade in bio was dependent upon my knowledge of anatomy and my ability to slice into a frog or a fetal pig without fainting or throwing up, I marched over to Alane’s table. “Hey,” I said. “I’m Lucy.”
She looked at me warily. Her eyes shone against her dark skin. “I’m Alane.”
I jerked my head at my usual table. “Do you want to come sit with us?”
If I were a queen, I would have dubbed her the Knight of Wariness. “Why?”
I shrugged. “Why not?” That didn’t seem to be enough for her. “I’m new here. I’m still getting to know everyone. Come sit with us.
”
Something in my face must have convinced her I wasn’t playing some sort of joke. “They know you’re asking me to sit there?”
“Sure,” I said. They didn’t, but they’d be okay with it. They had to be, or Violet would be stuck stringing out formaldehyde-soaked intestines and pinning tiny livers to sheets of cardboard all on her own.
And so somehow Alane was absorbed into our group. The next semester, Violet and I got placed in different chemistry classes and drifted apart, and Ella started hanging out more with the girls on the swim team, but Alane and I stuck. I told her to go out for show choir after I heard her singing under her breath, and the chorus teacher was so stunned by Alane’s voice that she made Alane lead soprano.
So I was willing to risk my social standing for Alane, but I wasn’t going wherever she wanted to go right now. The only place I wanted to go was my bedroom. Spence wouldn’t be there. He couldn’t.
“I”—I stopped for a dramatic pause of my own, fully worthy of the one Alane had just given me—“want to go home.”
“You,” she said, “do not want to go home. I know you’re not having a good day, and I’m going to cheer you up.”
“You can cheer me up by taking me home.”
“No, the boys’ swimming practice is just about ending. On Tuesdays after practice, they stop off at Crazy Elliot’s for coffee and scones.” She paused and considered. “Well, probably not scones. Meat or something. Giant plates of meat. Whatever boys eat.
“And of course,” she continued, “you know who’s on the boys’ swimming team. That’s right. Michael Silverman.”
My feet stuttered to a halt. Banging erupted in the hallway, echoing against the lockers that lined the sides, and I shrank into myself, cringing, before I realized I’d just dropped my books.
“See?” Alane said wisely. “That’s why you need a backpack.”
I knelt to gather my things. Alane crouched beside me, her arm still on my shoulder.
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