My Adam’s apple bobbed against her forehead, and I knew that no matter how much I protested, my eyes were going to search out the very thing that would be sure to haunt my memories for years to come. That was human nature. That was why when passing roadkill on the highway it was physically impossible not to look to see what type of animal had been crushed. That was why when watching a horror movie, everyone peeked through their fingers to catch a glimpse of the monster even though that one look would guarantee nightmares for a month.
That was why I looked over the top of Honor’s head to Mrs. Dolsey, whose skin was already turning gray. Blue veins branched out under paper-thin flesh. Dolsey’s blond hair was matted and red at the roots. At the edge of the pool of blood, I spotted my own footprint and when I raised the toe of my shoe I looked down to see a red imprint beneath me.
I squeezed my eyes shut against the well of nausea and held Honor more tightly. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” I whispered into her hair.
But was it?
My stomach convulsed violently. I breathed in through my nose as deeply as I could, but the tang of blood was still sharp in the air. At last I wrenched us away, turning to use my back as a shield against the carnage that lay behind.
Before today, I’d never seen a dead body. Dolsey’s face lingered underneath my eyelids like red dots after a camera flash. Slowly. Though the sound started to come back for me. The first thing I heard were sirens. From a distance still, but coming.
And then there were tiny vibrations in my chest. Warm, moist breath slipped through the cotton of my T-shirt and turned cold on my skin. And that, I realized, was Honor saying, “She fell from nowhere.” I had to ask her to repeat that part because initially it’d been lost in the sea of my temporarily loud deafness.
“She fell from nowhere.” Honor was rubbing her nose into the plate of bone between my lungs. I slid my hand along the ridges of her spine and looked up at the vertical stretch of building toward the roof. Not from nowhere exactly, I thought.
“I was walking back from the theater and then … She was so close,” Honor said. “I could have touched her hair.”
I pressed my nose into the top of Honor’s head, letting her scent flood my senses. The world around me was taking shape. The ambulances had arrived. I didn’t know where Principal Wiggins had gotten to, but he wasn’t here. There were teachers around, but not as many as you’d think and the ones that were there were all looking as shaken up as the students.
I kept my arm around Honor’s back while herding her over to join a cluster of students who had gathered in the western shadow of the school building, far enough to be out of the way, but close enough to watch. The stunned electricity of shared experience ran through us all like a current. Murmurs of “suicide” had begun to pop up. Questions about whether Mrs. Dolsey had left a note, whether she was depressed, did she take medication? Snatches of phrases caught between hushed conversations.
I had the feeling of standing at a funeral only the undertakers had forgotten to dig the grave and so we were all left milling around while we tried to figure out the next right thing to do.
To my immense relief, men and women in uniforms now obscured the view of Mrs. Dolsey’s body. I knew I should feel bad. I had been laughing at an unflattering cartoon of her not more than an hour before her death. But instead, all I could think was, what kind of teacher killed herself in front of a whole school full of students? The thought didn’t sit right. She had to have known the mental image she’d be leaving on a group of teenagers. Despite our recent run-in, Mrs. Dolsey had seemed like an okay lady who wished we would pay attention in class and who’d once gotten very bad advice from a hairstylist. But to do something like this, she must have really, really hated kids.
And that was the thing to which I kept coming back like a Ferris wheel that I couldn’t get off of. Because I wouldn’t have thought her capable and based on the snippets of talk happening around me, no one else had thought so, either. And that meant it was impossible to know the inner workings of anyone’s mind. We were all opaque beings walking around with the ability to crush someone else under our dead weight. It was a chilling thought for a Wednesday morning.
“Hello.” Lena slipped through the crowd as unobtrusively as ever, and she appeared before me as though by magic. “Did you hear?” She wore a strange half-smile.
Out in the parking lot, the sound on all the sirens had been mercifully cut, but the lights continued to flash. The school looked to be in a state of emergency. I would never understand why a fire truck was sent in nonfire emergencies, but there was one now along with three police cars and two ambulances. Nobody would be able to get out of here anytime soon.
I thought Lena’s question was odd. We were standing in the middle of a full-scale crisis and the entire student body learning about Mrs. Dolsey in this very moment. But the whole situation was odd, so who was I to criticize? “Yeah,” I said, gesturing over my shoulder with my thumb. “Honor saw it happen. She’s a little shaken up,” I said.
“Shame,” said Lena, peering around me at Honor. Honor was sniffling into her sleeve. I frowned.
“Are you all right?” I asked. Perhaps Lena was in shock. “Did you see—well, did you see her?” The question brought the sight of Mrs. Dolsey freshly to mind. Here was what I would remember about my math teacher: her fingernails broken on the pavement, an ankle snapped sideways, blood gone sticky on my shoe.
Already I couldn’t recall the sound of her voice or what she’d said to me this morning to make me so angry or why it mattered.
“For a moment,” Lena said thoughtfully, “yes.”
I gave a grim nod. Because I wouldn’t wish that on anyone, let alone someone as fragile as Lena.
From behind me, Honor’s fingers curled around my forearm. She dried her eyes as she moved up to stand beside me. “Hi, Lena,” she said in a small voice. “Hope you’re okay.”
Did Lena respond to Honor? I didn’t catch it. What I heard was, “So do you want to hang out after school today?” and it was aimed pointedly and only at me. “No more detention I guess.”
My stomach clenched. But was Lena right? Would I voluntarily tell my aunt and uncle that I’d received detention?
It was a stupid thing to think about at a time like this. What did it matter? A woman was dead.
My eyes skirted quickly to Honor, who gave away no reaction other than the shaky unease that had seemed to rob her of her normal poised energy since Mrs. Dolsey had fallen.
Lena’s face was placid, but interested. My brows twitched. “I … can’t,” I said slowly.
At last check, someone was still dead within a twenty-foot radius. The body hadn’t even been moved yet. And sorry, but I didn’t feel like making after-school plans just to “hang out.”
“Why not?” she asked as though that weren’t totally obvious.
But something was keeping me from saying that. I took off my glasses and wiped the lenses with my shirt to buy myself some time. The neckline was still wet with Honor’s tears.
“I have a lot of homework,” I lied. I pushed the glasses back over my ears and the blur that had been Lena came into focus again. I felt Honor’s eyes on me, but she didn’t say anything.
Lena picked her heel up and itched at her leg through a hole in her stockings. “I doubt any of the teachers are going to care much about homework now that Mrs. Dolsey’s dead,” she said.
“Lena!” Honor’s hand jerked from my arm.
“Well, she is dead.” Lena cocked her head. “You saw her.”
“What is wrong with you?” She swept back her hair and shook her head at Lena while retreating from her a few steps.
I stretched my arms between them. How did I get here? “She’s processing. You’re just processing, right, Lena? You don’t mean that?”
“Were she and Mrs. Dolsey close or something?” Lena asked.
Honor rolled her eyes and turned away. “I’ve got to get out of here, Chris. I feel queasy.”
&
nbsp; “I—” I hesitated for a moment, stuck between Honor and Lena. I pressed my hands into my sockets, but the vision of Mrs. Dolsey with her head cracked open wouldn’t go away. How long was it going to be stuck there? Sixteen years in New York and I’d never seen a person die. And now here, in this town where I never wanted to be in the first place, I saw it within weeks of arriving. I needed air. Not the open skies, unpolluted air of Hollow Pines, but the gray smog of New York that, though it may kill me in the end, at least felt like home. “God, I wish I could, too,” I muttered. “Get out of here, I mean. I wish … I wish I could just go home. Christ.” I looked once more at where, if I squinted—and I did—I could make out the chunky heeled shoes of Mrs. Dolsey as a small team of EMTs lifted her onto a stretcher. My stomach seemed to wring out like a dishrag. “I’ve got to go, Lena. We … can talk later, okay?”
And I left before the ambulance doors had closed behind my former math teacher.
FOURTEEN
Lena
“The show must go on.” Those were the infamous words Mrs. Fleury had recited to the gathered cast on our first day back to school since Mrs. Dolsey’s untimely demise. Of course, the production would now be dedicated to Josephine Dolsey—that was Mrs. Dolsey’s name, a detail I didn’t know before.
If anyone wondered whether the guilt set in minutes, hours, or even a couple of days after I watched my math teacher plunge to her death, the answer was no, it didn’t do any of those. At first I continued to wait for it to sneak in like a noxious gas slowly and silently poisoning the air. But the longer I breathed easily, the less I worried that any minute I would be hit with crippling remorse. Eventually, I gave up waiting full stop.
In the world outside the theater department, the rest of the school was also pulling itself back together. The high school’s front entrance would be blocked for at least another week while they attempted to pressure clean Dolsey’s blood from the pavement. Walking the halls, I’d overheard that the task wasn’t going well and that there was talk of jackhammering out the entire block of concrete and pouring new. I had no idea how much of a mess a single dead body could leave.
I did wonder whether Mr. Roy was a tiny bit relieved at Josephine’s passing. I wasn’t sure I’d ever know the answer to that one. It was the kind of secret that left so few outside traces, that it might actually stay a secret forever.
One of the strangest things I’d noticed, from this whole string of events since Chris’s arrival, though, was that I was beginning to have my own secrets, too.
With all the clean-up commotion, students had to enter through the gymnasium. Along with the fact that I couldn’t stay at the school while investigations were pending, these were the only true inconveniences Mrs. Dolsey’s failed high-flying act had caused. I’d managed to avoid Misty by crawling through my bedroom window at night. It was nice having clean clothes each day anyway. And the rest of the time, I’d found ways to amuse myself. There was always looking after Chris.
Inside the auditorium, the show was, indeed, going on. I sat on a trunk next to Chris as a noticeably giraffe-like girl from costume design took his measurements.
“Stretch out your arms, please,” she said, bending down to wrap his chest with the tape.
I liked the messy-haired look Chris had adopted in the last week during which he seemed to have misplaced his comb. “Drake won’t lay off,” he said, pressing his chin to his chest to stretch the back of his neck. Was he tense? Did Chris look stressed out? I didn’t want Chris to be stressed out. I watched him carefully. “Even with all this other shit going on. He won’t lay off.”
“Nobody likes Drake,” the costume designer said through the end of the tape measure that was now clenched between her teeth. “Whoever gave him a microphone and told him he could sing ought to be shot.” She kneeled and stretched the tape from Chris’s heel to hip.
“That’s what I told him,” I said, but she didn’t seem to hear me or didn’t notice me sitting there.
Chris dropped his arms. “He has a good voice, though, doesn’t he.” His upper lip twitched. It wasn’t a question.
A mannequin head teetered on a pile of knickknacks at my side. I pulled the blond wig off its top and slipped it over my hair for size. “Don’t listen to him,” I said.
Chris did a double take at me in the blond wig. I looked coyly over my shoulder, striking a pose. “So not you,” he said. “And anyway, it would help if he wasn’t right at least some of the time.” Chris stepped his feet apart so that the costume designer could measure his inseam. When she was finished, Chris jutted his leg out like he was on the red carpet. “How do you think I’ll look in a leather skirt?” he asked. Was it just me, though, or had the laughter in his eyes gone back-of-the-milk-carton missing?
“One more thing.” The costume designer looped the tape measure over her neck. “Do you own a pair of ballet flats?” she asked.
“What?” Chris raised his eyebrows. “No!”
“Right.” She nodded. “We’ll figure something out.”
I waited for her to move onto her next victim. Pulling the wig from my head, I wrapped a course tendril of the fake blond hair around my finger. “Chris, you’re not really worried about Drake, are you?”
Chris was stepping back into his own shoes and straightening his collar. “I don’t know.” He frowned. “It doesn’t matter. He’s the male lead. I don’t think he’s going anywhere.”
“Right. Yeah.” I stared down at the wig, absentmindedly combing it with my nails.
“Anyway,” he said, “I better make it to stage call. If you’re not early, you’re late.” He sounded tired.
As he turned to leave, I stopped him. “Chris?” He turned back. “You’re happy here, though, right?”
He paused. “Do I have a choice?” Then he winked and I knew that at least he wanted everything to be okay before he stepped out onto the stage.
The wings slowly emptied of everyone but backstage workers like me. Chris’s words rang in my head. Of course he had a choice. That scared me. There was always a choice. Chris could choose to ask to go back home, and his parents could choose to say yes. That was one possible choice. But I had a choice, too. And choices were like dominoes.
I once heard that a butterfly could flap its wings in Brazil and cause a tornado in Texas. I just had to decide where I wanted to aim the wind.
Marcy was a choice. Maybe it was fate that she’d come into my life to teach me how to be someone who took action. After all, I could be that person now. I’d proven that I wasn’t the scared little girl she’d once rescued. I didn’t make the same mistakes twice. That had to count for something.
I didn’t want Chris to leave. I wanted him to be happy here. If he was happy, he wouldn’t choose to leave. And I was here to remove all impediments to that happiness. All of them.
The backstage lights were dimmed, and I pressed myself into the velvet curtains. Near the front of the stage, Drake was running through his vocal warm-ups. “Seven salty sailors sailed the seven seas. Seven salty sailors sailed the seven seas.” Then he trilled his lips. I watched the spit fly off his mouth with a measure of disgust that overwhelmed me. “The lips, the teeth, the tip of the tongue, the tip of the tongue, the teeth, the lips,” he crooned. His helmet of blond hair glinted under the spotlight.
“Excuse me.” He turned on his heel, snapping. “Can someone please fetch my hot tea? My instrument is freezing up.” He touched his throat while nearby Honor was quietly humming octaves to herself. She glanced up and rolled her eyes before facing her back to him.
A set designer—Glen—scurried out of the wings with a steaming mug of tea. The liquid sloshed onto Glen’s hands, and he yelped in pain, trying to shake out the burned fingers.
“You’re spilling,” Drake scolded.
“Sorry, sorry, I’m sorry,” said Glen, passing the tea back and forth between his hands.
I watched with growing interest as Drake took the cup. The ridges of his throat rose and fell as he swallowed.
He tipped his head back and gargled the warm liquid.
My hand gripped the curtain behind me. It was so simple, I was realizing. Almost too simple. It was the first one that was the hard part.
The thought should have scared me. But that was the whole point. It didn’t.
I switched focus to Chris. Poor, maybe-miserable Chris. My best friend. And then Drake, Drake who did have a good voice. Chris was right about that much. But did he have to?
Lena …
This didn’t have to be like Mrs. Dolsey. Nobody had to die. We just needed a little less Drake in our lives. And that sounded like a change everyone could get onboard with, so long as they didn’t know how their meat was made.
I was so used to disappearing that it felt as though I was already gone before I’d even completed the thought.
It was so much easier not to get caught up in the mire of indecision this time. I moved through the school like I had a hall pass. I could go anywhere, I realized, as long as I looked like I belonged. Anywhere except the fire-exit stairwell, anyway, since those had now been booby-trapped with alarms.
The place I wanted to go, however, was the science lab. Chemistry in particular. I wouldn’t take chemistry until next semester, but for some reason that didn’t seem to matter to me today. It was like with Mrs. Dolsey. Part of me wondered if somewhere in my subconscious I had thought the outcome and therefore it had come to pass. Had I imagined her diving off the roof and then she had, problem solved? There was a word for that: visualization.
A key to gruesome success.
Four chemistry laboratories occupied a block of classrooms and only one of them was vacant. I turned the knob. All doors at Hollow Pines High had to remain unlocked after senior pranksters put superglue in the locks a few years back and the school had gone into a full-scale panic when a group of students thought they smelled smoke. Locked doors, we learned, were a fire hazard.
The lights were off inside the lab. Slits of white sunlight streamed through the blinds, drawing stripes along the blacktop tables. At the back of the class was a door to a storeroom that I allowed to fall gently shut behind me with a click. The air in the small room was stale. A pen dangled from a chain attached to a clipboard that hung from the wall. SIGN-OUT SHEET, it read over a list of handwritten names and diligent check-in and check-out times.
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