A hand touches my elbow.
I flinch and whirl around. “Jesus,” I breathe when I see that it’s just Mara. “You scared the shit out of me.”
“Yeah, this place is disgusting.” She glances at the display case and shivers. “Let’s go.”
She and Harper hurry out of the shop, but I lag behind. The butcher shop girl drums her fingers against the counter, watching me with flat, empty eyes. I shiver, thinking that her eyes remind me of the dead goat’s.
“Did you want something else?” the girl asks after a moment. Her voice is deep and throaty.
“Yeah, hi. Uhm, I’m Berkley?”
The girl blinks. After a moment, she says, “Elyse,” through clenched teeth. Her apron is stained with dark reddish-brown spots.
Blood. My stomach turns. “I’m sorry, I’m friends with Giovanni. I just thought that maybe he works here?”
Elyse considers me, saying nothing. Then she steps away from the counter and removes a butcher’s knife from the metal strip attached to the wall. Its sharp blade gleams in the fluorescent light.
“So what if he does?” She shrugs in a slow, lazy way and pulls a small animal carcass from a hook dangling off the ceiling. The animal looks fresh, its meat still bright pink.
She slaps it onto the butcher-block counter, picks up the knife, and slams it into pink flesh. Gleefully.
I flinch, letting an awkward moment pass as Elyse butchers the animal, her movements practiced and precise. She separates meat from bone with quick flicks of her blade. She wipes blood on her apron like it’s nothing.
Finally, I clear my throat. “Is he here now?”
“Who would like to know?” she asks, eyes flicking up to me.
I swallow, but I can’t look away from the half-butchered creature. Without skin, it’s hard to tell what kind of animal it was. Too small to be a pig. A rabbit, maybe.
Or a cat.
My stomach clenches. Lucky never returned to my room last night. And all that blood had to have come from somewhere.
Nausea rises up in my chest, filling my throat. I’m going to be sick. I shake my head, muttering “Never mind” before hurrying back to the entrance. I push the door open—
“Diavolina.”
Nerves crawl over my skin. I look over my shoulder. “Did you say something?”
Elyse raises a heavy black eyebrow. There’s a spray of blood across her cheek. It looks almost pretty against her dark skin and black eyes.
She shakes her head. “No. I didn’t say anything.”
CHAPTER 12
Before
There’s something dark crusted beneath my fingernails.
I pick at it with my thumbnail, pressing so hard that the jagged edge cuts into skin, making it sting. It looks like dirt. Or blood, maybe. It could be anything, in this place.
“You’re going to be sitting here for the remainder of the hour anyway.” Dr. Andrews taps her pen against the edge of her notebook. “You may as well talk to me.”
I drop my hands onto my lap. Everything around me is white and curated and perfect. It makes me even more aware of my own grubbiness. The scrubs that haven’t been washed in a week and my hair, all dry and frizzy from the cheap shampoo they keep in the showers. I can’t remember the last time I saw my reflection, but I feel a zit pressing through the skin just above my eyebrow, the bump raw and painful to touch.
Back home, I have an entire closet of beauty supplies. Shampoos that smell like coconut and Korean sheet masks decorated to look like animal faces and tiny bottles of tea tree oil ointments that make my zits disappear overnight.
I curl one fist around the other. I can’t see the dirt beneath my fingernail anymore, but I can feel it. It pulses at the tip of my finger, like a second heart.
I swallow and force my attention back to Dr. Andrews’s face. “I’m sorry, what did you say?”
Dr. Andrews lifts both eyebrows in tandem. “I asked you why you’re here.”
I roll my lower lip between my teeth. I should just ignore her. The thought of silently counting down the minutes until she has to let me sulk back to my room fills me with a kind of terrible glee. Tayla and I did that once, after we got caught ditching PE, the one and only time either of us ever skipped a class. The vice principal called us into his office, demanded to know where we were. We claimed period cramps and then gave him stone-faced silence for the next twenty minutes as he told us that he didn’t believe us, that he was going to call our parents, that we were getting suspended. Eventually, frustrated with our refusal to defend ourselves, he just let us go. The two of us giggled about it the entire way home.
It’s not like these sessions have done anything for me anyway. I’m only here because I have to be.
I plop back against the fluffy white pillows. “Why am I here?” I repeat. “You ask that question every time.”
“And you still haven’t answered it.”
I shift my gaze to the clock on the wall above Dr. Andrews’s head. The short hand points to the one, and the long hand has just twitched a hair closer to the eight. 1:39. Only twenty-one minutes left in this session.
I blow a frizzy lock of hair off my face. It’s my sixth—and final—week at Mountainside. Which makes this my second-to-last session with Dr. Andrews. May as well go out with a bang.
I say, “I told you about my friend Tayla. The one who . . .”
Dr. Andrews leans forward, elbows sliding to her knees. “You’ve mentioned her.”
“We were friends.” The words come easily, like they’ve been waiting for their chance to escape. “In grade school and middle school, we were best friends. Practically inseparable. And then we got to high school and things got . . . I don’t know . . . complicated.”
“Complicated?”
I think of Mara and Harper and me at the lunch table, giggling under our breath at the oh my God so dumb thing Erik Masters said in homeroom, gossiping about how Todd Harrison was totally cheating on Marissa Clark and how could she not know?
Tayla listened with a sour expression on her face, judging us. Afterward she pulled me aside, told me I’d changed.
Her voice was desperate and confused. “When did you get so mean?”
I don’t realize I’ve started picking at my finger again until a sharp jab of pain pricks the skin beneath my nail. I wince and slide both hands under my thighs, digging my fingers into the fabric of the couch.
“Berkley?” Dr. Andrews urges.
I say, in a rush, “You know how some people are, like, weirdly perfect? Tayla was like that. She got straight As in school, made the varsity volleyball team her sophomore year. She got into Columbia. She would’ve gone in the fall, if she hadn’t . . .” I pause to take a breath. “If she hadn’t committed suicide.”
The word hangs in the air between us for a long time. I look up and see Dr. Andrews watching me. She doesn’t look surprised, just patient, like she’s waiting for me to say something deep and profound.
“Were you jealous of her achievements?” she asks.
I feel my lip curl. “No. You don’t get it.”
“Then help me understand.”
I think of Tayla skipping Harper’s birthday party junior year because it was the night before a big chem test and she wanted to study. Tayla going out for yearbook even though Mara teased her about it endlessly. “I just want you to know what kind of girl she was.”
“And what kind of girl were you?”
I wasn’t stupid enough to miss one of Harper’s parties, I think. I slide a hand out from under my legs, grasping, like I might pluck the right words straight out of the air. “I was . . . I don’t know. Different.”
“You didn’t care about school?”
“I did, it’s just . . .” I close my eyes, frustrated. She isn’t getting it. “Tayla cared way more than she was supposed to. This one time,
she got a 98 on a test instead of a perfect 100. After class, she ran into the bathroom and cried. Over two points.”
“And you think that’s why she killed herself?”
I shrug with one shoulder. “Not over that exact test, no. But yeah, I figured the stress of school had something to do with it. She didn’t leave a note or anything, so no one really knows why she did it.”
Dr. Andrews writes something down. Underlines it. “How did her death affect you?” she asks without looking up from her notebook.
I remember my mom knocking on my bedroom door, red-eyed, her voice raspy and strange. Honey, I have something to tell you. It’s about Tayla. The way the world seemed to stop spinning after that moment. How time stood still.
I press my lips together. “It didn’t.”
Dr. Andrews lifts her eyes without raising her head.
“I mean, I guess it freaked me out a little. It always seemed like Tayla had everything under control, and then it turned out that she couldn’t deal. It made me wonder if . . .”
I don’t finish the sentence. Dr. Andrews leaves it hanging for a beat and then says, “If . . . ?”
“If I was going to end up like her, I guess.” My voice sounds very small. “If I was going to crack, too.”
Once, the four of us were hanging out in the gym after school. The gym’s in the old part of the high school, and it hasn’t been updated in something like fifty years. Bleachers wrap around the edges of the room. They’re old, made of wood instead of aluminum, and when the basketball hoop is lowered, you can see the other side of the backboard. For years, kids have written things there, signed their names, or drawn pictures.
We all wrote on the backboard that day, using these bright pink and green Sharpies Mara stole from the art room. Harper and Mara left thinly veiled pieces of gossip. I just wrote my name: Berkley was here!
But Tayla . . . she wrote these old lyrics from some song I didn’t recognize. I’ve been afraid of changing because I’ve built my life around you. We made fun of her, but she didn’t care. She signed her name beneath it, proud.
She was so sure of who she was, who she wanted to be. It never occurred to me that she could break.
Her mom played that song at Tayla’s funeral. She said it used to be one of their favorites.
I close my eyes, and it’s not until my eyelashes press into the tops of my cheeks that I realize they’re wet. I’m crying. I brush the tears away with a jerk of my hand.
I hear the sound of a notebook slapping shut. The click of a pen. Then, “I’m really proud of you, Berkley. I think this is a breakthrough.”
I open my eyes again. “Does that mean I’m getting better?”
“I think it means that you’ve done some good work today and that you should be proud of yourself.” Dr. Andrews smiles. “Next session, let’s start talking about some strategies you can incorporate into your day-to-day life when you get back home. Ways not to let the pressure get to you, so to speak.”
The soft curl of her lips sends a shock of hope through my chest. Back home. I’ve barely let myself imagine it. It’s like I thought I might jinx myself.
But now . . .
Now it feels real.
* * *
• • •
Sofia sits in the waiting room, slouched on the off-white chair. She has a cream-colored pillow on her lap, and she’s idly flicking the tassel with her thumb and forefinger.
She curls her hand around the tassel as I walk past, and her eyes shift to my face. “You look happy.”
“My six weeks are almost up.” I replay Dr. Andrews’s words—back home—and a shiver of anticipation moves down my spine. “I guess I’m just excited to get out of here.”
Sofia stares at me, not blinking. Her eyes have that empty look they sometimes get, like there’s nothing behind those inky black pupils but space. She asks, “What makes you think you’re getting out?”
“Just some stuff Dr. Andrews said.” I shrug, looking at the wall behind Sofia’s head. “She thinks I’m making progress.”
“So you finally told her the truth?”
My lips twitch. “A . . . version of it.”
“What’s that mean? A version?”
“I told her everything she needs to know.”
Sofia releases the pillow tassel. For a moment she’s silent, watching it spin as the tangled threads unwind. I’m halfway to the door when she reaches out, fingers wrapping around my wrist. “You’re not going home. You know that, right?”
I shake her off with a jerk. “How is that your business?”
“Rule number one of this place: no lying. They catch you in a lie and you’re totally fucked.” She holds both hands up, all innocence. “I just thought you should know.”
“I didn’t lie.”
Sofia laughs, a single dry scrape. “But you didn’t tell the truth either. Not the whole truth.”
I feel my chin jut out, same as it used to when I was ten years old and Dad caught me in a lie. The thought causes a hot rush of blood to shoot up my neck. “I told her what happened. What difference does it make if I left out some of the details?”
“Trust me. I’ve been here long enough to know what they’re going to freak out about. You have to tell them everything. They’ll know if you don’t.” Sofia shrugs, hands dropping back into her lap. “I’m not making this shit up.”
I think of what she said to me the first time we met. They’re never letting me out. “If you’re such an expert, then why are you still here? Why not confess your secrets or whatever and go home?”
Sofia still doesn’t blink. “I am going home.”
Bullshit, I think, but the door to Dr. Andrews’s office swings open before I can say the word out loud.
“Sofia, how nice to see you again.” Dr. Andrews holds her white cardigan closed with one hand and beckons Sofia with the other. “Why don’t you join me?”
It isn’t until Sofia has disappeared into Dr. Andrews’s office, the door closing firmly behind them both, that I realize I haven’t moved a muscle.
There’s only one way out of here . . .
Bullshit, I think again. I pull the door open, shaking the nerves from my arms.
But Sofia’s words echo through my head as I wind through the institute’s cold hallways, making my way back to our room.
They catch you in a lie and you’re totally fucked.
CHAPTER 13
After
The crowd of people in the streets has multiplied by the time we make our way out of the apartment again.
“Whoa,” Harper says, eyes going monstrous. The crush of bodies is too much for the narrow walkway. We can barely move. “This is insane. Is everyone in Italy going to this thing?”
“More like everyone in Europe,” I say, but that’s not exactly true. The families and children all seem to have gone home. The people on the streets are our age: students and teenagers, dressed in skimpy costumes, their faces painted with dark eyeliner and glitter.
Music vibrates through the air. I feel it before I hear it. It pulses up from the sidewalk, moving through my bones and humming over my skin. The heavy bass reaches my ears, and it sounds like a heartbeat.
Bomp bomp bomp bomp.
“You really think the red’s okay?” Mara asks, linking arms with me. “I don’t look like a whore?”
I smile at her sweetly and rest my head on her shoulder. “You look great. We all do.”
We were right to go all out with our costumes. Everyone in the crowd is decked out in crazy masks and outfits: devil’s horns twist out of heads, long snouts protrude from faces, and forked tails trail away from people’s backs. Angel’s wings glitter in the fading sunlight.
I catch Mara checking her reflection in the window of the butcher shop as the crowd carries us forward. I don’t know what she’s stressed about. Her la
cy red teddy fits like a glove, showing off every curve of her tiny pixie body. Her eyes shift up to where the dead pig hangs behind the glass, empty eye sockets staring.
She winces. “That thing is so gross.”
“The whole place was creepy.” Harper drops her arms around our shoulders, inserting herself between us. She doesn’t bother asking if we think she looks good. Her white teddy looks angelic and soft against her deeply tanned shoulders, and her sky-high heels show off her long legs. “What kind of person would ever want to work in a butcher shop?”
I think of the butcher girl—Elyse—and shiver. “No idea.”
I check my reflection, too, just before we turn the corner. I’m wearing nude and black lace, devil’s horns twisting out of my auburn hair. I pull at my jacket, feeling naked. The crowd and the people suddenly feel like too much. The food stands from earlier are gone, and now the smell of human bodies hangs heavy in the air. It’s gotten dark, the sun no more than a thin gold line on the horizon. The last bits of light bounce off glittery angel’s wings and sweaty arms.
The crowd surges forward, and we’re tossed into the wide, open square. The beat drops, and the people around us scream, elbows and shoulders jabbing the soft parts of my body as they jump and gyrate.
They’re so happy. Intensely, ecstatically happy. I feel my own lips curving to mimic theirs, that touch of nerves mostly vanishing.
Tonight’s going to be epic, I tell myself. I look at Harper and Mara and see matching grins on their faces. Harper leans in close, cupping a hand around her mouth.
“Drinks!” she shouts.
I nod, and we push our way through the crowd to find the trattoria. Candlelight flickers, dancing over dark skin and black eyes. The light distorts everyone’s features, making their teeth seem jagged, their eyes hooded and haunting. Horns curl away from their heads. Demon’s horns. Devil’s horns.
“Look,” I say, spotting Giovanni by the fountain. He’s wearing a devil’s mask, too, but it’s shoved up on his forehead so I can see his gorgeous face. I feel a grin pulling at my lips, and I start pushing through the crowd toward him, Harper and Mara following along behind me.
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