“She needs me,” I repeat. “She won’t kill me.”
“And what happens if Ben doesn’t want to run away with you? Do you think she’ll just let you go back to New York? Or that she’ll set you free?” He steps even closer to me, just a fraction, as if trying to read my eyes.
“The plan will work,” I say fiercely, my eyebrows contracting as I stare him down. “And I’ll be fine.”
The anger finally slips from his eyes, and all that is left there is pity. And it nearly breaks me.
I turn away and set my shoulders as I open the door and walk away from him. I don’t need his pity. I will be fine.
It’s March fifth, two days before Ben’s eighteenth birthday. I spend most of the evening in the art room, filling reams of paper with black lines of desperation. I draw a woman’s back, hunched in grief. She’s staring into a dying fire, a portrait of her disapproving mother above her. Then I draw that same woman, a black shadow overtaking the viewer, undefined except for her eyes, which are wide with rage and revenge. I sketch a boy with eyes full of trust and love. Then a boy—a man—reaching his hand out to me, trying to save me.
I hide the last two sketches from Ms. Elling when she walks by. She rests a hand on my shoulder, trying to be reassuring. She can see the shadows enveloping me.
When I head back to the dorm, the gas lamps lining the courtyard are straining against the darkness. I’m staring blankly at my feet, lost in my head, when a gust of wind blows through and rips away some sheets of loose paper sticking out of my bag. They’re the sheets I tore out, the portraits of Ben and Arthur that I didn’t want Ms. Elling to see, and they scatter across the yard.
I mutter a curse under my breath and hurry to gather them.
He’s too quick for me, though. Before I can stop him, Arthur snatches one of the sketches and holds it up to the light.
I run to his side. “It’s not what you think!” I cry, sure he has found the portrait of himself.
When I look down at the paper in his hands, though, I see Ben. One where I was trying to capture the way he looked at me when he told me he loved me. I wanted to show the hope in his eyes, the mixture of certainty and uncertainty as he poured his heart out to me.
“You’ve drawn him like you’re in love with him,” Arthur says softly. He brings his eyes up to mine, and my breath stutters in my throat.
I rip the sheet from his hands. I can’t think of anything to say, so I hurry off without a word. I can feel his eyes on my back as I march resolutely to Faraday Hall.
CHAPTER 28
By the time I reach my room, I’m shaking, and it takes a great deal of effort for me not to slam the door. I’m angry, though at whom I don’t know. Claire must see it in my face, because she looks up from the book she’s reading and then looks quickly back down again.
I take a deep breath and try to clear my face of emotion.
I go to the dresser in search of a hair tie so that I can pull my hair back. Really, I’m just looking for something to occupy my hands.
But when I open up the top drawer, I notice something’s off. I usually keep everything in neat, ordered rows: my makeup brushes, my nail polish, my hair clips. But now everything is jumbled. Maybe I pulled the drawer open too hard and bounced everything around?
I check the next drawer down to find my sweaters and jeans crumpled and mixed together, and my heart starts beating faster.
“Did you go through my drawers?” I ask Claire.
She looks up. “No. Why?”
I examine her face. Her brow is scrunched in genuine confusion, and I know she’s not a good enough liar to fake it. “They look disorganized, that’s all. Like someone messed with them.”
“The door was locked all day. Only Mrs. Hallie has the key.”
I nod. “I must have just messed them up myself this morning and forgotten about it,” I murmur.
I think of Mrs. Hallie being in the room and nearly start to panic. As soon as Claire leaves for the library, I lunge for the box under my bed where I’ve stashed the yearbook I took from the student lounge and my meager mementos from childhood. The packet of Molly that I bought from G-Man is still there, still half-full since Ben has been using less and less.
Nothing else in the room could have gotten me in trouble. But the box looked a little askew when I first reached for it, like it had been shoved back under my bed hastily. Had I done that? I’ve always been so careful.
A shiver runs through me. Something has happened—is happening. I just have no idea what it is.
When Claire comes back from the library two hours later, I’m sitting on my bed staring at the wall. I’m scouring my mind for clues, trying to figure out why someone would search my room but take nothing. Someone might have been looking for the pills, but if they found them, they left them there on purpose. Why?
“You have to come out with us tonight!” Claire says as soon as she walks in. “Everyone’s going out on the moors, and you haven’t been in ages. I mean, with someone other than Ben.”
“It’s not really my crowd, Claire,” I say with a grimace. “It doesn’t sound fun.”
“It’s going to be brilliant,” she says, ignoring me. “Someone’s scored a stash of pills that are supposed to blow your mind. I probably shouldn’t keep going, honestly, but this stuff is going to be really good. You have to come try it.”
“Sorry.” I turn back to my textbook.
She shrugs, but I know I’ve hurt her. She feels like I’m judging her. She doesn’t know about the packet of pills beneath my bed, the pills I have to get rid of immediately.
As soon as Claire and the others sneak out at midnight, I grab the bag of pills and head for the bathroom, where I flush everything down the toilet.
That night, I can’t fall asleep. I wait in my bed, watching the fingers of moonlight play across the ceiling, trying to sort out what I know and what I speculate.
And right now there’s only one name jumping out at me: Arabella. She might be a more vicious enemy than I’d anticipated.
CHAPTER 29
After a few hours of staring up at the ceiling, I hear the girls tiptoeing up the stairs. There are only a few of them tonight, probably just Claire, Arabella, and her two minions. One is murmuring, but it’s not the usual giggling type of murmuring. It’s softer, lower, like something’s wrong. I wait for Claire to scurry into the room, but she doesn’t come. The murmuring dies off, and the door to my room remains closed. I hear a quick knock, and someone scampering away. Claire?
Arabella?
I throw off my covers and open the door as softly as possible, peering down the shadowy hall. No one in sight. I pull on jeans and a black sweater, then patter down the hall and the stairs. It’s so dark that I have to feel my way, gliding my hand along the wall and hoping that no one has left anything out for me to stumble over. Jenkins must still be outside on her smoke break.
As soon as I push open the back door, I see her.
Claire lies, limbs strewn out, on the bottom of the cold steps, as if someone has dumped her there. She’s on her back with one arm crossed over her chest and the other flung over her head. Her eyes are closed, and her face looks like the pale surface of a pearl in the moonlight.
I stand frozen for a moment, blinking and unsure, and then run down to her. “Claire!” I yell, shaking her. “Claire, wake up!” Her head rolls, and I stop shaking her, worried I’ll make her hit it against the stone steps.
I bend down. She’s breathing, but it’s so shallow I almost miss it.
I have to do something. But what? If I take her to the nurse, they’ll think I was the one who gave her whatever she’s overdosed on, and I’ll be expelled. Or worse, the administration will look too closely at me and start to unravel all of Mother’s carefully constructed lies. No. I just need to get her better. If I could get her to the hospital, if I could just get her fixed and
back to Madigan without anyone noticing . . .
I run straight through the courtyard past Rawlings Hall to the light shining through the fog. Arthur. I sprint to his shed and bang on the door until he opens it. “It’s Claire, please!” I say, not knowing if I’m making any sense. “We have to get her to the hospital.”
“Where is she?” he asks, scanning the darkness.
I run back to Faraday, and he follows. “She’s overdosed on something,” I explain. “She won’t wake up.”
Arthur kneels down and cradles her in his arms, picking her up and moving swiftly across the yard and around his shed. He places Claire carefully in the back of a tiny black car parked there, and I jump into the backseat with her. He’s roaring down the hill before I can get my seatbelt on.
I hold Claire’s head in my hands and beg her over and over to wake up. She answers me with nothing but her shallow, slow breathing.
The nearest hospital is miles away, in a village even farther than Loworth. Arthur goes as fast as he can, speeding in this tiny car with its cracked leather seats through the heavy fog encasing us. But it still doesn’t seem fast enough.
I stare down at Claire’s pale face. I knew she was going out tonight. I knew she was going to take some kind of pill. I knew she had been out on the moors more nights than I could count. I knew G-Man was worried about her, that if I had been a real friend, I would’ve worried about her, too. I knew everything I needed to know to stop this from happening, but I’d done nothing. Because I didn’t think it was my business. Because keeping Claire alive was not part of Mother’s plan.
I feel as if all the blood is draining from my face, leaving me as pale as she is. I did this. My inattention, my refusal to acknowledge that Claire had a problem, has led to this night. It’s all my fault.
We pull into the emergency entrance of the tiny hospital, and I jump out of the car. Arthur gathers Claire in his arms as I run into the building.
A distraught mother and three children sit in the white blankness of the waiting room, and they stare at me with wide, hollowed eyes as I run in. I turn to the nurses at the reception desk. “My sister—I think she’s OD’d,” I say with the best British accent I can muster, as Arthur brings Claire in behind me.
The nurses bustle around the desk, calling for a gurney. An orderly takes Claire, her head lolling as she’s transferred from Arthur’s arms.
“Is she going to be okay?” I ask, my messily accented voice a wail in the cold space.
They wheel her away, leaving us alone with a stocky nurse who reaches a hand out to pat my shoulder, her eyes kind and comforting. “They’ll do their best. Now what did she take?”
“I don’t know. Some kind of pill, I think. I overheard her talking about it on the phone. I wasn’t supposed to hear, she hates me eavesdropping.” I try to look beyond the nurse to see if I can get a glimpse of Claire.
“You didn’t hear what kind?” she asks.
I shake my head, focusing back on her. “No. All she said was that her friends had scored some pills, and she was going to try them.”
“Okay, that’s fine, dear. We’ll sort it out. Now what about your parents?”
“Business trip,” I say quickly. “I’ve been calling, but I can’t reach them.”
She pats my shoulder again. “How about you take a seat here,” she says, gesturing to the waiting room, “and we’ll start getting your sister better.”
“Thank you,” I murmur. I settle into a seat as far away from the distraught family as possible. I can’t let their worry and stress melt into my own.
Arthur sits beside me as the seconds drip by, his face tense and motionless. The fluorescent light buzzes above, nearly drowning out the howl of the wind outside. The nurses refuse to look at me. No one is telling me anything. I try not to picture Claire’s pale face, the lifeless weight of her body, but I can think of nothing else.
A doctor comes out, and I straighten up in my chair, but he heads for the family. He says something to them, and then they’re crying.
I reach for Arthur’s hand on the armrest beside me, needing something to hold on to.
For a moment, he freezes and lets my fingers intertwine with his, lets my palm graze against the calluses of his much bigger palm. His thumb brushes a half circle on the back of my hand, but instead of calming me, it feels like sparks burning into my skin. And then he takes a sharp breath in, pulls his hand away, and stands. I drop my hand back in my lap.
“I’ll go get some tea,” he says without looking at me.
I don’t know what’s come over me. I bury my head in my hands. I’m alone with the crying family, and the seconds seem to move backward now. I wish Ben were here. He would hold my hand as long as I needed him to.
But his hand would never feel like sparks against mine.
Another doctor enters the waiting room, and she heads right toward me. “You’re Claire’s sister?” she asks.
I nod.
“We’ve eliminated the oxycodone from her system. She’s sedated, unconscious, and we won’t know anything until she wakes up.”
I can hardly breathe, but I force my voice out. “Can I see her?”
She nods with a sad smile. “Yes, but only for a few minutes. She needs to rest.”
I nod, thoroughly obedient as always. The doctor leads me down the hall and points to a room. I take a deep breath, staring at the door for a second before I twist the handle and push it open.
At first all I see is her hair. Everything else is covered in wires and tubes. I look away quickly. One of the machines beeps a monotonous rhythm, but the room feels still and silent. Like a tomb. I am underground with the dead, and I don’t know if I will ever be able to get out.
I shake my head, trying to get the strange thoughts out. Claire is right here on the bed, and she is going to be fine. I know it. She’s too happy, too precious and pretty a thing to be destroyed by something like this. This kind of thing doesn’t happen to good people. It happens to people like me.
For a moment, I wish I were the one lying on that bed instead. I wish it so hard that my knees nearly collapse under the weight of my wishing. I stare at her a few more minutes, not daring to move closer.
My fault. All my fault.
I need air. I leave without another glance at Claire.
I close the door behind me and lean back against it, my knees still threatening to buckle underneath me. I close my eyes and take a few deep breaths, desperate to loosen the tightness in my chest.
When I open them, I realize I’m not alone in this hallway. And someone—a much too familiar someone—is staring at me.
Arabella.
She stands outside the room huddled with Headmaster Harriford and a couple of policemen, and I’m so tired that it takes a moment to realize that there is a shiver running down my spine. This tableau in front of me signals nothing but danger.
The cops barely glance at me, until Arabella raises her finger. “That’s her,” she says.
I look to Harriford, my ally. Only now he’s staring at me not with the care and devotion that he used to show me, but with something more like revulsion.
“What? What is it?” I ask. “Whatever she’s told you, it’s not the truth. She’s lying. She hates me!”
The cops look at each other as I protest, and then one of them approaches. He spins me around and traps my wrists in handcuffs, snapping them shut so quickly that one of them scratches my skin.
“Vivian Foster, you are under arrest for the possession and sale of illegal narcotics.”
“What?” I ask. “I didn’t do anything! I just found her!”
He continues to talk over me. “You do not have to say anything. But it may harm your defense if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.”
Arthur comes running
toward me. He takes in the scene, then tells me urgently, “Viv, don’t say anything. We’ll get you out of this, just don’t say anything.”
I keep my mouth shut as the cop pulls me down the hall and out into the waiting car.
CHAPTER 30
They’ve put me in an interrogation room, a box of concrete and harsh fluorescent light. They leave me in here alone for what feels like hours, though it may be only minutes. It’s long enough for me to curse Arabella and picture all the ways I can exact my revenge on her.
I don’t think she’s cruel enough to make Claire overdose. I’m sure Claire did that all on her own. But Arabella took advantage of the situation and told them that I provided the pills. And she must have convinced the others to leave Claire on the steps and knock on my door so I would be the one to discover her and implicate myself in her overdose. She left her on those steps. To die.
I want to scream, take the shiny metal chair I’m sitting on and throw it against the wall, beat my fists against the concrete. Instead, I let my head sink into my hands and try to regulate my breathing.
A cop I haven’t seen before walks in. He isn’t in uniform, but his straight posture and cold smile give him away. “We usually don’t have this much trouble with Madigan students, even the American ones,” he says by way of introduction. He’s letting me know that he knows everything about me. Or at least he thinks he does.
“Let’s make this easy, yeah?” he says, settling down in a chair across the table from me. “You tell me everything, and we can call it a day.”
I stare at him, my face blank. He will get nothing from me.
His cold smile fades, and he looks down at the folder in his hands. “You’ve been accused of possessing illegal drugs and selling them to your roommate, Claire Templeton. You gave her so much that she overdosed, and you brought her to the hospital for medical attention.” He pauses, looking at me. “At least you did the right thing, in the end,” he sniffs.
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