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I didn’t open my eyes. I didn’t have to. I kept my hand on the knob and listened to her outside, doing something I couldn’t figure out. There was a tinkle of glass. Then the cold started to recede. “She’s leaving,” I whispered.
There was a repressed sob, which sounded like it came from Beatrice. I admired her restraint. It was hard not to scream when Shannon Haller was only a few feet away, dead and not dead at the same time.
The dryer whirred, painfully loud. When one of the girls clicked it off, we heard another footstep in the hall and the classroom door opened. “Is anyone in here?” a voice said.
It was a man’s voice. A real, live, actual man. Even though we were about to be caught, the sound of it was comfortingly sane. Still, we all froze, and I kept my grip on the doorknob.
There was a minute’s pause, and then the man’s voice came again. “If you’re in here, say so. You won’t be in trouble. I just want you to leave.”
I opened my eyes and turned to look at the others. Beatrice was frozen in place, and Gracie had a strip of negatives in her hand. The negatives wavered in the air as her hand shook.
Eddie was standing still, his brows furrowed in confusion. The man outside must be able to see the sign lit up above the darkroom door, but he didn’t come to the darkroom. Instead, we heard him come into the classroom and straighten the chairs, grumbling under his breath. He was the janitor, doing a daily sweep of the building. He had to be.
There were more footsteps, accompanied by more grumbling. Then the classroom door closed and the janitor was gone.
“Oh my God,” Gracie breathed. “I think I’m going to pass out.”
“What do we do next with those?” Eddie motioned to the negatives. His voice was tight and calm. Iraq calm.
“There were only four exposures on the roll,” Beatrice said. “We can print them if we’re fast.”
“Do it,” Eddie said.
So the girls took paper from a stack on the shelf. Eddie moved to stand next to me at the door, so close I could feel his breath against my neck as liquids sloshed. It seemed like a long time before Beatrice said, “Okay, we’re done.”
She clicked the red light off, and I opened the darkroom door so we could all exit. I didn’t want to look at the photographs in there; I didn’t want to be in there for even one more second. I felt like I was suffocating.
“We need to get out of here,” Eddie said in his perfectly calm voice. “The janitor is still in the building somewhere, and he’ll probably be back.”
He moved to the door, but Gracie said, “The light.”
I turned to see her staring at the light above the darkroom door, the one that said darkroom in use. It looked slightly crooked.
“Bea, turn on the light,” Gracie said. Her sister walked back into the darkroom, and we heard the click of the switch. Nothing happened. The light didn’t come on.
I walked to the darkroom door, reached up, and touched the light. It tilted against my fingertip, and then it fell to the floor. The glass from the broken bulb scattered at our feet. Behind the disconnected light, the wall was burned and black, the outlet incinerated. There was a plastic-smoke smell in the air.
“Shannon,” I said. That’s what she had been doing outside the door. Of course she hadn’t tried the doorknob—she didn’t want to interrupt us. She didn’t want the janitor to interrupt us, either. Whatever was in those photos, she wanted them developed. She wanted us to see.
Beatrice made a strangled noise and grabbed her big sister’s hand. She had always been so bold and confident, but right now she looked young. She looked like a scared sixteen-year-old who had just seen something she didn’t understand. She stared up at the scorch marks on the wall, her eyes wet with unshed tears.
I took her other hand. It was cold, not with the presence of Shannon Haller, but with fear. I squeezed it, telling her I understood.
The four of us left the room in silence.
CHAPTER FORTY
Twenty minutes later, Beatrice drove her car into an empty parking lot outside a closed Kmart. She pulled the prints from under her shirt, where she had hastily stuffed them as we made our escape from Coldlake Falls High School.
“So? Are we going to talk about that?” she asked, turning in her seat to look at the rest of us.
She had regained some of her composure, but she was still shaken. In the passenger seat, Gracie was pale and silent.
Oddly, I felt calmer than I had since I watched Eddie climb through John Haller’s window. The pulse in my throat had slowed, the sweat drying against my shirt. “I told you what happened,” I said. “You said you believed me.”
“Are you kidding me?” Beatrice’s voice was high-pitched with leftover adrenaline. “We did, but that was before—oh my God.”
“I think I might throw up,” Gracie said.
