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“Don’t panic. Is everyone all right?” Mrs. English said, trying to regain control.
I turned toward the pencil sharpener. I wanted to make sure Lena was okay. She wasn’t. She was standing by the broken window, surrounded by glass, looking panic-stricken. Her face was even paler than usual, her eyes even bigger and greener. Like last night in the rain. But they looked different. They looked frightened. She didn’t seem so brave anymore.
She held out her hands. One was cut and bleeding. Red drops splattered on the linoleum floor.
I didn’t mean it—
Did she shatter the glass? Or had the glass shattered and cut her?
“Lena—”
She bolted out of the room, before I could ask her if she was all right.
“Did you see that? She broke the window! She hit it with somethin’ when she walked over there!”
“She punched clean through the glass. I saw it with my own eyes!”
“Then how come she’s not gushin’ blood?”
“What are you, CSI? She tried to kill us.”
“I’m callin’ my daddy right now. She’s crazy, just like her uncle!”
They sounded like a pack of angry alley cats, shouting over each other. Mrs. English tried to restore order, but that was asking the impossible. “Everyone calm down. There’s no reason to panic. Accidents happen. It was probably nothing that can’t be explained by an old window and the wind.”
But no one believed it could be explained by an old window and the wind. More like an old man’s niece and a lightning storm. The green-eyed storm that just rolled into town. Hurricane Lena.
One thing was for sure. The weather had changed, all right. Gatlin had never seen a storm like this.
And she probably didn’t even know it was raining.
9.12
Greenbrier
Don’t.
I could hear her voice in my head. At least I thought I could.
It’s not worth it, Ethan.
It was.
That’s when I pushed back my chair and ran down the hallway after her. I knew what I’d done. I had taken sides. I was in a different kind of trouble now, but I didn’t care.
It wasn’t just Lena. She wasn’t the first. I’d watched them do it, my whole life. They’d done it to Allison Birch when her eczema got so bad nobody would sit near her at the lunch table, and poor Scooter Richman because he played the worst trombone in the history of the Jackson Symphony Orchestra.
While
I’d never picked up a marker and written LOSER across a locker myself, I had stood by and watched, plenty of times. Either way, it had always bothered me. Just never enough to walk out of the room.
But somebody had to do something. A whole school couldn’t just take down one person like that. A whole town couldn’t just take down one family. Except, of course, they could, because they had been doing it forever. Maybe that’s why Macon Ravenwood hadn’t left his house since before I was born.
I knew what I was doing.
You don’t. You think you do, but you don’t.
She was there in my head again, as if she’d always been there.
