I get onto the treadmill Mom folds up and down in the guest room, since exercise is supposed to be good for your mind.
At dinner, I finish the peas in the salad Mom makes, instead of pushing them to the edge of my plate like I’ve always done.
I don’t know if any of this is working. I only know that I’m exhausted.
It’s taking all the energy and concentration I have to focus in school, to follow conversations during lunchtime, to not keep whirling around in my seat, expecting to find my world inhabited by dozens of invisible people. And I think I’m doing a fairly good job of this, of fixing my eyes on things that are solid and certain and close enough to touch.
Until Wednesday, when the boy shows up at school.
I catch only a glimpse from the corner of my eye. A tall, lanky figure at the window of the music room during orchestra practice.
My fingers freeze on the bow and my heart seizes as I whip my head to the right to make sure it wasn’t just a shadow, a trick of the light.
It’s not.
I’m sitting in the viola section near the center of the room, with Katy and the other second violinists to my right. Only one seat separates Katy from the window, and I can’t take my eyes off the glass. I try to blink away the angular crook of his jaw, the clump of hair sticking out from underneath a black beanie. The cloud of air, of human breath, as he presses his forehead against the window, peering in.
It takes everything I have not to grab Katy’s arm and force her to look, to see how the mist of his breath stains the glass, how his teeth chatter noiselessly underneath our playing.
Tell me you can’t see him,I want to say.
How can you not see him?
But I’ve told her I haven’t seen him since the Cineplex, which is true. I went back there twice without Katy and he wasn’t there. I’ve told her I’m sleeping okay now, which isn’t exactly true, and I’ve tried to stay present when she talks to me, to remember the things she says.
So I can’t tell her he’s here.
I throw off the orchestra three times on one page.
Katy quirks her eyebrow up at me, silently demanding to know what’s with me.
Finally I set down my viola and bow. I ask for a bathroom pass from Mrs. Dubois and hustle out of the room, leaving Paulie rippling a particularly gassy set of notes through the air and Katy giggling behind me.
As soon as I’m in the hallway, I take off running toward the heavy doors that lead to the back of the building, outside the music room. Cold air slaps at my cheeks and chest and fingers, and I think vaguely that I should have retrieved my coat from my locker, but it’s too late now. I’m hurtling forward too quickly to stop or turn around. As I approach the music-room window, I see that he’s gone. There’s no one there.
I come to a stop a little ways from the window so no one from orchestra can see me, and try to catch my breath. I look for footprints or a dropped item or some sign that he was here, but there’s nothing.
And then I hear it.
A scrambled noise not far away, like feet crunching through snow.
I know it’s him immediately. It has to be.
“Hey!” I call. “Hey, wait!” I take off running again, sprinting on a shoveled walkway in the direction of the noise. I round the corner of the building too fast to stop myself from crashing into someone. He catches my elbows to stop me from toppling over.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” he exclaims.
His voice is thick, and his face is wide, weathered by too many hours in the sun. He’s also in his forties.
“Where are you going in such a hurry?”
I blink several times, giving the image in front of me a chance to change, but it’s still Bert, our school groundskeeper. There’s no sign of the boy.
“And you’re not wearing a coat. Do you want to catch your death?”
I give a ferocious shake of my head, too out of breath and too disappointed to form words.I said almost exactly that to Bus Boy days ago.
“You okay?” he asks, letting me go, and I nod. He continues to give me an odd look, so I force myself to speak.
