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She was expendable.
“I don’t care!” she screamed at the trash can, kicking it. The crash echoed, and the can upchucked more wadded paper towels onto the floor.
She was stupid for shouting. She was stupid for crying, and most of all, she was stupid for believing, for even a second, that they might have been friends.
Isobel grabbed a handful of paper towels from the metal dispenser. She would not go back out into the hall with her makeup smeared and her eyes puffy-red.
Drawing in a shuddering breath, she turned on the faucet and brought her gaze up to her reflection.
A dry croak caught in her throat.
He stood in the doorway of the stall behind her. A man, cloaked in black. He stared at her, a tattered fedora hat shading his features, a white scarf swathing his mouth and nose, hiding his face.
She opened her mouth to . . . to what? To scream? To say something?
Suddenly, in the mirror, the door to the bathroom popped open. The skinny girl, her locker neighbor, poked her head in. Isobel whirled around.
“Talk about crash and burn,” the girl said. “You all right or what?”
Isobel stared at the open space where she had seen the man. Behind her, she gripped the cold sink. Her eyes darted to the girl and then, her head whipping around, she looked back into the mirror. In it she could see her own face, drained of color, and the stall behind her—empty.
Her lips formed words. “Did you . . . ?” The question withered in her mouth.
“I . . . ,” the girl started, “well, I thought I’d better, I dunno . . . check on you?”
“You didn’t just see . . . ?” Isobel turned, pointed at the stall.
The girl shrugged. “Well . . .” She gave a quick glance over one bony shoulder back into the hall. “Hate to break it to you, but I think it’s pretty safe to say everybody saw.”
15
The Power of Words
“All right, ladies, take five!”
The shrill blast of Coach Anne’s whistle pierced through Isobel’s head, ringing in her brain like a fire bell, sending her headache officially into migraine status.
Without turning to talk and stretch with the others like she normally would, Isobel broke away from formation and trudged to the bleachers, where she’d left her gym bag. She tugged down on the hems of her blue practice shorts and plopped onto the bottom-most bench. She grabbed, opened, and drained the rest of her Gatorade in one smooth motion, then screwed the cap back on and stuffed the empty bottle into the bag between her street shoes and jeans.
Sitting there, she couldn’t seem to bring herself to form a single coherent thought. Not since she’d had to order her brain to stop its relentless attempts to assign a rational explanation to what she’d seen in the girls’ bathroom earlier that day: the dark figure that had stared her down and then vanished.
Deciding that she would do better to wait until after she’d had more than ten cents’ worth of sleep, Isobel tried to think of something else. That, however, only left room for her brain to play and replay the agonizing scene from lunch.
Again and again she saw Varen look up at her from the crowded lunch table, those stony green eyes fixing on her, at first in mild surprise, then slowly melding into two pools of nothing
—until he was looking at her with only vague recognition, like he might have seen her on a milk carton somewhere.
And that girl. Lacy.
Isobel thought back to the way she had glared at her—territorially.
She pictured them together, hands linked, and she couldn’t help but wonder what kind of boyfriend he was.
He could be so cynical. So dry and acidic. As blank as a page. Could he be tender, too?
She flinched at the thought, angry at her mind for letting it venture so far beyond what she already knew to be true. He wasn’t any different from the people he pretended to be above.
He’d proven that much at lunch.
