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I’d only been caught sleeping in one class, surprisingly.
Classes with Sorina were the easiest to feel that calming warmth you feel when you’re sleeping somewhere safe. And I was never caught in those classes, as if she had settled a grey fog over me, a shield.
I didn’t take my clothes off in the locker room with the rest of the guys. They seemed comfortable in their bodies, unafraid to walk around nude after their showers. I always changed in one of the bathroom stalls in the locker room. It set me apart and made me stand out—but not in a good way.
I heard the names I was called when I slipped from sight. The idiots I went to school with assumed I couldn’t handle their naked bodies and that I lusted after them. I just couldn’t handle anyone seeingmenaked.
I was sitting on the stool that day, my head against the stall door. I’d been waiting for my classmates to leave and had fallen asleep sitting there in my jeans with my shirt clutched in my hands.
The voices woke me.
Jarring.
Raised.
One noticeably upset, the other trying to calm the agitated voice in some way.
It was Eric and one of his teammates.
I jolted awake at the sound of a locker slamming before I heard the voices.
“I keep having this fucking dream. Last night I fucking had it again.”
“Eric, man, you gotta stop this. Stop.”
There was a loud noise, a fist to a locker, an inaudible curse. “You think I fucking want to? You think I want to dream about my missing girlfriend being pregnant? And that fucking look in her eyes … so fucking scared …”
“No, no man I know. And I know you said—”
“We never fucked. Her daddy was all in her head about it,” Eric said, the sound of his feet moving, his voice moving closer.
I pulled my feet up, wrapping my arms around my knees. The space was cramped, and I made a vow then to get more sleep so I wouldn’t nod off at school again.
“Never? Not even once?” the other guy asked. “Listen, I know how those preachers daughters can be sometimes. I fingered Lane freshman year in the back of the bus when we went to that game in Waynesville.”
“Amber is nothing like that slut Lane, Justin,” Eric said, his shadow passing by the crack in the door.
Justin said nothing, and the locker room was silent for a long while. The only sounds were Eric and Justin changing into their basketball uniforms.
I saw Amber’s face then. The grainy photo clear in my mind. Eric’s haunted look outside the grocery store.
Finally, Eric spoke again. “Everyone is just carrying on like she isn’t gone. Like she left on purpose. She would never do that. She isn’t some runaway. Someloser. We had plans. We were going to go to college in Springfield after we graduated. Far enough to have our own lives, close enough to come back home to see our parents. She wants to be a nurse, did you know that? Her dad wanted her to go to SBU, but she was going to do what she wanted. But, I don’t know. We’d barely talked all summer. I called while I was in New Mexico with my mom at my uncle’s, but she was always somewhere else.”
Eric’s voice was close, and I could see his shoes as he leaned on the stall door. I held my breath. There would be no excuse for me hiding in here while they had this conversation, and I didn’t want to fight at school.
“And your dad?” Justin asked.
Eric let out a laugh, and it held no warmth. “Oh,SheriffChildress has many a theory. All revolving around me driving her away.”
“Your dad gonna arrest you?” Justin said, going for a joking tone.
“He isn’t going to arrest anyone. This is fucking Hart Hollow, Misery. What do you expect?”
“So what are you trying to say with the dreams, man? You don’t really think she was pregnant? Do you?”
Eric’s voice was low, laced with frustration. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s … I don’t know. Maybe she was keeping something from me. But … she looked beautiful.”
“When?” Justin asked. “When she was pregnant?”
