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  “Yeah, sure, it was fun.” Though it was hard to think of anything else besides what Dana had said.

  “People have been pretty messed up about her.”

  “Who, Dana?”

  “Becca.”

  Obviously. I’m an idiot. “Right, right. Of course.”

  “Tensions run a little high when her name comes up.”

  “I’m sure. Yeah.”

  I didn’t want to talk, and suddenly I didn’t want to listen.

  What was it about this girl Becca? Everything I’d heard about her made it seem like she was some kind of goddess who enchanted people just by being around them. I mean, I understand that it’s really awful to have a peer be missing and possibly dead…but it’s like she was friends with everyone. It was like she’d been perfect.

  I didn’t want to go to my room, where Dana would inevitably be at some point. I was humiliated. I was sick. And to make matters worse, I felt cold pricks of rain start to fall into my hair.

  A wave of sickness washed over me. We were only about fifty yards from the girls’ dorm door. I wanted to run to it, but I couldn’t.

  “Well, I’m glad you came. We should, I don’t know, hang out or something.”

  “Yeah sure. Um…thanks for walking me. I’ll see you tomorrow or something.” I gave a pitiful attempt at a smile and then flew through the door and up to my room.

  When I got there, I took a deep breath. In almost that same instant, I was in the bathroom, getting close with the mouth of another toilet.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I WOKE UP BRIGHT AND EARLY AT TWO IN THE afternoon. Dana had made it her business to amble around as loudly as possible until she finally fell asleep. I had lain there for God knows how long with my eyes shut, pretending to sleep and trying not to move.

  I was trembling and weak when I awoke, and I felt that putting my head in a vise might be a lot more preferable to the pounding it endured now. My churning stomach needed something in it or it was just going to shrivel into a raisin. But I really didn’t feel like eating was going to go well. Even so, I made it down to the dining hall.

  Sandwiches, soup, salad, chicken, pancakes…my stomach had all the options in the world and was rejecting even the thought of any of them. I groaned and turned to leave.

  And then there was Max, walking in.

  I gave a small smile. God I hope I don’t puke.

  “Hi.” He looked uncomfortable.

  “Hey.”

  “Did you just get here?”

  I nodded. “Yes. Trying to decide what to eat.” I looked around again at all the things I couldn’t imagine putting down my throat and keeping there.

  “Do you want to sit with me?”

  A chill filled my chest. I felt so stupid for letting myself drink so much last night that I was screwing myself over today. “Sure.”

  We walked through the line together. I looked around me. I didn’t want him to know how bad I was feeling. I really didn’t want to give him the opportunity to picture me with my face in a toilet.

  Potato soup. Nope. Would look the same going down as it would five minutes later.

  Sandwich. Entirely too many textures.

  Yogurt. Only one texture, but it was a nasty one.

  Salad. That nail-polish-remover taste in the lettuce would remind me way too much of the alcohol directly.

  Bread of any and all kind seemed out of the question. People always say bread and water is the way to go, but the very thought of either one of those things was absolutely revolting.

  Chicken tenders. Maybe I could do that. Maybe. I grabbed them and a ginger ale, and sat at the nearest table.

  I exhaled slowly and purposefully, trying to soothe my quivering stomach. I shut my eyes fast when I saw Max’s cheeseburger. This was going to be tough.

  “Did you have fun last night?” he asked. “Before Dana freaked out?”

  “Yeah, up until then.”

  “Just…ignore everything she said. You’re obviously not disgusting.”

  Only in this bizarre context could that give me the thrill of flattery.

  “Thanks.”

  “I don’t know why she attacked you like that.”

  I shrugged. “I don’t, either.”

  I considered the chicken tenders, and took another bite. Oh, big mistake. The second it hit my throat I had to cough and swallow hard.

  “You okay?”

  I nodded vigorously. Too vigorously. “Mmm. Oh, yeah, I’m fine.”

  “Hey, so…” He looked uncomfortable. “I hope you didn’t take anything Dana said to heart last night.”

  “I… No. I’m not even thinking about it.” My stomach felt as though it was being pulled like taffy. “You know, I just remembered something I need to do. I’m sorry.”

  I fled from the hall like it was on fire. I jumped down the last four stairs of the staircase, and banged into a stall. I puked before I could get the door shut.

  I was there for another fifteen minutes, my knees picking up God knows what off the floor, and my elbows turning red from being planted on the hard, plastic seat.

  I wasn’t sure if I was miserable about having to dart from the conversation right then, or if I was okay with that. It had sounded a lot like I was about to get rejected when I’d never even offered myself.

  I didn’t know. And before I could even begin to figure it out, the fluttering was back in my throat.

  I slept until that night. Then of course, I could do nothing but sit up, wide-awake in my room. Dana read in her bed again, saying nothing about the night before, and all of Becca’s pictures still stared down at me. I looked away from them and spent the next ten minutes trying to read the spine of Dana’s book. Finally I saw what it was. It was called Coping, and was written by some doctor I couldn’t see the name of. I felt a small tinge of pity.

  A knock came on my door at ten-fifteen. I opened the door to find Madison and Julia looking very serious. I had a feeling I was going to start feeling sick again.

  “What’s up?”

  “Would you mind coming over to our room for a minute?” Julia asked, as Madison looked at the floor.

  “Okay.” I followed them, sat down on one of the beds, and they sat across from me. “If you guys are getting a divorce, I know it’s not about me.”

  “It’s about Max and Johnny.”

  “We just think it’s important for you to know a few things before your interest in either one of them goes any further.”

  I was baffled. “My interest in either one of them? I don’t… What?”

  Madison looked earnestly at me. “You already know Max was with Becca before she went missing. But what you might not know is that he was crazy in love with her. And so was Johnny.”

  Johnny had loved Becca?

  Julia took over. “But Max and Becca were so in love. He said he wanted to marry her and everything. She tried to break up with him a hundred times, and he always begged for her back.”

  I found it hard to picture Max begging anyone for anything.

  “If they were so in love, why did she try to break up with him so many times?”

  They were silent for a few seconds, but then Madison spoke. “I really think they would have gotten married. And if—and when—she comes back…they’ll definitely get back together.”

  “We just don’t want you to get hurt,” Julia explained.

  “We don’t want that at all.”

  “And if Johnny does have any interest in you, it’s kind of weird.”

  My stomach was slowly plummeting. I didn’t even know him. “Weird, why weird?”

  “I mean…she was the new girl last year. Now you’re here…in her room....”

  “You even kind of look like her,” Julia said. She observed me for a moment and clearly decided that if I did indeed look like Becca, I was a much less attractive version. “No wonder he likes you.”

  I froze. “I’ve only had a few conversations with him. I’m not trying to…anything.”

&nb
sp; “But we also don’t want you to misread anything Max might say or do. He’s protective of girls, so if he talks to you it’s probably just him trying to make you feel better about how everyone is talking about you.”

  “Is everyone talking about me?”

  I wanted to go home.

  The two girls stared blankly at me.

  “Look,” I said, sparing them the duty of having to say yes, “I won’t go near either of them.”

  “Do you promise?” Madison asked. “It’s really for your own good.”

  “Yes. I’m— I’ve gotta go.”

  I went back into my room. I wished I could run farther. It seemed suddenly to be a horrible idea, sleeping in the school you go to. Everyone was everywhere, every second of every day. And in high school, that’s pretty much the fastest way to lose your sanity.

  I didn’t even know what I wanted, and Madison and Julia were assuring me that anything I might consider was out of the question. I couldn’t put one toe onto Becca’s property. Max could never like me. Johnny might, but I was supposed to know it was creepy. I got it. I wasn’t going to start “going after” anyone. I never had, and I wasn’t going to start now.

  I sat down on my own bed, breathing hard. I looked straight across from me at all the many smiling faces of Becca, Becca and Max, Becca and Max kissing, Becca and Johnny, one of the three of them and Becca and the rest of her friends.

  “Are you upset?”

  I almost jumped at the sound of Dana’s voice. “Yes. I’m upset.”

  “Why?”

  “I’d rather not talk about it with you?”

  Um. Obviously.

  “Does it have to do with Max? I saw how you looked at him. You have feelings for him.”

  “No, okay, I don’t.”

  “You better not, because—”

  “Because he was madly in love with Becca—I get it, okay?”

  “Is. He is in love with Becca. She’s not gone. She’s not dead. I wish everyone would try to remember that every once in a while.” Dana threw down Coping. “Max and Becca are meant for each other…you couldn’t even begin to understand! Anything she did…it was just— She’ll come back and it’ll be for him, not for anyone else!”

  Dana had gone from less than zero to over a hundred in five seconds flat.

  “I didn’t mean to imply that she’s definitely gone or…or anything!”

  “Yes, you did!” Dana’s eyes were wide and scary. She looked crazed. “And you don’t even know her! I knew her, okay? She’ll be back, nothing happened to her!”

  “Okay!”

  “No! She will! You have to understand that. And you’ll understand why no one will ever see you how they saw her, so you can just stop trying. Her hair? Her face? Her body? She’s physically better than you. Her hair is shinier and lighter, she doesn’t have stupid little freckles all over her face like you do, and she’s taller than you.”

  I didn’t even know what to say. This was baffling. She just went on and on.

  “And that’s just physically. But otherwise? Everybody loves her. She started everyone going down to the boathouse to have parties. She came up with that. She’s fun, and you’re drab. You and your hippie lifestyle—”

  “Hippie lifestyle? Are you kidding?”

  “Yes, you’re all tan and your hair’s all wavy, you’re always wearing flip-flops and beat-up jeans—you’re trying so hard to look like some kind of ad for Sex Wax. How much do you spend a year on self-tanner and highlights? How much of your life have you spent trying to look like you’re not trying?”

  “I…”

  It was impossible to defend. This was crazy. For one small and pretty irrelevant thing, I actually really didn’t use self-tanner. It was something my mom was always reprimanding me for. And as for my hair, it was the one thing I really liked about myself. I never highlighted it or colored it, and it always got lighter in the summer. But I couldn’t insist that to a crazy person. I couldn’t engage in this. And she was grief stricken. I wanted to understand her but she was making it impossible.

  “Becca will come back,” she threatened, “and then you’ll see. If anyone is giving you any kind of second look right now, you’ll see how quickly that goes away, because you could never compare to her. You’ll never be as good as her. You’ll never be as pretty. You’ll never have what she has.”

  That was it. I whipped around, and my hands were moving of their own volition. I was pulling thumbtacks out of the wall and gathering the pictures of perfect little Becca and hurling them at Dana.

  “Stop it!” Horror was filling her eyes, and seemingly paralyzing her where she stood. “Becca put those there! You put them back!” She was screaming now, reminding me of that scene in Lord of the Rings when that blonde girl goes from beautiful to a big computer-graphic monster.

  “No! You take these. Put them up on your own damn wall if you want to. Put them in a box for when and if she comes to pick them up, but I am not going to stare at these pictures anymore.” I threw the last of them on the floor and then threw the thumbtacks at her closet. It may have been the most violent act I’d ever made. “This is my bed. This is my shelf—” I picked up the remaining four picture frames “—and this shit is not mine.”

  “You bitch. You fucking bitch!”

  “I don’t care what you think. I’m sorry you’re worried about your friend. I really, truly am. But you will not belittle me and my life because of it.”

  I grabbed my wallet and key and left the room, slamming the door. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was, that every single door along the hallway was closing as I walked out into it. Great. If everyone was talking about me, then now they could add psycho to the list of things wrong with me.

  I had no idea whether it was too late to go check out my phone, but I needed to call someone. My mom. Leah. Emma. Someone.

  I ran to the cell phone office. It was eight forty-five. I glanced out the doors. Dark already.

  “Hi, I want to check out my phone, please.” I handed him the checkout card I’d been given on my first day.

  He handed me my phone. “Fifteen minutes.”

  “Okay.”

  I turned it on and darted out the side door into the courtyard. It was freaking cold, and my Florida-based wardrobe only made it colder. I called Home the second it turned on.

  No answer. My desperation was starting to make my hairs stand on end. I needed someone to tell me that I was right.

  But I had a bunch of voice mails.

  The first one was from my mom:

  “Hey, sweetie, I miss you already! I know you’re going to have a fantastic time at Manderley. You really are. It’s such a good school, you’re going to get into a fabulous college, and oh, you’re going to have so much fun. You’re going to make so many friends there. Oh, gotta go, I think I’m getting pulled over. Call me sometime soon. Love you!”