A girl who looked way too young to be on a roof in the middle of the night said, “We could scream.”
The freshman guy who’d been pulling on the door said, “Don’t be stupid. If we get caught, they get in trouble, and then what? We’re stuck with them for the rest of the school year. You want to be on their bad side? ’Cause I don’t.”
And with that sentiment, everyone settled into complacency. Some curled up around the edges under the bricks. Bree folded her hands behind her head and closed her eyes. Like it was no big deal she was stuck on a roof for the foreseeable future. And some people took the opportunity to gossip, like it was some planned slumber party or something. Not like we were herded like animals, marched up here, and locked on the roof against our will.
I was surrounded by people who never worried, it seemed. Who never checked to see where the closest exits were or what they could use for a weapon if they had to. People who didn’t worry about killing or being killed.
I walked the perimeter of the roof, stepping over a few freshman along the way. I peered over the edge every few steps. “Hey,” I said. “There’s a ladder.” A few people rose to look over the edge with me. They leaned forward, ever so slightly, and peered down the three stories below.
“It stops, see?” one guy said. He was right. It stopped right at the next floor, like there used to be some sort of fire escape, but it had since been torn down. They all went back to doing nothing, but I kept walking and peering over the edge. On the opposite side of the roof, behind some chimney-looking thing, there was another ladder. This one stopped as well, but it ended right beside a classroom window. We were three floors up—not twelve or anything—so I carefully eased myself over the edge to investigate.
When I reached the bottom rung, I pushed on the window with my foot, and it creaked open. No need for locks when the windows were so high. I pushed it farther, so it sat at a ninety-degree angle, and then I swung one leg into the building, eased myself from the bottom rung until I was safely straddling the sill, and then tilted my weight so I fell inward.
I was in a math classroom. Inside. On the floor. And I couldn’t stop laughing. It sounded hollow and unfamiliar in the empty room. I stood up, brushed my pants off, and let out one last laugh. Then I listened to the silence buzzing in my ears.
The chairs, wedged up against each desk. Half a math problem on the white board. Unfinished.
Boom, boom, boom. In the distance, coming closer. I should’ve stayed up on the roof with everyone else.
Mallory. I should’ve stayed up there, with the things that were real.
Wait, it whispered, sounding way too close. I felt something, just out of sight, hovering behind me, and I didn’t wait. I ran out of the room, down the hall, down the staircase to the lower level, where the door had been left ajar. I ran across the quad as fast as I possibly could. Faster even than I thought I could. I didn’t stop.
I had been too pumped up to sleep by the time I crawled my way back through my dorm-room window, and it had been too close to morning to take a sleeping pill. But now, three minutes before English class was about to start, I couldn’t keep my head off the desk.
Just as I was starting to doze, Chloe dropped her notebook next to my head. “How did you do it?” she said, leaning closer.
I sat up and rubbed at my face. “What?”
“You weren’t on the roof when they went back. Everyone was freaking out. I heard they even checked the bushes.”
“They thought I fell?”
“Or . . . Well, let’s just say you gave everyone a freaking heart attack until Taryn saw you getting ready this morning. So how did you—”
“Ms. Murphy.” Mr. Durham was standing over us. He placed my quiz, F, as expected, face up on the table. “Less talking, more reading.”
Everyone stared at me for the rest of class. But this wasn’t the type of stare I’d grown used to over the past two months. This was something else entirely.
Reid was waiting in the hall after class, and he looked angry. He gripped me by the elbow, so unlike last night. I ripped my arm away from him. “You scared the shit out of me,” he said.
“You locked me on the goddamn roof.” We weren’t whispering. Actually, we were making a scene.
“We locked everyone on the goddamn roof,” he said, remembering to lower his voice. “And we came back for them a few hours before class. You weren’t there!”
To everyone else, it might not have been a big deal. But he didn’t get how much I feared the very idea of being trapped. “Yeah, well, excuse me for not wanting to spend the night freezing my ass off with a bunch of people I don’t know.”
“That’s the point of it, Mallory. To get to know everyone. It’s like a bonding thing. It’s supposed to be fun. Or, at least, it was for us.”
“Who should I be bonding with? Let’s see, there’s the girl who moved out of our room the first day I was here, a bunch of scared little freshmen, people who talk about me behind my—”
Jason was suddenly between us. “Impressive, Mallory.” Then he turned to Reid. “See? Told you she was fine.” He turned back toward me again. “He was convinced you fell or something. So tell us. How’d you do it?”
But I was looking past him, at Reid, at his expression. Because I suddenly remembered how his father had died. A freak accident—he was chipping the ice off the roof because there’d been a leak underneath, and he slipped. Broke his neck. Not a fall that should kill you, but it did.
Of course he’d be thinking of that when I went missing. I guess he saw the realization on my face, because he turned around and left.
“I clicked my heels together three times,” I told Jason, “and said, ‘There’s no place like home.’ ”
Home. I should’ve stayed home.
I shouldn’t have gone to Brian’s party. Shouldn’t have left my house. As soon as I walked in, I felt the urge to leave. To click my heels together three times and magically transport myself home. We’d been late—so late—and things had already slid past the point of controlled or predictable.
Brian’s house didn’t look white or open or airy at night, filled with people and music and sweat. Colleen stood in the foyer and scanned the room. Cody was standing in the hallway, very tall and very dark and very worth sneaking out of the house for. His head was back against the wall, and Colleen walked straight for him.
She tossed a look over her shoulder, her eyebrows raised at me, before she reached him. I nodded. I didn’t need a babysitter.
Brian’s voice echoed down the hallway, like the blender that day with his mom, churning away above all the rest of the sound. I looked down the hall toward the kitchen and saw him pass across the doorway a few times. He was doing some routine, some reenactment, and everyone was laughing at him.
“Don’t.”
I spun around to find Dylan sprawled on the couch in the room beside the foyer. He had a red plastic cup in his hands and his feet were propped on the table, littered with discarded cups. Someone was unconscious on the couch across from him. And Dylan was looking at me with these alcohol-dazed eyes.
“I broke up with Danielle,” he said.
“I know.” I looked back down the hall and bit my lower lip.
“Please don’t go down there.”
I wanted him to understand. Because I understood. “You didn’t dump her for me.”
“I did.”
“No,” I said, more sure of myself. “No. You would’ve done it before. A long time before I was . . . with Brian.”
Dylan chugged whatever was left in his cup and tossed it onto the coffee table. “Come on, Mallory. Brian isn’t with people. He’s not with you. You’re just today. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe not.”