I walked to the back of the diner, past the front counter where people sat on barstools. Back toward the kitchen. And then I paused. Because right there, right past the bathroom, was a chopping board. A chopping board covered in sliced tomatoes, one left mid-cut. And a knife. Not a big one. Not like the one missing from my kitchen. But big enough. Big enough to scare someone off. Big enough to protect myself.
Everything else faded away. The promise of Reid kissing me. The smell of ground beef, the sound of bacon sizzling. The smoke from the barstools. Just me, two feet of emptiness, and the knife.
I took it.
Chapter 10
I grabbed the black handle, the blade still dripping with tomato juice, and shoved it deep into my bag. I spun around, back to the bathroom. And Krista stood there. In front of the bathroom door, which was still swinging behind her. Her mouth was pressed tightly together. I didn’t know how long she’d been standing there.
So I readjusted my ponytail to keep my hands busy and said, “What’s wrong with Bree?”
She didn’t blink. “Something of very little consequence, I’m sure.”
“Doesn’t look like it.”
She plastered her fake, preppy smile on and said, “But it is.”
Reid didn’t kiss me outside the diner. I didn’t give him a chance. I pulled on the door handle over and over until he gave in and pressed the unlock button on his keychain. Then I stared out the window.
Reid kept glancing at me on the way home. He drove with one hand on the wheel and one on the center console, like he was thinking of reaching out and taking my hand, but wasn’t sure how I’d react. To be honest, I wasn’t sure how I’d react either. I was too preoccupied with the fact that I could feel the blade through the fabric of my bag, wedged between my body and the car door.
Reid flipped the headlights on, even though it was late morning, bordering on early afternoon. The sky had grayed, and the air had that heavy feeling, like it was about to bust. Like something big was coming.
The way it feels before a storm. Just like it felt when I was racing through the alleys that night. I was walking and I heard footsteps and then my name . . .
“Mallory?” Reid said.
“Hmm?”
“Did you hear me?”
“Sorry, what?”
“Remember after the funeral, when you came in my room—”
“Yes, Reid. Seriously, you can stop asking that. I remember. And, unlike you, I remember all of it.” I didn’t know why I was acting so angry, but I couldn’t stop the way the words came out with bite.
“No,” he said quietly. “I remember too.” A fat drop fell on the windshield, and then another. “That’s what I wanted to tell you. It was my dad’s funeral, you know? I wasn’t supposed to be smiling. I wasn’t supposed to feel . . . I wasn’t supposed to feel anything. Just hollow.”
And then the sky burst open, and Reid turned on the windshield wipers. He pulled into campus and parked behind the student center. I couldn’t see anything, and the car was still running, like we could go anywhere still. Like we were unfinished.
I heard Reid unbuckle his seat belt, so I unhooked mine. But he didn’t move, and neither did I, because everything still felt unfinished. An inevitable, unalterable sequence of events. I turned to look at Reid, and he was looking back at me, like he was thinking the exact same thing.
Light off, light on.
I met him halfway, twisting unnaturally in my seat to get there, and my mouth found his before his arms pulled me tighter. And the rain pelting down outside made it seem like we were the only people in the world, and the thickness in the air made it feel like what we were doing was not at all dangerous, like we were being pushed together, like it was the only decision, like it was logical.
I kissed him without thinking. Of all the reasons I shouldn’t, of all the reasons I couldn’t. And it felt like he was doing the same thing. So I crawled across the center console, and Reid seemed surprised but not at all upset, because I felt the corners of his mouth turn up.
And Colleen’s voice in my head was saying Do what you want to do.
And it turns out what I wanted to do at that very moment was smile. So that’s exactly what I did. And Reid was doing the exact same thing.
A blue car pulled up beside us, and doors slammed. Someone giggled outside our window—it sounded like Taryn. And then that someone tapped on our window, which made me think it wasn’t Taryn, because Taryn didn’t seem like the type to do anything.
I slid off Reid’s lap and sat on my side again, and we both stared out the front windshield. He turned the engine off, and the voices faded into the distance, swallowed up by the rain.
He left his hand on the key, like he was wondering what to do next. “I can drive you around the back entrance. It’s closer to your dorm,” Reid said.
“No,” I said, grabbing my bag. “I’ll run.”
I backed out of the car, gripping the blade through my bag. I wiped the rain from my face, smiling, as I raced across campus. I wasn’t sure if was supposed to be smiling, if I was supposed to feel anything at all—other than hollow.
Three days after Brian died, I heard a scraping sound out back. Through the kitchen. Which I had been avoiding. But I thought maybe it was Colleen sneaking over to see me.
But when I opened the back door, I saw Brian’s mom standing on a garbage can, looking through the kitchen window. She saw me and stumbled—the garbage spilling around the patio. She crawled out of the middle of it, her fingers digging into old food and paper and dirt. She looked up at me and she screamed, “You!” I froze. My legs wouldn’t move.
She stood up and pieces of trash clung to her—a napkin on her leg, yesterday’s dinner on her elbow. I cringed. I was embarrassed for her—no, I wanted her to be embarrassed. But she didn’t notice. And that was terrifying. She didn’t notice anything but me. She walked toward the back door. Toward me. I focused on the napkin clinging to her leg.
“You took him from me! You took him!”
I could see the blood flowing under the surface of her skin through her neck. And I just stood there, shaking my head. I walked backward and she walked forward until she was at the back entrance of the kitchen, and finally she yelled, half delusional, “Where is he?”
Then my dad was there, pulling me back. He was talking real low to Brian’s mom, and then he was yelling for my mom. Then my mom was there, but she was just shaking, staring past me at Brian’s mom, who wasn’t making any sense. “Where is he?” she yelled again. Dad let go of me and placed his hands on her arms. He kept talking real low and calm, even though nothing about this felt low or calm. He eased her back through the door and turned the lock, and then he called the cops. That’s how we got the restraining order.
Right then, with Brian’s mom in the backyard and Dad on the phone and Mom shaking behind me, that was the first time the kitchen started pulsating.
And I knew she had come to the right place after all. Because he was here.
In my dorm room, I changed out of my dripping-wet clothes. Then I took out the knife. I wiped the blade with a tissue, careful not to snag my fingers. I cleaned off the leftover flesh from the tomato. And then I pushed it into the back of my bottom drawer. Behind my binders and office supplies. I slammed the drawer shut.
I booted up my computer, prepared to write this Lord of the Flies essay, but I couldn’t concentrate. The cursor blinked on the Word document until the screen went to sleep. I stared at the bottom drawer, imagining the knife laying idle inside. So close. Too close.
I retreated to my bed, but I could smell it still. I could. Ripe and acidic. Full of possibility. Good and evil and offense and defense and life and death.
Lights out. The whole room was beating, and I stood in the middle of it, willing it away. Mallory, it whispered. I turned toward my bed, where I thought I’d heard it. No, I saw it out of the corner of my eye, by the desk. The dark shape. I whipped my head toward it, but it shifted again, to the closet, just at the edge of my vision. And then the room started to blur, like my vision couldn’t keep up with what I was trying to see.