She seems to read my mind, waving a hand dismissively. “We’ll cover all that later. Let’s g-get you on your feet.”
Adam scoots back from me, giving himself the space to stand up. I shiver on the floor. It’s colder here without him against me. When I look up, I see them both, hands outstretched to help me up.
I reach for Maggie with my right hand and Adam with my left. Our fingers connect, and the floodgates open.
I shouldn’t be driving. I don’t even know why I’m in the car or where I’m headed, but my head is pounding and swimming at the same time and it’s hard to see the road with the snow pouring down like this.
I lick my lips, recoiling at the acrid, lemony tang in my mouth. An image of Blake flashes through my head. We’re in his house. In his father’s office. We’re shouting and then we’re not. I shove something into my purse when he’s not looking. I try to remember what, but it’s all in jagged pieces now.
I’m terrified. Struggling against someone. No, it’s fine. I’m fine. Blake kisses me at the car. Smiles and tells me to take care of my head.
No, it doesn’t make sense. I was at Blake’s but…There is nothing but blankness. I feel stuck, like a badly copied music track. There are blips of silence in my evening.
Not right. It can’t be right. My head hurts so bad. And I’m so cold. Where the hell is my coat? Why am I driving?
My car slides a little coming up to a red light. I try to pump the brakes, but the back end fishtails to the left. I hear my purse slide off the seat, dumping on the floor. The car comes to a rest, and I grope blindly through the mess on my passenger mat: lipstick and wallet and my iPod and then—what the hell?
My fingers close around a black box. Something rattles inside, tinkling like glass. The sound turns my stomach to lead.
I have to hide it.
The snow falls and my head reels. Everything blurs. There are snowy streets. And then I am walking. I watch my feet crunching through a thin layer of snow. I hear myself grunt and feel the agonizing burn of the snow I’m shoveling away barehanded.
My head spins and spins. It aches and I feel sick. Just sick. I open my eyes and I am back in my car. Driving again. I see dirt under my fingernails. The box is gone. I don’t know how. Oh God, I don’t know.
I feel a sob shake my shoulders. I’m so cold. So sick. I pull out my phone and blink hard, trying to clear my vision. I tap out the only number I can think of and wait for it to ring.
“Don’t tell me you’re stuck on number twenty-nine,” Adam says by way of greeting.
I try to keep my voice normal. “Can you meet me?”
“Yeah. What’s wrong? You don’t sound right.”
“I’m okay,” I say, swerving over double yellow lines. I’m not okay. I’m a million miles from okay. I glance around, getting my bearings. The school bus lot blurs by on my right. “Maybe we’d better meet at the school.”
“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
I shove my phone deep into my jeans. Then I park in the front lot. I’m shivering in my sweater, so I can’t stay out here. The latch on the cafeteria door is ice-cold, but I move it up and left, leaning on it hard like Adam taught me.
I slip inside and feel the quiet surround me completely.
It’s darker than dark. I feel my way through the tables, my eyes fixed on the red exit sign glowing at the back doors. I need to sit down. Like now.
I don’t understand why I’m here or why it’s so dark or what I’m so freaked out about. I just need to rest for a minute. I just want to close my eyes. I stop in the first classroom I find, study hall from last year. Thank God. I can just sleep. Just for a minute.
Everything feels slow and dull. My eyelids droop as I slide into my seat from last year. I sink down low in the desk, watching the snow fall like tiny white butterflies. It is the last thing I see.
Chapter Twenty-nine
“Chloe!” Adam’s voice brings me back to the present. His hands are on my face now. Maggie is clasping my hands. I’m sort of sandwiched between them, only half upright.
I gasp, filling my lungs with the sweet, yeasty air of the Campbells’ kitchen. “I remember. I remember the night I woke up.”
“What n-night? What are you t-talking about?”
“The night in the classroom?” Adam guesses. “The night I met you there?”
I nod, feeling stronger and warmer with them so close. “I was at Blake’s. I found something. They did something to me, but they didn’t take what I found. I had it.”
My heart is still racing. I feel Maggie’s hand, a soothing pressure against my shoulder. But it is Adam’s eyes that anchor me. “I remember calling you, Adam. I remember the box, but I don’t know what was in it. I hid it though. It had to be important.”
“They would have never let you leave with any evidence. Hell, after tonight—” He stops, taking a harsh breath. “God, after tonight, who knows what they would have done to you.”
I remember myself, remember exactly who it was I called that night and all the lies he’s told me since. I pull away from his touch. “They?”
He has the decency to flush, dropping his hands to his side. “I was never one of them. I was a guy who worked for them.”
“And how do I know you’re not working for them right now?”
“Maybe you don’t, but I d-do,” Maggie says. “He let me tape a confession from him detailing everything he knows. It’s on my phone.”
“That doesn’t fix this,” I tell him. “Dr. Kirkpatrick is dead. You can’t fix that, can you?”
Adam doesn’t say anything at all. He nods once and then slips outside to the back steps where they must have found me. I half expect him to keep walking, but he doesn’t. He just stands there waiting, his profile frozen in the moonlight.
“It’s real, you know,” Maggie says quietly. “The way he feels about you.”
“Funny, I thought you were Team Stay-the-Hell-Away-from-Adam like two days ago.”
“I was.”
“And what? You find out he really is just as bad as you thought—hell, worse than that—and suddenly you think he’s hero of the day?”
“I d-didn’t say that. I’m still not sure what I think of him.”
I glance outside the back door again. He’s still there. “I know what I think. I think he betrayed me.”
Maggie sinks into a chair, sighing. “Yeah, well, d-don’t start flinging stones in your little g-glass house.”
“What does that mean?”
Mags looks at me with a flinty expression. “It means you b-betrayed me too.”
I wince at her words, torn between curiosity and dread. “What happened, Mags? Tell me what happened to us.”
“They happened to you, Chloe.” Her face goes dark and sad. “I t-told you that group was wrong. It was almost like a cult. You hung out at the same places, wore the same kind of clothes. You started d-dating each other, for God’s sake.”
I shake my head. “It still doesn’t make sense, Maggie. We didn’t stop being friends when you went through your Danny obsession or when I was on the volleyball team and at practice ten thousand times a week.”
“That’s because you didn’t insult me!” She takes a shuddery breath, and I can see that her eyes are too bright. Her chin trembles when she speaks again. “When I t-told you something felt wrong, you said I was paranoid. Time after time you blew me off, and then when ignoring me wasn’t enough, you staged an intervention. You sat me d-down with a couple of your study bitches and t-told me you wanted to help. You told me that maybe if I spent a little more t-time centering myself that maybe I w-wouldn’t, that m-m-maybe I wouldn’t…”
I fill in the blank with a hollow voice. “Stutter.”
It can’t be true. I can’t be capable of that. But somehow, her words prickle at my mind, whispering of a memory that’s waiting to be recovered.
“You always p-protected me,” she says, swiping tears off her cheeks angrily. “Even way b-back in the second grade, you never t-treated me different. Not until that d-day.”