CHAPTER 12
Instead of going to lunch, Hazel went to the bathroom to splash water on her face, studying her freckles in the mirror, looking past eyeliner and eye shadow to the blue of her iris. She hoped to see someone who knew what she was doing staring back. Someone she could believe would get her out of this. No such luck.
Jack might take her to the revel, but once there, she was going to need to figure out the right questions to ask, the ones that would make them think she knew more than she did, the ones they would answer without knowing they were giving anything away. The girl in the mirror didn’t look like a master of deception, though. She looked as if she was already in over her head.
If she couldn’t trick them, then it would be good if she had something to trade, because with the Folk, nothing was ever free. If she’d been Ben, she could have played a song for them and, even broken-fingered, she would have been so good that they would have granted her any boon. If she’d been like Jack, they would have told her stuff because she was one of them.
But she was Hazel. She had no magic. Which meant she needed to be on her toes, thinking fast and paying attention to everything. With a sigh, she took one of the paper towels from the dispenser, wiped her face, and went into the hall.
A freshman boy came around the corner so fast he nearly knocked into her. His face was wet. Lourdes’s little brother—Michael, she thought that was his name. Tears streamed over his blotchy cheeks. A choking sound came from his throat.
“What’s wrong?” she asked. “Did something happen?”
“I can’t,” he managed through the tears and ragged breaths, wiping at his face furiously. “I can’t stop. She’s coming. She’s almost here.”
That’s when she heard it—sounds of crying coming from inside the classrooms around her. Thin wails that rose to shrieks.
The door to a classroom to Hazel’s right flew open, and seniors flooded into the hall, eyes wild with terror and wet with tears. Megan Rojas fell to her knees and began to tear at her clothes in an orgy of grief.
“Please,” Franklin sobbed, turning his face to Hazel, his anguish so raw she barely recognized him. “Please, make it stop. Kiss me. Make it stop.”
Abruptly, she remembered Jack’s warning: Something even more dangerous than your prince walks in his shadow.
Hazel backed away from Franklin, from his terrified, upturned face. There was a scent in the air like turned leaf mold and vegetal rot.
“It’s so sad,” Liz was saying, over and over, words muffled by tears. “So sad. So very, very sad.”
Hazel had to do something—she had to find Ben before whatever was happening to them happened to him. She started to run, past lockers and closed doors, turning a corner into the art-room hallway. Light streamed in from a bank of windows facing a grass-covered courtyard. One of the freshman Language Arts teachers was locking a door. A burst of laughter came from another classroom. It was as though she hadn’t just come from a hallway full of weeping students.
“Did you come from some kind of assembly?” Ms. Nelson asked. “I heard a lot of noise.”
Hazel began to speak, stammering over words, when, above their heads, a loudspeaker crackled to life. Someone on the other end seemed to be crying. The sound of it stuck in Hazel’s head like taffy.
Ms. Nelson looked puzzled. “Someone must have hit the button in the office without realizing it.”
Hazel could hear the weeping in the liquid drum of her heart. In her every breath. It pricked the back of her eyes. It was so much—so sad, as though all the sorrow she’d ever felt woke in her at once.
Ms. Nelson stumbled, her hand going to the glass. Her breath hit the window, fogging it. Her eyes filled with tears. And then Hazel noticed blotches of something greenish, like mold or moss, creeping across the glass. Outside, black crows began landing on the branches of a tree, cawing to one another.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” Hazel whispered in a tear-slurred voice. She stumbled away and heard a body hit the floor, heard the sound of soft, muffled weeping.
Hazel had to think. Her eyes were already filled with hot tears, her throat already thick with them, and everything she’d ever lost was crowding her head. She remembered looking down at Adam Hicks’s half-rotted body and feeling utterly helpless. She thought of being sick during one of her parents’ parties, having eaten a big chunk of cake before she realized it had been soaked in rum. Dizzy, she’d looked for her mother, but everyone had seemed to be a stranger. She’d thrown up in the bathroom for what felt like hours, until some of her throw-up was streaked with blood and a man she didn’t know brought her a glass of water from the tap. Hazel thought of that night and other nights, thought of her brother’s broken fingers, of the way his nails blackened and fell off, one by one. Of all the boys she’d kissed and how the names she remembered first were of the ones who’d hated her after, because she remembered things that hurt more easily than anything nice. Hazel wanted to lie down on the sticky linoleum floor, curl up, weep forever, and never rise again.
It seemed pointless not to give in, to keep standing, but she kept standing anyway. It seemed pointless to cross the hall, but she crossed the hall anyway.
Go over there and pull the fire alarm, she told herself.
She didn’t think she could.
You don’t have to believe you can, she told herself. Just do it.
The sound of weeping grew louder, nearly crowding out all other thoughts.
Her fingers closed on the red metal lever. Throwing her weight against it, she brought it down hard.
Immediately, the alarm sounded, louder than the crying, louder than the keening and the shrieking and the cawing of crows. Hazel’s head pounded, but she could think again. After a moment, students started shuffling out of classrooms. Their cheeks were wet, eyes red-rimmed, and faces ashen. Normally the hall would ring with shouting, with gossip, with friends calling to one another. Right then, it was as quiet as a procession of the dead.
“Liz?” The Industrial Arts teacher came over, crouching near Ms. Nelson’s body. “Evans, what happened out here? What’s happening?”
“I don’t know,” Hazel said, looking up at the loudspeaker. Moss was spreading up the wall in patches, thickening like fur. If it kept growing like that, it would eventually smother the alarm.
He blinked at her, as if he hadn’t quite processed what he was seeing yet, as if he was still making up excuses in his head.
Ms. Nelson blinked and started to push herself up. “What’s going on?” she asked, voice hoarse. “Is that the fire alarm?”
The shop teacher nodded. “Some kind of emergency. Come on, let’s get you outside.”
A tiny crack started in one corner of the wall. Hazel watched it spread, watched it split into two cracks as vines seeped through.
“There’s a fire?” a sophomore boy with a shaved head asked, coming from another hall in gym clothes.
“Outside!” commanded the shop teacher, pointing toward the exit. “You too, Evans.”
Hazel nodded, but she wasn’t ready to move. She was still staring at the moss and at the looping, pale vines poking through the growing fissures like fingers pushing free from a grave.
Students flooded around her, on their way to line up outside. On their way to wait for the fire department to declare this a false alarm, maybe a prank. Hazel leaned against the windows, taking several shaky breaths.
That was when she saw Molly coming down the hallway, moving against the stream of bodies. She was walking strangely, as if she was half dragging herself along, as if her limbs had become unfamiliar to her. Her expression was blank, her gaze seeming to slide over everything until it fell on Hazel.
Molly’s lips looked blue at first, but the more Hazel stared at them, the more she realized they were stained green, stained from the inside, as though she had been eating sour apple Laffy Taffy.
Hazel stayed still, a hideous chill starting at the base of her spine. She’d been scared when she saw the other kids crying, but the revulsion she felt at the way Molly moved was entirely new. Hazel knew that she might be looking at Molly’s body, but Molly was no longer looking out through her eyes.
“Stay back,” Hazel said as whatever it was got close, throwing up a hand automatically, stopping just short of knocking the girl to the floor.
A syrup-sweet voice came from Molly’s mouth, speaking in singsong. Her head tilted to one side. “I loved him and he’s dead and gone and bones. I loved him and they took him away from me. Where is he? Where is he? Dead and gone and bones. Dead and gone and bones. Where is he?”
With every word, clumps of dirt fell from her tongue.
“What are you doing to Molly?” Hazel asked shakily. The hall was nearly empty. The alarm was still ringing, but somehow the voice coming from Molly’s mouth carried easily over the sound.
“I loved him and I loved him and he’s dead and gone and bones. I loved him and they took him away from me. Where is he? Where is he? Dead and gone and bones. Dead and gone and bones. My father took him. My brother killed him. Dead and gone and bones. Dead and gone and bones. Where is he?”
Molly had been Hazel’s best friend for two years, the one she’d stayed up late instant-messaging about boys, the one she’d trusted to trim her bangs. When she and Molly walked through the halls, Hazel had felt like there was nothing wrong with normal, as if maybe she could just focus on having fun and not worrying too much about what came after. Molly didn’t care about faeries in the woods; they were just stories to her. She thought that all the tourist stuff was a scam and that the tourists themselves were boring, desperate for someone to tell them they were special. Seeing Fairfold through Molly’s eyes was like seeing an entirely new place. After Molly dumped her, Hazel sometimes thought she missed seeing the world that way even more than she missed Molly.
Now Molly would have no choice but to believe in the Folk. The thought made Hazel furious.
“You can’t have her,” Hazel said, fumbling for her necklace, the one Ben had made her wear. She pulled the chain strung with rowan wood from around her throat. When the creature didn’t react, Hazel thrust it over Molly’s head, letting the amulet settle at Molly’s throat. “See? So go! Go! You’re not welcome here!”
Abruptly, Molly’s eyes rolled upward, until Hazel saw only the white of her sclera.
Hazel’s heart thundered. Then Molly collapsed to the floor, her whole body going limp at once. Her head hit the linoleum, making a horrible, hollow sound.
“Help!” Hazel called. She knelt down, fumbling for Molly’s wrist, meaning to take her pulse, before she realized she had no idea how to do that. Over and over she screamed the word, and over and over nobody came.
Then Molly opened her eyes, blinking wildly, coughing so hard it was half choking. When she looked at Hazel, the expression that washed over her face was some commingling of embarrassment and terror. It was an entirely human expression.
“Hazel,” Molly croaked, spitting out dirt and what appeared to be leaves.
Sweet, incredulous relief made Hazel lean against the wall. “You’re okay?”
Molly nodded slowly, pushing herself into a half-sitting position, wiping at her chin. Her black hair, usually gelled into spiky precision, was a mess. Blood dribbled from a shallow cut where her head had struck the floor, turning the collar of her white shirt red. “I saw it. The monster. It’s made of old, knotted branches grown over with moss, and it has these horrible black eyes.”
Hazel scooted closer and reached out to take Molly’s hand. Molly squeezed hard.
The alarm was still going, a siren wailing into the emptiness of the halls.
“You always knew this was all real, didn’t you?” she asked, anguished. “How can you stand it?”
Hazel was trying to formulate a reply when Molly’s eyes closed. She shuddered once and collapsed like a marionette with its strings cut. Hazel shouted and shook her by her shoulders, but Molly’s body was as limp as Amanda’s had been.