Here I was now, outside an impossibly locked stall door, reaching to open it.
The stall was as green as a lime left to grow mold in a fridge drawer. It was cold, not warm.
“Hello?” I said against it.
What I heard was . . . a hiss. The hissing wasn’t her breathing. I knew it was only the old radiators against the far wall, the spit of the steam heat.
I tried to push the stall door again, but it held in place. I bent down, but no feet poked out below.
I climbed the toilet in the neighboring stall and balanced up on the point of one toe, bracing myself against the shared wall, to dangle over. No one was hiding inside, though the toilet looked stopped up with paper. I assumed the stall was only locked because the toilet was out of order.
The last bell rang, meaning class had started already, and I should have been in my chair getting ready to discourse on Shakespeare. I hopped off the toilet and grabbed the backpack I’d left on the sink. I was almost at the exit when I heard the voice again. Heard it distinctly. Heard it in my ears and heard its echo through my bones.
Lauren, wait.
I did. The bell stopped ringing. Again I found myself edging closer to the third stall from the right.
“Natalie?” I said softly. “Is that you?”
It was then that she knocked in response. Her knuckles rapped from the inside of the stall in quick succession.
Even though I’d willed it to happen, it startled me. I jumped backward and almost took out a sink.
She was in that stall—or something was. An entity without visible feet was trying to communicate with me. To let me know she didn’t mean to do . . .
whatever it was she did.
I could sense her inside, willing me closer. I didn’t speak, and she didn’t speak, and when I took two steps in her direction, a foot could be seen dropping down, finding floor. A scuffed snow boot, once pale blue but dirtied and streaked with soot. A second boot followed, more blackened than the first.
Time distended into one long, unbreakable moment that broke anyway when the girls’ room door banged open, slamming against the wall, and a group of three freshmen clattered in, crowding me.
At the same time, the door, third from the right, slowly swung itself open, creaking as it went, revealing an empty stall. No soot-covered snow boots. No girl.
The freshmen tittered a little, bowing their heads and not making eye contact— as freshmen do around upperclassmen and I don’t even know why—and then one of them got brave and spoke up. She was the smallest of the three, brown glowing skin and shiny dark hair held tight against her head with two yellow clips, and she said, “You cut off all your hair.” She flushed when I turned and looked at her, but still stared at my head.
“Rain!” one of her friends said, admonishing her.
“I like it,” Rain said, ignoring her two friends but talking so fast it could barely be made out. “I mean it brings out your eyes or, I don’t know, something.”
“Thanks,” I said. This was the same girl who’d bothered me in the library, but now I had my eyes on the stall. I had my heart lodged in my throat and a whisper of a voice in my ear. The voice wasn’t Fiona Burke’s; it didn’t snap at me, it wasn’t cruel. And it wasn’t Abby —she was staying quiet, giving this new girl a turn to speak. It was Natalie Montesano, whose face had lodged itself over mine just that morning. I was hearing voices, seeing phantom feet. I didn’t care what some freshman thought of my haircut.
“I’m Rain,” she said patiently. “We used to be on the same bus? You look —”