“You should go,” I said. I almost growled it, and I don’t know why it came out that way, like I was one of those bullies who’d demand lunch money or an iPhone and humiliate someone simply because she was younger than me. I fit the part, maybe today, with my asymmetrical haircut that toughened up the angles of my face and my red eyes from the thrashing I’d done in my sleep and the insistence, the deep need, to be alone again because someone was trying to tell me something important.
“Oh, okay,” Rain said, lowering her head.
“The sink’s broken in the art room, so we just needed to fill this up,” another freshman said, and I noticed now that she was carrying a bucket. “Ms. Raicht said we could. She told us to come in here. She said . . .”
“Just do it,” I said, like I ruled the girls’ room and commanded the sinks, “and hurry up.”
They filled the bucket quickly and were heading out the door when Rain turned back and held it open, pausing to say this to me: “Are you feeling okay?
You look like you’ve seen a ghost or something.”
I looked her in the eyes for the first time and wondered if she might be able to see the girl in the stall, too. If I pointed her out.
Then she said, “I had the flu over break and I was so dizzy and I puked and everything. Do you need me to take you to the nurse?”
I was about to tell her I was fine and she should leave me alone when a person shoved past her into the bathroom and said, “Someone said you were up here. Nice haircut.”
Jamie walked in and leaned up against the far sink.
“You’re not allowed in here,” Rain said to him. “You’ll get in trouble.”
Jamie glanced at her, then said to me: “Who is this girl?”
“Nobody.” It was true. She wasn’t even close to sixteen yet, let alone 17, so I didn’t have to bother about worrying over her. I was staring right at her and blanking on her name.
It took her a few moments to sense that she should leave. The door slammed closed, and Jamie stepped closer, as if we were alone, but we weren’t. It was impossible now to be alone with me because I was always being followed.
He stepped close to me, and then I stepped away, and I think that’s when it began to dawn on him.
“Didn’t you see me downstairs?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I admitted, not able to keep it up anymore, not now that the visions were multiplying, now that there were three girls.
“So you’re avoiding me?”
I shrugged. I felt my shoulders make the motion, and I didn’t do a thing to stop them.
“What’s gotten into you?” he said, just coming out with it. “Are you into someone else? Is that it? Who is it?”
“It’s no one. It’s not that.”
“So what is it then?” I now realized we were having “the talk,” and that I wasn’t going to get away with avoiding it today.
He’d retreated back to lean against the sinks. His arms were crossed over his narrow chest and his thick, dark hair was curling down over one of his eyes.
He didn’t reach up to move it away.
I didn’t want to let myself keep looking at him—like I’d given up that right—so I dropped my gaze and thought and thought of what to say. There was a drain in the middle of the tiled floor that I hadn’t noticed before and my eyes caught on it. Was that how Natalie had entered the room? And was that the exit she’d taken to leave? Could the girls travel through the pipes of the school?
Were they anywhere, and everywhere, able to find me wherever I went, no matter if I wanted them to or not?
“Lauren,” Jamie said. “You owe me this. You know you do. Just say it. I can take it.”
He was right: I did owe him an explanation. It was more than just that we’d gotten physical together and that made all of this so much more serious.