Glaring actually. He knew I wasn’t planning on coming back—but he wasn’t trying to stop me from leaving.
I grabbed my coat from my locker and then headed for the main hallway, the closest way out. The lockers in this hallway were red, and the floors were checkered in black-and-white, making the exit bob and swim out there in the far distance. I could see down the long corridor into the sunlight beyond: the south parking lot, unguarded, the gleaming windshield of my van. There was more I needed to find out about Abby, and I felt drawn to talk to this Cassidy girl, to someone who’d been there with her that summer. There was more, and I could learn what it was . . .
If I could just get myself out of this building.
“The bathrooms are that way,” a voice said. “I mean, if you’re using that hall pass for what I think you’re using it for.”
I paused in the empty hallway and looked back. Around the corner, braced by a wall of teal-painted lockers, stood a tall girl. A real one.
I blanked on her name for a moment, like I barely even knew her, and then it came to me: Deena Douglas. Deena of the fake eyelashes and the smoky voice, of the boyfriend who was six years older and the habit of sucking her thumb when she slept and then denying it when she woke, even when it was sticky with saliva and still hooked in her mouth.
Deena was a senior and—I remembered, as if I were looking back on a life I’d abandoned on the highway, gaining distance and watching it shrink—at one time, she was the closest thing I had to a best friend.
I hadn’t been thinking much about Deena lately because I didn’t need to.
She wasn’t one of them. Besides, she was older than me. She’d turn eighteen soon, and none of this would even touch her.
She had no laminated hall pass in her possession, as far as I could tell, and yet she didn’t seem in any rush to get to a particular class. I couldn’t recall the last time I’d had an actual conversation with her.
She must have been thinking the same thing, because she began to carry on a two-way conversation, doing both her voice and mine. “How are you, Dee?
Awesome, thanks for asking. I’m so sorry I forgot, isn’t it your birthday this week? Oh, no worries, Lauren, I know you love me. Things with Karl still on?
Oh, yeah, thanks for caring, I know you never liked him. Hey, speaking of, heard you dumped Jamie. What’s up with that?”
She stopped with the voices then and raised an eyebrow, waiting for my answer.
“I can’t talk about this now, Deena, I’m sorry. There’s someone . . . There’s somewhere I’ve got to be.”
“Jamie’s right,” she said. “You’ve changed, and it’s more than just the hair.”
The awkwardness between us wasn’t entirely about her boyfriend, Karl, though it would be nice to say it was.
Truth was, I’d done this. I’d pushed her away. It was frighteningly easy to do that with people. I couldn’t pinpoint when I started pushing—but I guess it would have been around the time I found Abby’s flyer. My friendship with Deena could have been halfway to Montana by now and I wouldn’t know it.
“So are you coming to my party, or what? At Karl’s house, remember? Or, let me guess. You’re planning to bail.”
“I said I’d go,” I told her, though I’d forgotten about all her plans for her eighteenth birthday party, including details about it being at Karl’s house and if I was supposed to come help her set up or anything.
I was going to ask, but then I caught sight of her at the far-off door glimmering in the distance. Not Deena; Deena didn’t have anything to do with this. It was Abby at the end of the black-and-white-checkered hallway, Abby holding the door open straight into the sun. Or it was a vision of Abby. Ghosts can’t hold open doors.
Did she know I’d gotten in touch with someone from Lady-of-the-Pines? And that I was headed down to see her now?