Is that why she’d come out?
Abby was wearing what she always wore; I’d never seen her in anything else: her Lady-of-the-Pines T-shirt with COUNSELOR-IN-TRAINING above her heart —it was pasted to her skin and dotted with flecks of mud. The shorts with the racing stripes. The leaves and twigs and muck matted into her hair that, from this distance,
seemed
woven
into
a
headdress, as if she were modeling some new girl-run-over-by-a-car look in the fashion pages of Vogue. I couldn’t see her feet to make out if she had on the one flip-flop.
“What are you looking at?” Deena asked. “Mr. Floris is taking the rest of the year off—I heard he had a stroke.
We’re good.”
My eyes left the open door where Abby was waiting and went to Deena, who was much closer. I’d really liked her once. I’d liked being her friend. I remembered this in an absent way, like how a long time ago I used to enjoy pooling sand into newly dug holes on the playground when I was, like, five. Right now, I needed to get rid of her.
“You’re cutting class, right?” I asked her.
She lifted her chin, proud. “Spanish.”
I held up the hall pass. “Want this? In case you get stopped?”
We both knew that, without a pass, getting caught in the hallway during a class period would get you detention.
Making a run for it once a hall monitor spotted you would get you ISS, or in-school suspension. I don’t know what never coming back would get you. The chance to never come back?
She shrugged, and I handed over the pass. As our fingers touched on the laminated plastic, there was a charge of life running from her into me. Deena would keep living to see this birthday and the ones that came after. I didn’t know what her life would be—maybe that creepy Karl dude would make her happy one day with baby Karls. Or maybe they’d forgo the offspring and take up a life of robbing liquor stores instead. But whatever choices she made, whatever mistakes, she’d live them.
She’d go on. It wasn’t in Deena Douglas’s fate to disappear.
I drew back my hand and shook the feeling out of it. From around the corner, two approaching teachers could be heard talking.
Deena perked up; she loved taunting the teachers. She whispered, “You go.
Make a run for it. I’ll be loud, cause a diversion. They won’t have any idea.”
She winked at me and then began stomping off toward the teachers, rattling lockers as she went. She turned the corner and I couldn’t see her anymore, but I could hear her. I could hear her even when I reached the end of the corridor, where there was no vision of Abby waiting, but there was an exit door propped open with a cinder block into the dazzlingly white winter’s day.
The south parking lot, once I reached it, was drenched in the kind of bright light that always seems artificial.
Anyone looking out the school’s south windows was sure to see me. I spotted my trig teacher at the head of class as I drove for the exit and, in a row in the middle of the classroom, the back of Jamie’s head. Ms. Torres had mapped out a problem on the whiteboard, and at the exact moment I drove past her window, she looked up, straight at me, and revealed the answer.
— 36 — THE girl who had been counselor to Abby Sinclair’s counselor-in-training was in the coffee shop between classes as she said she would be—she just didn’t know how long I’d driven to get to her university’s campus, and that I wasn’t actually “in the neighborhood”
that week as I’d said. In fact, I’d never been down to that part of New Jersey before in my life.