She glanced at him across the crowded floor of the church. “I don’t like him,” she said.
“He’s probably a Withered,” I said, “and almost certainly a killer. I’d be disturbed if you did like him. But you don’t have to like him, just … talk to him. We need to get to know him better, and he doesn’t like me. Or at least he knows that something’s up with me. You can go make friends.”
“You want me to flirt with him?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“But that’s what you meant,” she said. “You want me to smile and blush and laugh at his jokes and make him like me.”
“I’m just saying you’re better at it than I am.”
“Because I’m a girl.”
“Because I’m a sociopath,” I said. “We’re not charming people.”
“Yes you are,” she said. “Ted Bundy was the most charming person his victims had ever met.”
“I’m not Ted Bundy.”
“But he might be,” said Brooke. “And you want me to go and talk to him.”
“Are you scared of him?” I asked. “How many Withered have we faced?”
“This is different,” said Brooke. “He’s a teenage boy—that calls for a very specific kind of interaction, and I can’t do that. Maybe before, but not … like this.”
“We have to get to know him,” I said. “We won’t be at this meeting together forever, which means we need to find out where he’ll be next. He already introduced us to his social circle, so all we have to do is step into it.”
“I don’t know,” she said, grimacing as she stared at their little group. “What do I say? I suck at this.”
“You’re great at talking to people,” I said. “You were the one who asked me out on our first date.”
“I’m not going to ask him on a date.”
“That’s not what I meant,” I said, “I just mean that you are a social person—you know everything about everybody, because you talk to them. You talked to that girl in the car yesterday for hours.”
“She wasn’t a boy.”
“What, are you … attracted to him?”
“Of course not,” she snapped. Her hands were clenched in fists and she was practically bouncing on her toes. “It’s a cultural thing—there are certain ways a girl talks to a boy and they’re different in every era of history, sometimes in every year. And 99.99-whatever percent of my experience in this area is centuries out of date. I can’t do it. I can’t do it.” She was gritting her teeth, and I recognized the signs too late: she was having another episode. I grabbed her hand and changed tactics immediately.
“It’s okay,” I said. “We can do it together.”
“You asked me to do it for a reason,” she said. “If it was something we could do together we’d have done it together.”
“We can do it together.”
She shook her head, still staring at him. “I screwed up. If I was Brooke I could do it, but I’m just a big pile of dead girls. I can’t do anything.”
I stepped in front of her, still holding her hand and now looking straight into her eyes. Talking to Corey’s group could wait—saving Brooke was the most important thing in the world right now. “Look at me. Do you see me?”
Her breath was coming too quickly.
“Brooke,” I said, “can you see me? What’s my name?”
“I’m not Brooke.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “You’re you, and that’s okay. Who am I?”
“You’re trying to save me,” she said, closing her eyes. Tears seeped from under her eyelids. “That means I’m having an attack, which I always do every time we have to do something important. We have to talk to them and I’m ruining this.”
“Forget them,” I said. “You’re awesome and you’re not ruining anything.”
“Stop saying that!” she hissed, and I could see now that people around us were starting to look. “You think you’re saying you want to help me, but all you’re really saying is that I need help. That I can’t do it on my own. I am broken—I’m a hundred thousand girls and every one of them is broken—”
“Marci,” said Ingrid, stepping out of the crowd, “is everything okay?”
Brooke tugged on her hands, trying to pull free of my grip on her wrists, but her movements were stiff—not halfhearted, but as if she were physically fighting not just me, but herself. “You’re okay,” I whispered.
“Marci?” asked Ingrid.
“Yes I am,” said Brooke. She straightened her back and looked me in the eye. I could tell just by the way she held herself that she was Marci now. “You want me to go charm somebody? That’s what I’m here for.”
She pulled on her wrists again, and I let her go. The depression had disappeared like a switch had been flicked, replaced by cool, brazen confidence. She walked to Corey and his friends and started chattering happily, smiling, laughing, even touching him lightly on the arm.
“None of my business,” said Ingrid, and she walked away.