“What do you mean?” I asked.
Lucy held up her arm, so that her wrist appeared to me sideways, a portion of the charms hidden from my sight. “This bracelet?”
“Yes.”
She frowned. “Alice, this isn’t your bracelet.”
I stopped. “What are you talking about, Lucy?”
She dropped her arm. “I mean that this is my bracelet.” She turned, so that her words came to me, distorted by the distance. “It was my mother’s bracelet, in fact.”
I opened my mouth, then shut it. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t understand. I wanted to say: No, it was my mother’s bracelet—and perhaps I did—though the words sounded thick and far away, as if someone other than I was speaking. Lucy continued to stare at me with that strange look, so that I was unsure of whether she had heard me, or if, in fact, I had actually spoken the words at all.
She took a step toward me. “Alice, are you feeling well? I could get the school nurse if something is wrong.”
I felt a rising tide of panic, suddenly overwhelmed by it all—her strange behavior over the last few weeks, the incident with the clothes, and now this. I wanted to shout at her. To race forward and rip the bracelet from her arm. But would they believe me? I wondered—simultaneously questioning who they even referred to. After all, who could I go to with such a problem, who would not turn away, laughing? It all sounded so absurd, of course I realized that. The idea that two girls would claim the same story about a bracelet—that their respective dead mothers had gifted it to them—it was so unlikely, how could it ever sound anything but absolutely ludicrous?
That was what she wanted.
The thought came to me quickly. It seemed absurd, hard to believe—and yet, I told myself, it had to be true. It had to be true for no other reason than that there was no other reason. Why else would she claim the bracelet had been her mother’s if not for that outcome—she wanted to drive me mad.
She knew about my past. I had told her once, in those early months of friendship, about the time after my parents’ deaths, about the darkness and shadows that had hovered above me so that my aunt Maude had wanted to send me away, to commit me to a place where I would never see the sun again. About how they still came, so that at times I questioned the accuracy of my mind, of my memories.
I would be lying if I did not admit that for the briefest of moments it had passed my mind, that I had wondered if the bracelet did not in fact belong to Lucy and I had somehow confused it as being my own. One dead mother’s bracelet for another.
But no, I told myself, looking up at her, watching her confusion with suspicion.
It was mine, I knew it.
I could feel my face burning, but this time it was not in embarrassment or nervousness. “Please, Lucy,” I implored.
She let out a sigh. I thought at first she meant to relent, to admit to it all, to claim it as some sort of cruel prank. But then her expression changed: her eyes narrowed and her face looked suddenly small and mean. “We’ll have to sort this out later, I’m afraid. I have a class now.” And with those words, she was gone.
LUCY DIDN’T RETURN HOME THAT NIGHT.
It was the first time I had slept alone in our room, and I found the sudden absence, the total quiet, to be unnerving. Shadows that I had never before noticed danced across the length of the walls. A shrill noise awoke me in the middle of the night, and it was only some time later that I realized it was simply the sound of two trees rubbing together. By then, my heart had begun to pound and I could hear a strange roaring, loud enough that it blocked out the other sounds that had frightened me only seconds before.
Stop it, I chided myself. You’re a grown woman. You can certainly manage to spend one night on your own. The truth was, it was the first time I had slept alone at all. Someone else had always been in the house with me—my parents, and then later, my aunt. And yes, I knew that there were other girls just a door away, but somehow the house seemed empty, as if it were possible that I was the sole occupant. I worried for a moment that this might somehow be true. Perhaps there had been an emergency drill that I had missed. I peered out the window, wondering whether I would see a row of girls there, huddled together in the night air. There was no one. Still, I could not quite manage to convince myself that I was not somehow totally and completely alone within the walls of our clapboard house. My ears strained for sounds of the other girls. For anything other than the eerie shrieking the two trees continued to produce.
There was nothing.
Or was there?
At some point in the night, I began to feel a presence. My heart stammered, the blood rushed to my face. Where before Lucy had acted as a barrier, a shield, between me and everything else—for nothing would ever happen while she was there, I had reasoned—at that moment I was alone, defenseless. I pushed myself to the edge of the bed, so that my back aligned with the cold glass surface of the window. I closed my eyes and held my breath—certain that, as I did, the sound of breathing continued. It’s not real, I told myself, although the words did little to comfort, to dispel the feeling that I was being watched. That I was no longer alone in the bedroom.
I slept little that night. In novels, the heroines always tossed and turned, exclaiming that they were unable to remain still and pass the night in a peaceful sleep. I did not toss and turn. Instead, I remained entirely still, rigid, I thought, as if the preservation of my life depended upon the immobility of my body. After several hours of this, I began to sweat from the exertion. Passing in and out of sleep quickly enough that I could no longer tell how much time had passed, my body bathed in dampness, I could pass a hand across my chest and feel the wetness clinging to my palm. The terror abated only at the first bit of sun peeking through the curtains. Instead of waiting for the day to start, I swept aside the sheets, as if this movement would somehow hasten the arrival of dawn. I had had enough of night. And yet still I lingered, unsure where to go and what to do without Lucy’s presence to guide me, to help mark the time. She was always the first to rise, and I waited until she had retreated to the toilet to do the same. Without her, I stalled, lying, waiting.
Sleep-deprived from my night alone, I drifted off, despite my intention to stay awake. Instead my eyelids began to droop, my breathing becoming slow and heavy. I could feel myself falling asleep and yet I could do nothing at all to resist its soft, insistent call.
I awoke, heart pounding.