The music room door is locked, but when I peer really close through the small window, I can make out a few music stands and chairs. Aubrey sits in one of them, back perfectly straight as her bow juts through the air. Long, curly hair shields her face, but I know her eyes are closed, her face calm and dreamy.
I can see it so clearly.
“Is it true?”
The voice jerks me back, and the vision of Aubrey flickers out like a lightbulb going from bright to broken. I breathe through the ache in my chest and try to pull myself together before turning around. There’s a trio of girls standing a couple of feet away from me, huddled together and staring. Ninth-graders, going by their size and still-childish features. One is blond and the other two are dark-haired. I’ve never seen any of them before in my life.
“What?” I say, confused.
“You’re Dara, right?” asks one of the dark-haired girls. When I nod, she asks again, “Is it true?”
“Is what true?”
She exchanges a quick look with her friends before turning back to me. “That you killed your best friend over some guy.”
My body goes cold, but I resist the urge to shrink away and force myself to meet her eyes instead. “Where did you hear that?” I ask over the rising noise-level around us. The hallway is filling up fast, people retrieving belongings from lockers and heading off to class. The bell’s going to ring any minute, and I still haven’t made it upstairs.
“It was all over school yesterday.” Dark-Haired Girl #1 looks at me steadily while her sidekicks divide their gazes between my face and the floor. Her air of confidence reminds me of mine at that age. She’s clearly the brave one, the one who steps up when no one else will. “So?” she prompts when I don’t respond. “Did you really, like, off your best friend?”
I clench my hands to stop them from trembling. Who would say something so nasty about me? “No, I didn’t off her. It was an accident.”
“That’s not what we heard,” she says, nudging the blonde with her elbow. “Someone said you—”
“Back off.”
The girl frowns at me for a second, as if I were the one who said this, but the words didn’t come from me. The voice is deep, authoritative, and located a few feet to the left of us. I turn my head, expecting a teacher, and meet a pair of familiar brown eyes. Aubrey’s eyes. Ethan’s eyes. But obviously it’s not Aubrey, and this tall boy with the angular face and broad shoulders and grown-up-man voice can’t be Ethan. Can it? The same gawky, baby-faced Ethan I saw at the graveyard fifteen months ago?
“We were just curious,” the girl says in a snotty tone. Her friends nod quickly, eyes round as they look up at Ethan. “We wanted to know if the rumors were true, that’s all.”
“I said back off.” He steps forward, and I realize I have to look up to see his face too. Ethan has never been bigger than me. He must be six feet tall now. And he’s let his buzzed hair grow out so it curls over his ears and forehead. And he’s wearing an Iron Maiden T-shirt.
Iron Maiden? Ethan?
“Sure, whatever,” the girl says, turning away. She shrugs at her friends and they stroll off down the hall like they don’t have a care in the world.
The bell rings, signaling the start of first period, but I’m still standing here, dumbstruck. I look up at Ethan, expecting a disgusted glare or some nasty words or something to let me know he’s offended by my presence. But all he does is brush past me and disappear just as fast as he arrived.
At lunch, I head for the cafeteria.
Yesterday, Mom took me out for lunch—a sort of reward for making it through the first half of the day, I guess—so this is the first time I’ve been inside the cafeteria since sophomore year. Everything looks basically the same. A new vending machine near the entrance is the only noticeable difference. Well, and the fact that Aubrey isn’t going to walk in any minute and join me in line for pizza.
I move forward in line and scan the room. I don’t see Ethan, or Travis and Paige, but there are plenty of other familiar faces. A few of them are turned my way, watching me with big eyes. Everyone else seems to be ignoring my existence. It feels surreal, like the person I was the last time I stood here is just as dead as Aubrey. Like I’m a ghost.
I buy pizza and a water and carry both to a mostly vacant table near the wall. As I bite into my slice, my gaze lands on the two girls at the other end of the table. I know them. Katherine and Saskia. We were on the volleyball team together sophomore year and became pretty good friends.
They notice me a few seconds later. I stop chewing, wondering if this will be a repeat of earlier today, when Chloe practically ran out of the bathroom to get away from me. But Katherine and Saskia don’t run. Instead they wave at me casually, as if my presence in the caf were a totally normal thing. Like I’ve been on vacation for the past year and now I’m back—no big deal.
“Hey, Dara,” Saskia calls down the table. “You joining the team again this year?”
I swallow the bite in my mouth and think about my year on the team. The coach assigned me the middle blocker position, because of my height and because I was confident and quick on my feet. Fearless. But the only one of those qualities I still possess is my height, and it’s not nearly enough.
“I don’t think so,” I say. Saskia and Katherine glance at each other and shrug, then go back to whatever conversation they were having before I sat down. They don’t look at me again for the rest of lunch.
It’s after eleven and I’m lying in bed, contemplating the new mature-looking Ethan and the way he came to my rescue today, when I hear my parents arguing downstairs. I get out of bed and slink over to my open door.
“What were you thinking?” I hear my mother say. The anger in her voice makes me feel uneasy. My parents rarely spoke to each other this way before last year.
“I told you, I wasn’t thinking,” Dad replies. His voice is calmer than hers. Mostly, he just sounds tired. Sad. “I didn’t even realize where I was driving until she . . . God, she looked so wrecked.”
“We need to take it slow with her, Neil. Just being there, close to where it happened, destroys her. She goes through it all over again. That’s why I avoid that road when she’s in the car. You never should’ve—”
“I know. I shouldn’t have gone down there. She’s obviously not ready for it yet.”
“She just needs time. Before she went to stay with Jared and Lydia, Dr. Lemke said—”
“I know what Dr. Lemke said. We have to be patient. Follow her lead. And that’s exactly what we’ve been doing for the past year. We sent her to therapy. We put her on antidepressants that made her even worse. We shipped her off to your sister when everyone suggested a change of scenery. We let her come home when she wanted to come home, even though I thought . . .” His voice trails away and I miss the rest of his sentence. Even though he thought what?