You make me crazy, baby. You make me crazy.
That’s what Katie had overheard her saying to Ryan that time at the Ramada sundries shop. Moments before she’d lunged up behind Ryan as he talked to Katie, her arms bolting around him like a shield: He’s mine.
Or maybe it was Hailey’s phone call still hammering in Katie’s head. But the picture. It looked like evidence for something.
Two hours before practice normally ended, the text came.
Mom, no Coach T. again. Short practice. Dad not txting back. Can u get me?
“You sure you’re up to the drive, sweetie?” Katie asked as they walked into the garage.
“Yeah,” Drew said, peering down at his two-liter bottle, thick with scum. The science project, of course. “It smells funny in here.”
“You mean like old shrimp?”
“No.”
A jackknifed truck held her hostage on Route 11 for an extra twenty minutes and by the time she pulled into the BelStars parking lot, gymnasts were already streaming out of the building in their matching warm-up suits, matching hollow-chested postures, matching stoic expressions, their mouths all straight lines. But no Devon.
Looking in the rearview mirror at Drew’s wan face, mouth open and lips coated white, she didn’t want to leave the car. But Devon wasn’t answering her phone and Katie had the sneaking sense maybe she was still at the vault, making use of every spare minute, feeling her progress whittled away by circumstance and tumult.
I just get lost up there. That’s what she’d told Amelise.
“Drew, I’ll be right back,” she said, leaning into the rear seat, resting the back of her hand on his forehead for the hundredth time.
Jogging inside the BelStars lobby, the familiar bite of Steri-Fab and Tinactin, she kept her head down, avoiding eye contact with the stray parent or staff member.
As she pushed through the heavy doors into the gym, she saw only a few assistant coaches, a handful of girls in leotards over at the Resi-Pit, one girl still practicing handstand pops on the tumbling track, Bobby catching her legs.
“Where’s Devon?”
“Katie. She was looking for you,” Bobby said, the girl’s ankles caught in his hands, her upturned face blooming with blood. “But that was a while ago.”
“I saw her in the locker room,” Missy Morgan said, zipping her gym bag. “But I think she’s gone now.”
Wending her way past the practice beams and uneven bars, Katie started to pick up her pace. Some feeling in her chest.
Approaching the locker room, eyes fixed on the long line of red cubbies veining through the door’s cutout window, she heard the scream, like a tear in the throat.
“Stop it! Stop it!”
Heart pommeling against her chest, Katie charged through the double doors.
At first, she couldn’t see anything, just heard a tight shriek, a hard clang.
“Devon?” Katie cried out.
Running past the locker stalls, her chest lurching, everything was a red blur until she saw them:
Two girls interlocked on the floor, almost like an embrace. Katie could see only the tall one on top, golden hair sprayed across the back of a red BelStars hoodie, and beneath her a pair of tanned legs scrambling, sneakers squeaking on the tiles.
“Help!” came a strangled voice as Katie forked her arm under the torso of the hoodie girl and lifted with all her might, which seemed infinite.
Wrenching the girl by her hood, barring the tanned expanse of her broad shoulders, Katie hurled her aside, somehow stronger than ever in her life, and found beneath the bloodless face of her daughter.
“Devon,” Katie cried. Sprawled on the floor, her daughter still grasped the girl’s hoodie cord so tightly it had cut into the center of her palms, blood-whorled.
“I’ll kill you,” the hoodie girl screamed, and Katie’s head whipped around to see who she was.
Though she already knew.
The freckled nose and bright teeth, that corn-colored hair rippling.
“Hailey,” Katie panted, her arms wrapping around Devon, shielding her hunched body. “Oh God, Hailey.”
“Call the police! Call the police!” someone was shouting as the doors to the locker room swung open behind them.
There was a swirl of noise and doors and shouts, Bobby and Amelise descending upon them, propelling Hailey backward, legs kicking, punching air, and the crash and rattle of locker metal and the skidding of sneakers and the savage howl of a girl who barely sounded human.
Her face, Katie thought, her face—who is that? Teeth bared, veins rising everywhere, a face full of blood.
In an instant, turning her body, Devon lifted her muscled leg and pounded, with a force like the force she marshaled to punch the springboard, her foot landing on something with a deafening crunch.
The stray bits of a lavender cell phone scattered across the floor like confetti.
Hailey let out one last howl.
“I called 911!” came a shout from the hallway.