Huddling over Devon, Katie looked up at Hailey, who stood panting wildly, a thick strand of her own hair caught in her mouth, her neck scored with nail marks.
Held back by Bobby’s trunk arms, Hailey breathed in, bent her head, and let loose a warm spray of pink saliva that scattered across Devon’s chest, onto Katie’s calf and ankle.
“Bitch, I know you,” Hailey muttered, Bobby pinning her arms back fiercely, “I know you.”
Devon, eyes sheeted black, her expression as stony, as pitiless as Katie had ever seen, looked up at her and said nothing.
Katie’s hands clutched the wheel tightly even though the car was not running.
Bobby had tried to get her to wait in Teddy’s office until the police arrived.
“If we don’t handle this right,” he’d warned, “there could be trouble. People trust their children with us.”
But she’d needed to get Devon out of there, and Drew was alone in the car.
Now, all three of them sat, fogging the windows, and there were too many things to do all at once, and Eric’s phone went straight to voice mail.
“What happened?” Drew asked. “Did Devon fall?”
Her head felt like it was whirring, her hands shaking.
Devon was leaning forward in the front seat, hand pressed on the dashboard as if she might fall.
“Devon, look at me,” she said.
But Devon wouldn’t, and wouldn’t, until Katie finally reached across and pulled her sharp shoulder back.
She supposed she’d imagined it would be worse. But other than Devon’s chin, scored with red half-moons, her daughter looked remarkably intact.
Except: Was that a strand of Hailey’s hair caught in the corner of Devon’s mouth, like corn silk?
“We may need to go to the hospital,” Katie said, reaching out for Devon’s chin.
Flinching, Devon pulled back, covering her chin with her hand.
A police car turned into the lot.
“Stay here,” Katie said. “Do not move.”
“You can meet us at the station,” said the officer with the shaved head and soft lower lip. “We’ll get some other statements here first.”
His nameplate said Officer Crandall and his severe affect was oddly comforting. Shaking his head as he took notes, he wouldn’t let her back in the locker room. The sounds coming from there, piercing girl squeals echoing, reminded Katie of the time they’d found the dead raccoon trapped in the gym air shaft.
Back in the car, Devon was still pitched forward, her eyes shut.
On the tan dashboard, there was a red palm print like a kindergarten art project. The palm that had been wrapped around Hailey’s hoodie cord.
“Mom,” Drew said when she opened the door, “Devon didn’t cry once.”
It’s what he always said when his sister got injured, and it was very dear. Katie tried to smile for him but caught a glimpse of herself in the rearview mirror, her face and neck smeared pink with adrenaline, sweat-smudged hair, mascara striped across the bridge of her nose.
“I think Dad called,” Devon said, eyes still closed.
Katie looked down at her phone, blinking rapidly.
When she called him back, he said he was already on his way to the police station. Bobby had phoned, he said. Bobby had told him.
“How is she?” he asked, breath ragged. “How’s her wrist?”
“Her wrist? She’s okay. She—”
“Goddamn it. I told you we needed to keep her away from Hailey.”
“What?” she said. “This is my fault?”
“I shouldn’t have left her there. That gym isn’t safe. Can you put her on the phone?”
The back doors of the gym opened.
“We have to go,” Katie snapped, turning the phone off and tossing it onto the console with a hard crack.
The three of them watched silently as the officer escorted Hailey, hair sprigged like Medusa, in plastic cuffs, to the squad car.
Once, at a booster-sponsored volleyball game, Hailey had worn a bikini, and Katie could swear she had the tan poreless skin of a slick Barbie doll, not a stray blemish, not one broken blood vessel, not a single scar. A perfect, markless body.
And here she was, face ruddy, eyes lowered, angry scarlet grooves swooping up her face and neck. Officer Crandall’s hand behind that honeyed head, ducking her into the backseat.
She imagined Hailey at thirteen, hitching her way down to Florida. Ripped shirt, clawed face. Fighting with another girl, beating her with a sandal. What took you so long?
“Mom,” Drew said, “what happened to your arm?”
Katie looked down and saw the long looping fish hook of a scratch extending from her elbow to her wrist.
“And your eye.”
Pulling her hair back, peering in the rearview mirror, she saw the knot of blood under her eyebrow and couldn’t remember how she’d gotten it. A tigress, protecting her young.
At the police station, Katie watched as Eric’s hand clenched the water bottle so tightly it cracked, leaking all over his jeans, into his pocket, blurring all the print on the speeding ticket stuffed there. The one that Officer Crandall said he’d “take care of,” given everything.