HADLEY CLIPPED IN the Wham! cassette as she left the school building. The last bars of “Come On” led into “Young Guns (Go for It!),” and she rolled the volume control under her thumb, bumping through the throng of bodies.
It would only be a matter of time until the others found out—she couldn’t keep it secret for much longer, and they were going to the box now.
She suppressed a shiver as she pushed through the playground’s broiling heat toward the gate, keeping her head down in case anyone from English saw her, or worse . . .
“Oi, freak show!”
Sonya.
Hadley turned to see her leering down from the top of the wall. Her face was framed by a tangle of badly permed hair, and her eyes were so thickly lined they seemed almost closed. She gestured for Hadley to remove her headphones.
“Heard about your little diary,” she said, nudging Chantelle. “Can I read it? I could use a laugh.”
“No,” said Hadley.
“No? You don’t say no to me, you little bitch. I still own you. Gimme your diary.”
Hadley put her music back on and turned away. The familiar, forgotten panic, unfelt since the summer of sacrifice, began to squeeze her insides, and the world moved in a slow, hyper-real blur.
“Don’t you walk away from me!” Sonya shouted, dropping from the wall and pushing after her.
Hadley reached the gate and ran, past the parents leaning on the hoods of cars, through the buses, and into the woodland at the back of the school. As she moved under the trees she felt her lungs squeeze, and fumbled for her inhaler, slipping and plunging her foot into a puddle of sticky mud.
“You can’t run, you wheezy bitch!” said Chantelle as they reached the edge of the trees. “We can hear you!”
Hadley felt her chest closing, and wished at that moment she might run into Mack, or Lamb—or Sep. Sep, who would have given her one of those looks where she could tell exactly what he was thinking, and they’d have wandered off in their own little world, not speaking—and not needing to.
She found her inhaler, dropped it, leaned down to grab it in a head-swimming haze.
Sonya’s frizz of hair loomed into view and Hadley ran again, throwing herself into a thicket of bushes and pulling her knees up to her chin.
The woods became very quiet, and she heard the distant rumble of engines from the parking lot. The sound of safety, of people going lightly about their day.
And here she was—a hundred feet away, trapped like a rat.
“Where are you, freak show?” whispered Sonya, alarmingly close.
Hadley opened one eye and saw the big, flat feet almost within reach, and she knew that all Sonya had to do was lean down, and they’d have her.
Her chest constricted again, and she felt her lungs slam shut.
She looked at her inhaler. If she used it, the burst of sound would give her away. If she didn’t . . .
“Where are you?” Sonya roared, laughing and banging a stick against the trunk beside Hadley’s head.
Hadley started to rock as her breathless chest began to pull on her consciousness.
She thought of Sep again. She imagined his gentle hand on her back as he reached for the inhaler, guiding it to her mouth and pressing it with a hiss that filled every vein and threw her lungs open with a desperate, painful rush.
Sonya’s feet stopped moving.
Then her upside-down face loomed in the little gap through which Hadley had crawled, and she banged the stick on the trunk again.