Dusk was darker in the woods than on the coast. Too many trees to see the horizon. Light filtered through at odd angles, stretching and distorting the shadows. There were two archways carved into the gate, which made the whole gate thing kind of pointless.
I walked through the one on the left, which was narrower than I’d thought, and I felt myself shrinking down as I passed through it. In front of me, the brick walkway diverged into three paths snaking through the trees and the buildings. I couldn’t see where anything led, so I rested my luggage against the iron bars, took out my cell phone, and held it toward the sky.
“Come on, come on,” I mumbled. I probably should’ve cleared this with Dad after all. I’d been so preoccupied with the getting away part that I hadn’t thought about what to do when I actually arrived. I paced to the other end of the gate, walked back through it, around it, and finally stood on a stone bench. Still no signal.
The wind blew strongly and I nearly lost my footing on the edge of the bench. Leaves rustled and a flag whipped around on the top of the building to my right. And then a vision came waltzing down the middle path. Brown hair, bouncing. Hips swaying. My heart skipped a beat and I thought, Colleen.
But it wasn’t Colleen. This girl had a splattering of freckles across her nose and overarched eyebrows, and when the shadows shifted and the light hit her hair, I could tell it was more red than brown. I hopped off the bench. And then another girl came skipping after her. Skinny and blond and all frail boned. Just a wisp of a person.
“It’s a dead zone. Because of the mountains,” said the girl with the curls. “That’s what they tell us anyway. Seems awfully convenient.” Then she extended a short, manicured finger in the direction of the bus stop. “About a mile that way I can get some signal. At the gas station.”
The blond girl shuddered. “Not worth the risk. The locals are inbred.” She opened her eyes wide and leaned forward, like a warning.
“They just don’t have dental insurance,” Curls said, waving her off.
I smiled at Curls, but neither smiled back. Blond Girl had a fine white scar running across her chin, and she raised her hand to touch it, like she knew I was looking.
“Well, anyway, I have a satellite phone,” said Blond Girl. Curls blinked heavily and shifted her jaw back and forth.
“Early arrivals need to check in with Ms. Perkins. Housemaster.” Curls pointed up to the top of the building with the whipping flag.
“On the roof?” I asked.
Curls cocked her head to the side and pulled her lips into a hideous grin. “Oh look, a funny one.”
And then they left.
I dragged my luggage into the building on the right. A dorm, I guess. But for the money my parents were spending, I expected a little more. Automatic doors instead of the heavy wooden ones that creaked when they opened. Fancy artwork instead of wood-paneled walls. For Christ’s sake, the lobby didn’t even have a television. Just a handful of couches tossed haphazardly around the room. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a moose head mounted on the wall.
Through the window on a thick wooden door, I saw a hallway stretch down to my left, door after door after door. Like some asylum. There was a staircase at the back of the lounge, wall sconces illuminating the way up and down.
I left my bags and went up, my flip-flops slapping at the steps. The stairs ended at the third floor with a single door.
A woman not much older than me in sweats and a ponytail answered when I knocked, looked me over, and pushed her glasses up onto her nose. “You must be Mallory,” she said, with no inflection to her voice whatsoever. I must’ve look surprised that she knew who I was, because she said, “Your father spoke with the dean of students earlier today.” Then she nodded and said, “Very well then,” like she was playing some part and going back to her script. She pulled a blue stretchy bracelet with a key attached off the table along the entrance wall. “Room 102. Do you have a laptop?”
Was I supposed to have a laptop? “No.”
“You’ll get one tomorrow during orientation. And the cellular service is appalling. There’s a pay phone in the hall and vending machines in the basement. The cafeteria doesn’t open until tomorrow, I’m afraid.”
I slipped the key bracelet onto my wrist.
“If you need anything, don’t hesitate to ask.” And yet, as she said it, she slowly closed the door in my face.
My steps echoed throughout the stairwell as I descended. Fresh start, like hell. Like this place could be anyone’s fresh start. Full of snotty people and arrogant buildings and way too many trees. God, there were so many freaking trees.
I entered the barren lobby, void of all sound except the low hum of electricity buzzing from the lights, and I felt it.
It. Him. Here, hundreds of miles from home. Here, in this emptiness. It was here, like a suffocating fullness to the room, humming along with the electricity.
I didn’t understand. There was no reason for his soul or presence or whatever to be here. He’d probably never set foot here in his life. This place meant nothing to him—to us.
And then I backed slowly into the stairwell again. Because I realized that whatever it was—a ghost, a soul, a ripple in the atmosphere—it wasn’t tied to my kitchen. It was tied to me.
I took shallow breaths so nothing could really register in the pit of my gut. Colleen. I needed Colleen. I stumbled down the last flight of stairs, and I kept casting glances over my shoulder but there was nothing there. Except every time I turned back around, I felt something, or this almost something, pressed up against my back, mirroring my every movement as I scampered down the hall past the vending machines.
But every time I looked there was nothing, like it was in my blind spot. Just out of sight. But there.
I ran into the laundry room, where everything smelled like dryer sheets and felt like excess heat, and that muffled the feeling a little, though it was still there.
Everything was coin operated. I ran my bills through the coin machine until my bag was half full of quarters because I had no idea how much it cost to call New Jersey from the middle of nowhere, and the sound of the money sloshing around made me feel a little better, for no reason at all, really.
But not that much better because my hands were still shaking when I inserted half the contents of my purse into the pay phone upstairs. And that feeling was practically on top of me, like someone was pressed up against my back, eyes on the back of my head, arms at my sides, deciding what to do.
The phone rang three times and Colleen picked up, breathy and quiet. “Hello?” she said. And the feeling retreated for the moment.
“Colleen?”
“Oh my God, Mallory?”
“In the flesh. Well, not really.”
“What the crap? Caller ID said unknown caller, New Hampshire. You’re already there?”
“Yes. And I’m on a pay phone in my dorm. A pay phone!”
“They still make those?”
“Are you ungrounded?”
“No.” Her voice dropped lower. “The parental unit is in the shower. Was in the shower.”
“Colleen?” a voice in the background asked.
“Shit. Okay, give me the number. I’ll call it when I can.”
I found the numbers on top of the keypad. “603-555—”
“Colleen Elizabeth, hang up this instant.”
“One sec, Ma. Okay, 603-555 . . . ?”
“23—” And then I heard a dial tone. I listened to the tone for a minute, willing the numbers across the connection.
I went back to the lounge and grabbed my luggage. The feeling was gone. All that was left was me and my luggage and the faint hum of electricity. I pulled my bags down the hall to room 102—the corner room, next to a secondary staircase, narrow and dark. I let myself into my room and I swear I could smell concrete. Because that’s all there was. White walls, two standard-issue twin beds with white linens that blended into the background. White on white, just like home. Minus the home part. There were desks in each corner, a light oak. But with the poor lighting, they almost looked the same color as the rest of the room.
I opened the closet door and found a low dresser shoved into the bottom. Brown and worn. Like the unseemly stuff was hidden from sight here.
I turned on the overhead light, but it was yellow and dim. So I flung open the shades, but the room faced the woods. And all that was out there now were dark shadows against a darker sky. So I propped the door to my room open with my bag and let the fluorescent light from the hall shine in. And even after I didn’t need the light anymore, I kept the door open, waiting for Colleen to call back. It didn’t matter that I couldn’t get the number to her. She’d figure it out.
I knew she’d find me.
She could always find me.
She found me that night, when Brian died. When the cops couldn’t find me, when my parents couldn’t find me. After I’d run. After.
I heard her steps splashing toward me, over the sound of the rain falling into the ocean, where I sat in a few inches of dark water, seaweed, plastic bottles, and remnants of blood.
“Mallory,” she called before she was really close enough to know it was me.
But of course it was me. The first time we hid here was in eighth grade, when Colleen’s mom wouldn’t let her date a boy in high school. We’d camped out under the boardwalk, which was not at all romantic but kind of foul, so we moved back home and Colleen learned to sneak out her bedroom window instead.
“Mallory.” She crouched in front of me. “Oh God, Mallory, I’m sorry,” she said, but I still wasn’t looking at her.
I felt her arm reach under my knees and she grunted as she tried to lift me, but instead she sunk down, tangled up in me. She wrapped her arms around me and said, “You need to stand up.” But the only thing I needed to do was sink farther into the wet sand under the murky water.
There was a shrill ringing down the hall. A second later, I heard it again. Colleen. I ran out of my room and down the hall and skidded to a stop at the pay phone. “Hello?”
“Mallory.” Not Colleen. My father. I plopped in the plastic chair beside the phone.
“Yes.”
“You shouldn’t have left. How could you just leave like that?”
“Mom let me. She drove me to the train station.”
“Your mother is in no position to be making those kinds of decisions.” Whatever that was supposed to mean.
“Well,” I said, “I’m here. And everything’s fine.”
Dad let his disappointment linger in the silence before he spoke. “I’m going to set up an 800 number for you to call home for free.”
“Great,” I said, extra emphasis on the T.
“And I’ll set up an account there in case you need money.”
“Perfect.”
“And don’t you ever do something like that again.”
“Yes, sir.” Then I hung up and felt the hate flashing again. Light off. Light on.
Now they could get on with their lives. Move on. Problem solved. I narrowed my eyes at the phone and watched my distorted reflection scowl back. Then I felt a presence behind me and my muscles tensed. I stayed perfectly still. A streak of blue passed behind my reflection. I jumped up, back to the phone, as the chair scraped against the floor with a high-pitched shriek.
There was a guy in the hall, blue shirt and khaki shorts, watching me.
I cleared my throat. “I’m done with the phone.”
“I’m not waiting for the phone,” he said. He was built tall and thick, with a cocky stance and a lazy grin.
“I thought nobody was here yet.”
“I live here. I’m Jason. Mallory, right?”
I searched my memory for his face, for his name. But I couldn’t remember seeing him at any of Dad’s alumni events. I didn’t remember any Jason. It’d been two years since I stopped going, though. He could’ve been anyone. “Sorry, I don’t remember you.”
I looked around the empty hallway, wondering if this Jason character was supposed to be wandering the girls’ dorm at night. He saw my expression and his grin stretched wider. It was the type of smile on the type of face that said he usually got exactly what he wanted. And in that moment, it looked like what he wanted was me.
I tugged down the ends of my shorts, which were now decidedly too short.
He laughed. “No, I mean I know who you are.” He stayed against the wall, but he smiled in a way that made him seem closer. “My dad is the dean of students.”
Which was his way of telling me he knew everything. Everything.
All the air drained from the hallway, my fresh start rapidly disappearing.
I walked toward my room, and he backed down the hall in front of me. “There’s nothing to do around here tonight. We should hang out.”
“Jason,” I said as I strode by him into my room. He knew who I was. He knew everything about me. I gathered my voice and said, “You should know better.”
He grinned again as I shut my door in his face. He tapped his fingers against it twice and said, “See ya, Mallory.”
I turned the lock. Ridiculous, really. I wasn’t naive enough to think a lock would prevent someone from getting in if he wanted to. But I ran across the room to the window and checked that lock too. The outside was blackness now. No moon. No lights. I couldn’t even see the trees. Just darkness, stretching forever.
I pulled the off-white shade down to the sill, rummaged in the smaller suitcase for my vial of sleeping pills, and swallowed one dry. The lock kept Jason out. But not that other thing. I heard it coming as I lay on the starchy sheets.
Boom, boom, boom.
Inescapable. I felt it like a jolt of cold air as it seeped through the crack at the base of the window and spread out along the floor.
The room throbbed with the boom, boom, boom just like at home. Same as always. But this time my eyelids fluttered open and I saw it hovering in the corner, starting to take shape. Like a shadow in the darkness, darker than all the rest.
I squeezed my eyelids closed again and I thought, Sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry . . . because it was the only thing I could think.
But it didn’t matter because I already knew those words meant nothing.
And as I drifted away, I felt the shadow coming closer . . . closer . . .
I woke to whispers in the hall. Fast-moving words, sharp laughter, an indecipherable string of syllables. Gossip. Girls moving in.
The clock told me what I already knew by the amount of noise in the hall—I’d missed breakfast. And I hadn’t eaten dinner. My stomach clenched. I slipped my key bracelet onto my wrist and padded down the narrow set of stairs near my room. I got a bag of pretzels and a soda from the vending machine in the basement and tore into the bag as soon as I pulled it from the dispenser. Then I heard doors slamming around in the laundry room.
I walked over to the entranceway and saw Curls slamming the dryer shut, leaning into it with her hip.
Blond Girl was sitting on top of a washer across the room, filing her nails. They were both in pajamas still. Blond Girl spoke, still looking at her nails. “I don’t know why you don’t just do it at your uncle’s place.”
Curls put her hands on her hips and said, “I’m not lugging this across campus.”
“Well then, at the very least you could send it out like I do.”
Curls opened the door again and slammed it shut, and this time it latched. “There,” she said. Then she turned to Blond Girl and said, “Stuff always goes missing when I do that.” Then she motioned for Blond Girl to follow her. “Time to get ready,” she said.
I backed away before they could notice me standing there.
Someone had slid a schedule for the day under my door, along with the Monroe Student Handbook. I spent the morning reading the handbook while everyone else moved in. Learning about the consequences as dictated by Monroe for various offenses. I wondered what would happen if I refused to wear those ridiculous red shirts, but I couldn’t find the answer.
There were two long folding tables set up at the end of the path in front of a large academic building, and two identical girls stood behind them. As I got closer, I noticed the girls were not at all identical, despite the red shirts and khaki pants and hair pulled up into taut ponytails. And, in fact, I knew them. They were the girls from the laundry room, from last night. Except now they were all smiles and perkiness, and they greeted me like they’d never seen me before.
“Welcome to Monroe!” said the girl with the reddish curls. She was looking at me, but I got the feeling she was looking right through me. It was unsettling. Her name tag said krista. “Last name, please.”
“Murphy,” I said as she rifled through the stack of red folders. Her eyes briefly flitted up to mine. The blond girl, who had been smiling at someone in the distance, stopped smiling. Her hand froze midwave.
“Taryn,” Krista said, looking directly at me. “I think you have this one.”
Taryn cleared her throat and rifled through the folders. I walked to her side of the table, but she passed the folder to Krista instead. And then we all stood in this awkward triangle: me with my folder, Taryn looking purposefully away, Krista looking purposefully toward me.
And then a voice from somewhere behind the table said, “Computer room next.”
Krista looked at a guy sprawled out under the nearest tree and said, “I was getting to it, Reid.” Then she turned back to me and said, “Computer room. Laptops.” Fake smile.
She gestured over her shoulder to the building behind her.
But I was looking at the boy under the tree. Reid. I knew him—I used to know him. I hadn’t seen him since freshman year, when I was an awkward fourteen and he was a cute fifteen, as long as you didn’t look too closely at his uncontrollable hair.
Reid wore sneakers and khaki shorts and that ridiculous red polo, and I started to worry I wouldn’t be able to tell anyone apart. When I passed close by him, he raised himself up on his elbows and smiled, and not only did he have that ridiculous shirt, he also now had this ridiculous brown hair that curled at the bottom. Not even close to the uncontrollable mess I remembered.
“You got taller,” he said.
“You got all . . .” I waved my hands around my head. “Nice hair.”
Reid laughed and stood up. “So you do remember me.”
Hard to forget the guy whose father—who also happened to be Dad’s oldest friend—died in a freak accident, or the funeral your parents dragged you across three states for, or the fact that you sat with him in his room while everyone else mourned for his father downstairs. Hard to forget the first guy who rejected you.
When my lack of speaking turned awkward, Reid shuffled his feet and asked, “Need help orientating?”
“No thanks,” I said. I would’ve thought that after two years, I wouldn’t feel the pit in my stomach when I looked at him. Wouldn’t feel the urge to spin on my heel and self-righteously walk away. And definitely wouldn’t feel the urge to close the space between us.
Walk away, Mallory.
I spent the rest of the morning orienting myself at the computer lab and the student banking center and the registrar’s office. Then I spent the afternoon orienting myself at the cafeteria and the bookstore. The new kids stood out—we hadn’t assimilated yet. Hadn’t learned how to wear our hair or carry our books. Hadn’t put on the red shirt and adopted the sameness yet. So when they smiled at me, I smiled back, like we were in this together.
I had my laptop bag swung over my shoulder and a stack of books propped between my arms and my chin as I moved slowly back toward my dorm, rocks getting stuck in my flip-flops every few steps. Reid was still under that same oak tree, like there was nothing worth moving for, but now he was eating a giant sandwich.
He was watching me, but I didn’t know whether he was staring because he’d heard about what I’d done or whether he was remembering me, reconciling the Mallory in his head with the Mallory in front of him. Whether he was remembering the same moment I was: his hand in my hair and his face an inch from mine the moment before he walked away.
Or maybe he was staring because I had to stop every few steps and shake my feet while simultaneously balancing a stack of textbooks. He put down the food as I passed by again. “Hey,” he said.
I kicked off my shoes and started walking faster.
There was a girl in my room. Actually, she was only half in my room. The upper half of her body was leaning out the window, blowing smoke toward the trees.
She turned around when the door slammed shut behind me but held her cigarette out the window. She had blond hair cut blunt at her shoulders, a heart-shaped face and jeans that fit her perfectly, and a T-shirt that fit too tight, but guys probably wouldn’t agree.
She watched me, expressionless, until I dumped my gear on the bed and said, “Hey.”
She smiled, which I guess meant I had passed some test. She held up a neon-pink lighter from her other hand and said, “You want?”
“I’m good,” I said, and she ground the cigarette onto the bricks outside the window and flicked it somewhere toward the forest. Apparently not worried about being caught. Or starting forest fires.
“So,” she said, quirking her mouth to the side and leaning her back against the wall. “Like what I’ve done with the place?” She had hung band posters over the other standard-issue bed, and there were stand-up lights in the corners of our room now. She walked over to me and stuck her hand out all formal like. “Brianne Dalton. Bree.”
I shook her hand and said, “Mallory Murphy. No nickname.”
She stepped back and looked me over, scanning me slowly from my bare feet to my bare shoulders and raised an eyebrow at me. “Hmm. Well, you don’t need one. You new here?”
I nodded, searching through my suitcase for another pair of flip-flops, feeling her eyes on me.
“Me too. Transferred from Chelsey. You know it? No? All-girls school. Can you picture me at an all-girls school?”
Actually, I could. Probably how she learned to make other girls uncomfortable just by looking at them. She reminded me of Colleen, even though they looked nothing alike. Colleen was the one who taught me how to walk when you know someone is watching, and how to walk to make someone watch. She oozed attraction just by being in a room. Same as this girl.
Bree looped an arm through mine and led me back into the hall. “Come on, orientation tours are about to start. And trust me, you are in for a treat.”
I looked down at the registration paper. Bree’s idea of a treat was my idea of perpetual humiliation.
“I see you made it unscathed,” Reid called to me as we approached the grass. Unscathed. Who says unscathed? Prep school boys, apparently. With perfect hair. Who reject you.
Bree leaned closer into my side. “You know Reid?”
“Not exactly,” I said, because it was true. I knew him two years ago, when his hair stuck out in every different direction. I knew him before his father was taken from him, before all of this. I didn’t know him anymore.
“Whatever,” she said. She kept her arm looped through mine, but I felt her pull away.
The whole quad area between the dorms and the school buildings took up the space of two soccer fields. Students were scattered in circular groups, like they were singing “Kumbaya” or something. Reid was already surrounded by two guys and one other girl. He must’ve been the leader since he was the only one in uniform.
Reid held my flip-flops out in an extended hand. “Hey, Cinderella, you lost your shoes.” He smiled and showed his dimple, which I’d forgotten about until right that moment, and suddenly I was back, three years earlier, a year before Reid’s dad died, walking into Dad’s twenty-fifth reunion and pushing through the crowd until I’d found Reid, and he was saying, “Miss me?” with that same dimple, and I was saying, “Hardly,” and trying not to smile.
Now he was holding my shoes and smiling, like this whole thing wasn’t horrifically awkward. “I didn’t lose them. I left them right there.”
“Well then, you’re welcome for keeping them safe. There’s a big demand around here for worn-out flip-flops.”
Or maybe this wasn’t awkward for him. Maybe two years was long enough to forget. Maybe he started the process of forgetting as soon as he walked out of his room. Not that I blamed him. He’d had enough going on that day, and in the days that followed. And if I could’ve made myself forget that, I would have.
I took them from his outstretched arm. “They’re not worn out,” I said, careful not to touch his fingers. But I threw them back onto the ground because I was pretty sure they actually were. I’m also pretty sure I was grinning.
Bree caught sight of someone over my shoulder and smiled a “hello, I’m cute and somewhat mysterious” smile that, as it turns out, was not at all mysterious. Must’ve been a boy. A cute one.
“When’s the tour start?” My shoulders tensed because I recognized that voice. I turned around just in time to see Jason, nighttime dorm lurker, skillfully pull out yet another obnoxious grin.
Reid narrowed his eyes and looked around the group gathered in front of him. “What do you want, Jason?” he asked. For the moment, I trusted Reid’s untrusting expression.
“Hanging with my new friend, Mallory.” He rested a hand on my shoulder.
I slunk down and stepped away. “New friend, huh?” Reid asked. But before I had a chance to throw an “I’d rather have my teeth pulled” expression his way, Reid shrugged, and it didn’t seem like the shrug was directed at me.
“This is the quad, obviously,” Reid said as he started walking backward, like he owned this place.
Jason leaned in close as we followed Reid. “I get the feeling you don’t like me.”
I didn’t answer.
“Didn’t mean to scare you last night. I wanted you to feel welcome.”
I grabbed Bree’s arm and said, “This is Bree. She’s new. Welcome her.”
Bree dislodged her arm and rolled her eyes. She was nobody’s second choice. And she sure as hell didn’t want my leftovers.
We walked out the gate with the M over the top and started walking around the perimeter. Reid said, “This is the West Gate—what the town considers our main entrance, but our main entrance is actually farther down this road.” He pointed behind him as he walked backward, and we all strained to see. Apparently there was a gate in our immediate future, but the only thing I could see was the car pulled off the side of the road, engine off. Same color as the surrounding weeds.
Jason was trying to say something again, but I had stopped moving. “Mallory?” Reid asked, shooting a glance from me to Jason.
They were all still moving toward the car. I turned around, picked a spot in the distance, woods on woods on woods.
And, like always, I ran.