I’m sleeping when Lark rattles the window and lets herself in. Moonlight fills my room with silvery light. She wears the flowing white dress she was buried in. She could be a sylph in a ballet, except for the bloodstains.
“So . . . , ” she says. “They think you’re crazy.”
I rub my eyes and yawn. “Well, I am acting rather oddly.”
“How?”
“Talking to a dead girl. Not sleeping. Not going to school.”
Lark rolls her eyes. “School!” she says with disgust. “I worried way too much about school.”
She’s restless. She taps her foot angrily.
“I won’t tell them how I have to see the cut,” I say.
“If you do, they’ll try to talk you out of it.”
“I know.”
She flops in my armchair and props up her head with a fist.
“I hate it out there,” she says.
“I know,” I say.
“No, you don’t. Believe me. You don’t.”
Her eyes fill with tears, the kind of tears you get when you’re angry and sad. She rocks back and forth, softly crying. Then she shakes herself out of it and jumps up to move. She practices one of her floor routines, the one with the back flips that won her a medal. She’s got that twitchy energy back. She’s alive again, thinking with her body, the way dancers and athletes do. Even though her movements are small and contained, you can tell how good she was. She uses her hands for the big tricks, like the round off to a twisting back flip. She marks the big leaps, fitting them in between the furniture and the walls.
I watch Lark remember how she used to cartwheel and flip. She tosses her head and laughs to herself. She arches her back and finishes, her hands high above her head. It’s scary to know a girl as fast and strong as Lark can get taken away and killed.