Chapter Eighteen
You might think being the target of an international terrorist organization, an amnesiac, and a girl with hair dyed in the middle of the night by Macey McHenry would make people stare at you. Well, try walking into the Grand Hall with seriously puffy eyes while holding hands. With a boy.
“Well, how are you this morning?” Tina Walters said, and I knew she had no idea what had happened on our field trip, or who had come to our door before the sun had risen. Or why.
I hoped they would never know why.
“Scoot,” Zach told her, and Tina smiled, sliding down to make room for the two of us on the bench.
He reached for the bacon in the center of the table, handed the plate to me.
“No thank you,” I said. “I’m not hungry.”
“I thought you wanted waffles,” Bex said, eyeing me.
“I—”
“Here.” Zach dropped a waffle onto my plate and reached for the butter.
“No, I’m really not—”
“You’re too skinny,” said Liz, a girl who I swear once bought a pair of pants that were a size double zero and had to have them taken in.
“It’s true,” Macey added. “Some girls look better with some fullness in their face.”
So I buttered my waffle and took a piece of bacon from the plate.
Bex smiled at me from across the table. “The hair looks good.” She turned to Macey. “Good call on the trim.”
“Yeah,” Macey said, eyeing her handiwork. “It’s a patch job, but it’s better.”
Everything looked normal. Everything sounded normal. But I still had cobwebs on my sweater and dust on my skirt, and the words I’d heard were still there, rattling around inside my head so loudly I thought that I might scream.
Zach must have sensed it, because he moved his hand to the small of my back and rested it there.
“Did you see your mom?” Bex reached for the carafe and poured herself a cup of hot tea as if nothing were wrong; but all I could think about was what I’d heard her say on my first night back: They’re pretending.
I didn’t say what I was thinking—that I was pretending too.
“Um…” I mumbled, stumbling over the answer. “She was busy.”
Everyone nodded. No one thought to ask, Busy with what?
So I ate my waffle and drank my juice and didn’t say a word about what Zach and I had overheard in my mother’s office.
“I’m stuffed,” I said ten minutes later, and nobody argued as I stood and started for the door.
With my friends and Zach around me, it might have been easy to pretend that we were typical students starting a typical day. But then Liz dropped her backpack.
Trust me when I say it was a sight I’d totally seen before. The floor was littered with textbooks and note cards, piles of paper and an extensive collection of highlighters that Liz herself had patented. But then I looked past the mess to the things I totally didn’t expect—bills and magazines, a whole bunch of thin circulars boasting pizza prices and going-out-of-business sales.
“What’s that?” Macey asked, picking up a flyer about an upcoming local election.
“Mail,” Liz said. Bex raised her eyebrows, and Liz lowered her voice. “I got it from the cabin,” she whispered. “I thought I’d go read it to him.”
She didn’t use Mr. Solomon’s name—she didn’t dare there, in the middle of the Grand Hall. But we all knew who she meant. When a pair of eighth graders stopped and tried to help us pick everything up, Macey said, “We’ve got it,” in a There’s nothing to see here tone, and the girls walked on.
“Oh, I’m sure he’s very interested in”—Bex reached for a flyer—“the prices of fertilizer at the local feed store.”