The Beginning of After - By Jennifer Castle Page 0,54

nodded. Grateful, like he’d been hoping for this from the beginning.

“Can you go in and tell Eve? She has to hear it from you.”

He nodded again, then headed into the building. Which left me standing by myself, not sure what to do next.

Since David was going to disappear without a trace, maybe I should beat him to the punch.

I checked my cell phone and saw that I didn’t officially have to be at work for another half hour. It would be just enough time for me to drive home and change clothes before coming back, at which point I knew David would be already on the road.

And we would not have said good-bye, just like he’d wanted.

Chapter Seventeen

The night before school started, I laid out my first-day outfit—jeans and an embroidered blue T-shirt—and Nana came in to see it.

“You’ll look very pretty,” she said, rubbing cream into her hands. This was a bedtime ritual for her, the spreading of lotion on all limbs and digits, and especially on the webby skin between her fingers. She had this idea that your skin got dried out while you slept, making you look older faster.

“I just want to seem, you know, okay.”

“You will. Because you are.”

Earlier that day, I’d had a session with Suzie.

“How do you feel about seeing everyone again?” she’d asked. “Especially the ones who were there that night, after the prom?”

I hadn’t been able to answer her then, so she helped me create a “comfort zone” that I could go to in my head if I needed it at school. (I settled on the space at home, between the white couch and the window, wrapped tightly in a quilt from my bed.)

After Nana disappeared into her room, I opened my journal, waiting for something to kick in. The window was open and a breeze swam in, almost chilly enough to raise the hairs on my arm. Fall was starting, right on cue. The starting part of that made me uneasy.

As a family, we got collectively bummed out by the end of summer. Toby and I would lie around and watch a lot of television, relishing the feeling of not having any homework we should be doing. My dad would work late to avoid the quiet sadness in the house, and my mother would spend extra hours at the studio to catch up on wedding season portraits.

I began forming words with my pen, but they felt clunky and stupid:

I’m going back to school tomorrow. They will look and stare and whisper again.

I stopped writing and started drawing. Big round eyes, sharp and jagged eyes, eyes narrowed to mysterious, sneaky slits. Soon, I was fast asleep, the notebook balancing on my chest, the cats on either side of my legs. Dreams came fast and short, flickers of scenes that ran into one another like a silent movie.

When Megan’s car reached the bottom of the school’s driveway, she turned to me and smiled. “Here we are at last,” she said, and I couldn’t figure out why she was so excited to be done with a three-minute drive. But now she was turning left into the senior parking lot, and I got it. What she meant was, At last, we’re seniors! We’re going to rule the school!

Meg was no longer driving her mom’s minivan. Her sister, Mary, had left for NYU the week before, and had bequeathed to Meg her very tiny but very cute red Toyota. She was so amped about it that you’d think it was a Mustang convertible.

We had timed our arrival to be early, but not too early. Other seniors were already there, leaning against their cars in groups, chatting. Meg drove over to them and pulled into the first open space. All heads turned, scanning the front seats to register first Meg, then me.

“Ready whenever you are,” she said, pulling up the parking brake until it made a grurt noise. I gathered my stuff and got out quickly, wanting to appear ready, even eager. Still, it was an effort for me to raise my head from the pavement to see who was there.

Andie Stokes and Hannah Lindstrom were coming toward me. Andie wrapped me in a hug.

“Hey,” she said.

Hannah did, too. Now, suddenly, Caitlin Fish. They were practically lining up.

I was getting an air kiss from Lily Janek when I noticed three guys hanging out across the parking lot, hands in their pockets. One of them was Joe. He looked up at exactly the wrong moment and our eyes