“Grace, you have to admit this is pretty weird. Say it. You disappearing from the hospital and Olivia is — and Sam suddenly shows up with you and, well, the freaky hallucinogenic mushrooms are looking more and more realistic, especially when you start talking about wolves. Because next step is for Isabel Culpeper to show up saying that everybody’s going to be abducted by aliens and I have to tell you, I can’t take that in my fragile emotional state. I think that —”
I sighed. “Rachel.”
“Fine,” she said. She threw her bag in the backseat and climbed in after.
As we headed toward Beck’s house, Sam in the driver’s seat, me beside him, Rachel in the backseat, I felt suddenly and inexplicably homesick, somehow frantic with the thought of my lost life. I couldn’t think what I was so desperately missing — surely not my parents, who hadn’t been around enough to be missed — until I realized that the emotion was being triggered by the wildly sweet strawberry scent of Rachel’s shampoo. And that I missed. Afternoons and evenings with Rachel, holed up in her room or taking over my parents’ kitchen or following Olivia on one of her photography treks. I wasn’t homesick, not really, because that required a home. I was personsick. Lifesick.
I turned to the backseat and stretched out my hand to Rachel, my fingers not quite long enough to reach her. She didn’t say anything, just took my hand and clutched it tightly. We rode like that for the rest of the trip, me half-twisted and her leaning forward a little, our hands resting on the back of my seat. Sam didn’t say anything, either, except for Oh, sorry when he shifted gears too soon and the car shuddered a bit.
Later, when we got back to the house, I told her everything, the whole story, from the moment the wolves dragged me from the swing to the day I’d almost died in my own blood. And everything in between. Sam looked more nervous than I’d ever seen him, but I wasn’t worried. From the moment that I held Rachel’s hand in the car, I’d known that in this strange new life, Rachel was one of the things I was going to get to keep.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
• ISABEL •
I was against felonies when a misdemeanor would do. Using the school’s lab would have constituted breaking and entering. Using one of the spare keys for my mother’s office was merely unlawful entry. It was just common sense. I’d parked my SUV in the grocery store parking lot across the road so that anyone driving by the clinic would see nothing out of the ordinary. I would have made an excellent criminal. Maybe I still would. I was young yet and it was possible med school wouldn’t work out.
“Do not break anything,” I told Cole as I gestured for him to go in before me. Possibly a futile plea, where Cole St. Clair was involved.
Cole stalked down the hallway, eyeing the posters on the walls. The low-income clinic was a part-time project for my mother, who also put in time with the local hospital. When my mother had first opened the clinic, the walls had been decorated with art that she didn’t have room for in the house or had gotten tired of. She wanted the clinic to seem homelike, she had said when we first came to Mercy Falls. After Jack had died, she’d given away a lot of art from home, and once she got over that, she’d taken the pieces from the clinic walls to replace them. Now the clinic was generally decorated with a decor I liked to call late pharmaceutical period.
“All the way at the end, to the right,” I said. “Not that. That’s the bathroom.”
The afternoon light was fading as I locked the door behind me, but it didn’t matter. When I turned on the buzzing fluorescent lights overhead, it became clinic time, where all times are the same. I’d always told Mom that if she really wanted the clinic to feel “homelike,” real lightbulbs would go a long way toward making it feel like a house instead of a Wal-Mart.
Cole had already disappeared into my mother’s tiny lab room, and I slowly trailed after. I’d cut class to take the package to Cole, but I hadn’t slept in — I’d been up and running. Then I’d helped Cole set