Rosales before everyone was seated and ready to go. She would know what to do.
Alex wound a bunch of toilet paper around her hand and tucked the makeshift pad into her ruined underwear, then pulled up her shorts and shoved out of the stall.
She yelped. A man was standing there, his face a mottled mess of bruises. She was relieved when she realized he was dead. A dead man in the girls’ bathroom was a lot less scary than a living one. She balled her fists and pushed through him. She hated going through them. Sometimes she got flashes of memory, but this time she just felt a blast of cold. She hurried to the sinks and quickly washed her hands. Alex could sense he was still there, but she refused to meet his gaze in the mirror.
She felt something brush the small of her back.
In the next second her face was jammed up against the mirror. Something shoved her hips against the porcelain ledge of the sink. She felt cold fingers tugging on the waistband of her shorts.
Alex screamed, she kicked out, struck solid flesh and bone, felt the grip on her shorts loosen. She tried to shove back from the sink, glimpsed her face in the mirror, a blue barrette sliding from her hair, saw the man—the thing—that had hold of her. You can’t do that, she thought. You can’t touch me. It wasn’t possible. It wasn’t allowed. None of the Quiet Ones could touch her.
Then she was facedown on the concrete floor. She felt her hips jerked backward, her panties yanked down, something nudging against her, pushing into her. She saw a butterfly lying in a puddle beneath the sink, one wing flapping listlessly as if it were waving to her. She screamed and screamed.
That was how Meagan and Ms. Rosales found her, on the bathroom floor, shorts crumpled around her ankles, panties at her knees, blood smeared over her thighs and a lump of blood-soaked toilet paper wadded between her legs, as she sobbed and thrashed, hips humped up and shuddering. Alone.
Ms. Rosales was beside her, saying, “Alex! Sweetheart!” and the thing that had been trying to get inside her was gone. She never knew why he stopped, why he fled, but she’d clung to Ms. Rosales, warm and alive and smelling of lavender soap.
Ms. Rosales sent Meagan out of the bathroom. She dried Alex’s tears and helped her clean up. She had a tampon in her purse and told Alex how to put it in. Alex followed her instructions, still shaking and crying. She didn’t want to touch down there. She didn’t want to think about him trying to push in. Ms. Rosales sat beside her on the bus, gave her a juice box. Alex listened to the sounds of the other kids laughing and singing, but she was afraid to turn around. She was afraid to look at Meagan.
On that long bus ride back to school, in the long wait at the nurse’s office, all she had wanted was her mother, to be wrapped up in her arms and taken home, to be safe in their apartment, bundled in blankets on the couch, watching cartoons. By the time her mother arrived and finished her whispered conversation with the principal and the school counselor and Ms. Rosales, the halls had cleared and the school was empty. As Mira led her out to the parking lot through the echoing quiet, Alex wished she were still small enough to be carried.
When they got home, Alex showered as quickly as possible. She felt too vulnerable, too naked. What if he came back? What if something else came for her? What was to stop him, to stop any of them, from finding her? She’d seen them walk through walls. Where could she ever be safe again?
She left the shower running and slipped into the kitchen to burrow through their junk drawer. She could hear her mother murmuring on the phone in her bedroom.
“They think she may have been molested,” Mira said. She was crying. “That she’s acting out now because of it … I don’t know. I don’t know. There was that swim coach at the Y. He always seemed a little off and Alex didn’t like going to the pool. Maybe something happened?”
Alex had hated the pool because there was a Quiet kid with the left side of his skull caved in who liked to hang around the rusted podium where the diving board had once been.
She rooted