“Don’t pretend like that’s not how you feel. I’ve heard you say as much. You wanted me gone from the beginning. That’s fine. Whatever. Go with Sarah and Rafael and then you won’t have to deal with me and my stupid ideas.”
He puts a hand on my arm but I jerk it away, then leave the room. I lock my bedroom door behind me, so frustrated I don’t know what to do with myself. Sarah hates me. Cole hates me. Rafael obviously likes me but I can’t be with him, and I don’t know if I’d want to even if I could. Not if it meant we’d be more than flirty colleagues.
An hour later there’s a timid knock.
“What?”
“Can we come in?” Adam asks.
I unlock the door, but stand in the doorway with my arms crossed. “Well?”
“We have presents,” Adam says with a smile in his voice.
“Tea isn’t a present.” Though it does smell nice.
“Not just tea. We also have a yoga mat, and ginkgo biloba, and a CD called Soothing White Noise.”
“That was his idea,” Cole says. “And you’re going for long walks. And getting to bed at a decent hour.”
“Look, when I said you were babysitting me, I didn’t mean you should actually start. You know my parents are dead, right? Even when they were alive, they paid really crap rates for babysitters.”
“You want more visions?” Cole asks. “We’re going to help your brain, not damage it. Now drink your tea and put on your shoes. Three miles walking a day, minimum.”
I take the tea and sip at it, mumbling, “Taking drugs was a lot simpler.”
Only Adam laughs.
“You’re breathing wrong,” Adam says.
“Seriously? You’re critiquing my breathing?”
“No! I mean, the lady on the video, she’s doing it with her stomach, not her shoulders.”
I roll my eyes, but try to do what he says. The last few days have yielded no visions, but I’ll admit I have more energy. Cole’s been avoiding me, sending Adam on all the walks. Adam tries to talk about Fia. It’s not as “centering” as I think Cole thinks it ought to be.
I take a deep breath, then let it out, trying to clear my mind, to let all the stress and worry drain out of the hollow spaces between my bones. Fill the space with nothing, instead.
And then there’s a girl.
She’s tall and thin, baggy clothes covering every inch of skin, the hood of her gray sweatshirt pulled up over her head, with a few strands of brown hair escaping. She leans against a wall, eyes down, hands shoved in her pockets, as people—teenagers? in school? they have backpacks, but unlike her they’re all in shorts and short sleeves—swirl around her. A broadcast crackles through the hall. “Good morning, Hoover High Terriers! Don’t forget to buy your raffle tickets. Last day!”
As the crowd thins, a hand comes down on her shoulder and she jerks away as though burned. “Get to class, Sadie,” a woman says, not unkindly.
“Yeah,” the girl, Sadie, mutters. She walks away, shoulders hunched, and then—
A tired woman, frayed around the edges, looks over a stack of papers. “It’s been hard,” she says. “What with the criminal case against my husband—” She looks up, alarmed. “He’s innocent. We have no idea how he got implicated in this embezzlement scheme.”
James nods, all false sympathy.
“The lawyer fees are bleeding us dry. They’ve foreclosed on the house. When the school offered before, we thought it was best to keep her close to us. We tried to help her. I thought we could handle it, but she’s failing out. I don’t know what else to do. With everything going on, I can’t—we can’t—”
The front door opens and Sadie walks in, a heavy backpack dragging her shoulders down. She takes in the strangers with hooded eyes, then walks along the wall straight past everyone and out of the room.
Her mother’s shoulders shake and an arm comes around them. Eden offers her a tissue, her own eyes tearing up. She looks up at James and glares accusingly. He doesn’t react. Seeing her there breaks my heart a little. Because she doesn’t know—she can’t know that I’m alive. She has to think they let Fia kill me.
And she’s still helping them. Oh, Eden.
James continues. “This is the best thing for her, Mrs. Kavadellis. We have the resources to help her. Sadie is going to have a new life.”