Untouchable (Private 3)

I nodded. I wanted to thank him, but I knew I had to wait for this latest wave of misery to pass.

"Thank you, Detective," Ariana said, easing her death grip slightly. "Come on, girls. Let's get inside before we freeze."

She really was becoming more like a mother every day. And I couldn't have been more grateful for it. If it hadn't been for her tugging on my arm, I might have stood there in the cold all day.

"Ladies," the detective said, stepping back.

"Bye," I heard myself say.

Ariana led us over to the door and opened it for us, waiting for Taylor and me to go through first. The warmth of the heated

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cafeteria enveloped me, and I breathed for the first time in what felt like hours.

"There. See?" Ariana said, facing me and Taylor. She slipped out of her light blue cashmere coat and folded it over her arm. "Don't you feel better now? Don't you both feel better?"

I looked at Taylor and she blew out a sigh, smiling slightly. It was the first smile I had seen on her since the Saturday night when we had all been in New York City, partying like the carefree idiots we'd been at the time.

"Yeah. Definitely," Taylor said, unbuttoning her plaid coat.

"Definitely," I echoed.

Now I just had to start believing it.

65

RESIGNED

Our grades arrived.

Grades. I had forgotten the quarter was ending. But there it was, in my mailbox in the hallway outside the school store: a crisp, cream envelope standing at an angle right up against the window. I could see hundreds of others just like it in hundreds of other mailboxes. A few feet away, a group of dizzy freshmen ripped theirs open and compared their contents. They giggled in triumph and groaned in dismay. My fingers itched to work my combination, but my fight-or-flight reflex kicked into high gear. I couldn't deal with this. Not right now. I turned around and walked out

into the cold.

As soon as the door closed behind me I felt lighter somehow, empowered. I'd finally taken control of something, however small. I knew I'd have to look inside that envelope, but for now I was resolved to remain ignorant. And it felt good.

That night, I was determined to actually study. Whatever those grades were, I was going to improve upon them in the second

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semester. This was exactly what I needed to get over Thomas. I would become a brain. An overachiever. I would throw myself into my work and forget about everything else. I walked determinedly into the library with my history book and my notebook and a new pen. I was going to take notes for the next day's quiz, using the advice Taylor had given me at the beginning of the year. All I had to do was copy the first and last sentence of every paragraph. That was where Mr. Barber always got his quiz questions. It was busywork. If I couldn't handle even that, I was in big trouble.

Every person I strode by stopped what they were doing to watch me go, and I felt my shoulder muscles coil, but I kept my focus dead ahead. I was tired of everyone staring at me. Whispering about me. Asking me if I was okay. But how could I blame them? In the past couple of weeks I had become a walking catastrophe. Spacing out in class. Staring at nothing in the library. Sleeping until the very last moment possible because usually those last twenty minutes were the only sleep I got. One morning I was so out of it that I was halfway across the quad before I realized I was wearing two different shoes. At Easton, that was akin to showing up naked.

Well, as of now, that was all going to change. I had to stop waiting for one of those fairy-tale godmother people to come along and hit me with a wand to the head to make me forget everything. It was up to me now.

In the center of the library, two guys from Drake House, one of the less appealing guys' dorms (nicknamed "Dreck House"), sat at the end of a long table. Neither of them looked up when I passed.

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I liked them already. I sat down at the far side and opened my book.

Okay. Here we go. Work time.

"Reed?"

I blinked a couple of dozen times. My eyes stung. Finally they focused on Josh, who was sitting down across from me. I felt like I'd just been shaken awake. I glanced at my watch. Half an hour had passed. My notebook was blank.