Page 10

The Portrait Gallery? Friends? I mean, I know she’s better with people than I am. Or, at least, she doesn’t hate herself or want to scream after almost every conversation, not like I do. But friends?

In the corner of my eye, something moves.

My heart kicks up into my throat.

Alyssa and I were the only people in the bathroom. Or we were supposed to be. Was there someone else in here the whole time? Was someone listening?

In the last bathroom stall in the row, a shadow. The toe of a black uniform shoe.

And the unlocked door shifts ever so slightly, like they know they’ve been caught.

Shit. They heard everything: My voice cracking. The pity in Alyssa’s voice that creeps in every time she tries to talk me down. Nausea hits my stomach like a brick.

None of that can leave this room.

I grab the stall door—”Wait,” a girl’s voice says inside, “wait“—and smash it into whoever the fuck is hiding back there.

I think violence comes easily to you, Dr. Lý said during one of our first sessions together—after I put William Campbell in the hospital, after I pointed the finger and wrecked Dr. Reich’s practice—because you’ve found it’s often the only form of communication people respond honestly to.

The bathroom stall door connects. A dull meaty sound cuts off whatever word was going to come out of the girl’s mouth and replaces it with a grunt.

The door rebounds and I catch it to shove myself inside. The girl’s hair is in her face as she reels, nearly tripping over the toilet, trying to protect the delicate cartilage of her nose.

“Wait,” she slurs, voice muffled by her hands, “wait wait wait—”

How much of that did she hear? Has she been following me?

Adrenaline narrows everything to a single blurry point, and I snatch the first part of her I can find: a fistful of that frizzy platinum-bleached hair.

And she bashes me into the cinder block wall.

My temple takes the brunt of the hit and my sight explodes into white, gasping pain. My lungs lock. I can’t focus. Just flounder in a desperate attempt to keep myself upright.

The stall latch screeches shut. No. No, no, she can’t do that, I don’t like locked doors. I try to grab for it—wherever it is, behind me, reeling for it as my vision clears—but she slams all her body weight against mine. Traps me cheek-first against the wall.

She’s whispering. Begging. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I—”

I grab for her face, desperately groping behind me, and my finger hooks through a hoop earring.

I pull.

She screams. Drops me. I lurch away, bang against the stall divider, stumble against the toilet and hit the floor. The earring, still fastened, falls off my finger like a too-loose wedding band and clatters against the fancy tile. The girl keens wildly.

I didn’t only take out the earring. I gouged the shit out of her jaw. And her neck. Long wounds slice open the skin in straight lines.

“You motherfucker—”

I lunge for the stall door, but she catches me. Throws herself in front of the lock. Her knee barely misses my face.

Snkt.

There’s a switchblade in her hand, and the sharp, shiny point hovers inches from my face.

We both freeze. Breathing hard.

She whimpers, “Wait, just, I just want to talk—fuck, my ear.”

Felicity Keating—the new kid in my first-block biology class, the midsemester transfer, a girl I haven’t paid an ounce of attention to—stands above me. Red streaming down her face and neck, seeping between her fingers.