School is every bit the nightmare I expected it to be. Pre-accident, my day usually went like this: Up at 5:00 a.m. to jog. Shower. Eat breakfast. School by 7:00 a.m. Look over homework, aka help Shannon with her homework, before first hour. Three lecture classes where no one paid me much attention. Lunch with Shannon and Dallas and some of his friends. Poetry class, technology lab, and last period gym. On a normal day, I probably spoke to fifteen people max.
Today I speak to almost fifteen people before I even make it to first period. The first two are Krissi and Mandy Sanchez, identical twins who play on our soccer team. My mom drops me off at school and Krissi nearly bumps into me as I’m limping my way up the front steps. Her eyes widen when she recognizes me.
“Oh my God, Genevieve. It’s so good to see you,” she says.
“You look great,” Mandy adds. “I like your shirt.”
I force a smile. I’ve gotten surprisingly good at that in the past few days. “Thanks.” My shirt is just a striped T-shirt from a local department store, but I’m sure Mandy just wanted to say something nice and couldn’t find anything else to compliment.
“I’m sorry about Dal—” she continues, cutting off when her sister elbows her in the ribs.
“We’re just happy to see you back at school so soon.” Krissi smiles brightly.
“Thanks,” I say again. The girls are both wearing their soccer jerseys. I gesture at their outfits. “Do you have a game tonight?”
“District playoffs,” they say in unison. They giggle.
“Awesome. I hope you win.” I fidget with one end of the scarf tied around my head, wondering if it looks weird.
We all turn and head into the school lobby together. Halfway to the main hallway, Krissi and Mandy get waylaid by a couple of senior boys and I continue toward my locker by myself.
Three girls I’ve never seen before suddenly appear in my peripheral vision. They have their heads together whispering as I slowly make my way down the corridor.
The tallest of the three flounces up to me. She’s almost as tall as my mom, but thin and coltish, with knobby knees and long limbs. A freshman, probably. “Genevieve. I just wanted to say I am so sorry. We all are.” Her minions quickly nod like a couple of bobblehead dolls. Tall Girl lowers her voice. “We hope the guy who killed Dallas goes to jail forever.”
The guy who killed Dallas. He doesn’t even have a name to these girls. He’s probably not even human. I wish I didn’t know his name either. I wish he wasn’t human to me. I think back to the three pictures from the online article, Dallas and I looking so fresh-faced and full of hope, Brad Freeman looking like a criminal. I wonder if that picture is who he really is. I wonder if his numbness has worn off too, if he’s hurting even worse than I am, if he’ll ever be able to forgive himself.
The second-tallest girl shoos curious onlookers out of the way while the leftover member of the trio timidly offers to carry my backpack.
“I’m okay,” I say, my fake smile materializing out of nowhere. “But I’ve got to get to my locker. See you later.” Or not.
I head down the corridor as fast as I can manage, leaving the freshmen behind, but accepting two more messages of sympathy—one from a teacher I had in tenth grade and another from our senior class president, a girl who I’ve shared at least six classes with during the past four years but only spoken to once or twice.
When I turn the corner and head down the main hallway, I’m relieved to see the one person I actually want to talk to rooting through our locker. Shannon. She’s wearing the cutest skinny jeans and tunic outfit and has her hair done up into three buns down the back of her head, what she likes to call her superhero hairdo.
“Oh my God, ohmygod, yay!” Shannon literally jumps up and down when she sees me approaching. “Why didn’t you tell me you were coming back today?”
“Surprise.” I grin.
Shannon wraps me in a tight hug. “I can’t believe you’re here! I’m so sorry I haven’t been by the house the past couple days, but my parents dragged me to Carlyle Lake this weekend and we didn’t get home until nine last night. I hate coming over late because I always feel like I’m pissing off your mom.”
“You and me both,” I say, wincing a little in her embrace. “Easy, I’ve still got a lot of cuts and bruises.”
“You poor thing.” Shannon steps back and the fluorescent lights reflect off her lip gloss, nearly blinding me. “I can’t believe you came back so soon.”
“Well, you know my mom. Pretty sure I’d be back here by now even if I broke every bone in my body.”
“Truth. Can you imagine sitting through school in, like, a full body cast? A janitor would have to roll you from class to class on one of those dollies.”
“That sounds almost as much fun as a coma.”
Shannon laughs, and for a few brief seconds life feels like it did before the accident, just me and my best friend getting ready to do her homework and then head off to first hour.
And then someone taps me on the shoulder. I spin around. It’s another girl I don’t know. Her face is stained with tears and she’s wearing a “Students Against Drunk Driving” T-shirt. A tiny bouquet of daisies is clutched in one hand.
She thrusts the flowers at me. “I am so sorry,” she says. “My boyfriend also died in a drunk driving accident.”
“Thank you.” I accept the flowers. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
“You’re welcome.” Tears start to leak from her eyes, but before I can say anything else, she turns and skitters down the hallway.
Shannon takes the flowers out of my hands and reads the card. “From one of Dallas’s biggest fans and someone who knows what you’re going through. May our hearts heal together. #NeverForget Sincerely, Cassandra 636-555-8989.”
I shake my head. “I can’t handle all these people.”
“They mean well.” Shannon hands the bouquet of daisies to me and I set them at the bottom of my locker.
“She did, maybe,” I say. “But my hospital room was full of gifts from strangers, and random people have been emailing me and asking me sketchy Dallas-related stuff.”
“Forget email. Have you seen your Twitter lately?” Shannon’s eyes widen beneath her expertly applied cat-eye eyeliner.
“No. I haven’t even downloaded the app onto my new phone. Why?”
“You have like eight thousand followers.”
“What?” I dig my phone out of my purse and open up Twitter in a browser window. Sure enough, I have 8,231 followers and more than two thousand new interactions. “This is insane.” I skim the most recent tweets that have tagged me:
Shelly Webster @ericdismylove • 6m
@GenevieveLGrace OMG. I heard that our #PrayForGenevieve campaign worked and you’re back at school! Is it true??
Justine @Kadet4Ever • 11m
@GenevieveLGrace I can’t wait until you get your memory back so you can testify against #BradFreeman. He’s a #drunkdriver and a #murderer.
Patrick S @pxs1228 • 14m
So @GenevieveLGrace is doing okay, but #BradFreeman is still a #liar and a #murderer who should pay for his crimes. #HumanWaste
Meera Malik @vivalameera • 15m
@GenevieveLGrace @RealTyrellJames I heard there was an eyewitness to the actual accident. Is that true?
Izzy Rocks @izrockin • 17m
@GenevieveLGrace Been listening to Younity all day. Might go get some #JusticeForDallas myself. #BradTheMurderer
The last tweet has an animated GIF of an automatic weapon spraying bullets into the air. Shannon pulls out her phone and responds to it. Another tweet appears in my feed:
Shannon Tate @shanrocks900 • 6s
@izrockin @GenevieveLGrace Ha! I like the way you think! #JusticeForDallas #BradTheMurderer
I close the browser window and stuff my phone back into my purse. “Don’t do that, okay?”
“Do what?” Shannon flips to the camera function on her phone and checks her makeup. She rubs at a smudge of eyeliner with the tip of her pinky.
“Feed the trolls.”
The smile fades from Shannon’s face. “I was just showing my support for you and Dallas.”
“I know,” I say. “But there’s nothing funny about death threats. And killing someone in a car accident doesn’t make you a murderer.”
“You’re right,” Shannon says. “But that Freeman guy is old. He probably doesn’t even have a Twitter.”
“He can still read it, you know.” I give her a pointed look.
“I’m sorry, Gen. I’ll delete it. Twitter will probably delete the original tweet too.” Shannon drops her voice. “But why are you defending Brad Freeman?”
“I don’t know,” I say honestly. “Some of the stuff people are saying, especially online, is really uncalled for. I guess I know what it’s like to feel guilty that Dallas died and I didn’t.”
“But Freeman deserves to feel guilty,” Shannon says.
“Yeah, but still. No one’s asinine tweets are going to bring back Dallas.” My voice gets louder with each sentence. “I just wish everyone would stop talking about it.”
Shannon glances around. The girls at the next locker are staring at me. One of them is wearing a “Try This at Home” T-shirt.
“Sorry,” I mutter. I lower my voice as I turn back to Shannon. “I know everyone misses him. I know they feel bad. But what am I supposed to say to all these people? Thank you? Me too? I’m sorry I didn’t die instead of him?”
“Genevieve.” Shannon’s face goes pale. She reaches for my hand. “No one thinks you should’ve died instead of Dallas.”
“Forget it.” I lower myself to the tile floor of the hallway, wincing as I extend my injured leg out in front of me. “So you need my Calc homework or what?”
“You’re caught up on your homework?” Shannon asks incredulously.
“It gave me something to do when I wasn’t reliving every moment of that night over and over trying to remember what happened.”
“You seriously don’t remember?”
“Nope. The doctors say I probably will eventually, but right now it’s mostly a blank.” I pull my Calculus textbook out of my backpack. “Fortunately for you, I still remember Pappus’s Theorem.”
“Well, in that case, let’s compare answers.” Shannon grabs her own book from the locker and sits next to me, stretching her long legs out in front of her.
“Wait wait wait. You did your Calc homework?”
“You’ve been out of class for two weeks, Gen. I only had two options—learn to do my own work or find a replacement for you. Do you know how hard it is to find someone both smart enough to get A’s in Calc and cool enough that I actually want to spend time with them?”
“Yeah,” I say. “That’s probably why I do my own work too.” Well, that and the fact that my mom would probably disown me if she caught me cheating.
We quickly go through our assignment, stopping to recheck and correct a couple of problems where we ended up with different answers. “I can’t believe we’re going to be out of here in two weeks,” Shannon says. “Are you still going to work in your mom’s lab?”
“I think so. Mom is a big fan of faking it till you make it. She won’t want me to change my plans because of . . . everything.”
“You know I’m here if you ever need to talk, right?”
I nod. “Right now I just can’t.” Back in the hospital I might have opened up to Shannon, but I’ve spent so many days thinking about the accident that for me there’s nothing left to say. All I really want is to know what happened, and why. Shannon can’t help me with either of those things.
“Okay. God, I’m so glad you’re back. The last couple weeks have been hell.” Shannon adjusts the lowest of her three buns, shaking out the hair and reworking it back into a tight circle. “Oh, random, but why are you wearing a scarf on your head?”
“Good question. It covers the ginormous bald stripe and scary staples I am currently rocking. I thought maybe I could bring back the nineties.”
Shannon makes a face. “More like the seventies. And probably not.” She cocks her head to the side and studies me. “Would a headband cover it? A thicker one, like Alison in Orphan Black?”
Shannon is a self-taught hairstyle expert who vlogs about style and hair design. She also manages to stay current on a wide variety of TV shows. “Is Alison the soccer mom?” I ask. “Maybe. But will that make me look thirty-five?”
“Possibly, but you won’t look like a time traveler. Let me think on it.” Shannon hops to her feet and then bends down to help me back up. She slams her locker and gives me another quick hug. “See you at lunch.”
Her buns remain firmly in place, like the spikes down the back of a stegosaurus, as she heads for her first class. A dull ache blooms in the pit of my stomach. I wish I could follow her. Sighing, I grab my own books and head for AP Physics.
And then the rest of the day goes downhill like an out-of-control skier.
Exhibit A: In first period, my teacher pauses for a moment right in the middle of taking attendance to welcome me back. “My deepest condolences, Miss Grace,” she says. “Please know that if you need to cry or otherwise express yourself, that is completely acceptable and my classroom is a safe space free from judgment.”
“Thank you. I’ll try my hardest to refrain from . . . emotional outbursts.” Everyone turns to look at me, and I’m half expecting the class to rise into a standing ovation or burst into spontaneous applause. Instead, the girl in the front row who sometimes gets misty-eyed during “The Star-Spangled Banner” sniffles into a Kleenex and most of the boys slouch awkwardly or stare right through me.
Exhibit B: On the way to second-period Calculus, I pass at least three different kids playing “Younity” on their phones. One of them is crying, I mean all-out bawling, as if Dallas were her brother or best friend or something. When I see all those tears, I can’t help but think about what Dallas would say if he were here. “I didn’t realize she and I were so close,” Ghost-Dallas murmurs in my ear. “What’s her name again?”
“No idea,” I say.
The janitor happens to be passing by with a mop and bucket and gives me a strange look.
Nothing to see here, I think. Just a crazy girl talking to a dead boy.
Exhibit C: Ciara Clark, the girl who emailed me about a feature post on her KadetKorps fan site, corners me the second I walk into third hour. “Genevieve,” she squeals, her dark curls bouncing as she practically skips over to my desk. She wraps an arm around my shoulder like we’re suddenly best friends. “OMG. I am so sorry for your loss. Well, the whole world’s loss, really.” Before I can even answer, she’s got her phone out, snapping a picture of the two of us.
“What are you doing?” I back away from her.
“My readers know that I go to school with you. I have to give them something. You wouldn’t be willing to share Dallas’s last words, would you? It’d be a great exclusive for SCCKadetKorps-dot-com.”
“No,” I say. “I still don’t remember that night and I don’t want to be on your website, Ciara.”
“Oh, come on,” she wheedles. “You look great. You know, considering. You can even make up some last words if you want. I’d go with something super-romantic, like—”
Luckily, the bell rings and Ciara is forced to shuffle off to her seat on the other side of the room before she can finish her thought. But as my World History teacher starts taking attendance, I keep thinking about how messed up it is that I don’t know Dallas’s last words. Did I even get a chance to say good-bye? The pressure of not knowing wraps itself around me, crushing down on my chest. I spend the entire lecture going through that night again. Why can’t I remember?
Just when I thought the day couldn’t possibly get any worse, my teacher runs out of slides about the Vikings and tells us to spend the last fifteen minutes of class reading the next chapter in the textbook. I stare at the print, but the words are just a blur of ink.
The kid sitting next to me, a dark-haired guy named Jake who gets a lot of in-school suspensions, passes me a note. I don’t want to read it but he’s staring at me like I’m stupid, so I unfold the page with a sigh.
Sorry about Dallas. You got any notes or T-shirts or stuff of his you want to get rid of? There’s a huge demand for his stuff on eBay. I can do the posting and selling and split the profits 50/50. Oh, and if you have any pictures of the accident or the smashed-up cars, that would also be an epic moneymaker.
My throat starts to close up. Is this guy seriously asking me to help him profit from Dallas’s death? I crumple up the note and shove it in my pocket. Without looking at Jake, I slide out of my chair and limp up to the teacher’s desk. “Can I get a bathroom pass?” I ask. “I meant to go between classes, but it takes me forever to go up and down the stairs and I ran out of time.”
“Of course, Genevieve,” my teacher says soothingly. He starts to write my name on a slip of paper. “Did you want one of the other girls in the class to go with you?”
“Um, no. I think I can pee by myself, but I’m going to bring my books so I can go straight to lunch if that’s all right.” I snatch the pass from his hand without waiting for an answer. Out in the hallway, I take in a deep breath of air. The crushing feeling dissipates slightly. I pass right by the bathroom and back to my locker. Someone has decorated the outside of it with sympathy cards and pictures of Dallas they printed out online. Seriously? In what world do people think calling attention to the fact my boyfriend is dead every five seconds could possibly be helpful? Tears well in my eyes as I pull down the pictures. “Everyone loved you,” I whisper. “It should’ve been me.”
I shove my books into my bag and slam my locker. “I tried, Mom,” I mutter under my breath. Then I head for home.