Instead of going to our next class, we had to stay while Mr. Hillenbrand tried to figure out what was going on. Mrs. Troutt, he told us, was going to the hospital. He wanted to know how she had hurt herself.
Everyone told versions of the same story: she had been supervising the use of the Bunsen burner, and then she had screamed and run out of the room. Some of the students added the details about how she had treated me. Most, though, left that part out. They might hate Mrs. Troutt, but they didn’t like me too much either.
Mr. Hillenbrand finally dismissed us. “I don’t know what went wrong,” he said to me, “but it can’t be your fault. Not if she was right there, talking you through it the whole time.” He shook his head. “God, you’d think she would know what she was doing.”
I got to English with only a few minutes left in that period. Mr. Spencer waved me to my seat without looking at my pass. In fact, he seemed determined to ignore me. I raised my hand. I stared at him. I moved stuff around on my desk just to make noise. But Mr. Spencer stayed on the far side of the room, and as soon as the bell rang, he shot out into the hall. I guessed he was pretty determined not to talk to me about his ability—or about anything else.
Finally, after guitar, the school day was over. I met Austin at the Charger.
“You had a day, I heard.”
I shrugged. “I don’t have good luck with teachers.”
“She ripped the skin off her palms?”
I nodded.
“Just to get away from you?”
“What? God, no. She—”
But Austin was already laughing. “That’s what everybody’s saying.”
“Austin, it was River.”
That wiped the laughter from the air. “What?”
“The ghost. The one I’ve been seeing at school. The one that told me about Belshazzar’s Feast. It’s River. And today, he did something—I don’t know what—and turned Mrs. Troutt’s power against her.”
Slumping against the Charger’s trunk with that effortless, casual grace that drove me crazy, Austin thought about this for a minute. “River?”
“Sorry, I know you don’t want to talk about him, but I had to tell—”
“No, I’m—I’m kind of glad. Is that weird? It’s a relief.” He pushed both hands through his hair and locked them behind his head. “I’ve been thinking about what you said on Sunday. I don’t regret what I did. In fact, I’d do it again. But knowing he’s still here, it helps.”
“I don’t think that’s strange at all. I think the fact that you’ve taken all of this as well as you have is pretty much the most amazing thing about you.”
“The most amazing?” He arched an eyebrow and smirked.
“Well.” I could feel the heat of that smirk rippling through my chest. “Pretty close.”
“Is River . . . angry? From what you told me about him, he wasn’t very stable when he was alive.”
“I have no idea. I can’t believe it’s him. He’s different from the other ghosts I’ve seen. They’ve been more like echoes, or maybe a better word would be reflections. They’re real, but only up to a certain point. River, though . . . River feels real.”
“Why do you think he’s different?”
“Maybe because of his ability. But that’s just a guess—I have no idea how this works. He’s been trying to help me, though.”
“We think he’s been trying to help you.”
“He told me—”
“He told you two words: Belshazzar’s Feast. We don’t know if there really is a connection; he might be trying to lead you astray or even draw you into a trap. And he led you to the locker room and Mr. Warbrath’s shoe. That might have been a trap too.”
I shook my head. “He wouldn’t do that. Mrs. Troutt just took advantage of an opportunity.”
“Then what was so significant about Mr. Warbrath’s shoe?”
I thought about that. “I don’t know. I assumed he was giving me a clue about the killer.”
“That doesn’t make any sense, though. You already knew who killed him, or at least you had a good guess, and pointing you to the shoe didn’t tell you anything. I mean, it’s not like you knew whose locker it was. They don’t even have assigned lockers, so it could have belonged to anyone.”
“So why show it to me?”
“That’s what I’m saying: a trap.”
Shaking my head, I said, “I don’t think so. Damn it, I left the shoe there. Maybe I was supposed to take it.”
“Well, let’s make something perfectly clear before you go back to the girls’ locker room: if you try to go by yourself, I’ll kill you and spare Mrs. Troutt the effort.” He was smiling, but it was the kind of smile that told me he meant it.
“Well, what are you doing tonight?”
“Tonight I have something. I can’t. And before you get any ideas, that means you either get Becca to go with you, or you don’t go at all.”
“What do you have going on?”
He let out a breath. “You’re not going to get worried, are you?”
“I basically already am worried, now that you asked me that.”
“Well, don’t be. You know what you said when we were driving to Emmett’s yesterday? How I don’t tell you any of my shit? Here goes: I’m having my first visit with a therapist.”
“River?”
“That’s part of it. But to be honest, part of it is dealing with my family and my friends and how much my life has changed.”
“You’re . . . you’re going to talk to him about coming out.” My insides constricted. “Jesus Christ, I ruined your life.”
He kissed me on the corner of the mouth and said, “You’re getting that dangerous look in your eyes. The one that makes me think you’re going to . . .”
“Say it.”
He shrugged. “Cut yourself. So if you’re going to do that, I want to be there.”
“I can’t cut myself alone. I can’t go to the girls’ locker room alone. What else can’t I do alone?”
“Sleep,” he said with another smirk, but the expression faded quickly. “I just need someone else to talk to about this stuff.”
Something very close to panic had a grip on me, tightening around my throat. “He’s going to tell you to break up with me. He’s going to tell you I’m . . . I don’t know, bad for you, or that I’m holding you back, or that it’s my fault you’re in this situation and you’d be better off without me.”
“Jesus, Vie. It’s not about you. It’s about me. And if he tells me to break up with you, I’ll fire his ass and find another therapist.” His hand closed around my forearm, his strong fingers pressing on the tally of cuts and burns I’d given myself. “This, though, if you need to do it—will you just wait until I can be there with you?”
“It’s not . . . it doesn’t work like that.”
“Try.”
I was shaking a little as I peeled his fingers away. “Yeah.”
“I’m serious.”
“Right. Fuck, I know that.”
“What are you going to do today? Do you have work?”
I shook my head.
“Do you want me to call Becca?”
“God, no. I’m fine.”
“Do you want me to call Emmett?”
The offer shocked me, even though I knew he had proposed something similar to Becca. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. He’s pretty angry with me right now.”
I barely heard myself say the words, though. Instead, I was thinking about what Emmett and Becca and Ginny had all asked me about: had I told Austin what I felt? No, I thought furiously. Fuck no. I haven’t told him. I’m not going to tell him. That’s when shit gets serious. That’s when everything goes sideways. Besides, he knows how I feel.
I was thinking about that box of shiny new blades in my backpack. My breath had become a whirlwind that was spinning out of control. I needed to be back in control. I needed to be in charge so nobody else could hurt me.
“You’ve got dinner, right? With those little kids?”
“What?” I said, struggling to bring my thoughts back to earth. “God, I forgot. Yeah, I guess I have to go over and at least meet their grandma.”
“That’s good,” Austin said, squeezing my shoulder. “You’re really good with them. You know that, right?”
“Right.”
“Vie?”
“Yeah.” I touched his fingers. “Talk to you tonight?”
“Definitely.”
“Oh, Vie.” Austin paused, obviously trying to think of how to phrase the next part. “If you’re trying to think of something creative, you know, I don’t care about that.”
“What?” I stared at him. The words had flown right overhead.
“Nothing. Forget it.” He laughed, and maybe it was nerves or maybe it was stress or maybe it was fear, but the laughter sounded forced, almost manic. “It’s going to be fine, babe.” He kissed me, and before I knew it, he was driving away in the Charger, literally leaving me in his dust.
Six o’clock. If I could make it to six o’clock, I told myself, I could make it the rest of the night. I just had to make it for—I checked my watch—two and a half hours. Ok, sure. Easy.
But it turned out not to be so easy. I patrolled the halls of the high school for half an hour, searching for any sign of River’s ghost, but I found nothing. A hall monitor noticed me and told me I needed to leave campus unless I were staying for an activity. My brain was too fried to come up with a lie, so I left.
I ran through some possibilities in my head: I could try to track down Mr. Spencer or Temple Mae, but they had both made it clear they weren’t going to talk to me, so that felt like a waste of time. I could try to do research on Belshazzar’s Feast, but that felt like another waste: whatever research I could do with my limited computer skills, Becca had already done. I could go back to Mr. Warbrath’s house, but Becca had been back. The computer was gone, anyway, and I couldn’t imagine that anything else crucial had been left behind. I couldn’t go to the girls’ locker room without Austin or Becca, and I couldn’t cut myself, which was what I really wanted to do. I had three options left: find and watch Makayla; find and watch Hailey; or find and talk to Mertrice Stroup-Ogle.
I’d never been particularly good at sneaking, and whatever Makayla might be up to (or Hailey for that matter), I didn’t think I’d be able to catch her without a lot of preparation and planning. So I did the only thing that made sense: I went to find a phonebook.