Despite my words, she hurried to remove the clothing. She placed the hat on my bed, looking more angry than embarrassed, I thought. The dress she lifted from her body, quickly and with such force that I worried she might tear the seams. It was all over in a matter of seconds, and once more Lucy stood before me in one of her own outfits, her face blazing with an emotion I could not quite interpret.

In the end, I thought it best to ignore the incident, turning from her and taking a seat behind my desk, arranging and rearranging my books until the tension in the room settled and then passed, as if nothing had happened at all.

BUT THEN, TWO WEEKS LATER, as Lucy readied herself for the morning, I found myself startled by the item she had clasped around her wrist: my mother’s charm bracelet, that thin piece of once-gleaming silver that had now worked itself to a tarnished gray. It was nothing valuable, of course, and yet, I still counted it among my most prized possessions—a fact that Lucy well knew. I had spent hours, after my mother’s death, studying the charms. A small couple, the girl in red, the boy in blue, preparing to ski. A bubble gum machine, with tiny little colored beads serving as the candy. A violin. I knew each and every one by heart, had memorized all their intricate details, particularly in those moments when the weight of the truth, the reality of never seeing my mother wear it again, sat heavily on my chest.

As I watched it dangle from Lucy’s wrist, my heart began to pound, and I saw spots in my vision—like little twinkling stars, bright lights that crowded and fought for space in front of my eyes. I blinked. I told myself that she did not mean anything by it, that surely she had just forgotten about what I had told her, about just how special the bracelet was to me. But then I paused, trying to recall—a conversation, a brief mention, anything I had said or done throughout the years we had lived together, only to find that it was all becoming too blurred, too confused in my mind.

“I’d be grateful if next time you could ask.” The words left my mouth and I tasted something bitter and hurried to swallow.

Lucy stopped. She held a notebook in one hand, the other—the one with the bracelet—hung limply at her side. She was silent for a moment. “Ask about what, Alice?”

I turned to face her, chiding myself for feeling nervous. After all, the bracelet was mine, had once belonged to my mother, and was one of the few things that I had left of her. There was nothing wrong with asking Lucy to get permission before taking it from my jewelry box, I told myself. “It’s nothing, really,” I said, feeling the heat as it burned my cheeks. “It’s just, the bracelet. I don’t mind, honest, it’s just, if you could ask next time.”

Lucy continued to peer at me with that same queer expression. Her hand had moved to the doorknob but it froze then, as if she couldn’t decide whether to respond to my request or leave the room without deigning to answer at all. Finally she dropped her hand and said, “I don’t understand.”

“My bracelet,” I replied, stammering over the first word. I pointed to her wrist.

A small laugh escaped from her then. “Alice,” she said, “don’t be silly.”

She was staring at me, her dark eyes boring into mine. I squirmed under their gaze, feeling as though I were the one who had done something wrong, as though the stolen object dangled from my wrist and not her own.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

Lucy held up her arm, so that her wrist appeared to me sideways, a portion of the charms hidden from my sight. “This bracelet?”

“Yes.”

She frowned. “Alice, this isn’t your bracelet.”

I stopped. “What are you talking about, Lucy?”

She dropped her arm. “I mean that this is my bracelet.” She turned, so that her words came to me, distorted by the distance. “It was my mother’s bracelet, in fact.”

I opened my mouth, then shut it. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t understand. I wanted to say: No, it was my mother’s bracelet—and perhaps I did—though the words sounded thick and far away, as if someone other than I was speaking. Lucy continued to stare at me with that strange look, so that I was unsure of whether she had heard me, or if, in fact, I had actually spoken the words at all.

She took a step toward me. “Alice, are you feeling well? I could get the school nurse if something is wrong.”

I felt a rising tide of panic, suddenly overwhelmed by it all—her strange behavior over the last few weeks, the incident with the clothes, and now this. I wanted to shout at her. To race forward and rip the bracelet from her arm. But would they believe me? I wondered—simultaneously questioning who they even referred to. After all, who could I go to with such a problem, who would not turn away, laughing? It all sounded so absurd, of course I realized that. The idea that two girls would claim the same story about a bracelet—that their respective dead mothers had gifted it to them—it was so unlikely, how could it ever sound anything but absolutely ludicrous?

That was what she wanted.

The thought came to me quickly. It seemed absurd, hard to believe—and yet, I told myself, it had to be true. It had to be true for no other reason than that there was no other reason. Why else would she claim the bracelet had been her mother’s if not for that outcome—she wanted to drive me mad.

She knew about my past. I had told her once, in those early months of friendship, about the time after my parents’ deaths, about the darkness and shadows that had hovered above me so that my aunt Maude had wanted to send me away, to commit me to a place where I would never see the sun again. About how they still came, so that at times I questioned the accuracy of my mind, of my memories.

I would be lying if I did not admit that for the briefest of moments it had passed my mind, that I had wondered if the bracelet did not in fact belong to Lucy and I had somehow confused it as being my own. One dead mother’s bracelet for another.

But no, I told myself, looking up at her, watching her confusion with suspicion.

It was mine, I knew it.

I could feel my face burning, but this time it was not in embarrassment or nervousness. “Please, Lucy,” I implored.

She let out a sigh. I thought at first she meant to relent, to admit to it all, to claim it as some sort of cruel prank. But then her expression changed: her eyes narrowed and her face looked suddenly small and mean. “We’ll have to sort this out later, I’m afraid. I have a class now.” And with those words, she was gone.

LUCY DIDN’T RETURN HOME THAT NIGHT.

It was the first time I had slept alone in our room, and I found the sudden absence, the total quiet, to be unnerving. Shadows that I had never before noticed danced across the length of the walls. A shrill noise awoke me in the middle of the night, and it was only some time later that I realized it was simply the sound of two trees rubbing together. By then, my heart had begun to pound and I could hear a strange roaring, loud enough that it blocked out the other sounds that had frightened me only seconds before.

Stop it, I chided myself. You’re a grown woman. You can certainly manage to spend one night on your own. The truth was, it was the first time I had slept alone at all. Someone else had always been in the house with me—my parents, and then later, my aunt. And yes, I knew that there were other girls just a door away, but somehow the house seemed empty, as if it were possible that I was the sole occupant. I worried for a moment that this might somehow be true. Perhaps there had been an emergency drill that I had missed. I peered out the window, wondering whether I would see a row of girls there, huddled together in the night air. There was no one. Still, I could not quite manage to convince myself that I was not somehow totally and completely alone within the walls of our clapboard house. My ears strained for sounds of the other girls. For anything other than the eerie shrieking the two trees continued to produce.

There was nothing.

Or was there?