Authors: Elizabeth Miles
“Gabby? Gabby! Wake up!” She barked at Gabby as she grabbed for her cell phone, hands shaking, and dialed 911. She knelt down and put her ear right up against Gabby’s distended lips to make sure that she was still breathing. There was only the faintest breath, hot and thin against her skin.
“Yes, there’s a girl here, 261 Allen Drive—I think she’s having an allergic reaction,” Em wept into the phone at the emergency dispatcher. “Please. Come. Come soon.” Where was her Epi-pen? Em started rifling through Gabby’s things, throwing stuff out of her nightstand drawer, dumping the contents of her bag on the floor. Nothing.
And as she ripped through Gabby’s belongings, hot tears welling in her eyes, she began to hear girlish, catty laughter ringing through the air. Satisfied giggles that came from some unidentifiable place. Inside the house. Or maybe outside. Or maybe from within Em. It was impossible to tell.
As she gripped Gabby’s hand, rocking back and forth on crouched legs and waiting for the ambulance to show up, only one thought raced through her mind:
Somehow, some way, the Furies had something to do with this, too
.
Skylar smelled flowers long before she reached Gabby’s room in the hospital. The scent was thick, overripe, like walking into a garden in mid-July, and it made her dizzy. She stopped for a moment to regain her composure.
She felt terrible, of course, for what had happened to Gabby. She’d almost
died
. Skylar put her hand against the wall to steady herself.
I didn’t know
. She kept telling herself that, over and over. She’d had no idea that Gabby was
that
allergic to shellfish! She’d thought it was, like, a few hives. A little rash. Not this. She never would have . . . not in a million years . . .
I didn’t know. It wasn’t my fault.
Gabby had been in the hospital for more than sixteen hours. She’d gone into anaphylactic shock—been almost unable to breathe, puffed up like a balloon.
And it was all Skylar’s fault.
Skylar had had to force herself to visit. It would seem weird if she didn’t. Fiona, Jenna, Sean—they’d all called, asking if she wanted to ride with them, but she’d declined. Instead, she’d had Aunt Nora drive her over. She felt so ashamed. And terrified. She didn’t want to be around anyone else, anyone who might discover her horrible secret. So there she was, alone in the busy hospital hallway, her stomach churning with nerves.
Skylar rounded the corner, and then stopped short. She had a clear view down the corridor to room 125. And honestly, it looked like a freaking florist, with bouquets and flower arrangements on every surface. Skylar could also see at least eight people from Ascension, all huddled around Gabby’s bed. Her friends. Gabby’s friends.
Skylar couldn’t help but flash back to the time she broke her ankle in fifth grade during recess: how empty her hospital room had been (her mom outside flirting with the disinterested doctor, Lucy not bothering to visit at all), how bored she’d been as she healed at home. She didn’t get one bouquet, and Lucy had made a game of placing things she wanted—soda, chocolate—just out of her reach. “It’s physical therapy,” Lucy had said.
She couldn’t do this right now. She’d had too much of hospitals in her life. Her gut screamed that she should turn on her heel and hightail it away from room 125. She couldn’t handle seeing all those people—not to mention Gabby herself—until she had
things more under control. She froze, ready to make a run for it. But then her stomach sank as she remembered: the evidence. The cream. She was so stupid not to have thought of it before. Someone was going to find out—if they hadn’t already—that Gabby’s La Mer skin cream was dosed with clam juice. If she kept using it, she would continue to have these reactions. And once that came out, it would be an all-out hunt to find out how it had happened. Who had done it. She had to destroy the evidence. But first, she had to make an appearance at Gabby’s bedside. Not to do so would only call attention to herself.
She pushed herself forward and hovered in the doorway of the hospital room until a nurse needed to get by. “Coming through,” the woman said. As the crowd parted to let the nurse by, Gabby spotted Skylar at the back of the room, and her face broke into a brave, warm smile. It lacerated Skylar’s resolve; she hoped her flushed cheeks would be interpreted as concern.
“Sky,” Gabby said softly, motioning Skylar closer to the bed. “I’m so happy you came.” Her parents were sitting on either side of her, looking haggard yet relieved. Their baby was safe.
Skylar thought that if guilt had a smell, it would be of cheap air fresheners or drugstore body oil—and she could swear that she was practically sweating the stuff.
“How are you doing, Gabs?” she asked as she approached the bed. “I’m so sorry that this happened. So sorry.”
“Hey, I’ll be fine,” Gabby said. “I’m just grateful that Em found me.”
Skylar nodded mutely. Then the nurse started shooing people out of the room: “That’s enough excitement for now.” Skylar was grateful for the excuse to leave. She didn’t even wait for the elevator at the end of the hall; instead, she took the stairs down, two at a time. There wasn’t much time to waste.
“Done so soon?” Aunt Nora looked up from her magazine as Skylar threw open the passenger-side door.
“Yeah,” Skylar said breathlessly. “Um, we need to go by Gabby’s house. She—she needs me to do something for her.”
“Right now?” Aunt Nora searched Skylar’s face, the wrinkles between her eyes furrowing with concern.
“Yeah . . . it’s—it’s something for school,” Skylar said, zipping and unzipping her fleece nervously as she talked. “For the dance! I need to get this list from her desk and send out some emails later.” Skylar tried to sound as chipper as she could. “It’ll only take a second.”
She knew no one would be home at the Doves’. She’d seen Gabby’s mom and dad had been at the hospital, and Skylar was almost certain that they would stay with their daughter until she was ready to be released. Skylar made Nora drive all the way up the winding driveway, and then she went in the back door and ran upstairs. The cream was sitting uncapped on Gabby’s dresser. It didn’t look like it had been touched since “the incident.”
Jesus.
It must have happened so fast.
With a shudder, she replaced the lid and pocketed the small jar, feeling a small sense of relief as soon as it was in her possession. Maybe she hadn’t lost control after all. . . .
• • •
“I just . . . I feel really shitty,” Skylar told Meg on the phone later that evening. “Gabby’s never been anything but nice to me, and I’m the reason she’s in the hospital!” She was lying on her creaky bed, staring up at the wooden slats on the ceiling. The cream was safely tucked beneath her rattiest T-shirts in a drawer. She wondered how long it would take Gabby to notice it was missing. The clam juice was in her bag, to be thrown away at school tomorrow.
“Skylar, don’t beat yourself up,” Meg said. Her voice sounded far away. “You had no idea the reaction would be as bad as it was.”
“But I can’t believe I did it at all,” Skylar said. “This . . . this isn’t me.”
Anymore
. “What kind of person would do that?”
“Sky. Sweetie. You didn’t mean for it to go this far, right? It was an accident, right? Just a practical joke that went a little too far. If anyone ever finds out—which they won’t—your story is totally kosher.”
Skylar sighed. She wanted to trust Meg, who seemed to have everything figured out, who always stayed so composed and collected. But her weird behavior the other day—the nonchalant way she’d reacted to finding a dead body in a pond—made Skylar see her in a new light. And there was something
in her tone tonight that was only making Skylar feel worse.
A practical joke that went too far.
Despite her breezy tone, Meg’s words seemed carefully chosen, an echo of old words, old comforts. Once again Skylar wondered if there was some remote possibility that Meg knew about Lucy’s accident. If so, why didn’t she just come out and say so? Or was this just Skylar’s guilty conscience acting up again?
“Babe, I gotta run,” Meg was saying. Skylar had almost forgotten she was holding her phone. “Gotta go meet Ty and Ali. Call me if you need me!” She hung up.
Skylar curled up on top of her bed, laying her cheek against the worn fabric of Aunt Nora’s patchwork quilt. Skylar’s maternal grandmother had made it. Her mom’s mom. Suddenly Skylar’s whole body ached for her mother—someone to hold her and make her feel better. She rubbed the spot on her arm where she’d been stung by the bee; it was throbbing.
The pain reminded her of the night of Lucy’s last pageant. They’d been in the dressing room together, getting ready.
Lucy leans in close to the long mirror, touching up her mascara, and Skylar is in the corner, pulling at the hem of her dress in an effort to make it fall evenly.
Lucy catches her eyes in the reflection. “Your arms look kind of flabby,” she says, appraising Skylar’s spaghetti-strap gown with a harsh eye. Skylar turns this way and that, trying to stand in such a way that her arms look slender—like Lucy’s.
With a snort, Lucy caps her mascara, comes up behind Skylar, and pinches the back of her arm. Hard. So hard that Skylar lets out an involuntary yelp.
“I don’t think you can camouflage this,” Lucy says, gripping a fold of skin between her fingers. Then, releasing her fingers slightly: “Maybe you should borrow my shawl.”
When Lucy lets go altogether, Skylar can still feel the pain. Pulsing.
Just like her arm was hurting right now. She got up to look at the bee sting in the mirror. Walking to the bathroom, she was aware of every step against the hardwood floor.
She flipped on the light in her bathroom and turned to face the mirror. What she saw there made her draw back swiftly. She gripped her hands around the door frame, swaying there for a moment. Squeezing her eyes shut. Maybe she was hallucinating. But no, it was still there when she opened her eyes.
A question was scrawled on her bathroom mirror in red lipstick:
Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the vainest of them all?
The writing was jagged and sharp. A shudder ran down Skylar’s spine; her knees buckled. She turned to look down the hallway, half-expecting to see someone there. She didn’t want to look back at the mirror, but she couldn’t help but stare at the bloodred words. Was this a joke? For some reason, when Skylar heard the phrase in her mind, it sounded like it was coming out of Meg’s mouth. Singsongy. Almost . . . deranged. She thought of
Em’s warnings. Did Meg and her cousins have something to do with this?
And then she remembered that night a few weeks ago at Gabby’s, when they’d walked out to Em’s car. This very phrase—or one very similar—had been written on Em’s windshield. The connection was too eerie. Terrified, Skylar forced herself to back away from the mirror.
She grabbed a wad of tissues and pressed them against the words, trying to ignore the way the lipstick smeared like blood. Her hand, shaking slightly, pressed down harder and harder. The letters weren’t coming off; they merely bled into each other as Skylar scrubbed with increasing force.
Mirror, mirror. Mirror, mirror.
Even as they became illegible, the words still mocked her. She clenched her teeth and leaned in to the mirror even more.
With a loud splitting sound, the mirror cracked. Her hand swerved, but not quickly enough. The glass sliced into the side of her thumb, and blood immediately began to well up around the cut. The incision didn’t hurt, exactly, but it sent a shock through her. She drew in a sharp breath through her teeth, trying not to look at how her blood matched the shade of lipstick almost perfectly.
Heart pounding, Skylar drew her thumb to her mouth and stared at her cracked reflection in the glass. The distortion made her grotesque. Like she’d been sliced, diced, and rearranged.
She looked like a monster.
As she shoved textbooks into her messenger bag before school on Tuesday morning, Em’s hand fell on a square of flat plastic—the CD Crow had given her a few days ago, the same day Gabby had had her allergic reaction. She flipped the case over in her hands, but it was unlabeled, so she just popped it into her computer as she finished her morning routine.
Em recognized the first chords of the song as the ones Crow had played for her in his pickup truck. The day it rained. The day they’d kissed. She pushed those thoughts from her mind and tried to focus on the music. That day, he’d said the song was still in the works, but it was clearly finished now. It was good. The sea-shanty chords soared over a twinkling piano in the background, and his words sounded clear and strong above it all. She paused from lacing up her boots and listened to the lyrics:
I don’t know what tomorrow brings, or when the dark will come Right now is all we’ve got—baby, let’s be young
She could picture him singing it, his dark eyes narrowing as he reached for the higher notes, his hair falling in his eyes as he lowered his head to reach the gravelly tones. The vision was quickly eclipsed by thoughts of JD. The way he moved his hands when he got really excited about something; the way his forehead wrinkled when he was trying to figure something out; the way he always let her have the first piece of pie and control over the radio when they were driving. The way he looked at her like she was really there—no, like she was the only thing he could see.
Right now is all we’ve got. . . .
The words leaped into her head and her heart, giving her a jolt of energy. She had the right to make mistakes, and the right to fix them.
• • •
Gabby returned to school that day. Her face was still red and raw, but she was in the clear, healthwise. She wore skinny jeans and wedge-heeled boots, a green scoop-neck top, and the sparkly scarf Em had gotten her for Christmas. It was an outfit that screamed,
I’m fine!
Still, their friends—and even near strangers—showered her with affection, care, offers to assist. She’d missed only one day of school, but it was as though she’d been away for weeks.