Chapter 17: It’s Better Off This Way

Eliana woke up at eleven with her hair still smelling like chlorine.

The red dress was in a wet heap on her bedroom floor where she had stepped out of it at one in the morning. She had told her mom she’d slipped on the pool deck and fallen in. Her mom had looked at the dress, and then at Eliana, and then said, very carefully, that she was just glad Eliana was home, and gone to bed without another word. That had been worse than yelling.

Eliana reached for her phone.

There was one notification, from 3:12 a.m.

And then, a minute later:

Eliana stared at the screen.

At 3:12 she had been asleep. She had fallen asleep the second her head hit the pillow, in a way she couldn’t remember ever falling asleep before, and she had slept straight through it. Hannah had been awake at three in the morning, after nearly drowning, and had reached out to her, and Eliana hadn’t been there.

She typed fast.

The reply came in under a minute.

Eliana read it twice.

The one time I get on it, it drags me to the deep end. Not I drifted. Not I fell off.

Eliana held the phone in both hands.

That was the version everyone had told Hannah last night, on the pool deck, with a towel around her and the whole party crowding in. You got tangled. You can’t swim. Eliana hadn’t said it. She just hadn’t said anything else. It was the version everyone believed, because it was true that Hannah couldn’t swim, and it was easier than anything else.

Now Hannah was saying it back to her.

Eliana put the phone face down on the bed and lay there for a long time, looking at the ceiling, listening to the house.

Her whole body ached. Her arms, mostly, and her right hand, from gripping the pick against that rail.

She told herself it was from swimming.

Lexie locked the bathroom door before she took the bandage off.

She hadn’t put a new one on last night. She had come home after midnight, soaked, and gone straight up the stairs and into bed with her hand tucked under her pillow, and in the morning there had been a damp, faintly pink print of three rings and a bolt on the pillowcase. She had flipped it over before anyone could see.

Now she held her hand under the bathroom light and looked at it.

It was almost three weeks old. It had stopped being red and angry a while ago, and turned shiny and pink and tight, the way burns did when they were healing. But it wasn’t fading. If anything, the lines looked cleaner than they had in the kitchen at school. Three rings, perfectly round, and the bolt cutting behind them like it had been drawn with a ruler.

She thought about the kelpie, floating in front of her with her belt around its neck, watching her with those wet dark eyes. Waiting to be told what to do.

Put a bridle on it, and it is yours.

It had done exactly what she said.

She didn’t know why that bothered her more than the rest of it.

She dug the first aid kit out from behind the towels, where she had been hiding it for three weeks, and wrapped her hand the way Eliana had shown her in the school kitchen. Gauze first. Then the roll, not too tight. She had gotten fast at it.

Downstairs, her dad was making eggs. Her mom was at the table with her coffee, not in the hoodie today, reading something on her phone.

Lexie kept her left hand in the pocket of her sweatpants the whole time she ate.

“So?” her dad said, pointing the spatula at her. “The party. How was it? Did my daughter attend her first fancy pool party?”

“It was boring.”

“Boring? You got home after midnight.”

“It was boring for a long time.”

He laughed and went back to the eggs. Her mom glanced up from her phone, just briefly, at Lexie’s arm, at the hand that was nowhere to be seen. Then she looked back down.

Lexie finished her eggs in four bites. Upstairs, her studded belt was hanging over the edge of the radiator, still drying, the leather gone dark and stiff from the chlorine. She put it on anyway.

Her phone buzzed.

She was already pulling on her boots.

Eliana got to the studio first, and by the time Lexie came up the stairs, she had both notebooks open on the floor.

“I found it,” Eliana said. “In yours.”

Lexie dropped down beside her. Cece’s pocket notebook was open to a page near the middle, the handwriting small and neat, with the three rings and the bolt in the corner.

Lexie read it twice.

“Something else that people will want to climb on,” she said. “Like a unicorn float.”

“Like a unicorn float.”

“Great. Awesome. Thanks, Cece.”

“And this.” Eliana pulled Tommy’s notebook closer and turned it toward her. It was one of the chicken-scratch pages, half buried under a chord chart, but she had circled four lines in pencil.

pretty pony by the wateralways wet and full of weedclimb on up and you’ll stick, Birdiethat’s the only thing it needs

Lexie looked at it for a long moment.

“He wrote you into it,” she said.

“He did that sometimes.” Eliana’s voice was flat in a careful way. “I didn’t see it until this morning.”

Lexie didn’t say anything to that. After a second, she nudged Eliana’s knee with hers, once, and left it there.

They sat like that, with the notebooks between them, while the dust moved in the light from the high windows.

“The ladder,” Lexie said eventually. “What was that?”

“I don’t know.” Eliana turned the pick over in her fingers. “It should have just clanked. Plastic on metal. But it didn’t. It gave me the notes. Like it knew which ones I needed and it just…” She stopped. “I wanted it to sound like the guitar, and it did.”

“So you can play anything with that thing.”

“I think so. If I mean it.”

“So you could shred on a fork.”

“Probably.”

Lexie leaned back on her hands, careful of the bandaged one. “It waited for me,” she said. “After. With the belt on. It just floated there and looked at me, like a dog. Like it was waiting for me to tell it what to do.” She frowned at the ceiling. “I didn’t like that.”

Eliana looked at her. “Why?”

“I don’t know. I just didn’t.”

Eliana’s phone buzzed against the floorboards. She picked it up.

Eliana looked up.

Lexie was sitting right beside her, close enough to touch, with her bandaged hand in her lap and her boots on the floorboards, reading over her shoulder.

Lexie’s face went completely white.

“I’m right here,” Lexie said.

Eliana was already typing, so fast she misspelled it twice and had to go back.

Lexie looked down at herself. At her jacket. The one with the patches.

Eliana put the phone down on the floor between them.

Neither of them said anything for a long time.

“It’s wearing me,” Lexie said finally. Her voice was very flat. “It’s walking around in my face. In my jacket. Hugging people.”

“The bleachers,” Eliana said slowly. “That Saturday. Anthony had you down for the bleachers when you were at practice.”

“Ajax saw another werewolf last night,” Lexie said. “Same mask as mine. Pushed up, just like mine. And then there was nobody there. Just the mask, on a chair.”

“Tessa saw me in the library after school last week. I was only there at lunch.” Eliana’s voice had gone very quiet. “And Emily saw me at the Halloween store, trying on wigs. I was home.”

“Narnia saw me buying half the candy aisle.”

They looked at each other.

It wasn’t one strange thing anymore. It was all of them, lined up in a row.

Eliana reached over and turned the pages of Tommy’s notebook, back, back, until she found the page from the yearbook room. The one with the lyric that hadn’t matched anything.

wears many faces

She didn’t read it out loud. She didn’t have to.

Lexie looked at the phone, still lit up on the floor between them, with she’s being so nice its weird on the screen.

“Don’t tell her,” Lexie said.

“I wasn’t going to.”

“I mean it. Don’t tell her it wasn’t me.” Lexie’s jaw was tight. “If it’s been to her house, she doesn’t need to know that.”

Eliana picked the phone back up and looked at the screen for a long time. Hannah’s last message was still sitting there.

she literally just hugged me??? who IS she

Then she typed.

She put the phone face down on the floor, between the two notebooks, and neither of them touched it.

On Monday, Hannah held court from the third step like nothing had happened.

“So I’m lying there on the unicorn,” she was saying, with her hands in the air, “just vibing, eyes closed, living my best life. And the next thing I know, I’m at the bottom of the deep end. Like, that is not where I put myself.”

Everyone laughed. Vivian laughed hardest.

“And my phone died, so there’s no evidence,” Vivian said. “Which is honestly a tragedy for the account.”

“It is a gift for my dignity,” Hannah said.

Eliana climbed the steps and took her usual place, one step below and to the left. Hannah’s hand came back without her looking, and passed down a paper cup.

“Have some marshmallows.”

Eliana took it. Hannah was holding the cup by the rim, with just her fingertips, the way you’d hold something hot, or something dirty. Her palm never touched it.

“Thanks,” Eliana said.

Hannah was already turning back to the group. “And then Eliana just dives in,” she said. “In the dress! Eliana, who has not gone past the shallow end since, like, the fire. Hero behavior. Truly.”

“So brave,” Tessa said, in the voice she used for compliments she didn’t mean. “I would have helped too, if I’d seen. I was inside.”

“Of course you would have, Tess.”

Emily leaned over and squeezed Hannah’s shoulder. “I’m just glad you’re okay.”

“I’m completely okay,” Hannah said. “Seriously. I’m totally fine.”

She wiped her hands on her skirt. Eliana watched her do it, the way you’d brush off crumbs, both palms, front and back. A minute later, while Melanie was talking, she did it again. And then a third time, while she wasn’t talking to anyone at all.

Eliana didn’t think Hannah knew she was doing it.

The bell rang. The group broke apart, heading for first period in twos and threes, and Hannah stood up and brushed off her skirt one more time, and fell into step beside Eliana on the way down the stairs.

For a few steps she didn’t say anything. Then, quietly, so only Eliana could hear:

“Can I ask you something weird?”

“Sure.”

Hannah was looking straight ahead, not at her.

“When I went under,” she said. “It felt like it was holding on to me.” She rubbed her thumb hard across her palm. “Like my hands were stuck. Like it wanted me down there.”

Eliana’s stomach went cold.

She didn’t have an answer for that. Not one she could say out loud. So she said the only true thing she could find.

“It happened really fast,” she said. “I couldn’t see much either. I just knew I had to get to you.”

Hannah walked a few more steps.

“Yeah,” she said.

Eliana waited for her to ask something else. She didn’t say anything else.

They got to the bottom of the stairs, and Hannah smiled at her, the steps smile, the one for everyone. Then she squeezed Eliana’s arm and turned toward her own class.

“I’m going to find Lexie at lunch,” Hannah said over her shoulder. “I still owe her a real thank you for the soup.”

She was gone before Eliana could say anything.

Eliana stood at the bottom of the stairs with the latte in her hand. She thought about the way Hannah had said yeah. Like she had noticed that Eliana hadn’t told her she was wrong.

By fourth period, Eliana couldn’t feel her arms.

It wasn’t like the studio. That had been heavy for one night and gone by morning. This was different. She had slept ten hours on Saturday night and nine on Sunday, and she had woken up both times feeling like someone had filled her with wet sand. Her arms hung from her shoulders like they belonged to someone else. Her head was full of cotton. Every thought had to swim a long way to get to the front of it.

In science, Mr. Bayer had asked her a question about electron transfer, and she had stared at him for so long that he’d said, gently, “Ms. Barker? Still with us?” and moved on to Lisa. Lisa had looked back at her across the room with her eyebrows drawn together. Eliana hadn’t been able to make her face do anything about it.

Now she was in civics, third row on the left, and Mr. Anderson was talking about the Fifth Amendment, and the words were coming at her from very far away.

Due process. She wrote it down. Her handwriting looked strange. It leaned and wobbled, the letters loose and uneven. It looked like Tommy’s.

She looked at it for a while.

Then she put her chin in her hand, just to rest her head for a second.

“Ms. Barker.”

Eliana jerked upright. Her pen rolled off the desk and hit the floor.

The room had gone quiet. A couple of people were looking at her, and someone in the back laughed. Across the aisle, Lexie was half turned in her chair, watching her with her jaw tight.

Mr. Anderson was standing beside her desk. She hadn’t heard him walk over. He bent down, picked up her pen, and set it on her notebook, right next to the wobbling letters.

He didn’t look annoyed. He looked kind, the way he always did.

“Long weekend, Ms. Barker?” he said quietly.

“Sorry,” Eliana said. Her voice came out thick. “I didn’t sleep well.”

“I can tell.” He looked at her for a second longer, with that pleasant, interested expression he always had. “Try not to get too bogged down.”

He went back to the front of the room and picked up right where he had left off, about the right to remain silent.

Eliana sat very still.

She picked up her pen, and held it so tightly that her knuckles went white, and didn’t close her eyes again for the rest of the period.

Lexie was halfway through a bag of chips in the yearbook room when the door opened and Hannah walked in.

Mika looked up from her laptop. Lexie stopped chewing.

Hannah had never been in the yearbook room in her life. Lexie could tell from the way she stood in the doorway, looking around at the proof sheets taped to the walls and the stacks of old yearbooks and the beanbag chair with a hole in it, like she had walked into someone’s bedroom by mistake.

Then she saw Lexie, and her whole face lit up.

“There you are,” Hannah said.

“Here I am,” Lexie said slowly.

Hannah crossed the room, and before Lexie could stand up or get out of the way or do anything at all, Hannah bent down and hugged her.

It was a real hug, and it went on a little too long. Lexie sat rigid in her chair with the chips crushed against her stomach and stared over Hannah’s shoulder at Mika, who stared back.

Lexie noticed something else, too. Hannah’s arms were around her, but her hands weren’t touching her. Her fingers were curled into loose fists against Lexie’s back, knuckles only, like she couldn’t stand to put her palms on anything.

Hannah let go and straightened up.

“I just wanted to say thank you again,” she said. “For real this time. In person. For the soup, and for coming by. You didn’t have to do that.”

“It was nothing,” Lexie said. Her voice came out strange.

“It really wasn’t. Nobody else came. I mean, everyone texted, but you actually came.” Hannah pressed her hand to her chest. “And what you said, too. About how I’m braver than I think I am. I thought about that all night.”

Lexie had never said that to anyone in her entire life.

“Yeah,” Lexie said. “Well. You are.”

Hannah beamed at her. Then she looked at Mika, and at the room, and seemed to remember where she was.

“Okay, I’ll let you get back to whatever you’re doing,” she said. “But we should hang out sometime. For real.” Then she stopped. “Wait. I don’t even have your number.”

She held out her phone, pinched between her fingertips.

Lexie looked at it. Then, because there was no way out of this that didn’t involve explaining everything, she took it and typed her number in.

“Perfect,” Hannah said, taking it back. “I’ll text you!”

She was gone before Lexie could say anything.

The door swung shut behind her.

The yearbook room was very quiet.

“Since when,” Mika said carefully, “do you bring Hannah soup? Since when do you bring anyone soup?”

“I don’t.”

“She just said you did.”

“I know what she said.”

Mika looked at her for a long moment. She had the face again. The one from Saturday, and from the basement. The one where she was deciding something.

She didn’t ask. She just turned back to her laptop.

Lexie got her phone out under the table.

The dots came up almost immediately.

Lexie stared at the screen. She thought about the deep end. About Hannah’s face going under, and her hands stuck flat to that thing’s back, and the way she had walked in here today anyway, smiling, with her hands curled into fists so she wouldn’t have to touch anything.