Chapter 24: Fight or Flight

Her dad had come to get her on Friday night. She’d called him from the end of Melanie’s street, standing under the same streetlight with her coat still inside, and he’d pulled up eleven minutes later in his slippers. He looked at her hand. He looked at her wet socks. Then he turned the heat up and drove her home and didn’t ask her one single thing, which she thought about all weekend.

Nobody else had asked her anything either. She’d texted Hannah twice on Saturday. Both said Read.

By Monday she had her face ready before she got off the bus.

The steps were salted and wet, and the clique had shoved together on the top two to stay out of the wind. Vivian was filming the snow on the flagpole. Emily had a scarf wrapped around her face up to her eyes. Hannah wasn’t there yet.

Eliana sat down in her usual spot and left the space next to her open. She popped her pen cap off, then on.

“Is Lexie okay?” Emily asked, through the scarf. “After Friday? I felt so bad. I didn’t even know about her aunt.”

“She’s fine.”

“Did she get home okay? She didn’t have her boots.”

Eliana had no idea. “Yeah.”

Hannah came up the steps ten minutes late. She had her latte in one gloved hand, held by the rim, and she said hi to everyone in the same voice, Eliana included. Then she walked past the open space and sat down at the far end, next to Vivian, and leaned over to look at whatever Vivian was filming.

She didn’t look cold, or mad. She just didn’t look over.

Eliana’s thumb found the pen cap again.

The group did the thing groups do where everyone keeps talking a little louder than before. Vivian showed Hannah the video. Emily asked about winter break. Melanie said her mom was still finding popcorn in the couch.

Tessa got up from the step below and sat down in the open space beside Eliana, close, the way she’d been trying to sit for years.

“So,” she said, low and pleased. “Are we talking about it, or…”

“About what?”

Tessa just smiled and looked down the step at Hannah, and then back at her.

Eliana looked at the snow on the flagpole. She could feel the shape of what she was supposed to say. Something easy, something that made it nothing. She didn’t know what it was.

“It’s cold,” she said.

Lexie had taken “Don’t text me” at face value, so she didn’t.

It wasn’t even hard. She had other stuff to do. She spent most of Saturday on her bedroom floor with both notebooks open and a city bus map she’d pulled off the transit website, tracing the way she’d run on Friday with a pen. Melanie’s cul-de-sac. Left at the first corner. Left again. A right that put her on a street she’d never heard of, then two more lefts.

By Saturday night the pen had drawn a big lopsided loop that came almost all the way back around to where it started.

It hadn’t been running away from her. It had been walking her in a circle, far enough out that she couldn’t feel what was happening at the house. Just far enough. Then it had let her go.

She sat back against the bed and looked at the loop for a long time.

It had wanted them apart. It had worked hard to keep them apart. You didn’t do that to two people unless you were scared of what they did together.

She wrote that down in the pocket notebook, under Cece’s last entry, in letters that came out bigger and messier than she meant them to. SCARED OF US TOGETHER. Then she underlined it twice.

Her feet still hurt on Sunday, red and tight across the toes from the snow. Her dad saw her limping to the fridge and asked what happened, and she said she’d gone out to get the mail in socks, and he gave her a look and made her soak them in a pot of warm water while he cooked.

She thought about Eliana yelling a little, between the notebook and the pot of water.

That had been bad. Eliana didn’t yell. But Lexie had seen her after the basement and after the kelpie, shaking and teary and saying things too fast, and Cece’s notebook had a whole line about it. Big nights make big feelings. Don’t trust anything you say after midnight. Friday had been the biggest night either of them had had alone. Eliana had bled all over a pool deck by herself. Of course she’d yelled.

It would wear off. It always wore off by morning.

So on Monday, Lexie got to school early with the notebook in her hoodie pocket and the loop folded inside it, and she didn’t go to the milk crates. She went looking for Eliana.

Eliana was at her locker when Lexie found her, standing with the door open and not getting anything out of it.

“Okay, so,” Lexie said, and pulled the folded map out of her hoodie. “Don’t freak out. I didn’t text.”

Eliana looked at her, then at the map.

Lexie unfolded it against the locker next door. “Friday. This is where I ran. Look at it.” She traced the loop with one finger. “It wasn’t getting away from me. It was walking me around. Far enough I couldn’t feel the house, and then it let me go. It wanted us split up.”

“You drew a map.”

“Yeah, I drew a map. Listen. It went to all that trouble to keep us apart, right? So it’s scared of what happens when we’re together. That’s good. That’s, like, the first good thing we’ve…”

“Do you ever think about anything else?”

Lexie stopped with her finger on the paper.

“It’s kind of the main thing right now,” she said.

“Not for me.”

Lexie looked at her properly for the first time. Eliana had her face on, the smooth one from the steps in September, but her thumb was going on the pen cap so fast it clicked like a turn signal.

“Okay,” Lexie said slowly. “Look, I get it. Friday was a big night. Cece says big nights make big feelings, it’s a whole thing, you yelled, it’s fine…”

“It’s not a thing.” Eliana shut the locker hard enough that the girl two doors down jumped. “Stop explaining me.”

Lexie opened her mouth, and Hannah walked by.

She was with Vivian, down the middle of the hall, gloves on, holding her phone up so Vivian could see something on it. She was laughing a little. She didn’t look over. She didn’t look away either, the way you would if you were trying not to. She just went past like they were two more lockers.

Eliana’s eyes went with her the whole way, down the hall and around the corner by the trophy case, and stayed on the corner after she was gone.

Lexie looked at the corner too. Then at Eliana.

“Is this about Hannah?”

“No.”

It came out too fast. Eliana heard it and kept going anyway.

“This is about you. You come back on Friday and the first thing out of your mouth is the cat. You come here today and the first thing out of your mouth is a map.” She held up her right hand. The bandage across her fingers was gray at the edges from the weekend. “You didn’t even look at this. Not once. You looked at the tile.”

“Because it’s trying to kill us!”

“I know! I was there!” Someone at the water fountain turned around. Eliana dropped her voice and it came out worse, low and shaky. “You weren’t.”

Lexie stood there with the map in her hand.

Eliana put the bandaged hand in her coat pocket, fast, like she was sorry she’d shown it.

“Hand,” Lexie said.

Eliana stared at her.

“Show me your hand.”

For a second Eliana didn’t move. Then she took it back out and held it there between them. Lexie peeled the edge of the gauze back with two fingers, careful, the way Eliana had done hers in the kitchen in October. The calluses on the first three fingers had split open across the middle and scabbed dark. There was a cut along the side of her thumb where the pick had slipped.

“That’s disgusting,” Lexie said quietly.

“Thanks.”

“Did you clean it?”

“Obviously I cleaned it.”

Lexie pressed the gauze back down and let go. She folded the map along its creases and stuck it back in her hoodie.

“Okay,” she said. “We find it first. Then you can yell at me about whatever else.”

Eliana looked down the hall at the corner by the trophy case. Then back at Lexie.

“Fine.”

“Studio after school?”

“Fine.”

They went to the studio after school every day that week. Eliana played until her fingers bled through the tape, and Lexie kept time on the bracelet.

“Again?” Lexie said on Wednesday.

“Again.”

That was most of it.

On Friday, the last day before break, the whole school got marched into the auditorium after second period for the winter assembly.

It was too warm in there and smelled like the radiators. Somebody had wound tinsel around the stage lights, and the choir was already on the risers in red sweaters, waiting. Sophomores got the middle section. Eliana ended up on the aisle of her homeroom row, with Tessa on one side and a boy from her English class she had never spoken to on the other.

Hannah was two rows ahead, between Vivian and Melanie. Eliana could see the back of her head and her gloves folded on her knee.

Lexie was across the aisle with her own homeroom, slouched so far down in her seat that her knees were up against the chair in front. She had her hood up. A teacher walked by and told her to put it down. She put it down, waited until he was gone, and put it back up.

The choir sang two songs. The principal read off the fall sports. Somebody’s mom had baked cookies for the drama club, and the drama club stood up and bowed for the cookies.

At the end of the faculty row, Mr. Anderson sat with his legs crossed, clapping for everything. He clapped for the cookies. He looked like he had paid for his seat.

“And,” the principal said, leaning into the mic, “I want to give a special congratulations to two students who brought home some hardware this fall. Our robotics team took first place at regionals in November. Emma Reyes and Dylan Park, come on up.”

Emma came up the side stairs first, in a hoodie with the team logo, looking like she’d rather be soldering something. Dylan came up behind her.

He took the stairs two at a time.

Eliana sat up.

He was smiling. Really smiling, with his whole face, and he waved at the crowd as he crossed the stage. His eyes were clear. There were no gray circles under them and no Monster in his hand, and his hair was combed. He shook the principal’s hand with both of his.

“Wow,” he said into the mic, and laughed. “Wow, okay. I just want to thank everybody. Seriously. Everybody who came out, everybody who helped. Mr. Willems. My mom. Emma.” He turned and threw an arm around her and pulled her into a hug. “Honestly, the best partner I could ever ask for.”

Emma stood stiff inside the hug with her arms at her sides. Over his shoulder she was staring at the side of his face.

Somebody in the back whooped. The whole room clapped.

Eliana didn’t. The pressure had come up under her ribs somewhere around wow, slow and low, like a bass note through a floor. Her thumb was already on the pen cap.

Across the aisle, Lexie’s hood had come down. She wasn’t slouching anymore.

She found Eliana’s eyes over the heads of four rows of sophomores, and held them.

Dylan didn’t go back to his seat.

Lexie watched him come down the side stairs behind Emma. At the bottom, Emma turned left toward the robotics kids, and he turned right, up the far aisle, still smiling and waving at people who were already looking somewhere else. Halfway up, a pack of seniors stood to let a kid out to the bathroom, and when they sat back down, he wasn’t in the aisle anymore.

The pressure was still there, sitting in her chest. It hadn’t gone anywhere.

Lexie stood up. The teacher at the end of her row hissed her name, and she stepped over three people’s feet anyway and out into the aisle. Eliana was already up on the other side of it.

“Where’d it go?” Eliana whispered.

“Back rows, I think.”

They went up the side aisle slowly, looking along every row. A redheaded girl from Lexie’s science class. A kid with braces. A senior in a Santa hat. Every face was normal. The pressure was stronger in some rows and weaker in others, but Lexie couldn’t tell which row it was coming from.

Near the back, a guy in a red jacket at the end of a row leaned over to whisper to his friend. When he sat back up, it was a girl in the red jacket. Same seat, same slouch. Her friend didn’t even blink.

A second later the girl turned to look at them, and it was the guy again.

“It keeps switching,” Eliana said.

Lexie looked down the row, and the next one, and the one after that. Two hundred faces, any of which could be it.

“Cool,” Lexie muttered. “Evil Where’s Waldo.”

On stage, the choir had started their last song, something slow with a lot of oooh in it. Lexie didn’t decide to do it. She was just scared and annoyed, and she started humming under her breath, the way she did before a set, low in her chest, PUSH with no words on it.

The pressure answered.

It came back at her from the right, hard and sharp, like her own voice bouncing off a wall. She stopped walking.

Eliana had stopped too. She had a hand pressed flat to her ribs.

“What did you just do?”

“I don’t know. Hummed.”

“Do it again.”

Lexie did it again. So did Eliana, quiet and a little off-key, right next to her. The two notes rubbed together, and the pressure snapped into place like a compass needle. It wasn’t in the seats anymore. It was down front, to the right of the stage, where the curtain met the wall.

The door to the wings was propped open with a sandbag.

They went down the aisle fast. Nobody stopped them. Mr. Anderson, at the end of the faculty row, turned his head a little as they went by, then went back to watching the choir.

Backstage it was dark and full of junk, flats from the fall play, a rack of coats, coiled cables, a stepladder. The choir was right there through the curtain, so loud Lexie could feel it in her teeth.

Dylan was standing by the loading dock door with one hand on the push bar.

Except it wasn’t Dylan now. It was a skinny stage-crew kid in a black T-shirt, and then a girl Lexie didn’t know, and then Dylan again, flickering like a bad channel. It looked at them and didn’t smile.

“Okay,” it said, in Dylan’s voice, then someone else’s. “Okay, no. Not here. Can we not do this here?”

“You picked here,” Lexie said.

“I picked a nice assembly where everybody claps.” Its face slid back to the stage-crew kid. It held up both hands. “Look. I watch. That’s the whole job. I’ve been in your lunch line since October. I lit a candle at your aunt’s vigil,” it said to Lexie. “I know which side your hair parts on when you don’t brush it.”

Its eyes moved to Eliana. “I know your locker combination. I don’t fight. I was told, go take a look at them, so I took a look. You passed. Gold stars. Can I go?”

“Told by who?” Eliana said.

Its whole body flinched. For a second it didn’t have a face at all, just a smooth blank under the stage-crew kid’s hair. Then the face came back.

“Nobody,” it said. “Forget it.”

Eliana had the pick out. She hit the steel leg of the stepladder, and it rang a note no stepladder should make, clear through the choir.

Lexie sang under the oooh.

back up, back downthis ain’t your town

It pushed the door open behind it, but too late. The shove hit it in the chest and slammed it back into the bar, and the door banged wide open onto the snow. It made a sound that wasn’t any of its voices, a high, hurt yelp, like a dog stepped on.

Its hair went dark and wet and clumped, with river weed knotted through it. Gray, slick hide spread up its arms from the wrists. Its legs got longer under the black jeans and bent wrong at the knee, like a horse’s. When it pushed off the door bar, its palm stuck, and it tore free with a wet sound and left a smear on the metal.

It went out over the loading dock and into the snow in one leap and ran.

The cold came in through the open door. On the other side of the curtain, the choir held their last note, and the whole school clapped.

Lexie looked at Eliana.

Eliana was already zipping her coat.

The snow had started again, small and dry. Eliana hit the bottom of the loading dock ramp and went down on one knee, got up, and kept going.

Its tracks went across the faculty lot and straight through the hedge at the back. They weren’t footprints. They were long, spaced-out hoofprints, too far apart for anything with two legs.

Lexie came through the hedge behind her, swearing. She was in her hoodie. Her coat was still under her seat in the auditorium.

“You want mine?”

“Shut up and run.”

They ran.

It stayed ahead of them the whole way, and that was the worst part. It never lost them, and it never let them catch up. Down the main road, past the closed-up ice cream place and the dentist. When they got within half a block, it would duck behind someone. An old man shoveling his walk. A woman getting out of her car with groceries. Then, for a second, there would be two old men, and one of them would look back at Eliana with weed in his eyebrows, and then he was gone again, the real one still shoveling and staring at the two girls tearing past his driveway.

“It’s using them,” Lexie panted. “It’s hiding behind people.”

“I can see that.”

At the light on the big intersection by the gas station, it stopped on the far corner and turned around. It had a little kid’s face now, round and pink, with a knit hat with a pompom.

“Come on,” it yelled across four lanes, in the kid’s voice. “It’s Christmas!”

Then the light changed and it was gone up the hill.

Eliana’s lungs felt like she’d swallowed the snow. Her bandaged hand throbbed every time her arm swung. She couldn’t feel her ears. Next to her, Lexie was running with her hands jammed in her hoodie pocket, which should have looked stupid and somehow didn’t.

They cut through the park by the library, where the path hadn’t been plowed, and the snow came up over their shoes.

“I should’ve stayed,” Lexie said. It came out in pieces, between breaths. “Friday. With you guys.”

Eliana didn’t answer for a while. The path went downhill and they half slid down it.

“She held my wrist,” she said at the bottom.

Lexie looked over.

“The whole time. When it had me.” Eliana held up her other hand, the good one, and closed it around nothing. “Like this. Her whole hand.”

It took Lexie a second. Eliana watched her get it. Hannah, who held lattes by the rim and wiped her palms on her skirt and hadn’t touched anything properly since the pool.

“Oh,” Lexie said. “I didn’t know...”

Eliana laughed once, and it hurt her chest.

“She said I let you in,” she said. “Just not her.”

Lexie didn’t say anything for a few steps.

“Did you?”

Eliana kept her eyes on the hoofprints and didn’t answer that one either.

They came out of the park onto the street that ran down toward the river. The hoofprints went straight down the middle of it. Far down at the bottom of the hill, under the overpass, Eliana could see the rail yard fence.

At the next corner, someone was leaning on a stop sign.

Gray hoodie. Sleeves shoved up. Messy knot of hair. She was smiling the easy, lopsided smile from every billboard in town, and she lifted one hand off the pole and waved.

Eliana felt Lexie’s step catch, just once.

She didn’t really stop. She didn’t even slow down. She kept running at the stop sign, level with Eliana’s shoulder, and didn’t take her eyes off it.

Cece’s smile dropped. Then it pushed off the pole and bolted down the hill toward the river, hooves skidding on the ice.

Lexie didn’t say anything about it. Eliana didn’t either.

She just ran a little closer.

The hoofprints went under the overpass, through a gap in the rail yard fence, and down the bank to the water.

Lexie got to the gap first and squeezed through. Her hoodie snagged on the wire, and she tore it free and kept going. Eliana came through behind her. On the other side, the snow was gray with soot. The tracks ran off in both directions, with a row of empty freight cars on the nearest one. Past them, the bank dropped down to the river, which was black in the middle and frozen white along the edges.

It was standing at the bottom of the bank with its back to the water.

It had stopped running. Lexie didn’t like that at all.

“Okay,” it said. It had the stage-crew kid’s face back on again, with weed hanging in its wet hair. It sounded out of breath. “Okay. You’re not going to let me go. Fine.”

Then it started putting things on.

That was the only way Lexie could think about it afterward. It was like watching someone get dressed for a blizzard. First its skin went dull and hard and gray, with seams running across it like the panels on a robot, and she knew exactly where it had learned that, from Alfred in the pit. Then light came up in the seams, orange, then white, the same color as the salamander from the fire in October. The snow around its feet hissed and vanished. Then a crackle ran over all of it, little blue threads jumping between its fingers like the wisp in the basement.

Last, the gray hide slid up over everything, wet and slick, from its feet to its neck. Steam poured off it.

It looked at them with a kid’s face on top of all that.

“Go ahead,” it said, and spread its arms. “Sing me your best song.”

Lexie hit it anyway.

She went in low and put everything she had into its ribs, and her fist sank into the hide and stuck. Under the wet, the steel was burning hot. She felt it through the hide, then all at once in her knuckles, and she yelled and yanked and her hand wouldn’t come. The crackle jumped up her arm and her teeth snapped together.

Eliana got there a second later. She came up on its other side and brought the pick down hard on its shoulder. It rang, and then it stuck. Lexie watched the hide nearly pull it out of her fingers before Eliana wrenched it free.

Lexie got her foot on its hip and shoved. Her fist came free with a sound like tape tearing. The skin across her knuckles was white and her sleeve was smoking.

It backed up into the river.

The water should have done something. It went in to its knees and the river just boiled, white and screaming, tearing apart around its legs the same way the pool had. The fire didn’t even flicker.

“It’s pulling the air out of the water,” Eliana said. Her voice was shaking. “It’s the same as the pool. Water won’t do anything.”

Lexie shook her burned hand out and stared at the hide. Wet and grabby. Sticking to everything that touched it.

“It’s like dough,” she said.

“What?”

“When you’re making dough for baking. It sticks to everything, so you dump flour on it, and then it can’t grab anything.” She was talking too fast. “It needs to be dry. We need to make it dry.”

Eliana was already looking past her, up the bank.

Lexie turned. Beside the nearest track there was a squat metal tower, rusted orange, with a chute hanging off it, and a long shed beside it with a pile of raw sand heaped against the wall, a tarp half off and snow on top.

“Sand,” Eliana said. “They keep it for the trains. For traction.” She was breathing hard, her eyes moving between the pile and the river like she was doing math. “The jar. The salamander. We didn’t drown it, we shut it in. It can pull air out of water. It can’t pull it through a pile of sand.”

“Flour and a lid,” Lexie said.

Down in the river, it was wading back toward the bank. Slowly, the water still boiling around it.

“Can you move that?” Lexie said. “All of it?”

Eliana looked at the pile. It was taller than she was.

Then she ran to the track, crouched, and hit the rail with the pick.

It rang like a bell the length of the yard. Lexie went with it without thinking, and she didn’t sing small this time.

back up, back downthis ain’t your townyou heard me oncedon’t make me twice

The tower groaned. The whole pile lifted, all at once, like someone had flipped a table, and came down the bank in one heavy tan wave.

It had just hauled itself out of the river and onto the bank. It looked up at the last second, and then it was gone under it.

The steam stopped. The hissing stopped. For a second there was only the sand, piled up at the water’s edge with snow sliding off the top.

Then the pile moved. Something pushed up through it, slow and heavy, shoulders first. It was caked in sand from head to foot, grit packed into every inch of the hide, and the fire was out.

It was caked in sand from head to foot, a thick gritty crust stuck all over the hide. When it moved, the crust cracked at its elbows and knees, and through the cracks the steel underneath glowed like the coils in a toaster. It shook its head, and grit sprayed off its hair. Then it looked at them, and it didn’t look smug anymore.

The crackle was still there. Little blue threads were still jumping between its fingers, and wherever they touched the sand, they left black specks.

Eliana stared at the threads. Dylan in the robotics lab, half asleep, telling her that electricity always wants the shortest way into the ground. The copper down the basement wall. The rig she built out of a clamp and wires.

She looked at the tracks.

“Lexie,” she said. “Get it to hit the rail.”

Lexie didn’t ask why. She walked backward up the bank until her heels were against the nearest rail. She stood there in her smoking hoodie with her burned hand hanging at her side.

“Hey,” she called down. “You know you got Dylan wrong?”

It stopped.

“His hair,” Lexie said. “He doesn’t comb it. He hasn’t combed it since freshman year. And he’d never hug Emma. She’d kill him.” She tipped her head. “Everybody in that auditorium knew. You looked like a mall Santa.”

It came up the bank fast. Faster than anything that big should move, horse legs digging into the sand.

Lexie didn’t wait for it. She went to meet it.

It swung, and she caught its forearm with both hands, and her hands didn’t stick. The sand crust was rough as a brick and hot through her palms, but it didn’t grab. She held on. For a second they just stood there, shoving at each other on the slope, its sandy face a foot from hers, and Eliana heard Lexie laugh, short and mean, like she couldn’t believe it.

“Yeah,” Lexie said through her teeth. “Not so sticky now.”

It twisted its arm free and hit her in the shoulder with the other one. She went backward and slammed into the rail on her back, and the air went out of her in one huff.

It stood over her. Pulled its fist all the way back.

Lexie rolled.

Its fist went past her ear and into the rail.

The steel rang. The blue crackle went out of its arm all at once and into the track. Eliana watched it run away down the rail in both directions, bright as a lit fuse, over the ties, under the freight cars, and off into the melting snow until she couldn’t see it anymore.

It pulled its fist back and stared at it. Nothing jumped between its fingers now.

“The river,” Eliana said. “Push it back in.”

She didn’t know exactly why. She only knew the fire was out, and it was still glowing, and the river was the only cold thing big enough.

She hit the rail with the pick. Her split fingers opened up again under the tape, and she didn’t care. Lexie came up off the ground singing, hoarse and loud, and the shove took it in the chest and threw it backward down the bank. It hit the river flat on its back.

The water exploded.

It wasn’t the white boil from before. It was one huge crack of steam that went straight up higher than the overpass and rolled out over the bank, so thick Eliana couldn’t see her own hands. The sound was like dropping a hot pan in the sink, only a hundred times bigger.

When the steam thinned, it was on its knees in the shallows.

It had gone dark. Its steel was gray and dull again, wet and steaming. It didn’t glow anywhere. It was trying to stand up, and its arm made a sound when it moved, a stiff little creak.

Eliana went down the bank before a rational thought formed in her mind. She was in the water up to her ankles, and it was so cold it hurt, and she was standing over it.

It looked up at her with the stage-crew kid’s face.

She thought about Hannah’s hand on her wrist.

She brought the pick down on its chest.

It didn’t ring the way it had on the shoulder. It made a short, ugly sound like a plate hitting a tile floor. A crack ran out from under the pick, across its chest, and up over its shoulder. Then another one branched off that, and another, thin and black, like ice when you step on it.

It screamed in about six voices at once.

Then it was scrambling backward out of the river on all fours, pieces of gray flaking off it, and running. It ran along the bank, away from the rail yard, toward the warehouses.

Eliana stood in the water and watched it go. Her hand was bleeding through the tape, all down the pick.

Lexie slid down the bank beside her. She looked at where it was heading, the row of brick buildings past the yard, and then at Eliana.

“That’s the studio,” Lexie said.

It didn’t make it inside.

They found it in the alley behind the warehouses, curled up against the studio door with its back to the metal. Its legs were human again and its hair was just hair. It was still crusted in sand, and cracks ran all over it like a dropped mug that had somehow kept its shape. It was holding its chest together with one arm.

The pressure was barely anything now. A hum, like a fridge in another room.

It looked up when Eliana’s shoes crunched in the snow at the mouth of the alley. Then its face went soft and worried. It was suddenly wearing one of her oversized thrift-store jackets, and it was Mika.

“Lex,” it said in Mika’s voice, small and wobbly. “Lex, hey. It’s okay. You don’t have to do this. Remember when Eliana wouldn’t talk to you, and I was the only person around? I gave you honey sticks…”

Its face slid. Now it was a woman Eliana didn’t know, with tired eyes and her hair pulled back for work, and Lexie’s jaw. Lexie made a sound like she’d been hit, and Eliana understood who it was.

“Baby,” it said. “Please. Come home. Your dad made dinner.”

“Stop it,” Lexie said. “You killed her. You don’t get to wear my mom.”

It opened its mouth like it wanted to say something. Then its face slid again.

It turned to Eliana. It was her dad, in his work jacket, with snow on his shoulders, looking at her the way he had on Friday night in the car, not asking.

“Eli,” it said quietly. “Come on. Put that down. Let’s go home.”

Her dad had never called her Eli in her life.

“No,” Eliana said.

She kept walking. The pick was slick in her fingers. She could hear her own blood in her ears.

It watched her come, and something changed in its face. The pleading went out of it. It dropped her dad like a coat.

Hannah looked up at her from the snow.

Hair down, cheeks pink from the cold, gloves on. Exactly right. She tipped her head and smiled, the small, private one she only did when it was just the two of them.

“She talked to me, you know,” it said, in Hannah’s voice. “In November. When I was you.”

Eliana stopped.

“After the pool. She came and found me, at your locker, and she cried. She said she was scared. Not about the water.” It smiled wider. “She said she was scared you were getting tired of her. That you had somebody new, and you were going to leave like everybody leaves.” It laughed, Hannah’s laugh, bright and a little too loud. “I told her she was being silly. I was so nice about it. I was a better you than you are.”

Eliana couldn’t breathe.

“She said it to your face,” it said. “Well. My face. And you never even knew.”

“Eliana,” Lexie said behind her. “It’s just trying to hurt you.”

But Eliana was already listening. She was thinking about Hannah in the car with her gloves on the wheel. I still would. She was thinking about every morning on the steps, and the latte, and the side door left unlocked, and how she had never once, not one time, thought that Hannah might be scared of losing her.

She wanted it gone. She wanted it to stop wearing that face. She wanted it more than she had wanted anything in her life, more than on the pool deck, more than anything.

She raised the pick.

It looked up at her, and Hannah’s face melted like wax.

Gray stubble. A chipped front tooth. Hair that needed cutting, and a flannel shirt with the elbows worn through, and the same crooked, embarrassed grin from the photo on the shelf.

“Birdie,” Tommy said.