notebook from her bag carefully, and lined them up on her desk … a full two minutes before class even started.
Mr. Gerry nodded with approval at her from his lab stool up front.
“What is going on here?” I muttered.
The rest of the class filtered in, including Jennifer Meyer, who was wearing the absolute worst plaid miniskirt. I shuddered. Plaid was so … mid-nineties.
The bell rang, and for the next thirty-three minutes, I saw a completely different Joonie Travis. She raised her hand on almost every question, volunteered to hand out safety goggles, and even put on a protective glove that no one else had to wear — Mr. Gerry thought the piercing in the web between her thumb and first finger might get overheated near the flames of the Bunsen burner — without complaint.
Now, you’re probably thinking, “Oh, how nice. The High Priestess of Pain found something she is good at that is also relatively socially acceptable.” Well, let me tell you that … she sucked. She got most of the answers wrong, and the ones she didn’t, it was only because she flipped through the textbook wildly before raising her hand. She also dropped two beakers — empty ones, thank God — and partially melted her own safety glasses when she leaned too close to the burner’s flame. In short, she was a disaster. But she kept trying … something I didn’t understand. At least, not until the last ten minutes of class.
When the clock reached 2:15, a full fifteen minutes before the end of class and the end of school, Joonie stopped working and began putting all of her equipment away. By 2:20, she was parked on her lab stool, books put away and bag zipped up, staring at Mr. Gerry.
After sighing at another pathetic attempt at the daily experiment by Jennifer Meyer and Ashleigh Hicks, Mr. Gerry finally looked up and saw Joonie, her foot jiggling against the stool legs and her body ramrod straight with tension. He nodded reluctantly at her, and Joonie leaped to her feet, slung her bag over her shoulder, and practically ran from the room.
Caught off guard by her sudden exit — I was entertaining myself by watching Jesse McGovern use the Bunsen burner to heat and bend plastic straws swiped from the caf into swearword sculptures — I had to run to catch up.
Joonie tucked her head down and darted down the hall and the stairs, through the main hall, and out the front doors. Interesting … she’d better hope that Brewster didn’t catch sight of her. He was exactly the type to bust her for skipping school, even if it was only the last ten minutes.
Breaking into a light jog — I hate sweating — I caught up with her near the Circle and tagged along out to her car, the Death Bug. She tossed her bag in the back, climbed in, and started the car while I was still talking myself into sliding through the metal.
She began backing out.
“Hey, watch it!” I threw myself the rest of the way into the car, trying to ignore the cold shuddery feeling I got from passing through the door. “What is your big freaking hurry?”
Joonie pulled out of the parking lot at, like, the speed of light, throwing gravel everywhere and leaving a huge trail of dust in her wake. She turned right onto Henderson, and then left onto Main. A couple more turns and it was obvious: we were heading into town.
Referring to it as “town” sort of gave the impression that Decatur was the cultural center of the area. It was, however, where most of the jobs were — people just lived in the little towns outside, like Groundsboro, and drove in to work at the factories. On a day with a strong breeze, you could catch a whiff of ADM or Staley’s, processing soybeans in town. It smelled like instant mashed potatoes. There’d been days when I couldn’t wait to get away from here and that smell. But now, honestly, if I’d caught the scent, I might have felt a little comforted. I’d died, but some things still stayed the same.
Anyway, Decatur did offer a few things — a movie theater, a mall, and a hospital. Actually, the big movie theater and the mall were technically part of Forsyth, another dinky little town clinging to the edges of Decatur, but that probably didn’t matter, since I doubted Joonie was going anywhere for fun.
My hunch was confirmed when, twenty minutes later, the Death Bug pulled into the visitors’ parking lot of St. Catherine’s Hospital. Joonie had mentioned visiting Lily in the hospital. I sat up straight in my seat. Finally, this was getting good! Maybe now I’d get some answers.
Joonie slammed the gear shift into park, snagged her bag off the floor by my feet, and hustled out of the car toward the hospital. With a sigh, I followed her, albeit at a slower pace. I didn’t understand what the big hurry was. If Lily was in the hospital, it wasn’t like she had other plans anytime soon, right?
Joonie pushed through the revolving door, and I slipped into the compartment after hers, letting her do all the work of moving the heavy glass and metal. She headed immediately for the elevator and pressed the up button. While we waited — I might have figured out how to pass through walls and solid objects, but levitation seemed a bit more of a stretch and I didn’t particularly feel like searching out the stairs — I noticed a lot of nurses coming and going with their lunch bags and jackets. Shift change, probably?
The elevator finally arrived, and Joonie pushed the button for the fifth floor. A short ride later, during which I very deliberately concentrated on thinking about how very
Joonie stepped off the elevator and immediately headed to the left, like she knew exactly where she was going. The nurses manning—
I watched Joonie stop at a door midway down the hall and step inside. A second later, her head reappeared, looking up and down the hallway, before she slapped either a yellow sticker or magnet on the outside of the door and shut it gently.
Interesting. Automatically glancing back over my shoulder at the busy nurses, like they could see me, I headed toward the now-closed door. When I got closer, I could see it was a magnet she’d put on the metal door frame, and it read, bathing. privacy please.
“What the hell?” I muttered.
“Don’t you know you’re on the kids’ floor?”
Startled, I looked down to see a little blond girl with pigtails, staring up at me from her old-fashioned wooden wheelchair.
She sighed in disgust and rolled on down the hall, passing through the wall. Yep, dead like me. Maybe it was a good thing Killian hadn’t come with me. The hospital was probably full of spirits.
I approached the door Joonie had closed and cautiously peered in, ignoring the chill against my face.
At first, it appeared to be your standard hospital room. Blah beige walls with a matching tile floor, a puke green curtain hung on a rack in the ceiling so it could be pulled for privacy from annoying roommates, and a television mounted high on the wall. That old cartoon
The girl in the bed, though, was my first clue that not everything was as it seemed. I recognized her, sort of, as the girl in the picture Joonie had pulled up earlier. I mean, I recognized her, but she only vaguely resembled the person she’d once been. Her dull and glazed eyes stared straight ahead, about three feet below the television. A jagged scar, still puffy and red, decorated the left side of her face from her hairline down to her jaw. There were no tubes or anything, other than an IV, and a monitor with her heartbeat showing, so she was obviously breathing on her own, just not much else.
The weird part was that seeing her this way, as a three-dimensional, albeit damaged person rather than a flat image on a screen, finally made it click for me. I knew where I’d seen her before. Months ago, she’d been one of Ben Rogers’s girls, another stupid and willing underclassman. Really, I’d only seen her a few times with Ben before they broke up …or at least, that’s what I assumed happened.
She was new, as of last year, I thought. Didn’t have many friends. I’d never seen her with Killian or Joonie … as far as I knew. To be fair, though, until recently they were not a demographic I would have bothered noticing. People like them don’t even vote for homecoming queen.
I tried to remember the last time I’d seen this girl, Lily Whatever — Turner, that sounded right. Maybe Ben’s back-to-school bash? I did remember something about a car accident a few miles away, one they were going to try
