I gently laid the remains of the once grey tweed skirt aside, touching the fabric gently as though showing this inanimate object a moment of tenderness could soften the blow for its owner.
“Find anything yet?” I asked, once I got back in the Dumpster.
“No. I don’t know if that’s bad or good.” He stepped back. “This is where the fire was centered. See that?”
He pointed to a blackened circle, then toed the small mountain of grey-white ash in its center.
“I was here when I found the skirt,” I said, using my hands to dig through the spaghetti. The stench was overwhelming—burnt plastic and garbage—but I was so focused on finding the rest of the charred uniform—and hopefully not the girl who had worn it—that I didn’t care.
“Wait.” My hand closed around something soft and I pulled. A stretch of fabric that used to be white slid through the debris. I winced. “It’s a blouse. Part of it.”
Will leaned in. “It’s not burned.”
“No. It’s torn.” I rubbed my finger across the sodden, frayed edge of the shirt and pulled back when something sliced across my flesh. “Ow!”
“Something get you?” He took my hand in his and rubbed the tucked tail of his shirt over my thumb. “You’re bleeding. That’s not good.”
“What got me?”
Will took the fabric scrap from my hand, then produced a small, filthy pin attached at what looked to be the shirt’s collar. He rubbed the muck from the pin and I could see that it was made of a cheap gold fashioned into a tiny lock with a key inside.
I took the fabric and examined the pin. “It’s a Lock and Key pin. It’s a club on campus. Every member gets one of them.”
I laid the piece of fabric on the end of the Dumpster, smoothing it out and shining up the pin. It glinted in the sunlight and my heart ached. Lock and Key was a club you had to be admitted into— only students with the best grades and community service records were allowed and it looked great on Ivy League applications. When I was at Mercy, Lock and Key was basically a country club for the already perfect, a tiny golden promise to keep the classes pure.
“What’s this?” Will yanked something then stood upright, offering it to me. My heart thudded.
“It’s a girl’s shoe.”
His face was sallow, his eyes glassy and rimmed with red. “You found a sock earlier.”
Tears pricked behind my eyes, but I wouldn’t let them fall. “Keep searching.”
We worked in frenzied silence, tearing open bags and tossing aside contents, and when there was nothing left to go through, we climbed over the side of the Dumpster one last time. I laid the shoe next to the remains of the skirt and blouse.
“Well, there was no body in there, so I suppose that’s good.”
“And we don’t even know who this skirt belonged to. It could be anyone. We should still report it to the police, though. Call Alex?”
“Sure,” I said, trying my best to convince myself. “But the whole thing could be nothing at all. Just common . . . uniform . . . burning.”
Will’s eyes flashed. I appreciated him not trying to rush me to the obvious.
“I mean, this shoe could be—” I stopped, biting off my words, keeping them back with my gritted teeth. Though the sole was melted completely on one side, it was untouched on the other. Untouched by fire, at least.
“Alyssa,” I whispered. I fingered the name drawn in fat letters and decorated with ballpoint ink stars and hearts. “Someone was trying to get rid of evidence.”
Chapter Three
I was congratulating myself for nearly getting through my first day at Mercy while my last class of the day was filing in. I went to turn around and found myself nose to cosmetically perfected nose with Fallon.
I cleared my throat and gripped my briefcase so tightly that I could feel my fingernails digging little half- moons into my palms.
My mind sprung into action and I pasted on a grin, then relived—in rapid succession—every humiliation I had ever suffered in these halls, at the hands of girls in identical skirts.
I felt myself start to tremble.
I quickly whipped up a memory of staking a big baddie vampire, of defeating a couple of crazed psychopaths, of having the super-popular-girl luck of seeing a fallen angel
I was pretty kick-ass.
“Are you mute or something?”
The snark in the comment—and Fallon moving toward her seat—thunked me back to the classroom and I blew out a sigh.
“No, sorry, ladies. I was just thinking about when I was a student here at Mercy.” A few girls leaned forward, a few raised their eyebrows, showing vague interest. Fallon whipped out a file and went to work on her right hand.
“My name is”—I paused, scanned—“Ms. Lawson, and I’ll be taking over for the time being while Mrs. Prusch is on medical leave.”
“You mean in the nuthouse.”
I was beginning to recognize Fallon’s voice with every part of my body. Just the sound of her spitting words poked at my stomach.
“Shut up, Fallon.” The mumbled quip came from a girl sitting in the front row. I smiled.
“Hi, again.”
Miranda looked up at me. Sitting in front of me at her desk, she somehow looked much smaller than she had in the cafeteria. She didn’t greet me, just went back to her book. I scanned my girls, then looked back at Miranda.
In real life, she was pretty. She had deep olive skin with thick, black brows and a head of fuzzy, dark curls that rolled over her shoulder. In high school world, however, she may as well have been wearing a kick-me sign: she was enviably thin (from a thirty-three-year-old’s point of view) with curves that the mean girls would call fat. Her curls were gorgeous and natural but neglected and unruly (similar to my own, which had earned me the quaint nickname Electric Head), and she bore the high school equivalent to leprosy: a decent case of acne that peppered her nose and chin.
“I had the pleasure of meeting Miranda at lunch today.” I looked up, thinking my connection to the obvious outcast would make her seem adult and cool. But the mention of her name—as if it were the punch line of some untold joke—caused a quiet ripple of laughter through the classroom. I felt myself bristle, then grabbed Mrs. Prusch’s role book and went through the hallowed high school ritual of butchering the students’ surnames and, in this decade of Ja Net (pronounced
Didn’t anyone name her kid Jennifer anymore?
“Uh, Kayleigh?”
“Here.” A strawberry blond raised her hand as if it weighed eight hundred pounds and her one-word response would be the last she’d ever utter.
“Finleigh?”
Kayleigh’s neighbor to her right gave me a finger wave and a dazzling smile.
“And . . . so—I’m sorry, I’m not sure how to pronounce this.”
Big blue eyes rolled backward like a slot machine. “It’s pronounced
