Page 22 of Haunted

I still haven’t answered her. I haven’t answered myself either.

Farley’s front doors look the same as they did two weeks ago. Inside, the smoke smell that hung in the hallways when it was a shelter has been replaced by floor cleaner and body spray. I hear laughter, and lockers banging, and for a few steps it’s just a Monday.

Then it happens, in waves.

The girl closest to the stairwell notices Parker and her face changes, and the boy next to her follows her gaze, and then the next cluster, and the next. Conversations don’t stop all at once. They die in ripples, spreading outward from us.

The teachers standing sentry outside their classroom doors go quiet. Students flatten themselves against their lockers as we pass. He’s been touched by death, and nobody has told them what you’re supposed to do about that.

Rochelle, who has sat next to him in art since ninth grade, takes a step toward us. Then she takes in the black clothes, the hollowed cheeks, the way he’s walking like the air has weight, and she starts crying and doesn’t say anything at all.

Pete lifts a hand to wave, catches the mood, and lowers it again. Two weeks ago they’d at least have said hey in the hall. Now, he doesn’t know what to say. He looks at the other kids, then at Parker, like he’s waiting for somebody to tell him what he’s allowed to say.

We reach his locker and I see what they’ve done. Flowers. Cards taped to the metal. A poster-board sign: “Welcome back! We all missed you!” Someone has tied a stuffed bear to the locker handle. I watch Parker’s face for a reaction, but there’s nothing. He just looks at it the way you look at a math problem you don’t understand.

He opens the locker. More cards inside, pushed through the slats. Notes in careful handwriting. He stares at them for a long time, then turns to face the hallway.

“Thank you for all this,” he says.

His voice does it. That rasp—the smoke-damaged, broken-glass edge that hasn’t gone away—is the loudest thing in the hallway. Someone whispers, “Oh my God, his voice.” A girl I don’t know starts crying. Parker closes his mouth and turns back to his locker. I take the backpack out of his hand and he lets me. He’s strung so tight I can feel it when our arms touch.

“Mr. Bishop?” a voice says behind us.

We both turn. Mr. Robillard, our English teacher—a middle-aged man with thinning dark hair and kind eyes—is standing in his doorway.

“Perhaps you and Mr. Broussard would like to wait inside my room to collect yourselves. I have my first period free, and I’ll be happy to write you a note.”

Parker doesn’t answer him. He turns back to the locker and starts going through it, moving cards aside, lifting the flowers off the shelf and setting them down again, looking for something. He checks and rechecks the bottom.

“I can’t find my history book,” he says.

Nobody moves. His textbooks and his homework and his gym clothes and every drawing he ever made are a layer of ash nine miles from here. He’s just said so out loud to a hallway full of people. Not one of them knows what to do with it. He crouches, staring at the contents of his locker as if he’s making an inventory of what’s not there.

“Leave it with me, Parker,” Mr. Robillard says.

“Thank you,” I say. “I think we’d like that room, if you don’t mind.”

Parker doesn’t look at me when I say we.

Mr. Robillard holds the door and Parker walks through it without waiting for me. Behind us the hallway lets out its breath all at once, forty people exhaling together, and then the door closes and cuts the sound off.

Chapter eight

Parker

Mr. Robillard closes the door behind us and goes back to hall duty. The noise of the hallway resumes on the other side of the glass, muffled and far away, like a television in another room.

It strikes me that this is the first time we’ve been truly alone in the past week. Even in his bedroom, there is always the sense that the walls are thin and there is someone five feet away, ears pricked for evidence that we’re doing things we shouldn’t. Here it’s different. Here we are insulated. The room smells like dry-erase markers and old coffee. I sit at a random desk and imagine just staying here, all day long, like a ghost.

Lance takes the desk next to me and pulls out his phone. “So I think I can meet you after your first two classes, but it’s a stretch getting from your Art to my Algebra II, because then I’ll have to book back to the other side of school. It’ll only be about thirty seconds to check in, So it might be just better if you shoot me a text for that one. Is that okay?” he says, scrolling. “And of course, there’s lunch. You’re on B lunch, right?”

“Yeah.” I have no idea how he knows that.

“I’m on A lunch right now. Good, We’ll at least pass by each other as we change, so I can check in on you.”

We. There’s a we now. I wasn’t ready for a we. I’m barely even a me anymore.

“I don’t want you to do that,” I say.