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Trace sets the gun down and a dull whine fills my head, my heart breaks in half. His hands hover over her like he’s afraid to touch her and Cary shines the light on her slowly and I see red, her stomach is red.
“Oh Grace,” I say. “Grace—”
“I’m okay,” she assures us, and she tries to get up again but she can’t and her eyes settle into a kind of understanding that makes me want to run so far away.
“No,” Trace says. “I didn’t—I didn’t—” He pulls her upright into his arms and she cries out and he moans like her pain is his. She buries her face in his chest. “Talk to me. ” He shakes her a little. “Grace, talk to me. Please. ”
This didn’t happen. This is not happening.
“I don’t want to die,” she says.
I step back. Rhys wraps his fingers around mine, stopping me.
I can’t feel it.
“Okay, don’t talk if you’re going to say things like that. ” Trace squeezes his eyes shut. “I’m sorry—I am so, so sorry, Grace—”
“Don’t be mad,” she whispers. “Please don’t be mad at me. ”
“I could never be mad at you,” he says, and she starts to cry because it’s all she can do, the last thing she’ll ever do. “Grace, come on. ”
“Please don’t be mad. ” Her voice is getting smaller and smaller. “I don’t want to do this to you…”
“Then don’t—come on, don’t do this to me—you don’t have to do this to me…”
But she does. Grace dies in the hall, in her brother’s arms, in our school in this stupid, unforgiving world where there are no phones or ambulances or hospitals or doctors. She closes her eyes and she tries so hard to stay, but in the end she lets us go.
Trace asks to be left alone with her body.
We wait for him in the auditorium. No one speaks. We try, but our voices sound funny when we do, our words awkward and stiff as they fall from our tongues, like we are just learning to talk. It is hard to hear anything over the ringing in my ears, the beating of my heart, the air entering and leaving my own lungs.
Harrison is curled up on his mat, crying.
I want to hurt him until he stops.
Seconds pass, minutes pass, hours pass. The sun rises. When Trace finally comes in, we are all so much older. His eyes are red and swollen and his face is drained of color. There is blood on him—Grace’s blood stains his shirt, his pants.
Even knowing this, I look for her. I look past him for her. She’s not there. Half of me understands this but half of me refuses to believe it and that half of me is waiting for her so we can talk about this. We can’t talk about her being dead without her being here.
Trace looks at us and no one says anything.
There is nothing any of us can say.
Seeing him makes Harrison cry harder. He covers his mouth and sobs. Grace kissed that mouth when she was alive. Cary’s mouth. It hits me again: Grace is dead. Just like that, there is no Grace. We live in a world without Grace.
“Where is she?” Rhys finally asks.
“I took her to Ms. Yee’s room,” he says. “She’s there. ”
My eyes drift to Grace’s mat. Where she should be. Some of her things are still scattered around. The clothes she wore yesterday. Rhys asks if we can see her and Trace tells us no. He crosses the room to Grace’s mat. He picks up her sweater and buries his face in it. He starts to cry and the material can’t muffle the sound. We sit there and watch him uselessly until he raises his head.
“This is real, isn’t it? That happened. ” And then he calls her name. “Grace? I—”
There is no answer.
He stares blankly at nothing and then he grabs her blanket, her pillow, and walks out of the auditorium. The air is too heavy to breathe. I can’t breathe. I get to my feet and I leave and I walk down the hall, my hand against the wall to steady myself because the world is moving, it’s moving under my feet until I finally have to stop and just sit on the floor. I don’t know how long I’m there before Rhys is beside me, helping me stand.
We walk back to the auditorium together.
There is a window in the basement we never barricaded.
This window is at the back of the school, facing the athletic field. It’s close to the ground and semi-concealed by boxwood. That’s how Baxter got in. It would be a forgivable oversight except as soon as Cary tells us about it, we all see it in our heads and it is the most painful kind of realization. The next stupid thing: shelves were placed in front of that window, a barricade. Baxter put them there the first time and then fought them down the second but don’t worry, Cary tells us, nothing else found its way in after Baxter came, after Grace died.
We checked that basement and we looked at those shelves.
“It wasn’t obvious,” Rhys says, like that should make it okay that we looked at those shelves and never considered the possibility of a window behind them. It actually makes it worse. We all knew Baxter was lying about forgetting, he wanted to use it as leverage so why wouldn’t he hide it from us? Why wouldn’t we look for something hidden?
“Where is he?” Rhys asks. “Where did you put his body?”
“He’s in the basement. ” Cary stares at his hands and then he shakes his head. “I can’t believe he came back just to do that. ”
“We sent him outside to die,” Rhys says. “Why can’t you?”
“Someone should check on him,” Harrison says. “Trace, I mean. ”
“You do it,” Cary tells him. “You’re closer to him than we are. ”
Harrison’s eyes widen. “I don’t want to—I don’t want to see her—”
“You wouldn’t. ”
“That’s not fair. ”
“Yeah, well, he can’t stay in that room forever. We have to go to Rayford. ”
“Jesus,” Rhys says. “He just lost his sister, Cary. Give him a couple of days. ”
“You think he’ll still go with us?” I ask.
Cary shrugs.
“I’ll check on him,” I say.
I leave the room without looking back. Each step forward is a slow and hateful thing. I am going upstairs to see Trace, who is sitting with Grace’s body. I bite my lip and tears come. I think the worst part is knowing it hasn’t really sunk in yet. This is just the surface of it, like when Lily left. First there was the shock, this total implosion, and then numbness and every so often it would hit me in waves, just to remind me it was still there. Each wave was worse than the last. A full-body ache, this heaviness, seeing the world in gray.
I’m standing outside of Yee’s classroom when I hear Grace’s voice.
She’s talking to Trace.
Relief surges through my veins, makes me weak. I knew it was a mistake, some unreality. I knew she was alive. I knew it. I push the door open and it slams into the wall. Trace sits on Yee’s desk and my eyes pass over him in search of Grace but they don’t see her how they expect to see her. They come to rest in the middle of the room, where all the desks are pushed together to display—her. She’s covered with a sheet, but her voice—
I still hear her.
I turn to Trace. He’s holding the camcorder.
My heart crashes.
“We made a video,” he tells me because he doesn’t know I know. “In case…” He pushes a button and Grace’s voice stops and the room gets colder as soon as it does. “The battery will run out soon and then I’ll never hear her again. ”
The air tastes funny. Strange. Everything is different now. The school is so alien. You’d think this place only ever belonged to us, that it was always ours and it is something so much less with one less of us in it.
“Can I see her?”
“You don’t want to see her. ” He holds up the camcorder. “You can see her here. Alive. ”
I walk over to him, never unaware of the other presence in the room. I don’t know how he stands it. I sit next to him, lean in c
lose, and stare at the tiny LCD screen. It’s paused on the two of them.
The quality isn’t that great. It’s fuzzy. Trace didn’t adjust the settings for recording at night and the only thing illuminating them is the flashlight and it makes Grace look unreal on top of unreal. I have this urge to find my way into the video, to tell her what’s coming. Grace, did you ever imagine that you’d die. He turns it off and looks at me. His eyes are empty.
“Do you need anything?” I ask. “I can get you … anything. ”
“No,” he says. “You can’t. ”
It gets quiet again. And then—
“Do you think if we brought one of those things in … if we brought one of those things in and they bit her … she’d…” His voice cracks. “Do you think she’d come back?”
“No,” I say, my stomach turning. “No. She wouldn’t. It’s too late…”
“Were you going to stay with us?” he asks. “She told me she asked you. Were you going to?” My mouth goes dry. “Don’t lie to me. Just tell me if you were. ”
“I wasn’t sure. ”
“She really wanted you to come. I wasn’t so sure but she liked you. ”
“I know. ”
“She said you didn’t know if you’d go because of Rhys. ”
“It wasn’t because of Rhys. ”
“But she really liked you. ” It’s almost an accusation. I don’t say anything. He rubs his eyes. “If I step out for a second—will you stay with her? I hate when she’s alone…”
I nod. Even so, it takes him a long time to leave. His entire being resists it. I can see the fight happening in him. He finally steps out. Leaves me alone with her. I know he’ll be quick so I know I have to be too, which means there is no time to prepare. I hurry to the center of the room, the desks, her body.