Forever

“What about Dad?”

“Dad can get a ride with Marshall. They’re a good couple.”

I looked up then. “They’ll see me.”

She shook her head. “We’ll go out the door on this side. We don’t have to go past the table. I’ll call him.” She used a tissue from her purse to dab my chin. “I hate this goddamn restaurant.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Okay?”

“Okay.”

She stood up and I took her hand so she could pull me up. “You shouldn’t sit on the floor, though — it’s filthy and you could pick up rotavirus or MRSA or something. Why do you have a piece of bread in your shirt?”

I picked the crumbs delicately out of my shirt. Standing next to each other in the mirror, my mother and I looked eerily similar, only my face was a tearful, disheveled ruin and hers was not. The exact opposite of the twelve months leading up to this point.

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s go before they start singing again.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

GRACE

I didn’t remember being woken up. I just remembered being. I sat up, blinking against the harsh light, cupping my face in my hands and smoothing my skin. I ached — not like from a shift, but like I had been caught under a landslide. Beneath me, the floor was a cold and unforgiving tile. There was no window and a row of blinding lightbulbs above the sink made everything permanent daylight.

It took me a moment to pull myself together enough to look around and then another moment to process what I was seeing. A bathroom. A framed postcard of some mountains next to the sink. A glass-walled shower, no tub. A closed door. Recognition dawned all at once — this was the upstairs bathroom at Beck’s house. Oh. What that meant hit me all at once: I’d made it back to Mercy Falls. I’d made it back to Sam.

Too stunned to be properly appreciative, I climbed to my feet. Beneath my toes, the tile of the floor was spread with mud and dirt. The color of it — a sick yellow — made me cough, choking on water that wasn’t there.

Movement caught my eye, and I froze, my hand over my mouth. But it was just me: In the mirror, a na**d version of Grace with a lot of ribs and wide eyes looked out, her mouth covered by fingers. I lowered my hand to touch my lowest rib and, as if on cue, my stomach growled.

“You look a little feral,” I whispered to myself, just to watch my mouth move. I still sounded like me. That was good.

On the corner of the sink sat a pile of clothing, folded with the extreme tidiness of someone who generally either folded a lot of clothing or none at all. I recognized it from my backpack, the one I’d brought when I came to Beck’s house however many months ago. I pulled on my favorite long-sleeved white T and a blue T-shirt over the top of it; they were like old friends. Then jeans and socks. No bra or shoes — they were both back at the hospital, or wherever things left behind at hospitals by bleeding girls went.

What it came down to was this: I was a girl who turned into a wolf, and I had almost died, and the thing that was going to bother me the most all day was that I was going to have to go around without a bra.

Underneath the clothing was a note. I felt a weird little tickle in my stomach when I saw Sam’s familiar handwriting, all run together and barely legible.

GRACE — THIS IS POSSIBLY THE WORST THING I’VE EVER DONE, SHUT MY GIRLFRIEND IN MY BATHROOM. BUT WE DIDN’T KNOW WHAT ELSE TO DO WITH YOU UNTIL YOU SHIFTED. I PUT YOUR CLOTHING IN HERE. DOOR’S NOT LOCKED SO YOU CAN JUST OPEN IT SOON AS YOU HAVE FINGERS. I CAN’T WAIT TO SEE YOU. — S

Happiness. That’s what the feeling was. I held the note in my hands and tried to remember the events he’d written about. I tried to remember being shut in here, being retrieved from the woods. It was like trying to remember an actor’s name after being shown his vaguely familiar face. My thoughts danced maddeningly out of my reach. Nothing, nothing, and then — I was choking on the memory of darkness and mud. Shelby. I remembered Shelby. I had to swallow, hard, and I looked up at myself in the mirror again. My face was afraid, my hand pressed to my throat.

I didn’t like what my face looked like afraid; it looked like some other girl I didn’t recognize. I stood there and composed it carefully until the Grace in the mirror was the one I knew, and then I tried the doorknob. As Sam had said, it was unlocked, and I stepped into the hall.

I was surprised to find that it was night. I could hear the hum of appliances downstairs, the whisper of air through heating vents, the sounds an occupied house made when it thought no one was listening. I remembered that Sam’s room was to my left, but its open doorway was dark. To my right, another door at the end of the hall stood open, and light spilled out into the hallway. I chose that option, padding past photographs of Beck and others smiling and, weirdly enough, a collection of socks nailed to the wall in an artistic pattern.

I peered into the bright doorway and found Beck’s room. After half a second, I realized that I had no true reason to believe it to be Beck’s room. It was all rich greens and blues, dark wood and simple patterns. A reading lamp on the bedside table illuminated a stack of biographies and a pair of reading glasses. There was nothing particularly identifying about it. It was just a very comfortable and simple room, in the same way that Beck seemed comfortable and simple.

But it wasn’t Beck who lay on the mattress; it was Cole, sprawled crosswise, his feet dangling off the edge, toes pointing at the floor. A little leather book lay on its face beside him. On his other side was a mess of loose papers and photographs.

Cole looked asleep among the mess. I started to back out, but when my foot hit a creaky section of floor, he made a noise into the blue comforter.

“Are you awake?” I asked.

“Da.”

He turned his face as I came around to the end of the bed. I felt like I was in a hotel room then, this nice, tidy, unfamiliar room with its sparse color-coordination, glowing desk lamp, and its sense of abandonment.

Cole looked up at me. His face was always a shock: so good looking. I had to make a conscious effort to put that aside in order to be able to talk to him like a real person. He couldn’t help what his face looked like. I was going to ask him where Sam was, but on second thought, that seemed pretty rude, to just use Cole as a signpost.

“Is this Beck’s room?” I asked.

Cole stretched his arm out across the comforter toward me and made a thumbs-up.

“Why are you sleeping here?”

“I wasn’t sleeping,” Cole said. He rolled onto his back. “Sam never sleeps. I’m trying to learn his secrets.”