Chapter Twelve: In Which I Cannot Sleep, or, Restless Thoughts

It occurred to me that night, as I lay flat on my back in bed, the sheets kicked into a tangled mess at the edge of my footboard, that Dr. Livesely might be right.

  Despite the lateness of the hour, two a.m. to be precise, I was still wide awake. The suffocating heat wouldn’t let me get comfortable. To help with that, I had thrown my window open completely, but, unfortunately, the night air offered only an occasional whisper of wind, so it wasn’t particularly helping me cool off. Instead, it ended up contributing to my general inability to sleep, as, every so often, there would be just enough of a breeze that my curtains would abruptly stir and flap eerily, which jarred my ears and tickled the edge of my peripheral vision with the image of phantoms. Plus, I couldn’t escape the niggling feeling at the back of my mind which told me that somebody was going to come crawling in through my window. The latter was ridiculous, and I knew it, but my brain didn’t care.

  My thoughts, however, kept me awake even more than anything but the heat. No matter how hard I tried to get them to stop, they continued constantly shifting from Glass Farthingdale and all her mysteries, to Dr. Livesely, to the anonymous letter I had written about Dr. Livesely’s conduct and then slipped under the Headmaster’s door, to the doctor’s statements about me that had hit much too close to home. The latter especially haunted me, and wouldn’t leave for long.

  As much as I hated the idea that Dr. Livesely might be right about me, I was fairly certain he was. Not because I trusted his judgment. No, not at all. It was because I couldn’t even think about Glass Farthingdale now without recognizing the truth. Because there was a part of me that wanted to share the clues that I had found with somebody else, to somebody almost as interested in them as I was. I wanted to discuss with someone everything that I had learned so far, and maybe get some fresh views or a different perspective. But, I couldn’t. There was nobody to share it with. And this wasn’t just because Walken hardly spoke and likely wouldn’t be interested, nor was it because most of the other students probably wouldn’t care about what I did. It was because I couldn’t bring myself to tell them. Not only that, but I didn’t want to.

  But why? Part of that was because I didn’t want to gossip. It’s one thing to snoop around and find things out for yourself, and it’s an entirely different thing to pass on that information to other people. But it wasn’t just that. I didn’t want to tell them anything.

  I rolled onto my side, my sweaty nightdress trying to stick to the fitted sheet underneath me. Tucking my right arm under my head, I stared hard at my slightly fluttering curtains, their usual pale green color almost bleached white in the moonlight, a stark contrast to the dark, boxy silhouette of books on my desk, looking like scattered gravestones in the shadows past my window. A swelling emptiness stabbed me with an unrelenting grasp.

  “You were fighting because you are alone,” Dr. Livesely had said, “and you trust no one.”

  He was right. I’d never quite made the connection to my fighting, but I knew I didn’t trust anyone. Not my mother. Not my father. Not the Headmaster. Not any of the faculty. Not the students. Not Walken. And certainly not Dr. Livesely.

  Because, in my experience, people didn’t really care. They didn’t care about you, even if maybe they should’ve, even if you cared about them. They didn’t care about what you did, or how you thought, or how you felt. And the fact that they didn’t care already made them untrustworthy.

  Then, of course, there were people who pretended that they cared, like Dr. Livesely. And they always betrayed you in the end by doing something like breaking confidentiality.

  I certainly did not trust people.

  But did that mean that I didn’t want to? No. I did want to, at least a little bit. I wanted to have at least one friend. I wanted someone to understand me, at least a little. I wanted to be able to understand someone else, and them to actually care about the fact that I did. I wanted to be able to tell Walken, “My hobbies are snooping and reading. What are yours?” and him to be able to carry on with the conversation. I wanted to be able to have a conversation with somebody. If somebody asked me, “What’s your name?”, or even something just barely personal, like, “Besides your session, what did you do this weekend?”, I wanted to be able to answer naturally. I wanted to be able to say, “Gale,” without feeling like socking them for knowing too much, or to answer without being completely tongue-tied or instantly suspicious of them.

  I figured that not everybody was going to betray me. But did that bit of logic help? No; no, it did not. Because, despite all my reasoning with myself, despite all my snooping, despite all the minimal evidence that people could actually care about other people deeply, I couldn’t believe that anybody would care about me. And because I couldn’t believe it, I didn’t want to give anyone the chance to prove my fears right, after murdering the last of my hopes and dreams. 

  Determined to think about something else, I rolled over again, this time to face the wall, and began going over my plans for the next day. Sunday was the only day students were allowed to visit the nearby town of Frore North, and I was going to make the best of it.

Chapter Thirteen: In Which I Bike to Town, or, An Uncanny Connection

“You look awful,” remarked Bernard Stibbins, our overly cheerful, red-headed physical education teacher, handing me the key to the bike shed. He was one of the only consistently nice people at Norlocke, and consequently one of the most well-liked teachers. I didn’t particularly like him, though. People who acted like they cared were significantly more dangerous than people who acknowledged that they didn’t. “Did you sleep at all last night?”

  I reached for the key without responding, but Bernard swung it back and over his head. Apparently, he wasn’t going to give it to me unless I answered. He was irritating that way.

  I tried not to glower at him as he stared back at me, a mixture of what might’ve been concern and humor playing across his features. After the night I’d had, I wasn’t in the mood for either. Exercise was just what I needed at the moment, and I wasn’t about to let a poky teacher get in the way of that and my plan for the day.

  “I’ll just jimmy the lock,” I finally said, refusing to answer him.

  “You’ll get detention,” he wheedled.

  “I don’t care.”

  He waited a few more moments, then, apparently convinced I wasn’t going to cooperate, sighed and held out the key.

  I snatched it before he could take it away again. “Thank you.” My words sounded hollow and tired, but at least they weren’t angry.

  “Don’t get into trouble,” he said as I left. “In town or otherwise.”

  Moments later, I sat perched atop my bike, pedaling like mad for town. Norlocke quickly grew small behind me, and my sleep-deprived brain began to wake up.

  Frore North, located just southwest of Norlocke, was a good twelve miles away from the school. On nicer days, when the dirt road consisted of actual dirt, I could bike to town in about forty minutes. On bad days, which were honestly most of them, when the dirt road consisted of mud five inches deep, chunky ice, or lay buried beneath three feet of snow, it could take anywhere between an hour and a half, or six hours.

  The road would’ve been mud that day after the unusual downpour if it hadn’t been for the past few days’ infernal heat, which instead made everything dry and dusty. After only a few minutes of pedaling, dirt coated my shoes, socks, and the bottom of my skirt, and every so often I had to cough from all the dust I was breathing in. However, it was still ultimately an enjoyable ride, since dust surpasses mud on almost every level, and it was still early enough that the horrendous heat remained mostly tolerable.

  As I biked, my thoughts strayed from my plans for the day to, once again, the words I’d overheard Ms. Harcourt say. Just promise me, then, that there will be no storms. No matter how hard I had tried over the past few days, I couldn’t shake that little sentence from my mind. Even now, I could hear the terror in Ms. Harcourt’s voice, the tremor in her words, and her rapid, frantic breathing. Why had she been so scared? Why had she been so insistent that there could be no storms?

  One conclusion could perhaps be that whatever Glass’ issues were, storms exacerbated them. I had very little information to back up this theory, but it made some sense to me. After all, she was likely expelled from five different schools, and she’d have to have done something immense – on multiple different occasions – to accomplish that. However, for her not to have been sent to Norlocke immediately, it couldn’t be horrendous enough that the faculty of the next school wouldn’t mind taking her on, or it would have to seem like a minimal risk due to its rarity. So, having her issues come and go seemed like a rational idea. Not to mention that Norlocke didn’t really have any storms. Besides, other than her rather arrogant, cold, and closed-off behavior, Glass didn’t seem all that awful based off of what I had observed of her. If I hadn’t read that she’d attended five different schools in less than five years, I wouldn’t have believed it.

  Thoughts of my stolen moments reading Glass’ file brought to mind Dr. Livesely’s session yesterday with Glass, specifically one of his questions. He’d asked, “Are you willing to discuss any of the disasters at your previous schools?” At the time, I’d thought the question and choice of words revealing and curious, but I hadn’t had time to fully process them, being too busy listening to the rest of the conversation.

  Now, though, as Frore North slowly began to emerge from the hazy distance, I had plenty of time. And my thoughts immediately connected Dr. Livesely’s question with Ms. Harcourt’s plea. After all, a synonym for storm can be natural disaster.

  Which brought about a whole new line of thought.

  If Glass’ issues were exacerbated, or even brought about, by storms, then what had Dr. Livesely meant? Using “disaster” to describe any episodes that Glass might have had seems extremely thoughtless of any psychologist, and unusual for Dr. Livesely in particular. He was usually so careful. It didn’t seem to me that he would use such a descriptive and negative word for any problems that Glass might have caused in the past. Which meant that when he asked Glass about the disasters at her previous schools, he probably wasn’t referring to disasters caused by herself.

  So, what was he referring to?

  My thoughts flew back to natural disasters, then connected to the strange weather anomalies we’d been having ever since Glass had arrived. An unexplained and uneasy dread slowly began to fill me up. Despite the heat that had burnt across the flat, beige landscape the moment the sun rose, I felt cold.

  With a sudden burst of speed aided by the uncomfortable feelings digging into my chest, I pedaled into Frore North.

  And promptly crashed into one of the very few people out and on the streets.

  The hard dirt road rose up towards me with a malicious greeting, and pounded against the left side of my head. For a second, everything went fuzzy, and I felt my bike collapse on top of me, pinning my left leg under its metal body, and flaying the skin on my right leg with the pedal.

  Ow, I thought.