Until It Hurts To Stop

Until It Hurts To Stop - Chapter 2

Two

At the end of lunch, I escape to the girls’ room, where I check under the stalls for feet. I pick the stall farthest from everyone else, double-check the bolt, and stand with my eyes closed.

Raleigh Barringer.

What the hell is she doing back here? And what is she going to do to me this time?

Toilets flush; girls talk and laugh; faucets run. All of it echoes off the cold olive tile, ringing against my skull.

I need to think, to get myself together. I might run into Raleigh in the hallway at any moment. If I’m really unlucky, I might meet her at the sinks in a few seconds. I have to know what to say, how to act.

The bathroom door thumps hollowly, and I check to make sure all the feet have left. The emptying of the room means the bell’s about to ring.

I’m out of time.

I dash out the door and through the halls, ears tuned to what’s happening on all sides of me. But I never look at faces, never risk eye contact. I slip through the door of my French class as the bell sounds.

In French, I sit next to Vanessa Webb. Today she’s in crisp white, which would make me look like a hepatitis case. (Sylvie says I should wear “jewel tones,” whatever those are.)

Vanessa recites the day’s lesson, a story about a guy named Jean-Claude buying bread at the boulangerie. The people in our French book never do anything exciting like fight tigers or shoot white-water rapids. Although Vanessa reads with an actress’s animation and timing, half the class nods off. I play with my pen cap, which I’ve gnawed until it’s white and frayed around the edges. For the four thousandth time, I vow to stop chewing my pen cap.

But I can’t even keep that resolution till the end of class. While Vanessa narrates Jean-Claude’s culinary adventures, my mind returns to Raleigh Barringer—definitely the worst birthday gift of all. And I find myself biting the plastic cap again, working it with my teeth.

Bio is my last class of the day. The teacher, Mr. Thornhart, is discombobulated because the guys in the back of the room have been throwing around stray worm parts during the dissection labs. And so he’s decided to reshuffle the lab partners, pairing up everyone himself. He’s like some deranged matchmaker who hasn’t bothered to find out our most basic traits, except which of us are more likely than others to use worm parts as projectiles.

“Margaret Camden and Adriana Lippold.” He taps the table where we’re supposed to sit.

Adriana and I both freeze. Then she takes her seat, keeping her eyes on the lab bench.

“Margaret? Did you hear me?” Thornhart asks.

I consider not moving. I would rather stick my hand in a toaster than work with the girl who was Raleigh Barringer’s best friend back in junior high—and still is, for all I know. I may be a year older today, but the world seems to be doing its best to stuff me back into eighth grade.

Thornhart’s already moving on, announcing the next happy couple. I grab my books and edge into the seat next to Adriana, not looking at her.

“I can’t believe he put us together,” she mutters.

I grunt.

“You don’t have to act like it’s such a burden to you, though,” she goes on. “I’m sure I can find my way around a worm as well as you can.”

I tighten my fingers around my pen.

What does she mean by that? “As well as you can,” in that vinegar voice of hers?

I raise an eyebrow at her and let her interpret that any way she wants.

We take turns at the microscope, exchanging the slides we’ve already viewed for the ones we haven’t, silence thick between us. I sneak glances at Adriana, trying to gauge the danger. She has plucked her eyebrows in a high, arched shape, so they swoop across her forehead like bird wings. Her lipstick is pale pink—an innocent, harmless color.

But that pale-pink mouth is the same one that sneered at me back in junior high, that said I was ugly, that any boy would puke rather than touch me. It’s the same mouth that laughed when Raleigh Barringer said I should hang myself, because nobody wanted me at school where I could turn the stomachs of normal people.

Adriana and I say nothing to each other now. The glass slides scrape the benchtop as we pass them back and forth. And I wonder if Thornhart has any clue what a spectacularly bad idea it was to put us together.