Bill was still asleep. A part of me hoped that if I stayed with him, he'd wake up, but a larger part of me knew that the human brain didn't work that way. The doctors had said he would wake up when his body knew it was safe, though I couldn't imagine that the world was ever going to be safe for William Kasey again.
So I left, knowing that I had an exam the next day and that spending another night in that plastic chair wasn't going to do anyone any good.
"You know," Macey said as she stood up from her bench and fell into step beside me. "I'm sure there are more productive ways to spend your time than coming here every day."
"Probably," I agreed, but I knew it didn't matter. Productive wasn't my concern. Bill was the only thing I cared about. He was the only thing that made me feel something—anything. Even if looking at him was a punch in the gut, at least I wasn't numb anymore. Even if hearing him call my name was like another stab in the back each and every time, at least the absence wasn't swallowing me whole.
I wanted to be there. I wanted to make sure that his flowers got changed and that his hair didn't tangle. I wanted to make sure that someone really was coming in and taking care of him. I wanted to be there when he woke up.
Because at one point, he had been one half of a pair that had known me better than I knew myself. At one point, he had been one of my closest friends, and until he had a chance to prove me wrong, I was going to keep believing in that.
Macey looked down at me as we walked on, her mouth ticking upwards into something that wasn't quite a smile. "You've got loyalty, kid," she said. "That's a good thing to have."
I hear everything and, when I say that, I don't just mean that I hear conversations that I'm not supposed to or the forbidden footsteps that are supposed to be silent. I mean that I actually hear everything. A lying heartbeat. A careful touch. And in that moment, I could hear an undeniable asterisk in Macey's tone. "But...?" I offered.
This time, she really did smile. "But you've got to be careful with that sort of thing," she warned. "There are a lot of people who would kill to have that on their side—and yes, I do mean that they would actually kill to get you to join them. You have to be careful about where your loyalties lie. Ask Bex about Mexico City and what happens when you're helping out the wrong people—it's not pretty."
"What are you saying?"
She stopped in her tracks, making me stop, too. The look in her eyes told me that I didn't have permission to look away. Not until I heard her out. "I'm saying that, until your friend wakes up, we don't know whose side he's on, okay? Until we do, you should just be careful about giving this much of yourself to him."
I hadn't known Macey for very long. It had only been about a month. But if there was anything I had learned about her in that time, it was that Macey McHenry called them as she saw them. I liked that about her. It was nice having some transparency—someone who understood that spared feelings didn't matter nearly as much as a stable state of mind.
"Listen," she said when I didn't respond, taking off in her long-legged stride once again. "I've spent too much time giving away parts of myself to people who didn't care, so I'm not going to sit back and watch you do the same. Just be careful. You don't want to spread yourself out too thin, and you especially want to make sure that the people who have your loyalty aren't going to use it the wrong way. When this is all said and done, you want to be able to say that every last bit of yourself is on the right side of things, got it?"
It didn't feel like any of this would ever be said and done, but I accepted her words of wisdom, knowing that I'd be an idiot if I didn't. Macey wasn't stupid, of that, I was certain.
Yet, a part of me wanted to cast her words aside. In that moment, they seemed almost useless. Of course I would end up on the right side of things—I was a Goode. We were the good guys. We had always been the good guys.
"Are you headed to your room?" she asked.
I nodded. "Homework," I explained.
"Okay. I'll turn in for the night, then. Go straight to your room—I don't want to hear about any late night snacks. I don't care how much crème brûlée is left in the fridge."
"How did you know about—?"
"I've got eyes everywhere, kid," she said. "And don't you dare forget it. Do you have your panic button?"
I felt for the pocket of my skirt, searching for that permanent extension of myself. When my fingers brushed up against a hard bump, I nodded.
"Good," she said with a final nod. I watched her legs as she turned, wondering how she could follow me around all day in those heels. She was all business in her pencil skirt, leaving me to wonder if it was some sort of crime against nature for a Gallagher Girl to walk her halls in anything but a skirt. "Straight to bed, Maggie," she called again.
So, here's the thing. I really was going to go to my room. Honest. I had every intention of throwing on some comfy pants and curling up with my blankets and a good textbook, but it's these pesky ears of mine. They always want to take detours.
And, well, it wasn't really a detour. When it really comes down to it, Ellie Suttons' room is between Bill's and mine, so it wasn't so much a detour as it was a delay. Totally different.
It wasn't any of the usual suspects chatting it up at Ellie's bedside. Aunt Liz had already made her visit for the day and Alice was, presumably, in our room (although, I don't think I need to remind you that Alice is very good at not being where you expect her to be). It wasn't the neurosurgeon or the orthopedic surgeon or any of the other surgeons that reminded us daily just how bad of shape Eleanora Sutton was in. Instead, I heard the voice of Charlotte Woods say, "I've had quite enough of your laying around."
There was a tease to her voice. Something that came with years and years of jokes aimed at the same person, but there was something wrong with it. Something empty. Any life that I'd seen pumped into my CoveOps teacher over the past year had been stolen from her the night that Ellie came back with a bullet in her side. Maybe it had even been gone sooner than that. "I think it's about time you wake up and join the party."
I heard the sound of metal against wood as she dragged the chair across the room. I could just picture her straddling it, looking as cool and indifferent as she always did. I wondered how she did it—how she separated herself from everything. Then I wondered if it was something she could teach me. "You're missing all the good stuff, El," she said. "We found the lead in Europe. I hear the boys are kicking some serious ass. Jealous?"
There was no response, but Woods talked on as if there had been and I had just missed it. "Your info helped," she said. "Granted, it wasn't much. I bet you have more for us, haven't you? Wake up and tell me what else you've got."
It was a dare. Or a plea. Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference between the two. But it didn't matter, because when Ellie didn't answer, Woods talked on as if everything were normal. "Zach and I just finished assigning cover legends for prom. That's coming up soon—did you know that they recycle the covers? I didn't know until I saw the cover that Zach assigned to Alice. Gianna Bassanelli. Remember that name?"
She let out a short laugh, but it was mutilated. Pained. Like someone had punched her in the chest and she couldn't hold back the shout. "Of course you do. You remember everything. I bet you wouldn't even need to see the file to reprise your role. Tell me how much you remember, El. Wake up and brag."
Again, there was nothing. Not until I heard the faint sigh from Woods. I could relate. There was nothing quite as frustrating as expecting no reply, then still feeling disappointed when it didn't come. "You looked so good that night," she continued. "We both did. You did our hair—remember when I tried to help you with your makeup? My god, I was truly awful, wasn't I?"
I tried to pin this new information to the CoveOps teacher, sticking it on my absurdly short list of things I knew about Charlotte Woods. Pegging her into some sort of timeline outside of the one I knew. I could almost picture her as a young girl with an ineptitude for femininity. Could almost imagine her with a roommate that was so good at all things girl that she would eventually make a career out of being the best disguise artist in her generation. I couldn't stop myself from thinking about my own roommates. About Alice. Ellie was Woods' Alice.
"They fitted you for that green gown," she reminisced. "You looked so good, El. And I had that sleek black thing—do you remember how nervous I was? Sleeveless! The horror."
As I stared at the stone wall opposite Ellie's room, I thought I could see Woods' scars in it. I thought I could spot the same burned twists, carved out in the brick before me, and I felt a twinge of pity. It was quick and fleeting—everything was nowadays—but I could feel it nonetheless, a part of me feeling sorry for the woman who always wore sleeves.
But Woods had stopped feeling sorry for herself a long time ago, which was probably how she was able to laugh. "And that boy—what was his name?" She waited for an answer, but none came. "What was his name, El? Wake up and tell me how bad my memory is."
I found myself waiting too, wondering what Ellie Sutton would say if she weren't down for the count. Woods waited through seven beeps. Seven heartbeats, but then she went on, desperate to fill the emptiness. "He just wouldn't take a hint, would he?" she said. "Just kept asking me for a dance and didn't stop until you punched him in the jaw—Gianna Bassinelli should not have been punching the Duke of Cambridge in the jaw, but you did it anyways."
There was another cross between a sniffle and a laugh. "Your sister almost killed you when she found out you'd flunked the exam. Ms. Morgan gave us detention for weeks, but can I tell you something?" She paused, giving Ellie the power to say no, but it was going to take a lot more than a well-timed silence to get Eleanora Sutton to start talking again. "Joe totally thought the kid had it coming—talked about it all the time. He laughed about it for years. Always swore that he was about to walk over and do it himself before you beat him to it, but he was always pretty fond of the idea of hitting my boyfriends—still is, really."
Woods kept stopping and waiting. Stopping and waiting. My mind jumped back to the first time I'd seen the two of them together. To the way Ellie had relentlessly run her mouth. To how her mind had been faster than anything else about her, resulting in a seemingly endless collection of spouted words and cut off sentences. I realized that this was probably the first time that Woods had gotten more than a few words out at once. This was probably the first time that Woods had needed to talk so much.
"That was so stupid, El. So, so stupid." Her voice wavered on the last word and suddenly I knew we weren't talking about prom anymore. I felt something inside of me turn into an awkward mush. I wasn't supposed to be hearing this. I was supposed to be in bed. "I told you to wait for me. If you had waited for the summer... If you had just waited for me like I told you to, then you would have had backup. We could have put the proper team together. I could've gotten Blake and the three of us could have run the op—"
All at once, every monitor in the room started screaming, slapping every once of my muscles into sharp points. I listened to the frantic rustling as Woods tried to figure out what was wrong and how she was supposed to fix it. "El," she said. "Ellie!"
The chair clattered as she pushed it out of the way, landing on its side. I heard her footsteps and then, before I could register what that meant, she was already hanging out of the door, shouting to the hallways. "I need a doctor in here!"
I froze, remembering that some predators can't see their prey so long as the prey doesn't move. But Woods sees everything.
Her hair was down, knotted and tangled, its usual sheen gone. Usually, when the light shined on it just right, you could catch a glimpse of red buried among the brown, but I saw no such thing that night. Her clothes were ratty, her lower lip painted with a fresh scab. There was a bruise ringing her eye that hadn't been there during class and I knew that Charlotte Woods had gone looking for a fight. And that she had lost. "Go to bed, Goode."
I didn't dare argue.
I took off, bumping into frantic doctors that all ran the opposite way, every last bit of me desperate to leave. To disappear. To die.
But I couldn't do that. So instead I just thought of Woods again. Of that bruise around her eye. And I wondered who had been stupid enough to take her on, but more importantly, who had been good enough to win.
Or there was another possibility. One that I had never considered until that moment. Maybe her opponent hadn't been that good. Maybe, that night, with her best friend fading away, Charlotte Woods had just been that bad.
And if Woods had lost her touch, I didn't want to think about what that meant for the rest of us.