Breaking

  For nice girls and monsters

  Also by Danielle Rollins

  Burning

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  I still think about the blocks.

  Their smell seeps into my head—the smell of sawdust and chemicals and paint. They used to give me headaches, until, finally, Mother scrubbed them down with bleach and dish soap and left them to dry in the sun. I can feel their weight in my hands. I hear the clicks of wood hitting wood as Mother stacked them into their precise, angular tower.

  I wasn’t allowed to watch. I’d turn my back and cover my eyes with my hands until she said, voice clipped:

  “All right, Charlotte. Begin.”

  She started the stopwatch the second I lowered my hands. Two minutes. I’d reach for the blocks while my eyes were still adjusting to the light, before I got a chance to study the shape of the tower she’d built. Always different. Always impossible.

  The concept was deceptively simple. I had two minutes to take the tower apart, revealing the tiny, wooden princess at its center. Every block had to be removed in the correct order or else the entire tower would fall and the princess would be trapped. It was a genius test, designed to separate the exceptional children from the mediocre. The mundane. The hopelessly normal.

  I never completed it.

  “Again.” Mother’s voice would cut through the sound of clicking wood. I’d lower my hands, blinking, and reach my chubby, eight-year-old fingers toward the blocks. Sometimes I’d get two out. Or three. They were balanced so carefully. One wrong move could send the whole tower toppling. Sometimes the clock would run down before I even made my first choice. Mother would sigh when that happened and take the entire tower down in a few, swift moves. The princess waited at its center, her pink dress creased and frayed, her painted eyes pleading.

  “You’re not concentrating,” Mother would snap, holding the wooden doll in front of my nose. “Pay attention this time.”

  We spent hours working on the block tower. There were other tests, too. Impossible puzzles, math problems I could never get my brain to work through, riddles that left me with headaches long after I stopped trying to solve them. But we always came back to the wooden blocks, the tiny princess.

  “Again,” Mother said.

  She took me with her to a conference the summer I turned nine. I stayed behind in the hotel room while she attended lectures and lunched with old friends and passed out business cards. I entertained myself with books and my computer. I tried one of her cigarettes and I threw up, but she thought it was food poisoning and sent me to bed with a cold can of ginger ale. I went through her purse. I put on her lipstick and shuffled through her credit cards and counted the pills in the plastic orange container with her name printed on the front.

  Then I found it. A small blue bag nestled at the bottom of her Prada tote. I knew what was inside, but I dumped the bag out on my bed anyway. I watched the blocks bounce across my bedspread and settle near my knees.

  All the anger I’d ever felt for my mother hit me in a sudden punch to the gut. I actually doubled over, clutching my stomach, struggling to breathe.

  My mother had dragged me along to her stupid conference like a pet she didn’t want to leave home alone. My mother didn’t realize I’d been smoking even though my hair and breath reeked of it, even though the crumpled pack of cigarettes was still sitting on my bedside table. And she’d brought these horrible blocks knowing how much I hated them. Knowing that I’d never be smart enough to solve any of her puzzles.

  You have to understand. I hadn’t found the others yet. I didn’t have Ariel to tell me Mother was miserable and middle-aged and living vicariously through me. I didn’t have Devon to urge me to try one of her pills, just to see how it felt. I was alone then. I was alone for a long time.

  I waited until I caught my breath, and then I gathered the blocks in my shirt and hurried across the room to the window. I wrestled it open with one hand, and I went up on my tiptoes and dropped the blocks, one by one. I watched them bounce across the sidewalk and disappear into some bushes. I hid whenever someone walked past.

  I saved the princess, though. I tucked her into the pocket of my shorts before I pushed the window closed and crept back into bed.

  Just that one time, I saved her.

  Chapter One

  “Charlotte, wake up.” Zoe leans over me. She’s so close that her dark eyes look like a single Cyclops eye in the center of her head. Her jet-black hair sticks up at odd angles.

  I blink. It’s still dark. Moonlight streams through the windows behind us, doing little to illuminate our messy, crowded dorm. Zoe didn’t unpack so much as explode into the room when she moved in. Boxes of rolled-up vintage movie posters and makeup and fencing equipment are everywhere.

  I hear whispering on the other side of our door. Footsteps.

  “Charlotte?” Zoe says again.

  “What’s going on?” My words blur together—wasgonnon? I groan and raise a hand to brush the hair off my forehead, but there is no hair on my forehead. It takes one slow moment before I remember that I cut it all off two weeks ago. I swear I can still feel it, like a phantom limb. Phantom hair.

  Someone giggles in the hall outside our dorm. More footsteps. It isn’t unusual for the girls of the Weston Preparatory Institute to sneak out at night. It’s easy to trip the lock on the door leading to the courtyard. But they don’t usually sneak out all at once.

  Zoe leans back onto her heels, the floorboards creaking beneath the weight of her knees, and I’m finally able to focus on her face. She looks like she’s not sure she should’ve woken me. We’re just roommates, after all, not friends, and we haven’t been roommates for long.

  She’s standing, but, since she’s not quite five feet tall, her head is just a few feet above me. Zoe Hoang is French Vietnamese, tiny with giant eyes and big lips that never seem to smile. I sit up in bed and we’re practically eye to eye.

  “Is everything okay?” I ask.

  “No,” Zoe says, her speech taking a trace of French accent. “Something happened.”

  Anyone else would make her say more, but I learned long ago to be comfortable with mystery. My old roommate, Ariel, never bothered with where or why when she woke me in the middle of the night. She’d just crook her finger and smile, and I’d come, like a puppy. Like a shadow.

  I pull a robe on over my T-shirt and follow Zoe out of our room, down the hall, and outside. It’s almost like old times, almost like Ariel’s the one hurrying through the darkne
ss ahead of me. Only Ariel never hurried. She walked like she had all night to sneak through the school. She dragged her fingers over the doors lining either side of the hallway, daring someone to open one. To find her. I let myself smile and, for a minute, I actually see her. Her red hair falls in tangles down her back, and she’s wearing that vintage slip she loves—the lime-green one with the broken strap, no matter if it’s freezing outside or if there could be boys wandering around. Especially if there could be boys.

  Dry leaves crunch beneath my toes, and wind claws at my ankles. I shiver, my teeth chattering. My robe is too thin and there’s a hole at the elbow. I’ve always hated the cold. It hits me harder than it does other people. It seeps into my skin and curls around my bones. Girls in pajamas flit past us through the trees, their voices trailing behind them like scarves. Moonlight paints their bare arms and legs silver.

  I wrap my arms around my chest, holding the warmth close. Ariel would love this. The trees, the dark. The mystery. I start to turn, a joke for her on my lips. But then I don’t. It’s been a month. I’ve almost stopped talking to her.

  Zoe glances over her shoulder to make sure I’m still following. We’re deep in the trees now, and I can’t really hear the other girls’ voices, but I feel them moving around us. I yawn, still half asleep. Red light flashes through the branches and, for a second, I think of sunlight. Then it flashes blue.

  “No.” I stop walking. My hands go to my chest and I press them there, flat. My fingers find the skin at the edge of my T-shirt.

  Zoe turns. “Are you okay?”

  I nod, but my voice cracks, betraying me. “Is it Devon?”

  Devon, my second-best friend since we were sophomores, which feels like forever and ever ago instead of eighteen months. Or first-best friend now, I guess, with Ariel gone. Devon disappeared two days ago, but everyone, even her teachers, thought she hitchhiked into the city to go dancing or see a concert. It wouldn’t be the first time, or even the fifth time. We were never worried—just pissed she didn’t invite us.

  Zoe hesitates. “I don’t know,” she says carefully. “I just heard that the cops were here. They found … something.”

  She darts through the trees. I walk slower, aware of the wet on the leaves beneath my feet, the wind on the back of my neck. I hear Ariel’s voice in my ear, but it’s a memory of a voice, not a real one.

  Why are you so surprised?

  The trees open onto a clearing. Police tape weaves between the branches, a shocking spot of fluorescent in the middle of all the black and gray and brown. I see faces, but most of the girls don’t creep close enough to be recognized. Dean Rosenthal kneels in the dirt, and her assistant, Mr. Coolidge, stands behind her. He has one hand pressed to his mouth. The emotion on his face is raw in a way that makes me blush and avert my eyes. I feel like I’ve just seen him in his underwear.

  Their bodies form a barricade, blocking my view of what they’re staring at. I hesitate behind Zoe, but just for a moment.

  “Charlotte,” Zoe says, but I’m already moving closer, ducking below the police tape. She grabs my wrist, her tiny hand surprisingly strong. I shake her off. An arm lies across the leaves. Brown skin and long, tapered fingers with bright red nails. The last time I saw those hands, they were wrapped around a tumbler of whiskey in her daddy’s office.

  Now Devon holds a syringe. Her knees are bent, like she’d crumpled to the ground after it happened.

  Doesn’t she look perfect? I imagine Ariel saying. I nod, because wouldn’t it be just like Ariel to say something so horrible? But she’s right. There are no marks on Devon’s body. No blood.

  “Like she’s sleeping,” I whisper. I close my eyes and wrap my arms around my chest. Devon isn’t lying here in the dirt. Devon is dancing at a party in the city. Devon is drinking martinis and flirting with a thirty-year-old businessman who hasn’t guessed yet that she’s only eighteen. Devon is wearing a ridiculous dress that shows off too much skin and that she bought with the credit card she stole from her mother. She’s not here.

  When I open my eyes again, they settle on a shape in the trees across from me. I recognize Jack by his height, which is nearly two feet taller than everyone around him. His hair bleeds into the shadows, his pale skin a spot of brightness in the night.

  If he’s out, the rest of the boys’ dorm is out, too. I pull my robe tighter around my body, suddenly self-conscious.

  Jack takes a few steps forward, and red and blue lights flash across his face. His shaggy black hair is messy with sleep, and his faded T-shirt strains against his broad chest. He finds me in the dark, his gaze lingering for a second too long. Heat creeps up my neck and spreads over my cheeks.

  There’s a part of me that doesn’t want to look at him, in case Ariel sees.

  But Ariel’s dead. So that’s impossible.

  Chapter Two

  Much later that night, when I’m back in my dorm and Zoe’s breathing has deepened, and even the moon has fallen asleep, I roll onto my side and curl my knees toward my chest. And I cry.

  Devon is dead. Devon, who told me that red lipstick made me look fierce, and who once brought a kitten to the animal shelter, a kitten so tiny and weak we’d had to feed her with an eyedropper. Devon, who always sat with me at lunch when Ariel was being a bitch and giving me the silent treatment, even though we both knew she liked Ariel better.

  Devon followed Ariel to that dark place knowing I would never be brave or strong enough to meet them there.

  I cry silent sobs. The ones that claw at your throat and dig their way up from your chest no matter how you try to choke them back down. The ones that hurt, deep.

  If Ariel were still here, she’d slip into my bed and knot her fingers through my fingers and lean her forehead against my forehead, like she did that night last year when I found the baby bird someone had run over with a bicycle. I replay that night in my head. How I squeezed my eyes shut because I was crying, and I don’t cry in front of anyone.

  “Charlotte,” Ariel said. She traced a finger down my cheek, catching a tear beneath her fingernail. “I know your secret.”

  “Shut up,” I said, hiccuping.

  “You act all tough, but you’re soft inside. You’re a kitten.”

  The words tiptoe through my head on feet made of needles. They dig their points into the soft tissue of my brain. It was a conversation we had a lot, when Ariel was alive. She was the only one who saw the real me. She told me that “nice” wasn’t something to be ashamed of, but I think she never really listened to herself say that word.

  “Nice.” It doesn’t even leave an imprint on the air after it’s been spoken. It doesn’t slash at you, like “daring,” or enchant you, like “magnetic.” It’s empty. A bubble that glitters and gleams, then disappears when you apply too much pressure.

  Nice girls don’t kill themselves. Nice girls get left behind. Nice girls cry in their beds alone.

  I turn my head, letting my tears soak into my pillow. I want to sleep, but Devon and Ariel wander through my brain all night, refusing to let me. They laugh and dance and, for a moment, it’s like old times, when we’d sneak out to the cave in the woods and drink and tell secrets. It’s like it’s supposed to be.

  But then they disappear into the trees, and no matter how hard I look, I never find them.

  “They’re saying it was an overdose.” Dean Rosenthal grabs a tissue from her desk, then leans back in her chair, dabbing at the corners of her eyes. She cried at the emergency assembly this morning, too. Her tears don’t seem real. They’re like props, like the tasteful strand of pearls around her neck and the sensible black heels she wears with her Chanel suits.

  I am appropriately sad, the tears say. I am having a healthy emotional reaction.

  “Who’s saying it was an overdose?” I ask.

  “The police.”

  “But Devon doesn’t do drugs,” I say.

  Rosenthal raises an eyebrow, calling my bluff, but I don’t correct myself. Like hell am I going to admit the tru
th to the dean of our school.

  Rosenthal balls her tissue in one hand, shifting in her seat so she can look at me. Really look at me. The way adults look at teenagers who concern them.

  Let’s take inventory of what she sees: Eyes, dry. Hair, freshly (and badly) cut, probably done with a plastic razor in the girls’ bathrooms. Too tall. Too thin (anorexia!?). Skin, ashy and pale. Deep circles under eyes. Not smiling.

  In other words, I am not having a healthy emotional reaction.

  Rosenthal clears her throat. “A few of your teachers mentioned that you haven’t been turning in assignments. Since …”

  “Yeah.” I take a pristine crystal ashtray off Rosenthal’s desk and turn it over in my hands. What’s the point of an ashtray you don’t use? Is it art? “I know. I’m trying to catch up.”

  “You were barely keeping up with your classwork before.”

  Before. Since. Rosenthal’s become quite the pro at dancing around difficult subjects.

  “I’ve always passed my classes,” I say.

  “Mr. Carver says you won’t pass physics unless you hand in your take-home test today by three. Ms. Antoine says you’ve missed her last three classes, and you still haven’t completed a ten-page essay on Brave New World that was worth seventy-five percent of your grade.”

  “But I’m getting a B in drama.”

  Dean Rosenthal pushes her glasses up with two fingers and pinches the bridge of her nose. “In light of … recent events, we think it might be best for you to take a break from Weston for the remainder of the year.”

  The air in Dean Rosenthal’s office grows several degrees cooler. Weston isn’t the kind of place you “take a break from.” Not without sacrificing a pound of flesh. People donate entire buildings to get their children considered for admission. The entrance forms and tests and interviews take months to complete. There’s a 3 percent acceptance rate.

  Unless your mother is very important, of course. Like mine.

  I place the ashtray back on Rosenthal’s desk and fold my hands in my lap. “We?”

  “Your mother and I.”

  A knife pierces my back and twists. I bite the inside of my lip to keep from doing something stupid, like forming an expression. My mother, who forced me to come to this idiotic school, has decided that I’m not good enough. My mother, who’s always been hopelessly embarrassed by how very ordinary I am. How unlike the cutthroat, genius sociopaths who attend this place.