Breaking Read online

  I ran all the way back to the library. I huddled in the stacks at the back of the room, and every time I closed my eyes, I saw flickering light and flowing water and Ariel’s red hair.

  Hours and hours later, some freshman I didn’t recognize came and found me.

  “Are you Charlotte?” she asked. I’d nodded, and I remember thinking how easy it was to nod, to pretend that I hadn’t seen what I’d seen in our dorm room. To pretend everything was fine.

  “You need to come with me,” she said. “There’s been an accident.”

  “What kind of accident?” I asked. It hadn’t even sounded like my voice. I don’t know why I asked that.

  “Your roommate,” she said. “Just … please come.”

  Chapter Seven

  You’re wondering if I slept with Ariel’s boyfriend.

  If that was why we fought. Why she killed herself.

  You think the guilt is driving me crazy. You think that’s why I’m so messed up.

  Well. I didn’t.

  What I did was so much worse.

  Chapter Eight

  I’m out the door, and cold like the sharp end of a knife slices through my skin. Mother’s black car waits at the curb. I hurry down the front steps, suitcase smacking against the concrete behind me, worn-out ballet flats slipping off the backs of my feet. A crow caws, then leaps from a half-naked tree branch, sending a shower of dead leaves to the sidewalk. Even this is like something from a story. Like Weston wants to send me off on an ominous note.

  I glance back at the school one last time. Ariel was right—it does look like a castle. The building itself is made up of a half dozen spiky towers, with intricately carved gargoyles peering over the windows and around columns. Its stone walls gleam unnaturally against the dull backdrop of the woods. Arched passageways twist around the school, and wild gardens grow over the courtyard. It’s like something alive. Wind blows through its walls, making it sound like the building is weeping.

  I shiver and tug my coat closer. The car engine purrs, exhaust leaking into the early morning.

  Darren, the driver we’ve had since I was four, steps out of the car and takes my bags.

  “Miss Gruen,” he says, opening the door for me. “A pleasure to see you, as always.”

  “Hey, D, how’s the new puppy?” I like to pretend Darren and I are friends, but he probably complains to his wife about the obnoxious rich girl he drives around as soon as he’s off work. Now he just nods, a slight smile curving his lips.

  “Finally house-trained,” he says as I slide into the car. “It’s a miracle.”

  I want to say something else, but he closes my door before the words can escape my lips. The car closes in around me, all butter-soft leather and shiny wood paneling. It feels like a very expensive jail cell.

  “Charlotte,” Mother says without looking up from her phone. Her short blond hair sweeps over her forehead, hiding her eyes. Her signature accessory—a gold rose pin—flashes from the lapel of her stiff black coat. She taps a manicured nail against her phone’s slick screen.

  My mother, Dr. Rose Gruen, is the president of the Underhill Medical Center, a sort of famous hospital and research clinic in Underhill, New York, which is just fifteen minutes away from my school by bus. She’s used the clinic’s deep pockets to stock Weston’s library, finance renovation projects, and set up a prestigious internship program specifically for Weston students. The school considers her a kind of folk hero, the brave woman who takes from the rich to give to the rich. And makes everyone—including herself—much richer.

  I clear my throat and shift on the leather seat. Mother doesn’t say she’s upset with me, but the words hang in the air around us like perfume. If her disappointment had a scent, it would be something expensive. Chanel No. 5 or Shalimar.

  The car pulls away from the curb and rolls smoothly down the driveway. I lean against the window, my breath fogging the glass. I play a game of tic-tac-toe against myself. And then I play three. And then five. I win every time.

  Finally, “What did you do to your hair?”

  Her voice is deceptively sweet. Honey and maple syrup. I look up and see that she’s tucked her phone back into her purse and folded her hands on her knees. She fixes her icy blue eyes on me, head cocked like a bird.

  I touch the edges of my hair, then drop my hand into my lap again. “I got tired of having it long.”

  Mother studies me, eyes narrowing. “It looks hideous. I’ll make an appointment with Anita when we get back to the city.”

  Anita, Mother’s stylist, who hates me for my “wasted potential.”

  “Thanks,” I mutter.

  Mother’s eyes shift from my head, over my torso, and stop at my knees. My coat has come unbuttoned, displaying the limp, dirty hem of my uniform skirt. I tug it closed, cheeks flaring.

  Mother lifts an eyebrow. “I’ve spoken with Dean Rosenthal, and she’s recommended several of the better tutors back in Manhattan. I thought you could meet with them over the next week and let me know your preferences. And it’d be wise to get you started with a new therapist. Dr. Gillespie is still taking clients, but I seem to recall that you didn’t like him.”

  Dr. Gillespie smelled like mothballs and stared at my ass unapologetically. “I’ll find a new therapist,” I say.

  “Good.” Mother is still staring. She’s back on my face, and something about it must upset her, because the skin around her eyes crinkles. She’ll get wrinkles if she isn’t careful.

  “What?” I ask. She rests a long finger against her lower lip.

  “You look different.”

  I wrap my arms around my chest, making sure that no other part of my offensive uniform is poking out from under my coat. “You mentioned. I know you hate my hair. I’ll see Anita—”

  “No, not your hair. Your skin.” She leans forward, the leather seat groaning beneath her. She takes my chin in her hand and moves my face first to the left and then to the right. “Are you using that vitamin C serum I sent you?”

  I swat her hand away. “No.”

  “Something else, then. A new foundation? Did one of your friends lend you something?”

  “I’m not wearing any makeup.” I grab my shoulder bag off the floor and drop it onto my lap, digging through crumpled-up homework assignments and old tampons for my compact. “I happen to know for a fact that my skin looks like the outside of a fuzzy, rotten—”

  The rest of the words fizzle and die on my tongue. My compact reflects a face back at me, and I guess it’s my face. It has to be my face. But it looks nothing like my face. The greenish tint has faded from my skin, the dark circles vanished from beneath my eyes. My cheeks are actually rosy, and the tiny zit I’d noticed popping up above my eyebrow has disappeared, leaving behind creamy skin the color of porcelain.

  Mother starts talking again. Something about the Med Center’s board of trustees being in crisis mode and working late, but I’m barely listening. I pull and pinch and tug at my skin, fascinated by the transformation. I bare my teeth and check my hair, but nothing else seems to have changed. My teeth are still coffee-stained, my hair still choppy. But my skin … my skin is perfect.

  I snap the compact closed and cram it into my pocket. My fingers brush against something small and round. I frown and pull it out.

  Ariel’s tiny bottle winks from my fingers. I don’t remember putting it in my coat pocket, but here it is. I turn it over, thinking of Ariel’s perfect hair. Devon’s flawless complexion.

  “Magic serum,” I whisper. If this were a fairy tale, the bottle would have come from an evil witch Ariel had met in the woods. It would be cursed. I’d eventually have to pay for my sudden transformation. In reality, I’m betting Ariel and Devon found it in Koreatown the last time they were in Manhattan. Under my breath, I say, “Thanks for sharing.”

  Mother doesn’t look up from the cell phone that’s found its way back to her hand. “Did you say something?”

  “No,” I say. “Drink me,” the label on the bottle
reads. I flip it over, hoping Ariel wrote the name of the shop where she found it on the back. But there’s just a scrawled number:

  2/3

  I stare down at the number and, for a long moment, I can’t breathe. Ariel made me a scavenger hunt once. She’d ripped up pieces of paper and left them all over Weston, eventually leading me to a secret party in the basement of the boys’ dormitories. On the back of every clue, she’d scrawled numbers just like this one—1/10, 2/10, 3/10—so I’d know I hadn’t missed one.

  My heart beats faster. I knew Devon and Ariel had been into something. Maybe the bottle was just a single piece of the puzzle. If this was the second of three clues, that meant there could still be two more. That I could find them.

  But no—the clues are back at Weston. I squeeze my eyes shut, and I’m hit with a want so strong it nearly knocks me over. Why didn’t I try harder to stay? Why do I always, always give up so easily?

  Darren taps his knuckles against the steering wheel. Mother’s fingernails click against her phone screen.

  I think of empty beds, twisted sheets. Devon’s hand lying across a pile of leaves. Ariel’s hair floating below the surface of the water.

  Our car pulls to a stop at a red light. Darren hums from the front seat as the engine idles. I glance out my window and notice a poster peering out at me from the coffee shop at the corner. It’s for an anniversary gala at the Med Center in a few weeks. The posters are everywhere, commanding townies to help the hospital “Ring in Our 50th Year!” by donating whatever insane amount of money they’d need to donate to score an invite. I stare at the navy-blue outline of the hospital and study the silver-scripted words.

  “What if I took more hours at the Med Center?” I blurt out suddenly. Mother lifts her head, and the hair falls away from her eyes.

  “What are you talking about?” she asks. I glance out my window, looking for the anniversary poster, but it’s gone. We’re driving again.

  “Could I stay at Weston if I volunteered for more hours at the Med Center?” I ask. Weston Prep and the Underhill Med Center have always had a symbiotic relationship. The Med Center donates money and sets us up with prestigious internships that look marvelous on a college application. And we provide them with unlimited unpaid labor. It’s win-win. Every Weston student volunteers for the internship program at the Med Center, but I always took on as few hours as possible, not wanting to run into Mother. “I could come in every day. That way you could check on me.”

  Mother shakes her head. “Dean Rosenthal—”

  “Rosenthal only kicked me out of school because you asked her to. If you made a phone call, I’d be right back in.”

  Mother studies me, eyes flashing, mouth a straight line. I feel like I’m being scanned, like she’s downloading my brain and searching for nefarious motives.

  I shift in my seat, uncomfortable with her scrutiny. She must find it infinitely frustrating to never know what I’m thinking. It wouldn’t occur to her to just ask. To make me a cup of tea and sit down at the kitchen table to talk about all the things I’m afraid of, all the things I want out of life.

  My heart gives a strange lurch, startling me. I thought I was too old to wish for the impossible.

  “Is that what you really want?” Mother asks carefully. “To be a student at Weston again?”

  I press my lips together. It’s always been just Mother and me, but Mother was never really there, so mostly it was just me. Then I met Ariel and Devon, and everything changed. I learned how it felt to have people care about what I did and where I was. My phone is still filled with texts from both of them that I can’t bear to delete. Where are you? What are you doing? What do you think about …? How do you go back to being alone after that?

  What I really want is for them to be alive. I want to be sitting next to them in study hall right now, passing gossipy notes and trying not to laugh out loud. I want to forget that there was a time they were secretive and cruel. I want everything to be like it was.

  I curl my fingers around Ariel’s mystery bottle. I can’t have that. So I’ll settle for figuring out why it was taken away.

  “Yes.” I shift in my seat, mirroring Mother’s confident posture. Hands folded on knees, shoulders straight, head back. “That’s what I want.”

  Mother lets another moment of silence pass between us. A negotiating tactic, I’m sure.

  “I want straight As,” she says finally.

  I’ve never gotten an A in my life, but sure, let’s throw that into the mix. “Fine.”

  Mother smiles and, for a moment, it’s almost like she’s proud of me. My heart lurches again, but this time the feeling is easy to ignore. She’s not really proud, after all. I don’t think she’s capable of that emotion. At least not when it comes to her only daughter.

  “Darren,” she says, “turn the car around.”

  Chapter Nine

  Mother sends me back to the dorms while she “works things out” with Dean Rosenthal. I don’t let myself think too hard about what that means.

  My dorm is empty, the floors dusted with morning sunlight. Zoe will be in class by now, oblivious to the fact that she has a roommate again. She’s lived in this dorm for almost a month now, but her movie posters are still rolled up and sticking out of boxes. She hasn’t bothered plugging in the sleek, flat-screen TV sitting on top of her dresser. For the amount of crap she has, the girl lives like a monk. Why own a TV if you aren’t going to watch it?

  I push the door closed behind me. It whispers against the wooden frame, clicks into place.

  “Come out, come out, wherever you are.” My voice sounds oddly flat in the empty room. It doesn’t echo back to me.

  Ariel and I shared this room just one month ago. She slept in Zoe’s bed, and stored her clothes in Zoe’s closet, and stared in the mirror on the back of Zoe’s door to apply her lipstick. If she left some clue for me to find, it should be here.

  I drop my luggage next to my bed and kick off my shoes. Zoe has long since muffled the last echoes Ariel left in this room. I can’t feel her here anymore. I pull open the top drawer of her dresser and push the clothes aside. Zoe has hidden a tiny pocketknife with a pink handle beneath her rumpled uniform skirts and balled-up socks. She could get expelled for that. Next to it, a well-creased sheet of notebook paper, folded. My mouth quirks. Love note, I bet. I push the drawer closed again without touching either item.

  Ariel wouldn’t hide anything in her dresser anyway. I close my eyes and massage the bridge of my nose. Think. If this really is a scavenger hunt, there will be a method to where the clues are hidden. The bottle was in a bag of underwear she made me buy. Why?

  Because she knew I wouldn’t find it. I open my eyes and stare at the floorboards between my feet. Ariel knew I wouldn’t go digging around for that bag of underwear. I didn’t even want to buy it in the first place. She knew it would stay hidden in the back of my closet until …

  “She died.” I swallow, the words hanging in the air around me like floating bits of dust. She’d been planning on killing herself, then. Planning it for long enough to plant three clues for me to find. They never found a note with her body. Maybe she left this instead.

  A wave of anger and pain rises inside me, but I push it down. This actually makes things easier. It’s like a riddle. Where else would Ariel think I’d never go?

  I lift my head, my eyes settling on the closed door on the far side of our dorm. Only a handful of the dorms at Weston have private bathrooms. Mother pulled strings to get one for me. I haven’t used it since—

  The community bathrooms in the hall actually aren’t that bad. Zoe hasn’t even mentioned using our private bathroom, though I’ve seen her glance at the door longingly while trying to apply eyeliner in the mirror above her dresser. The last time that door was opened was when the EMTs rushed into the room with a stretcher and dragged Ariel’s dead body out of the bathtub.

  I open the door and flick the lights. Ariel’s shampoo sits on the side of the tub, a ring of soap dried
around it. A stiff washcloth hangs over the faucet. A single black hair tie sits on the counter next to the sink. It could have been hers or it could have been mine, and there’s no way to tell for sure.

  I wrap my fingers around the doorknob and focus on how cold the brass feels beneath my skin. Something buzzes in my ears, a sound like the flickering fluorescents in the hall bathrooms. I look up at the ceiling and remember we don’t have fluorescents in here. Just a normal bulb hidden behind frosted glass.

  Ariel’s voice echoes around me. Answer the question, Charlotte.

  And then mine. Let him go.

  I swallow, tasting vomit at the back of my throat. It was the last conversation we had. The last words we spoke to each other, and we didn’t even speak them here. I feel betrayed. How does the room know? Who told?

  I glance at the bathtub, and I expect a flash of memory: Ariel lying below the surface of the water, hair like tentacles stretched around her.

  Instead, I see her as she was during that last argument. Her eyes bright and flashing. Her smile cruel.

  Do you love him more than you love me?

  I pull the bathroom door shut, and stumble back into the dorm. My breathing is thick, heavy. There’s a line of sweat on my forehead.

  My phone buzzes from my coat pocket, shocking me so much that I release a yelp and jerk around. Pain prickles up my neck. I dig my phone out and check the screen. One new message, from Mother:

  Dean’s office. Five minutes.

  Mother is already standing outside Dean Rosenthal’s door when I arrive, her black coat buttoned up to her chin. She casts a glance at me, and her eyes flicker back to her phone.

  “It’s been handled,” she says, tapping the screen. She starts walking, nodding for me to follow. “Dean Rosenthal has requested that you bring your GPA up to a 3.0 by midterms, which are …”

  “March twenty-eighth,” I say. “Six weeks away.”

  Mother pushes through the heavy oak door leading into the hallway. Once it’s closed behind her, she lifts her head.