Seventh grade started and Alex wondered if her new name was some kind of magic word. It didn’t fix everything. She still didn’t have the right sneakers or the right scrunchie or bring the right things for lunch. It couldn’t make her blond or tall or prune her thick eyebrows, which had to be vigilantly kept from joining forces to create a unified eyebrow front. The white kids still thought she was Mexican and the Mexican kids still thought she was white. But she was doing okay in class. She had people to eat with at lunchtime. She had a friend named Meagan, who invited her over to watch movies and eat bowls of sugary name-brand cereals shimmering with artificial colors.
On the morning of the Goleta trip, when Ms. Rosales told them to buddy up and Meagan seized Alex’s hand, Alex felt a gratitude so overwhelming, she thought she might vomit the tiny blueberry muffins the teachers had provided. They spent the morning drinking hot chocolate from foam cups, pressed together on the green vinyl seat of the bus. Both of their moms liked Fleetwood Mac, and when “Go Your Own Way” came on the bus driver’s radio, they sang along with it, mostly shouting, giggling and breathless as Cody Morgan pressed his hands to his ears and yelled at them to SHUT UP.
It took nearly three hours to get to the butterfly reserve, and Alex savored every minute of the drive. The grove itself was nothing speciaclass="underline" a pretty sprawl of eucalyptus trees lined by dusty paths, and a guide who talked about the eating habits and migration patterns of monarchs. Alex glimpsed a slender woman walking through the grove, her arm hanging from her body by the barest scrap of tendon, and quickly looked away, just in time to see a blanket of orange wings gust up from the trees as the monarchs took flight. She and Meagan ate their lunches shoulder to shoulder on picnic tables near the entrance, and before they got back on the buses, everyone went to use the bathrooms. They were low slab buildings with damp concrete floors, and both Meagan and Alex gagged when they entered.
“Forget it,” said Meagan. “I can hold it until we get back.”
But Alex had to go. She chose the cleanest metal stall, laid toilet paper carefully on the seat, pulled down her jean shorts, and froze. For a long moment, she wasn’t sure what she was looking at. The blood was nearly dry and so brown that she had trouble understanding it was blood. She’d gotten her period. Wasn’t she supposed to have cramps or something? Meagan had gotten hers over the summer and had lots of thoughts about tampons and pads and the importance of ibuprofen.
The only important thing was that the blood hadn’t soaked through to her shorts. But how was she supposed to make it through the bus ride home?
“Meagan!” she shouted. But if anyone else was in the bathroom they’d already cleared out. Alex felt her panic rise. She needed to get to Ms. Rosales before everyone was seated and ready to go. She would know what to do.
Alex wound a bunch of toilet paper around her hand and tucked the makeshift pad into her ruined underwear, then pulled up her shorts and shoved out of the stall.
She yelped. A man was standing there, his face a mottled mess of bruises. She was relieved when she realized he was dead. A dead man in the girls’ bathroom was a lot less scary than a living one. She balled her fists and pushed through him. She hated going through them. Sometimes she got flashes of memory, but this time she just felt a blast of cold. She hurried to the sinks and quickly washed her hands. Alex could sense he was still there, but she refused to meet his gaze in the mirror.
She felt something brush the small of her back.
In the next second her face was jammed up against the mirror. Something shoved her hips against the porcelain ledge of the sink. She felt cold fingers tugging on the waistband of her shorts.
Alex screamed, she kicked out, struck solid flesh and bone, felt the grip on her shorts loosen. She tried to shove back from the sink, glimpsed her face in the mirror, a blue barrette sliding from her hair, saw the man—the thing—that had hold of her. You can’t do that, she thought. You can’t touch me. It wasn’t possible. It wasn’t allowed. None of the Quiet Ones could touch her.
Then she was facedown on the concrete floor. She felt her hips jerked backward, her panties yanked down, something nudging against her, pushing into her. She saw a butterfly lying in a puddle beneath the sink, one wing flapping listlessly as if it were waving to her. She screamed and screamed.
That was how Meagan and Ms. Rosales found her, on the bathroom floor, shorts crumpled around her ankles, panties at her knees, blood smeared over her thighs and a lump of blood-soaked toilet paper wadded between her legs, as she sobbed and thrashed, hips humped up and shuddering. Alone.
Ms. Rosales was beside her, saying, “Alex! Sweetheart!” and the thing that had been trying to get inside her was gone. She never knew why he stopped, why he fled, but she’d clung to Ms. Rosales, warm and alive and smelling of lavender soap.
Ms. Rosales sent Meagan out of the bathroom. She dried Alex’s tears and helped her clean up. She had a tampon in her purse and told Alex how to put it in. Alex followed her instructions, still shaking and crying. She didn’t want to touch down there. She didn’t want to think about him trying to push in. Ms. Rosales sat beside her on the bus, gave her a juice box. Alex listened to the sounds of the other kids laughing and singing, but she was afraid to turn around. She was afraid to look at Meagan.
On that long bus ride back to school, in the long wait at the nurse’s office, all she had wanted was her mother, to be wrapped up in her arms and taken home, to be safe in their apartment, bundled in blankets on the couch, watching cartoons. By the time her mother arrived and finished her whispered conversation with the principal and the school counselor and Ms. Rosales, the halls had cleared and the school was empty. As Mira led her out to the parking lot through the echoing quiet, Alex wished she were still small enough to be carried.
When they got home, Alex showered as quickly as possible. She felt too vulnerable, too naked. What if he came back? What if something else came for her? What was to stop him, to stop any of them, from finding her? She’d seen them walk through walls. Where could she ever be safe again?
She left the shower running and slipped into the kitchen to burrow through their junk drawer. She could hear her mother murmuring on the phone in her bedroom.
“They think she may have been molested,” Mira said. She was crying. “That she’s acting out now because of it… I don’t know. I don’t know. There was that swim coach at the Y. He always seemed a little off and Alex didn’t like going to the pool. Maybe something happened?”
Alex had hated the pool because there was a Quiet kid with the left side of his skull caved in who liked to hang around the rusted podium where the diving board had once been.
She rooted around in the drawer until she found the little red pocketknife. She took it with her into the shower, setting it on the soap dish. She didn’t know if it would do any good against one of the Quiet Ones, but it made her feel a little better. She washed quickly, dried off, and changed into pajamas, then went out into the living room to curl up on the couch, her wet hair wrapped in a towel. Her mother must have heard the shower turn off, because she emerged from her bedroom a few moments later.
“Hey, baby,” she said softly. Her eyes were red. “Are you hungry?”
Alex kept her eyes on the TV screen. “Can we have real pizza?”
“I can make you pizza here. Don’t you want almond cheese?”
Alex said nothing. A few minutes later, she heard her mother on the phone, ordering from Amici’s. They ate watching TV, Mira pretending not to watch Alex.
Alex ate until her stomach hurt, then ate some more. It was too late for cartoons, and the shows had switched to the bright sitcom stories of teenage wizards and twins living in lofts, that everyone at school pretended they were too old for. Who are these people? Alex wondered. Who are these happy, frantic, funny people? How are they so unafraid?