Damage Done (2 page)

I let Alane lead me into the building, the force of her walk pulling me along at a near-run. We slid into our seats just as the late bell unleashed its war cry through the halls.

“You okay?” she asked once we were safely seated. I was staring at the surface of my desk, trying to find some sense in the grains of fake wood. “You look like you just swallowed a squirming puppy.”

That was an oddly descriptive way to say,
Lucy, you look crazy.
Because that was how I must have looked. I couldn’t have seen that man, not here. This was it. I’d finally cracked.

The teacher began calling attendance, and I gestured toward the teacher and then at my lips.
Can’t talk now.
Alane’s eyes washed over me with one of her concerned looks, but she turned her attention to the front all the same. I raised my hand when I heard “Black, Lucy” and then let myself disappear into my head.

Once upon a time I’d had a squirming puppy. No, Julia Vann had had a squirming puppy. A yappy little thing, more fur than sense, with a pink rhinestone collar that proclaimed
FLUFFY
in big bubble letters. (Julia had been ten—cut her some slack.) For two months, Julia loved that dog like it was a baby, or like how a ten-year-old imagined someone would love a baby. Then one day Julia went out into the backyard and found the dog sans fur, its organs on the wrong side of its skin, its tail missing. And there was Ryan, holding the knife.

You have to understand, my brother and I were born hand in hand. As in, we literally had our fingers entwined inside the womb. My mom and dad had been all set for a natural birth: no drugs, certified midwife, pool in the living room. They ended up having to rush to the hospital for an emergency C-section because the two of us just wouldn’t let go. My dad said we didn’t cry as they lifted us out and exposed us to this bright, cold new world. We didn’t cry until they wrenched us apart. Our parents tried making us sleep in separate bassinets, one on either side of their bed, but they quickly learned neither of us would sleep without the warmth of the other curled alongside.

And so that was why I didn’t scream. Of course it was also because Ryan had glanced between me and my beloved dog, unconsciously insinuating that the same thing could quite easily happen to me. I’d backed away slowly, still retching, until my mom poked her head out at the noise.

Ryan assured me later as I cried that I must have been imagining that glance, because he was my twin, my other half, and he would never do anything to hurt me. I was a female version of him, after all. We shared the same genes. Had been tied together before we were even born. I had to bite my tongue to keep from telling him how very different I was. But still I pleaded on Ryan’s behalf, saying that it must have been an accident, it wasn’t as bad as it looked, and so instead of sending him away, my parents made him start biweekly sessions with a psychologist, Dr. Atlas Spence. Dr. Spence wore a perpetually wrinkled suit and hipster glasses that didn’t suit his solemn demeanor. I never spotted him without either during the months Ryan saw him, or later, during the few weeks I saw him before my family fled Elkton.

After the incident, my parents and I became modern-day Medusas—nobody would look us in the face. Neighbors we’d once shared potluck dinners with—whose kids I’d babysat—lost the ability to knock on a door or ring a doorbell. The friends I’d had who were still above the dirt suddenly weren’t answering their phones. Even the people who were supposed to sympathize with us—the police—tended to be brusque and stare at their notes rather than look me in the eye.

Dr. Spence was no exception. The week after the shooting, which I’d mostly spent cocooned in blankets, my parents summoned him to our house, ushering me and the good doctor into the living room and shutting the door behind us. I took the armchair, leaving Dr. Spence to take the couch. I wasn’t going to be one of those people who stretched out and yawned and let all their secrets float away like dandelion fluff.

“Julia,” he said. He perched on the edge of the cushion, notebook and pen on his lap, his legs crossed. One foot jittered hypnotically. I couldn’t look away. “How are you feeling?”

I wrenched my eyes away from his jiggling foot and stared at the fireplace. A week ago, the mantel had been cluttered with family photos in crystal frames: me and my brother as toddlers with gap-toothed grins; me and my brother dressed up as Aladdin and Jasmine for Halloween in fourth grade; me and my brother holding our instruments high, clarinet and trumpet, respectively, when we started band in middle school. They weren’t there anymore. I would’ve settled for smashed frames, bits of crystal everywhere, or even having them tipped over, bowing, like they were as devastated as we were. But they were just gone, as if they’d never been there at all.

“Wonderful,” I said, my voice heavy with sarcasm. “How do you think?”

He lowered his head and scribbled something on his pad. “Sometimes we use sarcasm as a way of masking our true feelings,” he said gravely. “It sounds like that’s what you’re doing here.”

“Really?” I said. “Does it? I hadn’t realized.”

“It does,” he said, and then furrowed his brow. “You’re being sarcastic again.”

“Way to earn that PhD, Doc.”

He wrote something else down, then leaned back and met my eyes. His were big, doleful behind the pair of blocky black frames. “You sound angry,” he said. “Nobody would blame you. I would be angry, too.”

“Would you?”

“It’s not your fault, what happened,” he said. “You are not your brother. You did not do this, and people should not blame you.”

I looked him hard in the eye, and I almost believed him.

And then he flinched. A tiny, nearly imperceptible flinch, one I probably wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t been looking for it. To his credit, he continued staring me in the face, even if he was afraid I’d go for a gun or a knife, or jam his pen through his eye while he was looking at me. Or that my brother would burst through my skin, laughing maniacally, wearing our almost identical dark curls and hazel eyes and permanently rosy cheeks.

“It was nice to see you again, Doc,” I said, and then fled. That was the good thing about a house call: your nest of blankets was never too far away.

I’d done all I could to leave Dr. Spence behind in Elkton, and I wanted him to stay there. As soon as homeroom ended, I rushed out without a goodbye to Alane and charged through the hallways, elbowing my way through the streams of people surrounding me, and locked myself in the handicapped bathroom on the second floor.

Once safely ensconced in my disinfectant-smelling haven, I sat on the closed lid of the toilet and pulled out my phone. The cold porcelain chilled me through my jeans, and I wrapped one arm around myself as I tapped away with the other. Dr. Spence shouldn’t be here. He shouldn’t know my new name. I was probably just crazy—probably just seeing things—but I would feel a whole lot safer if I knew he was back in Elkton, where he belonged.

Just as I was about to press the green
CALL
button, to send my voice beaming over the waves or wires or whatever across the state, I laid my phone back on my lap. What if they somehow traced my number? If they—and by
they,
I wasn’t even sure who I meant—found out where I was?

So I clicked over to the Web and Googled him instead:
Atlas Spence psychologist Elkton.
I skimmed the list of results. Most were familiar: he’d appeared in a few articles about the shooting (though he never granted an interview), and then there were the general listings for his practice, a boxy brick building at the edge of town he shared with a few other psychologists and one misplaced chiropractor.

Nothing, notably, about a mysterious disappearance. But he didn’t have to have disappeared. He could just be taking a trip.

I sighed and realized my hands were shaking. I had to call. It wasn’t like the police had a wiretap on his phone. It wasn’t like anyone was actually looking for me.

Still, I had to hold my phone against my shoulder as it rang to keep it from slipping through my sweaty fingers.

“Good Help Clinic, how may I help you?”

“Hi,” I said breathlessly. Today was Tuesday. Dr. Spence should be in his office today. Unless his schedule had changed. Everything had changed—why not that? “I’m looking for Dr. Spence?”

“Dr. Spence can’t come to the phone right now. Can I take a message for him?”

“It’s kind of an emergency. Is he with another patient? Or will he be in at all today?”

“Dr. Spence is actually out of the office for a few weeks.” The receptionist’s voice had softened. “If it’s an emergency, I can get you in today with Dr. Fischbach. Do you—”

My finger missed the screen three times before I was able to hang up. I lowered my phone back to my lap, my hands shaking again.
Out of the office
could mean anything, I told myself. It could mean he was sick. He could be visiting family out of state. He could be reclining on a beach somewhere in the Bahamas, snapping his fingers for someone to bring him martinis.

Or he could be here. In Sunny Vale, looking for me.

But why? It didn’t make sense. Everybody in Elkton had been glad to be rid of my family. Or at least it seemed like everybody. I’d forgotten what my neighbors looked like; all I saw for weeks on end were their silhouettes behind drawn curtains. Reporters were everywhere; so many had popped out from behind bushes I was paranoid my mom would one day peel off a mask and announce she was from the
New York Times.
And every so often a few people would gather out front and just glare at our house, as if the power of their disapproval would cause it to crumble and trap us inside.

Sometimes I knew them. That was the worst.

A couple weeks after the incident, I’d finally pushed myself to start leaving the house, usually just running—because what else did I have to leave the house for?—and was always mobbed by reporters throwing questions at me.
Julia, how are you feeling? What happened in the band room? Tell the world your story, Julia! The world deserves to know!
As far as I was concerned, the world didn’t deserve anything from me.

One day, on the way home, I just couldn’t do it. I rounded the corner of my block and I couldn’t face the thought of elbowing through the reporters again, of feeling their hot spit on my cheeks as they yelled. So I jogged a few steps backward and slunk against my neighbor’s fence.

“Excuse me, hi.”

My head whipped toward the voice. All my muscles clenched when I saw who it was—one of the many reporters who’d knocked on my door after it happened. This one was short and curvy in a way that stretched the seams of her pantsuit, and she held her notepad and pen under her arm. A blotch circled the paper where her pit sweat had seeped into the pad. Gross.

“I’m Jennifer,” she continued. “It’s nice to meet you. I hope you’re well. Well—as well as you can be.” She tittered nervously.

I eyed her warily. I could turn and run away, but I was so exhausted. Of this. Of everything. I could stand here and refuse to speak, but that would say more than any interview could. I could jump her and paper-cut her to death with her notepad. No. That was a terrible idea.

“Call me Julie,” I said. Nobody called me Julie.

“Julie,” she said. A savage sort of triumph welled in my belly. Now this would be okay. She might pretend she knew me, she might sympathize with me, but every time she said
Julie,
she’d remind me she was just some stranger I could paper-cut to death at any time. “Julie, how are you doing?”

“That’s a stupid question,” I said. No, more like spat. The flash of shock in her eyes fanned my triumph into glee. “You don’t care how I’m doing. You want to know what happened in the band room.” The glee or triumph, or whatever it was, was beginning to burn, and I swallowed hard, hoping to quell it. I hoped it worked before I started to cry.

Jennifer pursed her lips and chewed on the inside of her cheek as if she was trying to figure out whether she should take the bait. “Fine,” she said finally, biting so hard the hook jutted through her upper lip. “What happened in the band room, Julie?”

I pulled back my lips, trying hard not to cry. I had to scare her. I had to freak her out so much she’d never come back. “Can’t help you there, Jennifer,” I said. “Or is it Jenny? I’ll call you Jenny.” Her smile tightened. “Jenny, I remember nothing. I remember sitting in the band room, my clarinet on my lap, carving my name into my music stand as the band director worked with one of the freshmen. My brother burst through the door. And then”—I gave a dramatic pause—“nothing. The last thing I remember is blinking and everybody was dead. Is that what you wanted to hear, Jenny?”