Page 109 of The Glass Girl

She takes a slip of paper from her jacket pocket and hands it to me. I unfold it.

In quotation marks, it says“Hi, I just wanted to tell you I was thinking of you. We don’t really know each other that well, but I’ve been places, too, and I just wanted you to know that.—Dawn.”

I blink at the paper. “What—”

“A friend of yours?” Tracy says. “They aren’t on the call list, so we couldn’t put you on. But we took the message. Is this a good thing? Or someone we should be aware of?”

I barely know her and she was nice enough to actually call me. Nicer than anyone else, even. My eyes get wet.

“Yes,” I say. “It’s cool. I know her.”

I know her, and she’sbeen places, too.

Day Twelve

I’m almost asleep aftermy ritual forty laps up and down the hallway when I hear Charlotte shift in her bed and whisper my name.

“What?” I ask in a quiet voice. Moonlight is ribboning the floor through the window. Brandy, Gideon, and Holly are quiet in their beds. Gideon reads herself to sleep every night, thick fantasy paperbacks with intricately designed covers.

“That thing,” Charlotte says in a low voice. “You with the cup the other day and breaking it. That was impressive, but you gotta watch out for Tracy. I saw you two yesterday. She’s zeroing in. She’s…she’s an instigator.”

I roll over to face her. I can make out her bright pink hair, the sharp bones of her shoulders poking through the thin fabric of her T-shirt. She’s sitting up in bed looking in my direction.

“A…what, now?”

“She’s an instigator. She picks at something you say and when you get real defensive or sad, she’ll pretend to move on to something else, but then she’ll zap right back to it when you least expect it and crush you until you snap.”

I blink at her, my eyes still fuzzy from sleep. “But isn’t that…kind of her job?”

“Partly, but—”

Gideon’s voice, raspy with sleep, cuts her off. “Can you giveit a rest, Char? What are you doing? Just because you and Tracy had your little skirmish doesn’t mean—”

“Oh my god,” a voice calls out faintly. “Why don’t you all just shut up? My god, I’m so sick of being with all of you twenty-four-seven and I was just having the best dream about chocolate cake. You do not know how much I miss chocolate cake.”

It’s Brandy. She rolls over on her side toward us.

“And I miss the tamales Mary gets from La Estrella,” she murmurs. “And the champurrado.”

Her voice sounds wistful.

“Who’s Mary?” Gideon asks. “That your mom?”

“No,” Brandy says. “She’s our maid. She’s knows all the yummiest places.”

“Amaid,” Charlotte says. “No wonder you can’t even cook an egg. You’ve never done anything for yourself in your life, have you?”

“I do plenty of things, thank you very much,” Brandy shoots back.

“What skirmish?” I ask, pinning my eyes on Charlotte. “Did you go to Seg? What happened?”

She just smiles at me in the half moonlight. “I did what I had to do. She just would not stop talking.”

“I miss getting high.”

I don’t think any of us even noticed Holly sit up in her bed. Her knees are tucked under her chin.

“I miss holding the foil in my hand and lighting the foil and watching everything get liquidy and snorting it up through a straw and dying a million warm deaths. I miss walking on First Avenue and waiting for the right person to come and notknowing what I’m going to get when I give them my money. Is it going to make me feel like cotton candy or am I going to die? I miss being on my bed or someone else’s bed and not knowing how much time has passed, hours or days.”

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