Page 21 of The Narrow

Delphine shakes her head. “I’ve been trying to reach her, but she doesn’t respond. I keep thinking she’s dead and no one wants to break it to me.”

“She’s not dead,” I say with more confidence than I feel. They wouldn’t lie aboutthat, would they? A new thought strikes me. “Have you looked at my profile?”

“I’ve looked at everyone’s profile. I have a lot of time on my hands,” Delphine says without a hint of embarrassment. “I probably know more about your classmates than you do.”

“What do you think you know about me?” I ask, trying tokeep my rising anger in check. Who does she think she is, prying into our lives? Who do our teachers thinktheyare, pretending we have a shred of privacy?

“You don’t use AtChat very much, so I don’t know as much about you as I do about other people,” Delphine says. She opens up a photo I’m tagged in. Me, Ruth, Zoya, and Veronica, Ruth beaming as she holds up a track medal, the rest of us giddy. “These three girls are your friends. You only ever show up in photos with at least one of them, and almost all of your comments are on their posts. You like other people’s posts a lot, but you don’t comment. You never post anything while you’re at home. I like your comics.”

“What?” I ask, startled at the seeming non sequitur.

“Grave Belles,” she says, and my stomach twists. “You uploaded a few pages to your private journal freshman year. It’s cool. Are you still working on it?”

“Yeah,” I say, voice hoarse. “You saw those?” I’ve never shown them to anyone.

“You’re angry.” Her brow furrows.

“It’s a pretty serious violation of privacy, don’t you think?” I choke out. “If I wanted people to see those, I would have shown them.”

Her eyes are huge and dark and still. “You feel like someone saw what they shouldn’t have, but it isn’t true. I’m no one. I don’t talk to anyone. There’s no one I could tell. I would just get in trouble,” she says, like this makes all the sense in the world. She turns away from me, back to the screen. “I wouldn’t tell, anyway. I keep everyone’s secrets.”

With a few quick keystrokes, she logs out and shuts the computer. Her fingertips run along the seam, and she stares down at it for a moment. Then she looks back up at me.

“I won’t look at your profile anymore. Since we know each other now. And since you aren’t going to lie to me.”

I have no idea what to say to her. Her eyes are pale blue, but the pupils are large, and the darkness in them reflects my own shadowed figure back at me. I am struck again by what a contradiction she is—naive and canny, delicate and dangerous.Dangerous?The word springs to my mind, and I can’t explain it or dismiss it.

She knows, the words in the journal say.Have you seen her yet?the text asks.

Mrs.Clarke is calling. I excuse myself, and Delphine doesn’t say a word as I go. Mrs.Clarke is in the hall. In her arms are Aubrey’s neatly folded clothes, gathered into a laundry basket. “Was this everything?” she asks.

I think of the red diary, still in the bedside table. “Yes,” I say. “That’s everything.”

10

I SIT UPthat night with my sketchbook. In its pages are my latest work onGrave Belles. Usually I work on it during my free time, but I haven’t touched it in weeks.

Back in the Victorian era, sometimes people got buried who weren’t really dead. People got so paranoid about it that they rigged up bells that could be rung from inside a buried coffin in case you woke up buried alive.Grave Bellesis about a young woman, the gravedigger’s daughter, who hears a bell ringing by a fresh grave and discovers a living girl inside. I started it in my freshman year, though I’ve revised and redrawn most of the pages from back then. I add to it slowly, in fits and starts, whenever I have the time.

Flipping through to find the first blank page in the sketchbook, I linger on a sketch I’d made of an important moment between the two heroines. Lenore, the gravekeeper’s daughter, standing with her back to the viewer, her face turned just enough to see the sweep of her dark eyelashes. Belle, facing the viewer,but with her face turned away and downward. Their hands stretch behind them, fingertips almost—but not quite—meeting.

In the story, Belle has just discovered that Lenore has been lying to her, concealing the fact that Belle’s brother has been arrested for her murder. Lenore believes he should hang, given that he didtryto kill Belle, but Belle thinks that she should reveal her survival and spare him.

I don’t yet know how it will all work out.

There is rain drumming on the windows. At first I don’t notice it—a steady, soothing sound. And then I remember the clear skies we’ve had, hearing the sound of rain only to wake to nothing, and a chill goes down my spine.

I rise from my bed and walk to the window. None of the windows in Abigail House open; they’re sealed shut, every one.

It’s not raining. I can’t hear it anymore, either, and I tell myself I must have imagined it. There isn’t even a drop of water on the window.

Except for the faint, almost-imperceptible imprint of a hand. It fades so quickly, I cannot be sure I saw it, but I fall back from the window, my breath caught in my throat.

Have you seen her yet?

I stand frozen. I am trapped in this house. I feel besieged, as if there is something just outside waiting to snatch me up if I stray, if I break the rules. But that’s ridiculous, isn’t it? I am not Veronica; I have never had faith in spirits and energy and higher powers. The rain is only the rain and the dark is only the dark, and so I force myself to stride to the door and step out into the hallway. There, I stop, listening.

Faintly, oh so faintly, comes the patter of raindrops. So quiet it might only be that my mind has invented the sound to fill the silence. I steal toward the end of the hall, slip into the foyer. Still those soft raindrops taunt me.

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