I was the weird one—pale, creepy. Blond hair might have been a strong point on someone else, but on me, it just made it harder to get away with how dark my eyes were. I didn’t make jokes or start conversations. Sometimes, people got uneasy just looking at me. It was better to stay in the background. But now here I was, standing in the middle of the cafeteria, and Alice was coming closer. Her mouth was pink. Her eyes were very blue.
And then she was right in front of me.
“Hi, Mackie.”
I smiled, but it felt more like wincing. It was one thing to look at her from across a room and think about maybe, possibly kissing her. It was another to have a conversation. I swallowed and tried to come up with any of the normal things people talk about. All I could think was how once I’d seen her in her tennis uniform last spring and her legs were so tan I thought my heart would stop.
“So, did you give blood?” she said, touching her yellow sticker. “You better tell me you gave blood.” When she pushed her hair back from her face, I caught a flash of something silver in her mouth. She had her tongue pierced.
I shook my head. “I can’t do needles.”
That made her laugh. Suddenly, her hand was resting on my arm for no good reason. “Aw, that’s so cute! Okay, fine, you’re off the hook for being a huge pansy. So, are your parents all completely freaked out about the latest drama? I mean, you heard about Tate Stewart’s sister, right?”
Behind me, Roswell took a sharp breath and let it back out. The twins had stopped smiling. I fumbled around for a way to change the subject but couldn’t come up with anything on the spot.
The smell of blood was sweet and oozy, too thick to ignore.
I had to clear my throat before I answered. “Yeah. My dad’s been pretty cut up about it.”
Alice opened her eyes very wide. “Oh God, do you actually know them?”
“His dad’s doing the service,” Danny said in a flat voice.
He and Drew had both turned away. When I followed their gaze, I saw they were watching Tate, who sat alone at one of the long tables, staring out the floor-to-ceiling windows at the sky.
I didn’t know her. I mean, I’d gone to school with her my whole life, and she lived down the block from Drew and Danny, and I’d had at least one class with her every semester since junior high. But I didn’t know her. I didn’t know her sister either, but I’d seen them together in the parking lot at my dad’s church. A chubby, smiling little kid named Natalie. Just this normal, healthy-looking kid.
Tate scraped back her chair and glanced in our direction. Her hair was dark brown and cut short, which made her face look strangely bare. From far away, she seemed small, but her shoulders were rigid as she stood up, like she was ready to take a punch. Until two days ago, she’d had friends. Maybe not the whispering, giggling, inseparable kind like Alice, but people had liked her.
Now there was an empty space around her that made me think of quarantine. It was unsettling to realize that it didn’t take much to make you an outcast. All you needed was for something terrible to happen.
Alice didn’t waste any time on Tate. She flipped her hair over her shoulder and suddenly, she was standing much closer to me. “Just, you never think about little kids dying. I mean, that’s so sad, right? My mom’s kind of been going crazy with the saints medals and the Hail Marys since she heard. Hey, are you guys going to be around on Saturday? Stephanie’s having a party.”
Roswell leaned in over my shoulder. “Cool. We might stop by. So you guys got suckered into the blood drive, huh?” He was looking at Stephanie when he said it. “How was exsanguination? Did it hurt?”
Stephanie and Jenna both started to nod, but Alice rolled her eyes. “Not really. Like, it hurt when she was putting the tube in—but it wasn’t bad. It actually hurts more now. When she pulled the needle out, it kind of tore and now it won’t quit bleeding. Look.”
She held out her arm. There was a cotton ball taped to the inside of her elbow, covering the needle mark. In the middle, starting under the tape and spreading out through the cotton, there was a red splotch that grew and grew.
