Before I Wake (3 page)

“Is it true that Mr. Beck died in your bed?”

On
my bed. He’d died
on
my bed, not in it. But I knew better than to
answer.

I’d known this moment was coming, but knowing you’re about to
be dunked headfirst into ice-cold water is never enough to prepare you for the
shock. And with that one question from the masses, the floodgates opened on all
queries personal and inappropriate, and I could only stand there, wishing it all
away as voice after voice shouted at me, dissecting my personal trauma and
baring my wounds for the world.

“Why was he in your bed?”

“Did you really kill him?”

“Were you sleeping with Mr. Beck?”

“Is that why Nash dumped you?”

“Why was Nash arrested?”

“Why did they let him go?”

“Was he there that night?”

“Did he kill Mr. Beck?”

After all the time and concentration it had taken to
reestablish breathing as a habit and convince my heart to beat, my body chose
that moment to claim perfect recall of both processes. My heart pounded too
hard. Blood rushed through my veins so fast my head swam. Air slid in and out of
my lungs so quickly that if I’d had actual need of it, I probably would have
passed out.

Panicked, I glanced at Sophie, desperate for help, but she was
edging slowly, silently out of the crowd, probably hoping no one knew she’d been
there that night so they couldn’t assault her with the same questions. When I
died, her dad had finally been forced to tell her the truth about our family. I
wondered how she was handling it, but I couldn’t tell that from watching her
back as she fled. I wanted to escape with her, but I couldn’t get through the
crowd. I couldn’t even get my locker open, because there wasn’t room.

There wasn’t room to move, and there wasn’t room to breathe.
The world started to close in on me, and the only way I knew to escape was to
disappear, and I couldn’t do that. No matter what, I couldn’t disappear in front
of fifty fellow students.

The questions kept coming, but the answers got stuck behind the
lump in my throat. They weren’t the real answers, anyway, because I couldn’t
tell them what had really happened, because the truth wouldn’t set me free. The
truth would get me locked up.

Distantly, I heard a couple of teachers yelling for order, but
it was Emma who finally made it stop. “Back off, vultures!” she shouted, and I
exhaled in relief as she pushed her way to the center of the crowd. “She just
got out of the hospital. Why don’t you go gossip behind her back, like decent
people?”

I could have kissed her.

Once Emma had achieved near-silence in the hall, the teachers
were able to start herding everyone toward their classes again, and through the
crowd, I saw Nash and Sabine heading away from us. Without a word.

I don’t know what I expected. For all I knew, he might never
forgive me, and I couldn’t really blame him.

“Are you okay?” Coach Tucker, the girls’ softball coach, asked
as I finally pulled my locker open.

“Yeah, I’m fine.” What else could I say?

“Here.” She pulled out a notepad and started scribbling on it,
then ripped the top sheet off and handed it to me. It was a late pass, with my
name on it. “Take a few minutes and get yourself together,” she said, already
scribbling on a second pass for Emma.

“Thanks.” But all I could think about was that she’d remembered
my name for the first time in nearly three years.

“I’m so sorry about what happened to you, Kaylee,” Coach Tucker
said as she handed Em her pass. “I feel like one of us should have known
something was wrong with him. We saw him every day. We talked to him. Ate with
him. I’m so sorry we failed you.”

I didn’t know what to say. The faculty had sent flowers to my
house the day after I’d been restored from the dead, but I’d assumed the bouquet
was an autoresponse from the secretary. Now I wondered if Coach Tucker had
arranged the whole thing.

“Nobody failed me. I’m fine. Really,” I said, but she didn’t
look convinced.

“Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help you get
readjusted,” she said, and I nodded, then started removing books from my
backpack and sliding them into my locker. I wasn’t trying to be rude. I just
didn’t know what else to say.

Finally Coach Tucker left to scold a couple kissing in the
hall, and I exhaled slowly.

“You okay?” Emma asked, leaning against the locker next to
mine.

“Been better. People suck.”

Em smiled. “Yeah. People do suck.” Her smile died as I stared
into my now-empty backpack, trying to remember what I’d been doing. What book I
needed.

Second period. Chemistry. Oh,
yeah.

“So, Thane’s back?” Em said softly as I dropped my chemistry
text into my bag again. “How is that even possible?”

“I don’t know.”

“What does this mean?”

“I don’t know.”

She frowned. “What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know, Em. I don’t know anything about it, except that
he killed the owner of the doughnut shop around the corner from the school, and
you’re the only person I’ve told.” But I couldn’t tell her what he’d said about
Avari coming after my friends and family. That would scare her to death.

“You haven’t told Tod?”

“Haven’t had a chance.” I closed my locker and threw my
backpack over one shoulder. “I can’t tell Madeline, because she’ll tell Levi,
and that will force him into making trouble for Tod. Like,
big
trouble. I have to do something, but I have no idea what that is
yet. For now���”

The bell rang, and several underclassmen ran past, on their way
to class.

“—we’re both late for second period,” I finished. And Em hadn’t
been to her locker yet.

“Okay, I know. But one more thing.” She laid a hand on my arm
and the rare show of nerves in her expression made me stop. “Since you’ve been
gone, Nash and Sabine have been avoiding me, so I’ve been eating lunch with
Jayson.”

“Jayson Olivera?”

“Yeah. We’ve been kind of…going out. For a couple of
weeks.”

I blinked in surprise. To my knowledge, she hadn’t actually
dated anyone since Doug died right before Christmas.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because I wasn’t sure it would turn into anything—I’m still
not sure—and you had enough on your mind without having to worry about censoring
yourself in front of my human boyfriend.”

My chest ached at the look in her eyes and at the silence,
where all the things she wasn’t saying should have gone. “I didn’t realize you
knew Jayson,” I said.

Em shrugged. “I didn’t, really.” She clutched her books to her
chest and leaned against my closed locker. “It was really weird here when you
were gone. Nash and Sabine were all closed off and unapproachable. Not that I
can blame them, with everyone talking about his arrest. And everyone else just
wanted to know what really happened that night at your house. Nash wasn’t
talking, so they came after me. Jayson was the only one who still
acted…normal.”

And she’d needed normal. I’d tried so hard not to drag Emma
into danger, but the Netherworld was like quicksand—the harder I tried to pull
her out of it, the harder it sucked her in.

She would have been better off if she’d never met me.

“I’m so sorry, Emma.”

“It’s okay,” Em said. “Really. But I like him, and he was
totally there for me when I was…lonely. I just… Is it going to be weird if
Jayson sits with us? I’m assuming Tod will be there, and you never know when
Nash and Sabine will decide they want to talk. He can’t be mad at you
forever.”

“Yes, he can. So, are Nash and Sabine…together?” Em hadn’t said
much about that during my month off, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about the
possibility. The probability. It was officially none of my business who Nash
went out with, and I wanted him to be happy, but…just asking the question felt
weird.

So much had changed so fast—my head was still spinning.

Em frowned in thought. “I can’t tell. You never see one without
the other anymore, but they’re not all over each other in public or anything.
Maybe that was never their style.”

But if there’d been a ban on public displays, that was Nash’s
doing. Sabine would claim him any way she could. Any way he’d let her.

I shrugged and tried to shake the thought off. “I wouldn’t
worry about Nash and Sabine showing up to make your human boyfriend
uncomfortable, and when Tod gets there…we’ll make it work.” So what if Em’s
boyfriend wouldn’t be able to see or hear mine. “Any boyfriend of yours… You
know the rest.” I scrounged up a parting smile, then headed for second-period
chemistry, where the stares continued for another miserable fifty minutes.

Third period was my free period, so I shoved my backpack into
my locker, then headed for the nearest restroom, which was quickly turning into
my own personal transit system. But as I passed the front office, the glass door
opened and the school’s attendance secretary stuck her head out. “Kaylee
Cavanaugh?” she said, both her eyebrows and her voice high in question.

I hesitated, almost certain she wouldn’t have been able to pick
me out of a crowd a month earlier.

“I was just on my way to find you. You’re late for your
appointment with your guidance counselor.”

Well, crap.
There’d been a message
on my home phone the week before, mentioning an appointment during my free
period when I returned to school, but I’d deleted the message and made a mental
note to have my dad talk the school out of mandatory trauma counseling.

Obviously I should have left myself an
actual
note…

Reluctantly, I followed the secretary through the main office
and into another suite, where several other students sat waiting for the N-Z
counselor, whose door was closed. I’d never met my counselor—the A-M
counselor—but the moment I entered the waiting room, she stepped out of her
office and directed me inside with one outstretched arm while she gave the
secretary a thank-you nod.

“Hi Kaylee. I’m Ms. Hirsch. Come in and have a seat,
please.”

I sat in one of the chairs in front of her desk while she
closed the door behind me, then circled the desk to sit in her own chair. My
file folder was open on her desk, and when she turned off the computer
monitor—though I couldn’t see it from my seat—I realized that she’d been reading
the local paper online. Or maybe she’d just Googled me in preparation for our
appointment. Were school counselors allowed to Google?

“Would you like a bottle of water?” Ms. Hirsch set a small
plastic bottle at the front of her desk, next to a bowl full of Jolly
Ranchers.

“No, thanks.” I set my backpack on the floor between my feet,
then realized that left me nothing to do with my hands.

“So, Kaylee, how’s your first day back going?”

“Fine.” As long as “fine” could be defined as the half-way
point between horrible and unbearable.

“What about your classes? Are you having any trouble getting
caught up? Did the school set you up with a tutor while you were out?”

They’d tried. But my father had insisted that he could help me
with anything I didn’t understand. The tutor finally accepted that as the
truth—after my father hit him with a heavy dose of verbal Influence, his natural
gift as a male
bean sidhe.

“I’m not that far behind,” I said with a shrug.

“Well, if you decide you do want a tutor or need help
scheduling any makeup exams, just let me know.”

“I’m fine. Really,” I insisted, but Ms. Hirsch only frowned
like she didn’t believe me. And why should she? What sixteen year old is fine
four weeks after being stabbed by her math teacher?

Certainly not this one… But that had less to do with what Mr.
Beck had done to me than the thought of facing another mob like the one in the
hall that morning. Beck was dead and gone, but the vultures were still alive and
circling.

“I’m sure it must be very difficult being back here for you,”
Ms. Hirsch said, and I realized she’d heard about the incident in the hall. “I
suspect you’re dealing with a lot of unwanted attention today.”

“Yeah.”

“How do you feel you’re coping with that?”

I was
trying
to cope by fleeing
school grounds during my free period—until I’d been dragged into the counselor’s
office. “All I can really do is ignore them, right?”

She nodded slowly. “People, especially teenagers, are curious
by nature, they don’t always think about how their curiosity affects others.
Peers may ask you directly or indirectly about what happened to you. But you
have every right to tell them you don’t want to talk about it with them. You
should never feel guilty about that.”

I didn’t feel guilty. I didn’t feel…much of anything, except
for the need—a truly escalating
drive
—to get as far
away from school and my “peers” as possible.

I should have been a wreck. People were obviously waiting for
me to fall apart at the seams and spill my emotional guts all over the floor,
and some small part of me wished I could. I wished things were still simple
enough that a good cry could purge all the bad stuff and give me a fresh start.
But I’d never felt less like crying, and I was all out of fresh starts. My
mother had given me the only one I was allowed when I was three.

“I’m fine. Really,” I said, and her frown deepened.

“Kaylee, it’s perfectly normal to be upset for a very long time
after something like what you’ve been through. It could be months before you
start to feel anything like normal and that is perfectly okay.”

Normal? Seriously?

“So, what, there’s a timeline for how long it should take me to
get over being stabbed by my math teacher? Someone really wrote that? How
convenient! Does it happen to mention how long I should be upset about the fact
that I had to kill him? Because honestly, with no guidelines in place, I might
be tempted to linger in mourning for, like, a solid
week.
Is that too long?”