there, but she refused to meet his gaze in the mirror.
She felt something brush the small of her back.
In the next second her face was jammed up against the mirror. Something shoved her
hips against the porcelain ledge of the sink. She felt cold fingers tugging on the waistband
of her shorts.
Alex screamed, she kicked out, struck solid flesh and bone, felt the grip on her shorts
loosen. She tried to shove back from the sink, glimpsed her face in the mirror, a blue barrette sliding from her hair, saw the man—the thing—that had hold of her. You can’t do
that, she thought. You can’t touch me. It wasn’t possible. It wasn’t allowed. None of the Quiet Ones could touch her.
Then she was facedown on the concrete floor. She felt her hips jerked backward, her panties yanked down, something nudging against her, pushing into her. She saw a butterfly lying in a puddle beneath the sink, one wing flapping listlessly as if it were waving to her.
She screamed and screamed.
That was how Meagan and Ms. Rosales found her, on the bathroom floor, shorts
crumpled around her ankles, panties at her knees, blood smeared over her thighs and a lump of blood-soaked toilet paper wadded between her legs, as she sobbed and thrashed,
hips humped up and shuddering. Alone.
Ms. Rosales was beside her, saying, “Alex! Sweetheart!” and the thing that had been trying to get inside her was gone. She never knew why he stopped, why he fled, but she’d
clung to Ms. Rosales, warm and alive and smelling of lavender soap.
Ms. Rosales sent Meagan out of the bathroom. She dried Alex’s tears and helped her clean up. She had a tampon in her purse and told Alex how to put it in. Alex followed her
instructions, still shaking and crying. She didn’t want to touch down there. She didn’t want to think about him trying to push in. Ms. Rosales sat beside her on the bus, gave her
a juice box. Alex listened to the sounds of the other kids laughing and singing, but she was
afraid to turn around. She was afraid to look at Meagan.
On that long bus ride back to school, in the long wait at the nurse’s office, all she had
wanted was her mother, to be wrapped up in her arms and taken home, to be safe in their
apartment, bundled in blankets on the couch, watching cartoons. By the time her mother
arrived and finished her whispered conversation with the principal and the school
counselor and Ms. Rosales, the halls had cleared and the school was empty. As Mira led
her out to the parking lot through the echoing quiet, Alex wished she were still small enough to be carried.
When they got home, Alex showered as quickly as possible. She felt too vulnerable, too naked. What if he came back? What if something else came for her? What was to stop
him, to stop any of them, from finding her? She’d seen them walk through walls. Where
could she ever be safe again?
She left the shower running and slipped into the kitchen to burrow through their junk
drawer. She could hear her mother murmuring on the phone in her bedroom.
“They think she may have been molested,” Mira said. She was crying. “That she’s
acting out now because of it … I don’t know. I don’t know. There was that swim coach at
the Y. He always seemed a little off and Alex didn’t like going to the pool. Maybe something happened?”
Alex had hated the pool because there was a Quiet kid with the left side of his skull caved in who liked to hang around the rusted podium where the diving board had once been.
She rooted around in the drawer until she found the little red pocketknife. She took it
with her into the shower, setting it on the soap dish. She didn’t know if it would do any
good against one of the Quiet Ones, but it made her feel a little better. She washed quickly, dried off, and changed into pajamas, then went out into the living room to curl up on the
couch, her wet hair wrapped in a towel. Her mother must have heard the shower turn off,
because she emerged from her bedroom a few moments later.
“Hey, baby,” she said softly. Her eyes were red. “Are you hungry?”