Frost

I shut the bedroom door behind me and sat on the bed with the photo in my hands, studying the damage. Then—pulse racing, knowing Celeste was right across the hall—I rummaged through my bag for a black Sharpie and began coloring in the chipped area on the frame. At first, the color was too brownish, but after a few layers it built up to black. If I looked closely, I could tell there was a variation in the surface; once it was hanging I thought it would be okay, especially if she didn’t know to be looking for it.

After I was finished, I couldn’t even entertain the idea of doing the homework I had left from the weekend. I went straight to bed. As I lay there in the dark, all I could think about was who would have done that to Celeste. The door had been locked; they would have had to climb through a window to get in. They would have had to break in to our bedroom— my bedroom. Picturing it, I couldn’t ignore the anger beginning to burn at the center of my chest.

This wasn’t how Frost House was supposed to be. None of it—the tension at the dinner, worrying about what was happening here in the room. It was supposed to be a sanctuary.

I brought Cubby onto my chest, wishing again, like I had with the vase, that she could tell me what she’d seen. If I didn’t know what had happened, how could I know what to do to make it safe again? I concentrated very hard on her eyes, trying to see the answer.

It will never be safe while she’s here. Cubby’s voice was inside my head, quiet.

“It’s not her fault,” I told myself.

Everything is her fault. She has to go.

I looked through the dark at Celeste’s side of the room: her hat collection, her flamboyant wardrobe, the beetle photo . . . and I wondered. One thing I knew was that she needed to be the center of attention. Was it possible that she was doing this all herself, so she would be the center of attention in the dorm? Was that what I was trying to tell myself, by saying it was all her fault? Maybe she’d ripped her own skirt, broken the vase, thrown her own photograph. And just pretended to be the scared victim.

Well, if she had, then hanging the photo back up and ignoring it was the best thing I could have done.

Chapter 16

THE NEXT MORNING, I pretended to be asleep when Viv came to get me for breakfast. I absolutely shouldn’t have missed bio—especially not an unexcused absence—but the only, only place I wanted to be was in my room. It was going to be one of those shockingly bright fall days, and the early sun shone in through the trees, filling the whole space with warmth. I liked knowing that if I was here, the room was safe. No one could come in except those rays of sunlight.

I lay curled up on my side with my comforter piled on top of me and tried to think about yesterday’s events without getting worked up. I needed to talk to someone about what was going on. But who? Not David, or Abby, or Dean Shepherd. Viv was a possibility, but she hated keeping secrets, and I’d have to ask her not to tell anyone. I was even considering my mother, when I had another idea. Trying not to get my hopes up, I looked at the clock and calculated. . . . Yes, it should be the perfect time. Without another thought, I opened my laptop and checked to see if she was online, then called.

I almost cried when Kate appeared on my screen, all the way from Moscow, wearing her favorite Violent Femmes T-shirt and playing with her ever-present wire mandala. Viv and Abby and I had talked to her occasionally as a group, but it was hard because of the time difference, and because she wasn’t online often.

“Leena Thomas,” she said with a smile. “You look like hell.”

The minute I started talking, it all rushed out in a waterfall of words, everything that had happened with Celeste and Abby and David from the beginning of the semester, so many things—I realized now—that I’d been keeping to myself.

Kate listened and nodded and kept up a steady rhythm with her hands, flipping the three-dimensional wire form into different geometric shapes. I could tell she was thinking hard because of how quickly her hands moved.

“It seems to me,” she said, “from thousands of miles away, that you’re tangling a lot of things all together. I don’t actually think there’s anything you need to be worrying about.”

“Really?” I said.

“The one thing you need to make a decision about is whether to tell anyone about the photograph, right?”

The weight of all the worries I had made it seem much more complicated than that, but I supposed that was the only actual decision to be made. “Right,” I said.

“Okay, I’m trusting that you can really tell it hit the wall hard enough to have been thrown. So, in that case, either . . . one.” She stopped playing with the mandala and held up a finger. “Someone snuck in the room and threw it to be mean to Celeste. Or two—” Another finger. “Celeste threw it herself, for God knows what reason. Right?”

“I guess.”