Very Bad Things (8 page)

Katie turned teary eyes on the doctor. “I’m pretty freaked out. Who’d do something so twisted?”

“I don’t know,” Dr. Capello answered. “Someone who needs help.”

“Someone who needs a padded cell, you mean,” Katie said. Her fingers shook as she shredded the tissue. “What I don’t get is why they’d send something like that to
me
? The security chief acted like I’d done something to bring it on.”

“Don’t blame yourself,” Dr. Capello told her. “You can’t control what other people do. It’s not your fault this happened.”

Katie bit her lip, nodding.

Tessa watched the exchange, keeping quiet. Every time she sat in a room with Dr. Capello she had to remind herself that no matter how caring and nice the shrink seemed, she worked for the headmaster. Everything that anyone told her wound up in a file, property of Whitney Prep.

“How do I explain this to my mom?” Katie asked, and her eyes filled with tears. “How am I ever supposed to feel safe again?”

“No place is safe,” Tessa said, pushing hair behind her ears. “Anyone can find you if they really want to. All they have to do is Google. If you really don’t want to be found, you have to drop off the grid like you don’t exist—”

“Stop, Tessa! You’re only making things worse!” Katie gave her a scathing look.

“Hey, it’s not my fault! Blame Big Brother.”

“It’s completely normal to be afraid after what you’ve gone through,” Dr. Capello said. “But the headmaster has campus
security working overtime, and I’m sure the Barnard police will get involved as well.”

“You think they’ll catch whoever did it?” Katie asked.

Dr. Capello nodded. “I do.”

“Get real.” Tessa snorted. “People get away with stuff all the time around here. And if their parents can’t buy them out of it, they just yank them from school and they start all over again somewhere else.”

“You think someone from Whitney cut off that girl’s hand?” Katie asked, looking horrified.

“Why’s that so hard to imagine?” Tessa said, wondering how her friend could be so naive. The school was full of spoiled rich kids who’d been raised by nannies and used as pawns in their parents’ divorces. To say they had issues was an understatement. “It could be anyone, right, Dr. Capello? You know things about us that no one else knows. Everyone tells you their deep, dark secrets. I’ll bet some are even creepier than this.”

The school shrink leveled her gaze on Tessa. “I understand why you’re cynical,” she said. “You’ve been through a lot more than most.”

Maybe Dr. Capello meant to sound sympathetic, but Tessa heard only pity in her voice, and it got her back up.

“So whose hand is it?” she said, sure that Katie was wondering the same thing but was too afraid to ask. “Is it that girl in the sex pic with Mark Summers?”

“Tessa!” Katie turned a shade paler.

But Tessa didn’t quit. “It’s the same rose tattoo, isn’t it?”
Did Katie want to pretend that there wasn’t a connection? “Does anyone know her name?”

“I’m sure we’ll find out soon enough,” Dr. Capello replied.

Tessa turned to Katie. “Didn’t your boyfriend say she was someone Steve Getty brought to his party?”

“Would you stop dogging Mark!” Katie snapped. “He had nothing to do with this.”

“I didn’t say he did.” Tessa was a little surprised that Katie defended him, especially after what Mark had done to her.

“Drop it, okay?” Katie went to the window, pushing back the drape. There was a swirl of red and blue lights as a police car pulled up out front. “Will the cops take the box with them?”

“Yes,” Dr. Capello said. “They’ll need to examine it to find answers. I’m sure they’ll piece everything together soon enough.”

“Piece together, huh?” Katie dropped the drape. “Where’s the rest of her?” she asked, a pained expression on her face. “She wasn’t alive when her hand was cut off, was she?” Katie swallowed. “Whoever she is, she’s dead, right?”

Dr. Capello didn’t answer. “I’m just very sorry you have to deal with something as horrible as this,” she said.

Tessa wanted to laugh. What a lame reply! Katie had to know the girl was dead. Otherwise, there’d be a zombie chick walking around without a hand. That was the problem with everyone at Whitney. They liked to pretend bad things didn’t happen. They acted like everything was picture perfect inside the gates.

Only Tessa knew better than anyone that it wasn’t true. Bad things happened to everyone, everywhere. They were just easier to hide when you had money.

“Campus security will keep an eye on Amelia House, and if you’re afraid to go somewhere by yourself, an officer will tag along, okay?” Dr. Capello was saying. “If you need to talk any time, day or night, call me.” She gave Katie a pat on the arm.

Katie nodded.

“You too, Tessa.” The shrink turned her dark eyes on Tessa.

“Right.”

Tessa just wanted everyone to go away and leave them alone.

But even after the school shrink took off and the Barnard police had removed “that nasty parcel,” as she’d heard Mrs. Gabbert refer to it, the campus cops hung around Amelia House. Mrs. G. was so skittish she offered to let one of the cops sleep on the couch in the den. Tessa found that kind of funny since the Whitney rule book noted that
Boys are not allowed beyond the foyer in the girls’ dormitories and may only remain there so long as the housemother is present
.

She guessed rules went out the window when a student got a box with a severed hand. Though Mrs. G. was hardly the only one flipping out.

Tessa couldn’t even get Katie to leave their room for the rest of the day. The headmaster had given them permission to play hooky, and Tessa wanted to get outside once the rain stopped. “Let’s hit the student center,” she said. “Grab a cup
of coffee and a stale doughnut. You’ll feel better if we just do normal things.”

“You think coffee will make me feel normal?” Katie frowned, hugging a ragged stuffed bear that she’d brought to boarding school with her. “What if the psycho’s there, watching me?”

“So you’re never going to leave the dorm?”

“I will when they catch him,” Katie said, looking at her like she was nuts.

Katie wouldn’t even go to the bathroom by herself, and she made Tessa stand guard when she took a shower that night. Even though Tessa didn’t let anyone near her, Katie emerged white-faced and scared. She claimed she’d seen shadows outside the frosted glass door, like someone had walked past it, though Tessa assured her that no one had been anywhere near.

At bedtime, Katie insisted they leave the closet light on or she couldn’t go to sleep. It had been such a long day and Tessa was pretty bleary-eyed, so she went along with it. She wasn’t sure when they’d finally drifted off. Katie hadn’t gotten off the phone with her Mom until midnight, and then she’d spent another hour texting Mark. It was still dark outside when Tessa heard Katie’s whimpers.

“Tessa,” her friend called, her voice quavering.
“Tessa!”

“I’m right here,” she said, flying across the room and grabbing Katie’s trembling hands. “It’s okay. Everything’s all right.”

“No.” Katie shook her head, hair falling in her face. Her
eyes welled with tears. “I smelled roses again. Someone was in the room.”

“No one’s here but us.”

“They stood by my bed, Tess!”

“Okay, okay, let me look around.”

Tessa got up and made a big show of peering into the hallway and checking their closet. She even got down on all fours and peeked beneath the beds. “I swear, no one’s hiding,” she said, and sat down beside Katie. She brushed dark hair from Katie’s face, hating the fear she saw in her friend’s eyes. “Scoot over,” she told her. “I’ll stay here so you can get some sleep.”

Katie moved nearer the wall and Tessa settled into the twin bed beside her. She turned her face so their foreheads almost touched. “You’ll protect me from the psycho?”

“Like a pit bull in Joe Boxer.”

Katie cracked a smile. “More like a Chihuahua.”

“Ha,” Tessa said. “Now go to sleep.”

“Okay.” Katie found Tessa’s hand beneath the covers and squeezed.

Tessa didn’t dare move for the longest time, not until Katie closed her eyes and her breathing became slow and deep. Tessa’s heart still beat too quickly. She would never admit it, but she was shaken, too. Bad things were happening that she couldn’t control, like before, with the fire.

You were just a child
, the school shrink kept telling her.
You’re not responsible for what happened
.

But Tessa knew differently. She
was
responsible, and she had to live with the aftermath every day of her life. Yeah,
she’d been a child, but she’d done nothing to stop it. She’d known something was wrong, and she’d never spoken up. Wasn’t keeping quiet sometimes a very bad thing by itself?

Katie sighed in her sleep, and Tessa whispered, “I’ll be more careful this time. I can’t lose anyone else.”

She’d lost too much already.

W
hen Katie cracked open her eyes the next morning, Tessa was already dressed and sitting at her desk, fingers tapping on her laptop.

Katie glanced at her alarm clock. It was half past eight. “Oh, God, I’m so late,” she groaned, throwing off the covers.

Tessa turned her head. “Hey, you. I thought you’d never getup.”

“I’m missing Nineteenth-Century American Poets,” Katie said, hopping on one leg as she pulled on black tights beneath her sleep shirt. Where had she put her bra?

Tessa flashed a rare smile. “The dead poets can do without you for one morning. The headmaster gave us a pass today, too, remember?”

“Oh, crap, you’re right.” Katie sank onto the bed. She sighed and wiped the grit from her eyes. “I feel like I hardly slept.”

“You snored like a freight train.”

“I was asleep for five minutes.”

“Then it just seemed like forever,” Tessa teased.

Katie gave her a look that said thanks. If it hadn’t been for Tessa, Katie wouldn’t have slept at all. Every time she’d closed her eyes, she saw the hand, the red-rose tattoo so bright against the gray flesh.

Blech.

“What’re you doing?” She pushed the ugly thought from her head and crossed the room, peering over Tessa’s shoulder. “Making friends?”

“Hardly.” Tessa moved her laptop screen so Katie could see the Facebook page she was looking at.

It was for a girl named Rose Tatum.

“That’s her,” Tessa said. “The one with the rose tat.”

“Rose,” Katie said, and her guts twisted. Seeing the page made the girl seem more human. She had dark hair hanging past her shoulders, almond-shaped brown eyes, and a wide mouth curved in a cryptic half smile.

“She does look like you,” Tessa said.

“I don’t see it.”

“You just don’t want to.”

Okay, yeah, Katie guessed there was a vague resemblance. But it creeped her out to think she looked like a girl who was missing and probably dead. So she focused on the differences. Rose wore a lot more makeup, had crooked front teeth, and had piercings up and down her ears. Plus, there was the matter of the rose tattoo on her hand and wrist.

“It’s too bad I can’t friend her,” Tessa said. “We could find
out more about her, like which Whitney hockey jock she liked partying with most.”

Katie ignored Tessa, reading Rose’s public info: she was single, worked as a waitress at the Barnard Diner, and had 267 friends. Her favorite quote was attributed to Snooki: “I’m not trashy unless I drink too much.”

“Typical.” Tessa sniffed. “Girls like her ask for trouble. Doesn’t it seem like they always end up OD’ing or something?”

Katie flashed back on the hand in the box and shivered. “Nobody asks for that, Tessa. No one.”

But Tessa wasn’t done. “Why would a nineteen-year-old waitress want to party with prep school jocks?”

“Um, because they’re rich and cute,” Katie said, stating the obvious.

“They’re spoiled and conceited,” Tessa countered. “Girls like Rose are Kleenex to guys like Steve Getty. They use them, then toss them.”

“Even if that’s true, she and Steve still could have had a thing. Maybe she helped him set up Mark. Except we might never find out,” Katie said, and reached over Tessa’s shoulder to close Rose’s Facebook page. “I can’t look anymore.”

“Well, you’d better get used to seeing her picture. The police posted a missing-persons flyer downstairs and they’ve got it up on the school’s website, too. They’re nosing around again this morning, asking if anyone’s run into her since last Saturday.”

The Barnard police had shown up yesterday before Dr.
Capello left, wanting to fingerprint Katie and Tessa and Mrs. Gabbert. “So we can rule you out when we examine the box,” the cop had explained. But it had made Katie feel like a criminal, having her fingers rolled in ink and pressed onto an index card. She could still see the purple residue on her skin.

“Everyone’s talking, you know.” Tessa hesitated, though she looked fit to burst. “Word is that Mark was the last one to see Rose alive.”

“Stop,” Katie said sharply, and wrapped her arms around her stomach. Maybe the school gossips were getting off on this whole mess but Mark was scared out of his mind. He’d sent her text after text last night, telling her about the police showing up at his dad’s office and how he was under suspicion.