“You’re not pulling the trigger. But you’re not taking the gun away, either.”
“Please, Kaylee,” Lydia begged. “Get me out of here. I did it for you. You owe me.”
She was right, and I was rapidly running out of time in which to repay my debts. “Will you do it?” I asked Tod, and he nodded. “I can’t take you both at once, though, so I’ll have to come back for her.”
“No, take her first,” I insisted. “I have a couple more questions for Farrah, and I still want to check on Scott. I’ll wait here for you.”
“You sure?” Tod knew how much I hated Lakeside, and that the thought of getting caught there terrified me.
“Yeah. Just make sure you come back for me.”
“Nothing could keep me from it,” he said, and I believed him.
I let go of his hand, and mine suddenly felt cold. And empty. And when he reached for Lydia, I had a sudden mad urge to slap her hand away and reclaim his for myself, in spite of what I owed Lydia, and my genuine need to help her.
“You ready?” Tod said, and she nodded, taking his hand.
“What are you gonna do?” I asked, trying not to see where they touched each other, or wonder what it meant that I cared. “You can’t go home, can you?”
She shook her head. “They’d just send me back. But I’ll be fine. It can hardly get worse than dying in here, right?” she said, glancing around the space she shared with another mental patient in a secure facility. I knew how she felt, but I also knew that starving—or being attacked—on the street wouldn’t be any better.
I glanced around the room until I found a pencil on her desk, then pulled the twenty-dollar bill from my pocket. “This is all I have,” I said, scribbling my number on a scrap of paper from my pocket. I wrapped the money around it and handed it to her. “Call me if there’s anything I can do to help. I gotta warn you, though, this offer expires on Thursday.”
She frowned in confusion, but took the twenty and my number and shoved them in her pocket. “Thanks.”
I nodded, and Tod met my gaze. “Be right back.” Then they both disappeared, and sudden panic nearly overwhelmed me. Anyone who walked in would see me. I could be arrested, or even mistaken for a resident by some eager new staff member. Neither of those catastrophes would last once Tod came back for me, but that knowledge did nothing to calm me.
So I focused on Farrah, who didn’t seem to know Tod and Lydia were gone.
I sank onto the end of her bed, facing her. “Farrah?” She didn’t look up. “I’m real, remember? You can talk to me.”
She shook her head without looking up. “Real people don’t talk to Lydia. She can’t hear them, ’cause she’s not real.”
“You’re not real either, right?” I said, hating myself a little for stepping into her psychosis. “But you hear real people. It’s the same for Lydia.”
Farrah seemed to think about that for a minute, her hand frozen in the act of turning a page. Then she looked up and met my gaze. “Oh. Yeah.”
“Since I’m real, just like David, do you think you could tell me a little more about him?” I held my breath, sure she wouldn’t fall for that one. But then…
“He’s beautiful,” she said, her gaze losing focus, as if she could see him in her mind.
“Yes, he is.” Blanket policy when talking to the insane victim of incubus procreation: agree with everything she says. “But I was hoping for a little more than that. Do you know if any of your friends know him? Like you know him? Are any of them having babies, too?”
“Erica tried,” Farrah said. “But she got sick, and her baby died. It must have been real.”
“How awful,” I said, as she flipped more pages. “Anyone else?”
“Tiffany. But I haven’t seen her in a long time. She’s not real. But her baby is. It’s a girl.”
“How do you know it’s a girl?” I asked, as chills broke out on my arms. I hoped Tod would be back soon.
“David told me. He was sad.”
“Do you know where David lives?” I asked, and Farrah shook her head.
“He doesn’t take students to his house. That would be inappropriate.”
“Of course.” But evidently sleeping with them wasn’t. “So you only saw him at school?”
“Except when he came to my house.”
I sat straighter in surprise. “Mr. B—I mean David came to your house? Were your parents okay with that?”
“My dad wasn’t home. But my mom didn’t mind. She liked David.”
Uh-oh. I closed my eyes and swallowed the sick feeling creeping up from my stomach. “Farrah, Lydia said your mother died. Was that after David started coming to your house?”
“Yeah. Doesn’t matter, though, because she wasn’t real. So she didn’t really die. I won’t, either.”
“Because you’re not real?”
“Right. You’re going to die, though,” she said, looking right into my eyes, and my chill bumps doubled in size.
“How do you know that?”
Farrah shrugged. “Because you’re real. Everything real dies.”
Thoroughly creeped out, I stood and backed away from her bed, and Farrah went back to her book, like I’d never been there at all. And for a moment, I envied her effortless ability to simply move on, like nothing she’d heard mattered. At first, I’d thought facing death would do that for me, but somehow, the less time I had left, the more there seemed to be to do. And it all mattered.
Nervous now, I crossed the room and opened the door enough to peek into the hall. It was empty. I glanced at my watch to see that nearly five minutes had passed. How long did it take to blink into the parking lot, then blink back? Was something wrong?
Tod would never leave me there. Not if he had any choice.
Five minutes later, I’d gone through most of Farrah’s stuff without learning anything new, and I had to get out of that room. Every passing second brought the next nurse check closer, and I could not be found at Lakeside, in the room of a missing resident.
Finally desperate, I took off my shoes and put on the plain white bathrobe Lydia had left behind. Then I pulled the ponytail holder from my hair and shook my head, leaving my hair down to half-hide my face, and knelt by Farrah’s bed one last time.
“Do you know Scott Carter?” I asked, and she nodded.
“How…um…?” Turns out there’s no polite way to ask exactly how crazy someone is. “How is he?”
She looked up at me slowly, eyes wide, expression more coherent than I’d seen from her so far. “He’s real, but he doesn’t know it. So don’t tell him. He might not wanna know he’s going to die.”
That made two of us.
“Thank you, Farrah.” I stood and took one last look at her, wishing there was something I could do to help her. Then I sucked in a deep breath and stepped into the blessedly empty hallway.
I’d gone four steps when a door opened at my back and soft-soled shoes squeaked on the floor. I didn’t turn. Unless she got a good look at my face, whoever was behind me wouldn’t know I didn’t belong. I could have been any brunette mental patient in a bathrobe—a fact which unnerved me enough to make my hands shake. So I shoved them into Lydia’s pockets.
My heart pounded with every step, and when I stepped into the open common area at the center of the ward, agoraphobia crashed into me like a hit from Eastlake’s defensive line. The light felt too bright and the tile floor seemed to go on forever. People milled around like living land mines I had to avoid, without looking like I was avoiding them.
When I passed the TV room, my fists unclenched in my pockets. When I passed the dining area, I exhaled slowly. But I didn’t dare look up from my feet until I’d passed the nurse’s station without triggering any alarms. And even then, I could still hear my pulse rush in my ears, each surge counting down the seconds until I might be caught.
I leaned against the wall next to the visitor’s bathroom and snuck several furtive glances around to make sure no one was watching me. No one was, but my luck wouldn’t hold out forever, and Tod had yet to make an appearance. If I wanted to talk to Scott, I was on my own, at least until then. So in my head I began a countdown, starting with three, trying to slow my racing heartbeat with each number.