Hours pass.
The light slowly changes through the windows, but not one of them pays any attention to the weather out there, all that sun and no rain, and the land one day deeper into drought.
A gloom settles over the floor, and over one girl especially. She is known at home and at church as Rebecca, but here, for these past six weeks, as Becca or Becks or B.
Rebecca: a tiny redhead in borrowed jeans, now detecting a slight ringing in her ears. She wants to ignore it. No one has mentioned a ringing.
In the bathroom, she sets her glasses on the counter. She splashes water on her face. It’s probably nothing. She is nervous, that’s what this is. She is scared. But a dizziness is dawning in her head.
She leans on one of the sinks. They are the old porcelain kind, cracked and yellowed, and she can still see the stains from when she held her head upside down over that same sink, while two girls dyed her hair a thrilling auburn that first week of school, and all the other girls stood around her, advising. It was new to her then, that belonging, the sounds of ten girls laughing in a small space.
Rebecca has been to church only once so far, sneaking off the floor that first Sunday, ready to lie to anyone who asked. It’s just that never before has she felt loved so quickly and never before by these kinds of girls.
These girls mixed her first drink. They’ve used their own rosy lipsticks on her inexperienced lips. These girls have plucked her eyebrows with their own tweezers and then shown her how to shape them herself. They’ve lent her their clothes and helped her buy a better bra, and she laughed right along with them, just the other day, when they discovered, all at once, that all their cycles were in synch.
But now Rebecca begins to worry. The dizziness is settling over her like a fog. She waits for it to pass, but it does not pass. A wild thought is blooming in her mind: maybe she is being punished—punished for the way she’s been acting these weeks, skipping church and drinking so much, and lying to her parents about all of it.
There is a whining of hinges behind her as the door swings open. Kara’s roommate, that quiet girl, walks into the bathroom. She holds a yellow towel under one arm, and a pink plastic bucket, inside of which a bottle of shampoo is rattling. She wears a sweatshirt and jeans, which is how she always arrives for a shower, Rebecca has noticed, instead of walking down the hall in a robe or a towel the way all the other girls do.
Rebecca feels a sudden urge to perform a kindness. “Hey,” she says.
The girl does not look her way, and Rebecca recognizes the habit as her own from earlier times, the surprise at being spoken to at all.
“Hey,” says Rebecca again. “Sorry, but what was your name again?”
The girl looks up this time. She is pretty, in a way, dark eyes and good skin. But she should wear her hair down—Rebecca knows that’s what the other girls would say—instead of tying it back all the time in that braid. And bangs, maybe. Bangs might make her look a little more fun.
“It’s Mei,” says the girl.
She sets her things down outside the shower stall farthest from Rebecca. She unravels her black braid with her fingers, but her hair holds the shape, crimped from roots to ends.
“I’ve been meaning to tell you something,” says Rebecca.
She’s been selfish lately. It’s true. You were supposed to give people whatever they needed, and she has given nothing at all to this poor girl. If he asks for your shirt, her father would say, you should give him your coat, too.
Rebecca goes on: “I wanted to tell you that you shouldn’t feel bad.”
Mei looks suspicious.
“About what?” she says.
“There’s just no way you could have known she needed help,” says Rebecca.
Mei bites her lip and turns away. She steps into the shower stall and disappears from Rebecca’s view.
“It’s not my fault,” says Mei from inside, her voice echoing against the tile. She seems to be speaking carefully now, each word a fragile object, pulled from a high shelf. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Right,” says Rebecca. “That’s what I’m trying to say.”
But the conversation is drifting away from her. She is screwing it up.
Mei closes the shower door behind her. There is the sound of the lock clicking into place. Through the gap beneath the door, Rebecca can see the sweatshirt and the jeans fall to the floor at Mei’s feet, her hands reaching down to hang them up, and then there is a squeaking of fixtures, a rattling of pipes, the rush of water pooling on tile.
Rebecca tries to think of something else friendly to say through the door.
But something is happening to her vision. There is a flashing at the corner of her eye. There is some sort of distortion in her sight, like a ripple on the surface of water. She begins to shiver.
She tells no one, as if to speak the words aloud might make them more true, a kind of spell.
She goes back to her room and lies down in her bed. She has the idea that she needs to relax. She closes her eyes. It is four in the afternoon. A Bible verse comes into her mind: You will not know the hour or the day.
The first stage of sleep is the lightest, the brief letting go, like the skipping of a stone across water. This is the nodding of a head in a theater. This is the dropping of a book in bed.
Rebecca falls quickly into that first layer. Ten more minutes. She sinks further, just beginning the deep dive. This is when a sudden dream floats through her: She is at church with her parents. A baby is being baptized. But something is wrong. It’s the minister’s voice—in the dream, his words are somehow out of synch with the movement of his lips. And the noise of the water splashing the baby’s forehead arrives a few seconds after the sight of it happening, like the pause between lightning and thunder. In the dream, Rebecca is the only one in the church who notices it.
But then the dream is interrupted—a bright voice rings out in the hall. Rebecca opens her eyes.
The voice that woke her is soon joined by other voices. Someone is laughing out there in the hall.
When she opens her door, she finds the hallway crowded with kids. There they are, at the center of the group, the two sick girls, back from Student Health, their ponytails bobbing, their laughing white teeth. In their hands bulge two burritos and two Cokes.
“I feel so stupid,” says one of them, still in her sweats, as kids begin to gather around them.
“We both just have colds,” says her roommate.
“Thank God,” says Rebecca. The relief comes to her like a drug. “Thank God you’re okay.” Rebecca, too, begins to feel better. The ringing in her ears, at least, has stopped. The dizziness is floating away.
Whatever it is, they are fine. They are fine, the girls say, did you hear, they say, to anyone they pass in the hall. They are fine. They are fine. They are fine.
After that, something shifts. The fear breaks like a fever, and that night, the third night, the girls and the boys crowd together into Amanda’s small room to get drunk, relief radiating from their cheeks.
There is Kahlúa and milk for the girls, and bags and bags of ice, and beer and tequila, and peach-flavored wine. There’s the whir of the blender and the clinking of shot glasses and the music a little too loud.
There is talk of doing something for Kara, a plaque on the building, maybe, or the planting of a tree. Yes, they say, a tree, they say, or even a little garden of her favorite flowers. They toast their short friendship with her, these six good weeks. She was so sweet, they all agree, maybe the sweetest one among them.
They begin to get drunk, and there is no way around it: there is a giddiness in that room. They are young and they are healthy, and they have survived a terrible thing.