Her phone stayed quiet after that.
For the first two days of spring break, Gemma did nothing. She watched TV on her computer without knowing what she was watching. She slumped from upstairs to downstairs to microwave food her dad wouldn’t have approved of her eating, the Hot Pockets and frozen mac and cheese she’d convinced Bernice, their housekeeper, to buy for her, Chinese takeout that had mysteriously materialized in the fridge. Once she took Rufus to the backyard and stood in her pajamas, blinking in the sun, while he ran circles around Danny, one of the lawn guys (she thought that was his name, anyway; there had been so many), who was moving slowly on the enormous lawn mower like a ship captain through a sea of green.
Her mom, who would normally have peppered Gemma with constant questions, or asked that she come have lunch at the club, or suggested they do mani-pedis—all activities that Gemma hated—largely left her alone. They were like two snowflakes, drifting through the vast white house, encased in their own arrangements of pain and misery.
All, she thought, her father’s fault: her father’s rules. Her father’s house. Her father’s walls, white and oversized, made pretty with ornate picture frames and chandeliers, so pretty they might keep a person from knowing she was trapped. Even, she realized, her father’s pills. She’d never before thought about the fact that her dad’s old company probably manufactured the meds her mother took, day in and day out, to help her sleep or wake or keep her from dreaming.
If she was honest, she realized that some small part of her—okay, maybe a big part of her—had been hoping that because she wasn’t going to Florida, April wouldn’t go. And she knew that if she’d told April the truth, April wouldn’t have gone: she would have gladly spent spring break watching bad TV or trying to learn the choreography of stupid pop videos from YouTube. It was her fault, which made her feel mean and stupid and small. But the fact that April did go made her feel mean and stupid and small—and also abandoned.
She was wallowing, and she was pretty deep.
On the third day of spring break, Gemma woke up and felt a desperate, urgent desire to move, to do something. April had been at her grandparents’ house for a full thirty-six hours. Gemma knew this because, in a moment of true, epic pathetic-ness, she had logged onto April’s iTunes account and used Find My Phone to track April’s progress down the coast—they had traded passwords years ago so they could always find each other if they were ever separated in a zombie apocalypse, assuming Wi-Fi still worked. No doubt April was already working on her tan and trying to scope out cute guys to flirt with who didn’t know she was an alien.
Gemma knew by now April would have heard about the Frankenstein mask, or at least some version of the story filtered through their parents, and Gemma wished they could talk about it. Why had the mask freaked her father out so badly? She wished she’d been listening more carefully to her parents’ midnight conversation. Already, the conversation seemed like a dream. She couldn’t remember details, just a place called Haven, a word she thought she remembered vaguely from childhood. A hospital, maybe? One of the boards her father sat on? He consulted for dozens of companies, all with names like NeoTech and Amalgam and Complete Solutions.
Missing April was like having a hole in the very bottom of her stomach. Like period cramps, as if she was puffy and swollen and bruised but on the inside. Gemma wasn’t gay, she didn’t think (although she didn’t know, having never kissed anything but a practice pillow—and in a moment of complete, delirious silliness, given one practice blow job on a cucumber), but that didn’t stop her from being stupid in love with her best friend.
She sent a picture of one of her oldest stuffed animals, an octopus missing two legs thanks to Rufus’s rabid appetite for anything stuffed. He was April’s favorite. I miss you! Hope you’re having fun! she’d written, and then left her phone in her bed, buried under a pillow, in case April was still mad and didn’t write back. Besides, she didn’t want her mom calling her every five seconds.
Leaving the house wasn’t a problem. It was early, and her mom was probably at her spin class. Leaving the property was a slightly bigger problem, since she a) had no car, and b) had never even learned to drive. She leashed up Rufus. It was a shortish walk down the drive, past Danny, who was pruning the hedges today, out the gates, and to the bus that ran past the university down to Franklin Street, with its pretty clutter of bars and cafés and the college bookstore selling UNC gear. Rufus loved the bus and sat the whole time on the seat next to Gemma, like a person, with his nose pressed against the window.
It was a beautiful day. She wandered down Franklin, looking in shop windows, debating whether to buy something. The town felt emptier than usual: UNC students were on spring break, too, until Monday. She kept picturing the phantoms of all her classmates, flitting by her on empty streets, while their real selves were four hundred miles away, lathering on sunscreen or taking tequila shots at breakfast.
She had just turned onto Rosemary Street, half thinking she would stop in at Mama Dip’s for hush puppies even though she wasn’t hungry, when she got a sudden nervous feeling in her stomach, as if she’d approached the edge of a cliff unexpectedly.
Watched. She was being watched.
If she’d been alone, in the dark, she might have been too afraid to turn around. But she was standing between the orthodontist’s office where she’d had her braces tightened for three years and a small Mobil station that sold postcards touting North Carolina’s many beauties. So she turned, even as the sense of dread yawned open wider, like a mouth lodged beneath her ribs.