Miles went in first. I followed in his shadow, tugging on my hair and trying to shake the feeling that men in white coats were going to jump out and grab me.
There was only one food line in the cafeteria, and about ten square tables in the middle of the room. Large windows let in the sun. Miles navigated through the tables without so much as a glance at the patients, intent on only one of them, on the far side of the room.
He was right—she looked like him. Or, rather, he looked like her. She sat at a table near the windows, rolling around a few green beans on her plate and flipping through the pages of a book. She looked up and smiled a radiant smile—it was almost tooth-for-tooth the same as his, only easier, more used—and it was not the smile of a crazy person. Not the smile of someone who injured herself because of swinging moods. It was just the smile of someone who was very, very happy to see her son.
She stood to hug him. She was tall and willowy, and the sun gave her long sandy hair a golden halo. Her eyes were the same as his, too, the same color as the clear sky outside. The only things they didn’t share were Miles’s freckles.
Miles said something to his mother and motioned me over.
“So you’re Alex,” June said.
“Yeah.” My throat felt suddenly dry. For some reason— maybe because Miles had so willingly hugged her—I felt no need to check her for weapons. I didn’t feel anything strange about her at all. She was just . . . June. “It’s nice to meet you.”
“It’s so nice to meet you, too—Miles talks about you all the time.” And before I could think about that, she pulled me into a tight hug.
“I don’t remember mentioning her before,” Miles said, but he rubbed his neck and looked away.
“Don’t listen to him. He’s been pretending to forget things since he was seven years old,” said June. “Sit down, you two; it’s been a long drive!”
I kept quiet and watched them go at it, talking about anything and everything. When Miles explained things that happened at school, embellishing small facts and details, I’d jump in and correct him. June talked about what it had been like when she’d been in school, the people she’d known.
“Do you know what your senior prank is going to be yet?” she asked, face lighting up with excitement. I hadn’t immediately taken her as a person who enjoyed pranks very much. “I thought up ours when I was a senior at East Shoal. Of course, not many people followed through with the entire plan—we only got to the first part of it.”
“Which was . . . ?” asked Miles.
June smiled vaguely. “Setting Mr. Tinsley’s Burmese python loose in the school.”
Miles and I shot looks at each other, then back at June.
“It was you?” I asked incredulously. “You set the snake loose?”
June raised her eyebrows. “Oh yes. I don’t think they ever caught it, though. That worried me a little.”
“Mom, that snake is a myth now,” said Miles. “People think it’s still there.”
I started to tell them that I’d seen the snake—that I’d been seeing it all year in the science hallway—but they pressed on, sweeping the conversation away.
The more she talked, the more I realized that June knew history. Not the history my parents were having an affair with, but personal histories. She learned the events that made up a person’s life, and she used them to understand why they did the things they did. Miles knew words. She knew people.
So when I started explaining McCoy and Celia and everything that had happened this year, she absorbed it the way my parents absorbed war documentaries: with complete seriousness. I talked and she listened. The only thing I left out was the part about McCoy having it in for Miles.
“Celia sounds like a handful,” she said after we’d vacated the cafeteria and moved into the rec room. “I went to school with a girl like that.” June settled into her armchair, crossing her legs. Relaxed and thinking, June had the same catlike look about her that Miles did. “She was exactly like Celia sounds. Cheerleader, very high strung, very . . . what’s the word I want . . .”
“Driven?” Miles offered.
“Ah! Yes, driven. And stubborn. All from her mother before her. The woman was a brute, hardly gave her a moment of rest from the time she could wear heels. Both of them got what they wanted.” June shook her head. “We called her the Empress. Empy for short. Boys fell to their knees for her. Richard McCoy—you wanted to know about him, too? He was head over heels for her. And not in the cute puppy dog way. He had a shrine to her in his locker.”
I snorted—it looked like McCoy was serving new mistresses now. Mainly, Celia’s mother.
“But Empy was never interested in him, oh no,” June continued. “I remember the day she started dating the captain of the football team, because when Daniel went to his locker after school that day, all of his things were scattered in the hallway, torn up. We all knew Richard did it, but no one could prove it. And he groveled at Empy’s heels until the day she died.”
“Do you remember that? What happened?”
“Well, it was a few years after they—Empy and the football captain—got married. Right after our senior year, she was pregnant and used it as leverage to make him marry her. She came back for our five-year reunion, and was standing under the scoreboard, talking about her glory days and her father’s philanthropy, and it fell. They say she died at the hospital a few hours later, but I think the scoreboard caught her in the head just right, and she was gone on the gym floor. Richard was there—I heard that he still followed her around after high school—and he tried to lift it off of her. They said he looked . . . unreachable. Like his whole reason for being was pinned under that scoreboard, and nothing tethered him to the world anymore.”
I shivered. “Do you think McCoy could be obsessed with someone else now? Like . . . he found a new tether?”
“It’s possible.”
Was that why Celia was doing all this terrible stuff to other people? Because McCoy was doing something to her? That changed things—I had really hoped Celia’s involvement in all this was just some byproduct of her need to be popular. Something she’d wished on herself. But more and more it looked like she was caught up in something she couldn’t control. And if that really was the case, how could I ignore it? After this semester, it wasn’t like she had any friends. Pariah was practically tattooed on her forehead.