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—and she’s trying to focus on the class, but she can’t because there are six bodies in her immediate vicinity, one to either side, two in front and two behind, and she can hear six hearts beating in six chests—

(can smell—taste? feel ?—the blood inside those organs)

—and then the guy beside her rolls his head atop his neck, the muscles cording, and her mouth goes dry, and her vision tunnels and her teeth begin to ache, and she doesn’t realize she’s digging her fingers into the desk until she hears the crack, looks down expecting to see broken nails and finds splintered wood instead.

Alice shoves up to her feet.

A dozen heads turn, but for once in her life she doesn’t care what anyone else thinks. She escapes into the hall, and then, into the nearest bathroom, bracing herself against the sink.

Her reflection stares back from the mirror, and it has the gall to look like nothing’s changed, and fuck the two points in her favor, fuck the whole game of Alice versus common lore, because isn’t she entitled to some kind of cosmetic recompense?

Where is the beauty meant to offset the horror of what’s happening?

The suddenly clear skin, the perfect hair, the glamour and the grace?

The only thing Alice sees are the hollows beneath her eyes. Her eyes, which are still neither blue nor green nor gray but that same old muddy in-between, and if there is a fevered light behind them now, that’s hardly enough to make up for the rest of this.

For the fact that even in this tiled room she can hear the crush of bodies through the walls, living breathing eating laughing bodies, and hers isn’t making any fucking sound, and how ridiculous and wrong that her chest is tight and she still feels like she can’t breathe, even though she doesn’t seem to need the air, and her heart still feels like it’s trying to claw its way out of her chest, even though it isn’t even beating, and Alice wants to scream, but she can’t bring herself to do it, even now, doesn’t want to make a scene, so instead she bends her head and splashes water on her face, and tells herself everything will be all right, even though she knows she’s lying.

And she’s still slumped forward at the sink when she hears the door swing open, the smack of bootheels on the tile, the twang of Hannah’s voice.

“Don’t tell me you’re still wrecked,” she drawls.

Alice drags her head up to the mirror, looks at herself instead of Hannah, focuses on the narrow streams of water running down her face, her jaw, her throat.

Hannah folds her arms across her chest. “How hard did you party at the Co-op?”

“Too hard,” says Alice, aiming for a wan smile and falling short into a grimace.

She tries to straighten, but feels her body clench around that dull, pervading hunger. “Cramps,” she adds, folding over again.

Hannah digs around in her purse, pulls out a bottle of pills. “You need some ibuprofen?”

She takes a step toward Alice as she says it, and her perfume is overwhelming, a vanilla-and-peach-scented cloud that hangs in the air and tastes like soap on Alice’s tongue. But beyond it, behind it, beneath it, she hears that steady pulse. Picks up the iron scent of blood.

Her throat tightens. She doesn’t move.

Hannah rattles the bottle. “Well?” she snaps impatiently.

Alice pushes off the counter, turns, and reaches for the pills—or at least, that’s what she means to do, but as she starts moving toward the other girl, she can’t seem to stop, the distance between them collapsing, until Hannah is pressing the bottle into Alice’s chest. She looks down, watches her fingers curl around Hannah’s, the pills nested like a doll inside their hands.

“Thanks,” she says, and this is the part where she’s supposed to let go, but she can’t seem to find the will to pull away. She can feel the pulse through the other girl’s skin, the heat of her body, imagines warming herself on this little fire of a life.

“Um, yeah, you can keep them,” says the other girl, trying to drag her hand free.

But Alice doesn’t let her. Her body doesn’t let her.

She doesn’t blame it—her skeleton hurts, her muscles and tendons hurt, her skull hurts, all the way down to her teeth, the kind of pain these pills can’t touch, but maybe Hannah can.

Like Colin, in the Yard last night. Alice remembers how much better she felt afterward.

She looks up into Hannah’s face, her dark eyes narrowed in a confusion that Alice swears she can taste. The thin flick of eyeliner over each, eyebrows raised, her lips pressed into a line, a combined force that would have once made Alice shrink back, embarrassed.

Alice, who sits at the back of the lecture halls because she hates feeling like she’s being watched, or seen.

Alice, who’s the barnacle on the party wall, not the center of attention.

Alice, who doesn’t know how to take up space without apologizing for it.

That same Alice meets Hannah’s eyes and holds her gaze, trapped like the hand beneath her own. And she’s pretty sure she’s seen something about compulsion in those TV shows, and Alice has no idea if it’s real, but Hannah is still standing there, a new flush of color in her cheeks.

Stay, thinks Alice. Stay right there.

She closes the last sliver of space between them, their hands knotted between their bodies, her teeth sharpening, her mouth starting to ache, and Hannah is just staring at her, lips parted and eyes wide, and it’s working, Alice honestly can’t believe it’s working—

Which is exactly when it stops.

Hannah blinks, and recoils, the air around her suddenly heavy with disgust.

“Ew, no,” she snaps, wrenching backward. Alice lets go, and the pill bottle drops, rolls, forgotten, beneath a stall, as Hannah scrunches up her nose and says, “I’m not a dyke. ”

The word bounces off the tile walls.

A single vicious syllable.

(Alice remembers the first time a boy called her that name, the sting of it like a slap, the way it made her cheeks burn hot and her eyes sting, the way Catty walked straight past her and broke his nose, and somehow that was worse, and afterward they walked home in silence, Alice brushing away tears, until she finally asked, “Why did you hit him?” and Catty shot back, “Why didn’t you?

” Said nothing else till they reached the steps outside their house, and then she turned and took her by the shoulders and said, “When the world pushes you, push back.”)

The word echoes through the bathroom.

Alice feels her face go hot again, but this time, it isn’t shame.

It’s rage.

Rage, at all the Hannahs of the world, convinced the worst thing a girl like Alice can feel is want, and at this particular Hannah, for looking at Alice and seeing a monster, just not the one she thinks.

The kind of rage that made Catty take a bat to the bottles in the parking lot.

Alice gets it now. Why her sister was always breaking things.

Because rage shatters out, not in.

She looks at Hannah, a tight smile tugging at her lips. “What did you just call me?” she hears herself ask, but doesn’t recognize the edges in her voice.

Those are new.

Sharp.

And maybe Hannah couldn’t feel her sorry attempt at compulsion, but she does feel this, Alice is sure, watches the girl’s face crumple as she backs away, one step, then two, until her shoulders hit the dryer on the wall, and Alice can taste her fear, the way she tasted the menace on the guy last night, his violence surrounding them like smoke.

She can hear Hannah’s racing heart, and it makes her teeth hurt, and in that moment, she wants Hannah to turn and run.

Not so she will get away.

So Alice can go after her.

But Hannah doesn’t move, and after a second—a minute, an hour—the world steadies, and Alice feels her senses steady, too, reality rushing back, and she shoves past the girl and out of the bathroom before she loses herself again.