Лей Бардуго - Ninth House

She felt something brush the small of her back.

In the next second her face was jammed up against the mirror. Something shoved her hips against the porcelain ledge of the sink. She felt cold fingers tugging on the waistband of her shorts.

Alex screamed, she kicked out, struck solid flesh and bone, felt the grip on her shorts loosen. She tried to shove back from the sink, glimpsed her face in the mirror, a blue barrette sliding from her hair, saw the man—the thing—that had hold of her. You can’t do that , she thought. You can’t touch me. It wasn’t possible. It wasn’t allowed. None of the Quiet Ones could touch her.

Then she was facedown on the concrete floor. She felt her hips jerked backward, her panties yanked down, something nudging against her, pushing into her. She saw a butterfly lying in a puddle beneath the sink, one wing flapping listlessly as if it were waving to her. She screamed and screamed.

That was how Meagan and Ms. Rosales found her, on the bathroom floor, shorts crumpled around her ankles, panties at her knees, blood smeared over her thighs and a lump of blood-soaked toilet paper wadded between her legs, as she sobbed and thrashed, hips humped up and shuddering. Alone.

Ms. Rosales was beside her, saying, “Alex! Sweetheart!” and the thing that had been trying to get inside her was gone. She never knew why he stopped, why he fled, but she’d clung to Ms. Rosales, warm and alive and smelling of lavender soap.

Ms. Rosales sent Meagan out of the bathroom. She dried Alex’s tears and helped her clean up. She had a tampon in her purse and told Alex how to put it in. Alex followed her instructions, still shaking and crying. She didn’t want to touch down there. She didn’t want to think about him trying to push in. Ms. Rosales sat beside her on the bus, gave her a juice box. Alex listened to the sounds of the other kids laughing and singing, but she was afraid to turn around. She was afraid to look at Meagan.

On that long bus ride back to school, in the long wait at the nurse’s office, all she had wanted was her mother, to be wrapped up in her arms and taken home, to be safe in their apartment, bundled in blankets on the couch, watching cartoons. By the time her mother arrived and finished her whispered conversation with the principal and the school counselor and Ms. Rosales, the halls had cleared and the school was empty. As Mira led her out to the parking lot through the echoing quiet, Alex wished she were still small enough to be carried.

When they got home, Alex showered as quickly as possible. She felt too vulnerable, too naked. What if he came back? What if something else came for her? What was to stop him, to stop any of them, from finding her? She’d seen them walk through walls. Where could she ever be safe again?

She left the shower running and slipped into the kitchen to burrow through their junk drawer. She could hear her mother murmuring on the phone in her bedroom.

“They think she may have been molested,” Mira said. She was crying. “That she’s acting out now because of it… I don’t know. I don’t know. There was that swim coach at the Y. He always seemed a little off and Alex didn’t like going to the pool. Maybe something happened?”

Alex had hated the pool because there was a Quiet kid with the left side of his skull caved in who liked to hang around the rusted podium where the diving board had once been.

She rooted around in the drawer until she found the little red pocketknife. She took it with her into the shower, setting it on the soap dish. She didn’t know if it would do any good against one of the Quiet Ones, but it made her feel a little better. She washed quickly, dried off, and changed into pajamas, then went out into the living room to curl up on the couch, her wet hair wrapped in a towel. Her mother must have heard the shower turn off, because she emerged from her bedroom a few moments later.

“Hey, baby,” she said softly. Her eyes were red. “Are you hungry?”

Alex kept her eyes on the TV screen. “Can we have real pizza?”

“I can make you pizza here. Don’t you want almond cheese?”

Alex said nothing. A few minutes later, she heard her mother on the phone, ordering from Amici’s. They ate watching TV, Mira pretending not to watch Alex.

Alex ate until her stomach hurt, then ate some more. It was too late for cartoons, and the shows had switched to the bright sitcom stories of teenage wizards and twins living in lofts, that everyone at school pretended they were too old for. Who are these people? Alex wondered. Who are these happy, frantic, funny people? How are they so unafraid?

Her mother nibbled on a piece of crust. Then at last she reached for the remote and hit mute.

“Baby,” she said. “Galaxy.”

“Alex.”

“Alex, can you talk to me? Can we talk about what happened?”

Alex felt a hard burble of laughter pushing at her throat, making it ache. If it got free, would she laugh or cry? Can we talk about what happened? What was she supposed to say? A ghost tried to rape me? Maybe he did rape me? She wasn’t sure when it counted, how far inside he had to be. But it didn’t matter, because no one would believe her anyway.

Alex clutched the pocketknife in her pajama pocket. Her heart was suddenly racing. What could she say? Help me. Protect me. Except no one could. No one could see the things hurting her.

They might not even be real. That was the worst of it. What if she’d imagined it all? She might just be crazy, and then what? She wanted to start screaming and never stop.

“Baby?” Her mother’s eyes were filling with tears again. “Whatever happened, it’s not your fault. You know that, right? You—”

“I can’t go back to school.”

“Galaxy—”

“Mama,” Alex said, turning to her mother, grabbing her wrist, needing her to listen. “ Mama , don’t make me go.”

Mira tried to draw Alex into her arms. “Oh, my little star.”

Alex did scream then. She kicked at her mom to keep her away. “You’re a fucking loser,” she shrieked again and again, until her mother was the one crying and Alex locked herself in her room, sick with shame.

Mira let Alex stay home for the rest of the week. She’d found a therapist to take Alex in for a session, but Alex had nothing to say.

Mira pleaded with Alex, tried to bribe her with junk food and TV hours, then at last said, “You talk to the therapist or you go back to school.”

So the following Monday, Alex had gone back to school. No one spoke to her. They barely looked at her, and when she found spaghetti sauce smeared on her gym locker, she knew that Meagan had told.

Alex got the nickname Bloody Mary. She ate lunch by herself. She was never picked for lab partner or field-trip buddy and had to be foisted on people. In desperation, Alex made the mistake of trying to tell Meagan what had really happened, of trying to explain. She knew it was stupid, even as she’d reeled off the things she’d seen, the things she knew, as she’d watched Meagan shift farther away from her, her eyes going distant, twirling a long curl of glossy brown hair around her forefinger. But the more Meagan drew away, the longer her silence stretched, the more Alex talked, as if somewhere in all of those words was a secret code, a key that would get back the glimmer of what she’d lost.

In the end, all Meagan said was, “Okay, I have to go now.” Then she’d done what Alex knew she would and repeated it all.

So when Sarah McKinney begged Alex to meet her at Tres Muchachos to talk to the ghost of her grandmother, Alex had known it was probably a setup, one big joke. But she went anyway, still hoping, and found herself sitting in the food court, trying not to cry.