Rachel Vincent - Before I Wake

And she’d needed normal. I’d tried so hard not to drag Emma into danger, but the Netherworld was like quicksand—the harder I tried to pull her out of it, the harder it sucked her in.

She would have been better off if she’d never met me.

“I’m so sorry, Emma.”

“It’s okay,” Em said. “Really. But I like him, and he was totally there for me when I was…lonely. I just… Is it going to be weird if Jayson sits with us? I’m assuming Tod will be there, and you never know when Nash and Sabine will decide they want to talk. He can’t be mad at you forever.”

“Yes, he can. So, are Nash and Sabine…together?” Em hadn’t said much about that during my month off, and I wasn’t sure how I felt about the possibility. The probability. It was officially none of my business who Nash went out with, and I wanted him to be happy, but…just asking the question felt weird.

So much had changed so fast—my head was still spinning.

Em frowned in thought. “I can’t tell. You never see one without the other anymore, but they’re not all over each other in public or anything. Maybe that was never their style.”

But if there’d been a ban on public displays, that was Nash’s doing. Sabine would claim him any way she could. Any way he’d let her.

I shrugged and tried to shake the thought off. “I wouldn’t worry about Nash and Sabine showing up to make your human boyfriend uncomfortable, and when Tod gets there…we’ll make it work.” So what if Em’s boyfriend wouldn’t be able to see or hear mine. “Any boyfriend of yours… You know the rest.” I scrounged up a parting smile, then headed for second-period chemistry, where the stares continued for another miserable fifty minutes.

Third period was my free period, so I shoved my backpack into my locker, then headed for the nearest restroom, which was quickly turning into my own personal transit system. But as I passed the front office, the glass door opened and the school’s attendance secretary stuck her head out. “Kaylee Cavanaugh?” she said, both her eyebrows and her voice high in question.

I hesitated, almost certain she wouldn’t have been able to pick me out of a crowd a month earlier.

“I was just on my way to find you. You’re late for your appointment with your guidance counselor.”

Well, crap. There’d been a message on my home phone the week before, mentioning an appointment during my free period when I returned to school, but I’d deleted the message and made a mental note to have my dad talk the school out of mandatory trauma counseling.

Obviously I should have left myself an actual note…

Reluctantly, I followed the secretary through the main office and into another suite, where several other students sat waiting for the N-Z counselor, whose door was closed. I’d never met my counselor—the A-M counselor—but the moment I entered the waiting room, she stepped out of her office and directed me inside with one outstretched arm while she gave the secretary a thank-you nod.

“Hi Kaylee. I’m Ms. Hirsch. Come in and have a seat, please.”

I sat in one of the chairs in front of her desk while she closed the door behind me, then circled the desk to sit in her own chair. My file folder was open on her desk, and when she turned off the computer monitor—though I couldn’t see it from my seat—I realized that she’d been reading the local paper online. Or maybe she’d just Googled me in preparation for our appointment. Were school counselors allowed to Google?

“Would you like a bottle of water?” Ms. Hirsch set a small plastic bottle at the front of her desk, next to a bowl full of Jolly Ranchers.

“No, thanks.” I set my backpack on the floor between my feet, then realized that left me nothing to do with my hands.

“So, Kaylee, how’s your first day back going?”

“Fine.” As long as “fine” could be defined as the half-way point between horrible and unbearable.

“What about your classes? Are you having any trouble getting caught up? Did the school set you up with a tutor while you were out?”

They’d tried. But my father had insisted that he could help me with anything I didn’t understand. The tutor finally accepted that as the truth—after my father hit him with a heavy dose of verbal Influence, his natural gift as a male bean sidhe.

“I’m not that far behind,” I said with a shrug.

“Well, if you decide you do want a tutor or need help scheduling any makeup exams, just let me know.”

“I’m fine. Really,” I insisted, but Ms. Hirsch only frowned like she didn’t believe me. And why should she? What sixteen year old is fine four weeks after being stabbed by her math teacher?

Certainly not this one… But that had less to do with what Mr. Beck had done to me than the thought of facing another mob like the one in the hall that morning. Beck was dead and gone, but the vultures were still alive and circling.

“I’m sure it must be very difficult being back here for you,” Ms. Hirsch said, and I realized she’d heard about the incident in the hall. “I suspect you’re dealing with a lot of unwanted attention today.”

“Yeah.”

“How do you feel you’re coping with that?”

I was trying to cope by fleeing school grounds during my free period—until I’d been dragged into the counselor’s office. “All I can really do is ignore them, right?”

She nodded slowly. “People, especially teenagers, are curious by nature, they don’t always think about how their curiosity affects others. Peers may ask you directly or indirectly about what happened to you. But you have every right to tell them you don’t want to talk about it with them. You should never feel guilty about that.”

I didn’t feel guilty. I didn’t feel…much of anything, except for the need—a truly escalating drive —to get as far away from school and my “peers” as possible.

I should have been a wreck. People were obviously waiting for me to fall apart at the seams and spill my emotional guts all over the floor, and some small part of me wished I could. I wished things were still simple enough that a good cry could purge all the bad stuff and give me a fresh start. But I’d never felt less like crying, and I was all out of fresh starts. My mother had given me the only one I was allowed when I was three.

“I’m fine. Really,” I said, and her frown deepened.

“Kaylee, it’s perfectly normal to be upset for a very long time after something like what you’ve been through. It could be months before you start to feel anything like normal and that is perfectly okay.”

Normal? Seriously?

“So, what, there’s a timeline for how long it should take me to get over being stabbed by my math teacher? Someone really wrote that? How convenient! Does it happen to mention how long I should be upset about the fact that I had to kill him? Because honestly, with no guidelines in place, I might be tempted to linger in mourning for, like, a solid week. Is that too long?”

Ms. Hirsch blinked. Then she pulled open a drawer and took a pamphlet from inside and slid it across the desk to me. “This is the contact information for a group of survivors of violent crimes. I think it would be worth your time to…”

“No, thank you.” I pushed the pamphlet back toward her. She was only trying to help. I knew that. But I also knew that through no fault of her own, she was in way over her head. And honestly, she’d probably been there all year, considering how many students and teachers Eastlake had lost under unexplained circumstances since the school year started. “I really have to go,” I said, picking up my backpack.

Ms. Hirsch exhaled slowly, then met my gaze again. “Kaylee, this office is a safe space.” She spread her arms to take in all four walls, then folded them on top of her desk, rumpling the pamphlet. “You can say anything you need to say in here, and what you tell me is completely confidential. I’m sure you have family and friends you can talk to, but sometimes it helps to talk to someone completely uninvolved. I want you to know that I can be that person for you. If things get too overwhelming at any point during the school day, I want you to come down here. We can talk. Or you can just sit in here and take a break.” She placed her hands palms down on the desktop and her gaze intensified. “Safe space. Please remember that.”