Rachel Caine - Glass Houses

“Hi,” Claire said. Her voice sounded thin and dry, and she had to swallow twice. “I’m Claire, up on four? Um, I had an accident yesterday. But I’m okay. Everything’s fine.”

“You’re the—they were looking for you, right?”

“Yeah. Just tell everybody I’m okay. I’ve got to get to class.”

“But—”

“Sorry, I’m late!” Claire hurried to the stairs and went up as fast as her sore ankle would allow. She passed a couple of girls, who gave her wide-eyed looks, but nobody said anything.

She didn’t see Monica. Not on the stairs, not at the top. The hallway was empty, and all the doors were shut. Music pounded from three or four different rooms. She hurried down to the end, where her own room was, and started to unlock it.

The knob turned limply in her fingers. Great. That, more than any graffiti, said Monica wuz here .

Sure enough, the room was a wreck. What wasn’t broken was dumped in piles. Books were defaced, which really hurt. Her meager clothes had been dragged out of the closet and scattered over the floor. Some of the blouses had been ripped, but she seriously didn’t care that much; she sorted through, found two or three that were intact, and stuffed them in the garbage bag. One pair of sweatpants was fine, and she added that, too. She had a lucky find of a couple of ratty old pairs of underwear that hadn’t been discovered, shoved in the corner of the drawer, and added those to the sack.

The rest was another pair of shoes, what books she could salvage, and the little bag of makeup and toiletries she kept on the shelf next to the bed. Her iPod was gone. So were her CDs. No telling if that had been Monica’s doing, or the work of some other dorm rat who’d scavenged later.

She looked around, swept the worst of the mess into a corner, and grabbed the photo of her mom and dad off of the dresser to take with her.

And then she left, not bothering to try to lock the door.

Well, she thought shakily. That went okay, after all.

She was halfway down the steps when she heard voices on the second-floor landing. “—swear, it’s her! You should see the black eye. Unbelievable. You really clocked her one.”

“Where the hell is she?” Monica’s voice, hard-edged. “And how come nobody came to get me?”

“We—we did!” someone protested. Someone who sounded as scared as Claire suddenly felt. She reached in her pocket, grabbed the phone, and held on to it for security. Star two. Just press star two—Shane’s not far away, and Eve’s right downstairs…. “She was up in her room. Maybe she’s still there?”

Crap. There was nobody in the dorm she could trust, not now. Nobody who’d hide her, or who’d stand up for her. Claire retreated back up the steps to the third-floor landing and went to the fire stairs, flung open the door, and hurried down the concrete steps as fast as she dared, ducking to avoid the glass window at the second-floor exit. She made it to the lobby exit door sweating and trembling from the effort, with her backpack and the garbage bag dragging painfully on her sore muscles, and risked a quick look out the window to the lobby itself.

Monica-groupie Jennifer was on guard, watching the stairs. She looked tense and focused, and—Claire thought—a little bit scared, too. She kept fooling with the bracelet around her right wrist, turning it over and over. One thing was certain: Jennifer would see her the second she opened the door. And sure, maybe that wouldn’t matter; maybe she could get by Jen and out the door and they wouldn’t be attacking her in public, would they?

Watching Jennifer’s face, she wasn’t so sure. Not so sure at all.

The fire door a couple of floors up boomed open, and Claire flinched and looked for a place to hide. The only possible spot was under the concrete stairs. There was some kind of storage closet crammed under there, but when she tried the knob it was locked, and she didn’t have Monica’s lock-smashing superpowers.

And she didn’t have time, anyway. There were footsteps coming down. Either she could hope the person didn’t look back in the corner, or she could make a break for the door. Once again, Claire touched the phone in her pocket. One phone call away. It’s okay.

And once again, she left the phone where it was, took a deep breath, and waited.

It wasn’t Monica; it was Kim Valdez, a freshman like Claire. A band geek, which put her only a tiny step higher than Claire’s status as resident freak of nature. Kim kept to herself, and she didn’t seem to be all that afraid of Monica or her girls; Kim didn’t seem afraid of much. Not friendly, though. Just…solitary.

Kim looked back at her, blinked once or twice, then stopped before putting her hand on the door to exit. “Hey,” she said. She pushed back the hood of her knit shirt, revealing short, shiny black hair. “They’re looking for you.”

“Yeah, I know.”

Kim was holding her instrument case. Claire wasn’t exactly clear on which instrument it was, but it was big and bulky in its scuffed black case. Kim set it down. “Monica do that?” She gestured at Claire’s bruises. Claire nodded wordlessly. “I always knew she was a bitch. So. You need to get out of here?”

Claire nodded again, and swallowed hard. “Will you help me?”

“Nope.” Kim flashed her a sudden, vivid grin. “Not officially. Wouldn’t be too smart.”

They had it worked out in a matter of frantic seconds: Claire zipped up in the shirt, pulled the hood down around her face, and held the instrument case by the handle.

“Higher,” Kim advised. “Tilt it so it covers your face. Yeah, like that. Keep your head down.”

“What about my bags?”

“I’ll wait a couple of minutes, then come out with ’em. Wait outside. And don’t go nowhere with my cello, and I mean it. I’ll kick your ass.”

“I won’t,” she swore. Kim opened the door for her, and she took a gasping breath and barged out, head down, trying to look like she was late for a rehearsal.

As she passed Jennifer, the girl gave her a reflexive glance, then dismissed her to focus back on the stairs. Claire felt a hot rush of adrenaline that felt like it might set her face on fire, and resisted the urge to run the rest of the way for the door. It seemed to take forever, her crossing the lobby to the glass doors.

She was swinging the door open when she heard Monica say, “That freak couldn’t get out of here! Check the basement. Maybe she went down the trash chute, like her stupid laundry.”

“But—” Jen’s feeble protest. “I don’t want to go down to the—”

She would, though. Claire suppressed a wild grin—mostly because it still hurt too much to do that—and made it out of the dorm.

The sunlight felt amazing. It felt like…safety.

Claire took a deep breath of hot afternoon air, and walked around the corner to wait for Kim. The heat was brutal out against the sunbaked walls—suffocating. She squinted against the sun and saw the distant glitter of Eve’s car, parked all the way at the back. Even hotter in there, she guessed, and wondered if Eve had gotten out of that Goth-required leather coat yet.

And just as she was thinking that, she saw a shadow fall across hers from behind, and half turned, but it was too late. Something soft and dark muffled her vision and clogged her mouth and nose, and pressure around her head yanked her off-balance. She screamed, or tried to, but somebody punched her in the stomach, which took care of the screaming and most of the breathing, and Claire saw a weak, watery sunshine through the weave of the cloth over her face, and shadows, and then everything got dark. Not that she fainted, or anything like that, although she was wanting to, badly.