بخش 03 - فصل 15

15

Tina starts feeling sick around the time Morris is strolling up the late Drew Halliday’s driveway and seeing his old pal’s car parked inside his garage. Tina hardly slept at all last night because she’s so worried about how Pete will take the news that she ratted him out. Her breakfast is sitting in her belly like a lump, and all at once, while Mrs Sloan is performing ‘Annabelle Lee’ (Mrs Sloan never just reads), that lump of undigested food starts to crawl up her throat and toward the exit.

She raises her hand. It seems to weigh at least ten pounds, but she holds it up until Mrs Sloan raises her eyes. ‘Yes, Tina, what is it?’

She sounds annoyed, but Tina doesn’t care. She’s beyond caring. ‘I feel sick. I need to go to the girls’.’

‘Then go, by all means, but hurry back.’

Tina scuttles from the room. Some of the girls are giggling – at thirteen, unscheduled bathroom visits are always amusing – but Tina is too concerned with that rising lump to feel embarrassed. Once in the hall she breaks into a run, heading for the bathroom halfway down the hall as fast as she can, but the lump is faster and she doubles over before she can get there and vomits her breakfast all over her sneakers.

Mr Haggerty, the school’s head janitor, is just coming up the stairs. He sees her stagger backward from the steaming puddle of whoopsie and trots toward her, his toolbelt jingling.

‘Hey, girl, you okay?’

Tina gropes for the wall with an arm that feels made of plastic. The world is swimming. Part of that is because she has vomited hard enough to bring tears to her eyes, but not all. She wishes with all her heart that she hadn’t let Barbara persuade her into talking to Mr Hodges, that she had left Pete alone to work out whatever was wrong. What if he never speaks to her again?

‘I’m fine,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry I made a m—’

But the swimming gets worse before she can finish. She doesn’t exactly faint, but the world pulls away from her, becomes something she’s looking at through a smudged window rather than something she’s actually in. She slides down the wall, amazed by the sight of her own knees, clad in green tights, coming up to meet her. That is when Mr Haggerty scoops her up and carries her downstairs to the school nurse’s office.