The Name of the Star - Maureen Johnson [122]
The last thing I took was the ashtray shaped like the lips from Big Jim’s. I put this on Jazza’s bed, along with a few Mardi Gras beads. I took my little bag and left our room.
I walked down the Hawthorne stairs for the last time. On the last step, I hesitated. I stared at the flyers on the bulletin boards and the recently filled pigeonholes full of mail. Claudia’s voice was fully audible, even though her office door was closed. She was telling my parents about hockey opportunities in Bristol.
“ . . . once her injuries are healed, of course, but the padding does cover quite a lot . . .”
I turned in the direction of the bathroom. I could leave now and never see that room again, but something drew me toward it. I walked down the hall. I reached out and ran my hand down the wall. I passed the common room, the study rooms . . .
The bathroom door was gone. From the way the hinges were bent, it looked like it had been smashed down. The glass of the mirrors was completely gone; only the silver backings remained. There was also a crack in the floor—a long one, at least five feet, and maybe a quarter of an inch wide at points. It ran jagged from the center of the room in the direction of the bathroom stall, breaking every tiny tile in its path. I walked along it, up until the point where it slipped under the door. I pushed the door open.
There was a woman standing there.
Maybe I still had some of the painkillers in my system or something, because I should have jumped or screamed or registered some surprise. But I didn’t.
This woman was old. Not in age—she looked like she was maybe twenty or thirty or something, it was hard to tell—but in time itself. She wore a rough blousy shirtdress.
Over that, she had a heavy, rust-colored skirt that went to the ground, and over that, a stained yellow apron. Her hair was as black as mine and was drawn away from her face with a scarf. But it wasn’t just her clothes that told me she was old—it was the way light reacted to her. She was there, she was solid and real, but there was a strange cast about her, like she was standing in a fog.
“Hello?” I said.
Her eyes widened in terror and she backed up into the corner, squeezing herself between the toilet and the wall.
“I won’t hurt you,” I told her.
The woman pressed against the tiled wall with her hands, which were worn and red and marked with cuts and strange patches of black and green.
“Seriously,” I tried again. “It’s okay. You’re safe here. My name is Rory. What’s yours?”
She seemed to understand this, because she stopped clawing at the wall for a minute and looked at me unblinkingly. She opened her mouth to speak, but only a rasping sound came out. A slow hiss. It wasn’t an angry hiss. I think that was just what her voice sounded like now. It was a solid conversational start.
“Do you know where you are?” I said. “Do you come from here?”
In reply, she pointed to the crack in the floor. Even the act of pointing to the crack distressed her again, and she began to cry . . . except she couldn’t cry. She just heaved and made a noise like air slowly leaking from a bike tire.
“Aurora?” Claudia called. “Are you down here?”
I had absolutely no idea what to do about this situation. But the woman was clearly distressed, so I did what I had seen Boo do—I reached out to her to try to calm her down before Claudia came into the room and this conversation was over.
“Come on,” I said. “It’s okay—”
As soon as I made contact, I felt a crackle, like a static shock. I couldn’t move my arm. Something was running through it, something that felt like a current, something that made me stiffen in position. I had a feeling of falling, like a lurching elevator dropping between floors. The woman opened her mouth to speak, but before she could say anything, there was a rush of air around us and a roaring noise.
And then, there was the light—impossibly bright and filling the senses. It consumed us both. A moment after that, it blinked out. I fell backward, stumbling through the open doorway of