Here Lies Bridget (13 page)

I studied her face, looking for some indication of dishonesty or humor. There was none. Just complete conviction.

“Okay, this is ridiculous. I don’t even
know
you. And I seri-1 1 0

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ously don’t want to end up on CNN because you went nutso and killed me.”

“You don’t want to die anymore, then?”

“I never—” My gut lurched. “What do you mean by
that?
”

“Tell us what your thoughts were as you drove home from school, won’t you?”

I stared at her. How did she know about that? She couldn’t.

She must have guessed.

“That was an accident, I didn’t mean to crash.”

Anna smiled and clearly seemed to be thinking,
If that’s
what you have to tell yourself…

Perhaps she was crazy.

Perhaps

I
was. That was seeming more likely by the second.

I stood carefully, trying to not let the pain or fear I was feeling deter me from my mission. I creaked over to the wood panel nearest me. I pushed, and instantly felt like a fool. Anna had started looking through her own notepad, and the others still wouldn’t look at me. I pushed on the next wall, then the next, until I’d pushed on every wall but one. Finally I walked over to it, banking all of my hope on it.

“This can’t…I—this is a dream, right? Some easily inter-preted dream that I’ll understand in the morning?”

I felt stupid for saying it. People who
weren’t
in dreams, and who asked if they were…well, that would be called
insane.

Anna said nothing. She merely stared at me benevolently.

My mind started to spin with anger, the result of feeling foolish and hopelessly trapped. Because I had to try, I pushed on the final wall. A swear word escaped my throat and my heart began to hammer against my chest as I realized that wherever I was, whatever was happening, I was stuck.

There was no way out.

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I walked over to a chair a few down from Liam. I kept my eyes on him, studying his features, which looked so fixated on whatever he was reading.

“All right, let’s get started.” Anna organized the papers in front of her and picked up a yellow legal pad and a pen. “First of all, is there anything you’d like to say?” Her tone was now all business, kindness gone.

All I could do was shake my head.

“Just as I thought.” She wrote something down. “All right, then let me ask you another question. What common threads are there between these five people?” She indicated the group that f lanked her.

“I don’t know,” I said, breathing tentatively. “Obviously we all know each other.”

“Okay. And do you have any idea why they might all be here to talk to you at this time?”

The first answer that came to my mind was that I had been in an accident and they were all here because they love me, but something told me that
none
of these people were here out of love.

Not if they wouldn’t even look at me.

So I thought for a moment about her question, but truthfully didn’t have any idea what might bring all of these people to a boardroom in wherever we were. I still didn’t even know what brought
me
here.

I spared her these thoughts and shook my head once more.

“All right. One last thing.” She leaned back in her chair.

“Would you consider yourself to be popular, Bridget?”

Something about the way she asked the question made me sure that she didn’t consider that to be the case. But I sat up a little straighter, and said that I did. She scribbled something else onto her pad of paper.

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“And if you don’t mind my asking, how did that come about?”

I found that question odd. Most people probably wouldn’t have an answer. But I, as it happened, did.

It had really begun at the start of eighth grade, when my only three friends got expelled.

The exact reason
why
they were expelled was never fully explained to the general student body. All we knew was that it was bad.

The funny thing was, they’d told me in no uncertain terms that I was not allowed to participate in the prank. After they were caught, I realized I was alone in school. I spent the next summer terrified of going into eighth grade without any friends.

When the first day of school finally came, I was exceedingly pleased to find that everyone was being nice to me. Boys were f lirting with me, girls were timidly asking if I was headed the same way as they were to class, or asking if the seat next to me was taken at lunch. I didn’t understand any of it at first, until Jillian—whom I did not know at the time—sat down with me in the library during one of our classes. She talked about normal things at first, asking me if I hated the project we were working on, too, and who I had a crush on (a question I had responded to with a blush as Liam’s face drifted into my mind). Finally, after a furtive glance at another table, she mentioned the prank the other three girls had pulled at the end of the last school year. Judging by the eager-looking girls watching our conversation, it seemed that Jillian was the only one with the guts enough to ask me about it.

I shook my head shyly and said that I really didn’t want to talk about it. That I didn’t know any more than they did. I remember feeling disappointed as I realized that that was why she’d sat with me; it wasn’t because she liked me. But then she 1 1 3

looked at me with the widest of eyes, and asked me how on earth I’d gotten away with it.

And that was the second that it all made sense.

I was the only one remaining of the four.
I
was the one everyone was scared of. None of them seemed to know that I’d just been along for the ride with that group, that I had never come up with ideas to terrorize my peers. No one knew that my constant “I don’t think we should do this” and crying were the reason I hadn’t been allowed to hang out with the group anymore and the reason I wasn’t let in on the prank that got them kicked out. They didn’t know anything about it.

And, given the fact that their fear made me their leader, I wasn’t going to be the one to tell them.

Once I realized what had happened, I took the opportunity to be a proud but fair leader. I was nice to everyone, eager to maintain my newfound status. I never again wanted to feel I wasn’t one hundred percent in control.

It wouldn’t be until later that I knowingly began to abuse that power.

I kept all of this awareness to myself, however, and chose not to share it with Anna. Why was I going to tell her anything? She was doing a pretty crappy job of answering
my
questions.

Instead, I just shrugged. “I guess it just happened.”

After a long moment, in which I felt sure she knew everything I had just remembered, Anna brought her eyebrows together like she was thinking very hard about something.

“Hmm.” She put the notepad down on the table and stood.

“There are a few things that I’d like you to see.”

“What kind of things?”

“Please

stand.”

“Are we going somewhere? I thought there weren’t any doors,” I said, feeling fooled.

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I was surprised to see that she was wearing something that looked like a judge’s cloak. Not only was this weird—she was dressing for her name?—but I was usually the first one to notice another girl’s outfit.

She looked at the ground in front of my feet. I followed her gaze and saw a pair of Adidas. I didn’t know what she was getting at.

“…What?”

“Step

in.”

“Step—what, into the shoes?”

She nodded. I lifted a foot to step in, and then felt idiotic and stopped.

“Really?”
I asked.

Anna said nothing, but the command in her silence was clear. I lifted my foot again and stepped into the left shoe, looking self-consciously around me, though I knew I had no attentive audience.

“Fine. I’ll play your stupid little game. But I swear, if I’m being Punk’d right now…”

“You have to be a celebrity to be Punk’d.”

I gave a single nasty laugh and then took my second step into the other well-worn shoe. The second I did, I felt like Alice falling down the rabbit hole.

My eyes were shut and I couldn’t open them. I tried to scream but the sound seemed very far away. It felt like wearing someone else’s glasses, with the dizziness and inability to perceive space. There was a ringing in my ears that reminded me of how I’d felt at camp one year when I fainted from the heat.

Then, all of a sudden, it stopped.

When I could finally see again, I found myself in another room. But this time, I recognized it.

C H A P T E R E I G H T

I was crouched down in the corner of the cloakroom in my fifth-grade classroom. My body felt small and compact, fitting in the corner quite snugly. I could hear a child’s voice in the next room saying, “Heads down, thumbs up!”

On my lap there was a piece of pink construction paper with a pencil-drawn heart in the middle. I watched my hand writing in loopy, slanted cursive, but I couldn’t control it. I looked at the words that appeared on the page.
And without
you, this place would be…

I had a split second of dawning, uncertain comprehension before I heard footsteps coming into the room.

I looked up to see my very favorite light-up Little Mermaid sneakers come squeaking into the room in front of me.

I was in Brett’s body.
Holy—this was no joke.

I was feeling everything he felt, understanding everything he thought and doing everything he did, but I had no control. It was like watching a TV show from inside one of the characters while having an intense understanding of another character.

A stab of foreboding hit me before I heard the ten-year-old Bridget Duke speak.

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“Brett!”

The paper was snatched from my lap and I watched myself—

across from me—read it, all the while feeling the fear that Brett had been feeling.

I watched the girl’s face, my face, and saw my eyes scan the poem. Watched as my eyebrows furrow as I came upon words I didn’t know or recognize.

Everything went dark as Brett burrowed his face in his hands very suddenly.

No, no, no, no, NO!
I knew what I was going to do, and I could feel that ten-year-old Brett had known also.

I looked up to see my own face burst into a victorious smile.

The next thing I saw was my ponytail swinging out of the cloakroom.

I heard my voice in the next room singing “Brett loves Miche-elle!”

My new stomach dropped, I felt embarrassment f lood into Brett. I heard my voice reading the poem aloud, using a nasty tone that made all of the words sound dirty. I listened as the rest of the class joined into the guffawing I remembered creating.

And then, in unison, everyone sang the K-I-S-S-I-N-G

song.

Brett stood shakily, kicking the other papers out of his path, and crept over to the wall to peer into the classroom. His gaze locked on Michelle.

I felt his surge of relief as he realized she wasn’t laughing.

She didn’t look amused at all. In fact, she looked downright embarrassed. The relief he felt to see that she wasn’t laughing at him combined with his empathy for how she must be feeling.

The fondness for her was so strong that I felt, for a moment, Brett’s urge to run up to her and tell her how sorry he was.

He was barely even thinking about his own shame.

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Deciding that it would only make things worse for her if he did run over, Brett headed to his backpack.

He gathered up the papers from the ground, the scissors, his multi-colored pencil (part of a set that had his name on it) and the tape, and threw all of it into the big section of his bag.

Hoisting it onto his shoulder, he stormed out of the room. I could feel the humiliation and the longing to be home all the way to my core.

Memories of his family and a home that I’d never seen before f littered through Brett’s mind. With each memory his pace quickened, until finally he burst full speed into the main office.

He looked around for Mrs. Gibbs, one of the secretaries.

When she came out of the copier room, she looked pleased to see Brett. It was peculiar, because in
my
recollection, she’d been a disdainful woman who did little more than frown at students.

“Hi, Brett!” she said.

Brett felt a distinct comfort upon seeing her. “Hi, Mrs.

Gibbs.”

Her cheer faded a little, as she looked at his face. “Are you feeling sick?”

“Not…exactly. Something just happened in class and…”

It was then that she seemed to take in what Brett was feeling. “Oh, no,” she said, her freckled arms dropping to her sides, “don’t tell me it’s that Bridget Duke again.”

Ex
cuse
me? “That” Bridget Duke?
Again?

Brett nodded, and my stomach tightened. It was like eaves-dropping, except that I was sure to not get caught. And I didn’t want to hear what she had to say about me.

“You know, that girl is going to hear it from me one day.

The number of students she’s terrorized into going home early 1 1 8

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and put in the guidance office, I swear.” She sat down in the chair behind her desk. “What did she do this time, Brett?”

“I was writing a valentine to Michelle, and then she caught me and read it to the whole class. Everyone laughed at me.”

I felt Brett’s mortification swell again.

Mrs. Gibbs was shaking her head. “So mean. Someday, someone will tell her off, believe you me. If I wasn’t—” She stopped, as if remembering that Brett was there and that whatever else she had to say wasn’t appropriate for a child’s ears. “Well, never mind that. Let’s just call your mother, shall we?”

Brett nodded again, and watched as Mrs. Gibbs dialed his home number.

“Hi, Teresa? Yes, it’s Sybil. Brett’s here, and one of the other children hurt his feelings. He seems very upset—” She paused and nodded at the words Teresa was saying. “Mmm-hmm.