Chapter 6
The next morning he was waiting by the side entrance before first bell. He didn't wave. He just stood with his hands in his pockets and his white shirt already pressed, his watch catching the flat daylight.
"You don't have to do this," I said.
He looked at my wrist. The bandage was gone. The faint line was there if you knew where to look. "You said you fell by the lockers," he said. "Let's see the floor that made that cut."
I had told the nurse I'd tripped near the science wing. It was the easiest place to picture. Wide hallway, polished linoleum, lockers on both sides. No one would question it. My pack status did most of the explaining for me. Omega without a wolf spirit, clumsy, fragile. People filled in the blanks themselves.
We walked together and didn't touch. The hallway was loud between classes, lockers slamming, sneakers squeaking. The smell was floor wax and old coffee from the teacher's lounge. The light through the high windows made everything look washed out compared to the amber lamp in his room the night before.
"This one?" he asked when we reached the second row.
I nodded, though I hadn't really fallen there at all. The cut had happened by the end locker, near the stairwell door where the foot traffic thinned. I remembered the edge of the metal trim, how sharp it looked after.
He crouched. I stayed standing. He ran his hand along the base of the lockers, not touching me, just the floor. The linoleum was smooth. No chip. No crack. No blood.
"If you fell here and caught yourself," he said quietly, "your palm would have taken it. Not the inside of your wrist. And you'd have scrapes. On your knees. On your hands."
"I put my hand out," I said.
"Show me how."
I hesitated, then lowered myself and put my palm flat. My wrist turned the wrong way. The angle was all wrong for the line he'd healed. He didn't say I was lying. He just looked at the distance between my hand and where the cut would have to be.
"Again," he said, "but like you were actually falling."
I couldn't make it match. My body wouldn't do it.
He stood and moved toward the stairwell, to the last locker where the paint had chipped on the corner. There was a dark seam where the metal edge met the cinderblock wall. He leaned in.
I saw it before he said anything. A tiny snag of white caught in the seam. Not the floor. The wall.
He pulled it free with two fingers. Gauze. White, with a faint rust-colored spot no bigger than a freckle. My gauze. From the first bandage I'd wrapped myself before he redid it. It had torn when I pulled away.
He held it out without looking at me. "This wasn't from a fall."
My chest went tight. I remembered yanking my arm back, the bandage catching. I thought I'd lost it in my backpack.
At the same moment, a girl came out of the classroom doorway across the hall. Sophomore, dark ponytail, varsity jacket. She'd been in the hallway the day it happened. I'd seen her by the water fountain, half-turned away, pretending to look at her phone while I was cornered near that same locker.
Our eyes met. She recognized me. I saw it flicker. Then she looked down at the gauze in his hand, at my wrist, and quickly looked away. She pulled her bag higher on her shoulder and started walking fast toward the main hall, head down.
"Hey," he called, not loud.
She didn't stop. She didn't even slow. She turned the corner and was gone. The hallway kept moving around us.
He folded the gauze into his palm. His watch ticked. 8:17. The late bell was about to ring.
"She saw something," I said, my voice low.
"I know," he said.
"She won't say anything."
"I know that too."
He didn't put the gauze in his pocket like evidence. He held it out to me. I took it. My fingers were cold. The little blood spot was dry and stiff.
For a second I wanted to drop it and say it was nothing, that I'd caught my wrist on the locker by accident after all. But the angle, the snag, the girl who wouldn't look at me — it all lined up differently in daylight than it had at night under his lamp.
The bell rang, loud and flat. Doors started closing. He looked at my wrist once more, at the faint scar the light had left, and then back at the chipped corner where the metal was sharp enough to do exactly what he'd said the night before.
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"This doesn't look like a fall," he'd said. "More like you got cut."
In the hallway, with the gauze in my hand and the empty spot where the witness had been, I finally believed he was right.
