Free Between by Jessica Warman

wearing socks—to stare at my foot. My big toenail is almost completely gone. My piggy who went to market. The piggy who stayed home isn’t looking too good, either. It’s not because I drowned, though—it’s because of all the running I did. The rest of me might have been beautiful, but my feet were always downright ugly. Oddly enough, it never bothered me much.
    Well, it bothered me a little bit. My friends—Mera and Caroline and Josie—used to love to get mani-pedis all the time, but I usually opted for just a manicure. I was too embarrassed by the condition of my feet to let anybody else see them. Hence the ostentatious footwear; I guess you could say I was overcompensating.
    I smile as I stare at my left foot. Around my ankle, there’s the same “Best Friends” bracelet that Josie gave me nine years earlier. Once she and I got to middle school, we decided it wasn’t cool to wear them on our wrists anymore, so we had extra links added to the chains and wore them around our ankles. We almost never took them off. It occurs to me that, at the front of the room, lying in my casket, I’m probably still wearing it.
    “You changed your running route?” Alex asks. “When?”
    “It must have been after they found you. I used to run past the Mystic Market every morning, and once they found your body, I couldn’t bear to go there anymore.” I shudder, slipping my boot onto my foot. I have no choice but to put it back on. More than once I’ve tried to leave them off, but the boots simply reappear in place a moment later. The shoes are a part of me now. I’m stuck with them.
    “What happened to you was terrible, Alex.”
    But he’s busy gazing at Mera’s chest as she walks back to her seat.
    “You’ve got quite a collection of friends, Liz. All the hot girls. All the pretty boys.” He shakes his head. “I never imagined I’d get to spend so much time with them.”
    I shrug. “Well, I was beloved. You’re lucky to get to spend time with them now, I guess.” I pause, remembering that it’s not good manners to be boastful, embarrassed by what I’ve just said. “I don’t know if I was all that popular, though, now that you mention it.”
    He glares at me. “Oh, you weren’t? Let me ask you something, Liz. Did you ever have to eat lunch in the library?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “You know what I mean.”
    I blink at him coolly. “No, I don’t.”
    “You do. I showed you the memory. You saw Frank in the lunchroom, getting bullied by your … friends. You saw me, eating by myself.”
    “Alex. I told you I was sorry about that.”
    “Sorry for what? For doing nothing? It happened almost every day, Liz. I knew it was only a matter of time before Topher, or one of your other friends, noticed that I was all alone, too, and that I packed my own lunch. So you know what I started doing?”
    “What?” I have a feeling I don’t want to know.
    “I used to take my lunch into the library and eat in there. All by myself.”
    “You didn’t have to—”
    “Yes, I did. I needed to be invisible. I knew what your group was capable of from watching Frank. You and your friends were … you were empty. You could be like monsters.”
    I don’t say anything. I stare at the front of the room, where my friends sit together, all of them red-eyed and crying. They certainly don’t look like monsters right now.
    “Richie’s the only one of you with half a conscience,” Alex says. “But he never did much to stop it. He was still right there by your side, no matter what you did. It was like, in his eyes, you could do no wrong.” Alex shakes his head bitterly. “You sure had him wrapped around your little finger, didn’t you?”
    “Alex, I already told you I feel bad about that.”
    But he’s not finished. “You don’t know what it was like to be uncool. To be alone. It wasn’t fun, Liz. It was hard.”
    I don’t know what to say to him. I don’t know how to make him feel better, or if there’s anything