Free Silence by Becca Fitzpatrick Page A

chance. A do-over, starting with the night I disappeared.
    I’d just climbed to my feet when I heard a voice whisper past my ear like a cold current of air.
    Help me.
    The voice was so small, I almost didn’t hear it. I even considered the possibility that I’d invented it. After all, imagining things was all I was good for lately.
    Help me, Nora.
    At my name, goose bumps popped out on my arms. Holding still, I strained to hear the voice again. The sound hadn’t come from inside the stall—I was alone in here—but it didn’t appear to have come from the larger area of the bathroom either.
    When he finishes with me, it will be like I’m dead. I’ll never go home again.
    This time the voice sounded much stronger and more urgent.I looked up. It seemed to have floated down from the ceiling vent.
    “Who’s there?” I called up warily.
    At the lack of a reply, I knew this had to be the start of another hallucination. Dr. Howlett had predicted it. My thoughts turned anxious. I needed to remove myself from the setting. I had to distract my current train of thought and break the spell before it overtook me.
    I reached for the door lock, when a sudden image burst across my mind, eclipsing my sight. In a terrifying twist of scenery, I could no longer see the bathroom. Instead of tiles, the floor under my feet became concrete. Overhead, metal rafters crisscrossed the ceiling like giant spider legs. A row of truck bay doors ran along one wall.
    I’d hallucinated myself inside a—
    Warehouse.
    He sawed off my wings. I can’t fly home,
the voice whimpered.
    I couldn’t see who the voice belonged to. There was a stripped lightbulb overhead, illuminating a conveyer belt at the center of the warehouse. Aside from it, the building was empty.
    A drone reverberated all around as the conveyor belt turned on. A clanging, mechanical noise carried out of the darkness at the end of the belt. It was carrying something toward me.
    “No,” I said, because it was the only thing I could think to say. I swept my hands in front of me, trying to feel the bathroom stall door. This was a hallucination, just like my mom had warned. I hadto push through it and find a way back to the real world. All the while, the awful metallic scraping grew louder.
    I backed away from the conveyor belt until I was pressed up against a cement wall.
    With nowhere to run, I watched as a metal cage rattled and clanged out of the shadows, moving to the edge of the light. The bars glowed a ghostly electric blue, but that wasn’t what seized my attention. A person was hunched inside. A girl, bent to fit the confines of the cage, her hands grasping the bars, her blue-black hair tangled in front of her face. Her eyes peered through the screen of hair, and they were colorless orbs. There was a length of rope emitting the same eerie blue light tied around her neck.
    Help me, Nora.
    I wanted to run for an exit. I was afraid to try the bay doors, fearing they’d only lead me deeper into the hallucination. What I needed was my own door. One I created
right now
that I could escape through to the inside of the school bathroom.
    Don’t give him the necklace!
The girl shook the bars of the cage fiercely.
He thinks you have it. If he gets the necklace, he can’t be stopped. I won’t have a choice. I’ll have to tell him everything!
    My skin was damp at my lower back and my underarms. Necklace? What necklace?
    There is no necklace
, I told myself.
Both the girl and the necklace are wild concoctions of your imagination. Force them out.
Force. Them. Out!
    A bell shrilled.
    Just like that, I was jolted out of the hallucination. The keyed-up door of the bathroom stall was inches from my nose. MR. SARRAF SUCKS. B.L. + J.F. = LOVE. JAZZ BAND ROCKS. I reached a hand out, tracing the deep grooves. The door was real. I slumped in relief.
    Voices carried into the bathroom. I flinched, but they were normal, happy, chatty. Through the door crack, I watched three girls line up in front of