“You shouldn’t have—”

Her chin came down to rest against her chest. Long, tangled masses of hair fell over her shoulders and cheeks, hiding her expression. I felt it then—the way that the hold I had on her had suddenly sprung free. I had the strangest sensation of floating, of drifting farther and farther away with nothing and no one to cling to. I was standing right beside her, but the distance between us had split into the kind of canyon I couldn’t jump across.

“You’re right,” Sam said, finally. “I shouldn’t have.” She drew in a shuddering breath. “But then, what would have happened to you? You would have just stood there, and let him do that, and you wouldn’t have defended yourself at all.”

And then she was looking at me, and all I wanted was for her to turn away again. Her eyes flashed, darker than I had ever seen before.

“They can say horrible things, hurt you, but you never fight back—and I know, Ruby, I know, that’s just how you are, but sometimes I wonder if you even care. Why can’t you stand up for yourself, just once?”

Her voice was barely above a whisper, but the ragged quality to it made me think she was either going to scream or burst out into hysterical tears. I glanced down to where her hands were tugging at the edges of her shorts, moving so fast and frantic that I almost didn’t see the angry red marks that circled her wrists.

“Sam—Samantha—”

“I want—” She swallowed, hard. Her tears caught in her eyelashes, but didn’t fall. “I want to be alone now. Just for a while.”

I shouldn’t have reached for her, not with fever and exhaustion pressing down on me. Not while I was trembling with a bone-deep hate for myself. But I thought, then, that if I could tell her the truth, if I could explain, she wouldn’t look at me that way again. She would know that the last thing—the absolute last thing—I ever wanted was for her to be hurt because of me. She was the only thing I had here.

But the second my fingers touched her shoulder, the world dropped out from under me. I felt a fire start at the ends of my hair and burn its way through my skull. The fever I thought I had kicked suddenly painted the world a fuzzy shade of gray. I was seeing Sam’s blank face, and she was gone, replaced by white-hot memories that didn’t belong to me—a whiteboard at school filled with math problems, a golden retriever digging in a garden, the world rising and falling from the perspective of a swing, the roots of the vegetables in the Garden being pulled free, the brick wall at the back of the Mess Hall against my face as another fist swung down toward me—a quick assault from every side, like a series of camera flashes.

And when I finally came back to myself, we were still staring at each other. For a second, I thought I saw my horrified face reflected in her dark, glassy eyes. Sam wasn’t looking at me; she didn’t seem to be looking at anything beyond the dust floating lazy and free through the air to my right. I knew that blank look. I’d seen my mother wear it years before.