Chapter Three
Three
MY FINGERTIPS TURN PURPLE WITH COLD, like little seashells.
The air circles around me, stifling and freezing at the same time, blood thundering in my ears.
Everything stops. Well, not really. The clock keeps ticking down, down, down, no matter how much adrenaline is firing through my veins. The clock never stops.
Jesus Christ, how is this possible? Another clock? Now?
In three days Ms. Jegstrup will be dead.
And the school will lose its absolute shit.
“I want to commend you all on your Camus essays from last week.” Ms. Jegstrup pulls a stack of graded papers from her briefcase and smiles, her lipstick leaving the slightest shadow of pink on her front tooth.
Damn it. Why does it have to be her? Why couldn’t it be Mr. Jerzo? He fucking sucks and his tests never follow his study guides. Plus he’s ancient. And Ms. Jegstrup isn’t.
I mean, she’s kind of old. But not old old.
Like I’m sure she’s got grandkids, but they’re probably little.
She’s not, like, feeding-tube, bony-hands, racist-comments-at-Thanksgiving old.
She still dyes her hair. Yeah, I can see her white roots like a strip of skunk fur on top of her head.
But still. She tries. I even caught her telling another teacher that her students were working “hard af” this semester. She pronounced it aff but whatever.
And now she’s got less than three days to live.
That’s three days until this school decides there’s a curse or some other stupid shit happening. Three days until everyone starts consulting Ouija boards and crying over another person they barely gave a shit about when they were alive. Three days until …
“Syd.” Peter’s voice, strong and insistent, pushes through the whirring in my ears. “Syd.”
“What?” I whisper-hiss, tearing my eyes from Ms. Jegstrup’s clock.
“Are you okay?” His eyes drift to my hands.
I release my white-knuckled death grip on the sides of my desk and pick up my pen. Casually. Normally. I make my face go smooth and emotionless. “I’m fine.”
He glances between me and the spot I was staring at over Ms. Jegstrup’s head. “Are you sure? Because—”
“Just leave me alone.” I mean for the sentence to come out sharp and barbed, but it ends up sounding kind of desperate and whiny. I seriously hate when that happens.
Except instead of annoyance his eyes fill up with concern, and for a second, I’m terrified he’s going to pull an Emma and try to hold my hand too. But he just runs his fingers through his hair, stopping to massage the back of his neck in this anxious sort of way. “Sorry. It’s just … you seem …”
I tense. Who does this kid think he is? “You don’t know me well enough to know what I seem. Why don’t you keep your eyes on your own paper.”
I take my own advice and turn away from him again. Only that means now I can’t stop staring at that fucking clock.
Ms. Jegstrup walks through the aisles, handing out our essays.
There’s this maddeningly soft smack, smack, smack noise that I can’t place until I realize it’s my own knee smacking the bottom of my desk over and over, faster and faster the closer Ms. Jegstrup gets to me.
I cross my ankles, squeezing my knees together.
Calm down. It’s just like any other clock.
Like the guy at the grocery store with the bushy gray eyebrows and the MY GRANDKID IS AN HONOR STUDENT button pinned to his vest, or that middle-aged woman from the hotel lobby in Maine with the terrible allergies who sneezed on Jules last year.
It’s not personal. Everyone dies. Including Ms. Jegstrup.
Just because you know what kind of soup she eats on Wednesdays doesn’t mean she matters more than anyone else. Chill.
“Really nice work on this one, Sydney,” Ms. Jegstrup says, placing my essay on my desk.
“The way you wove in the importance of the sunlight’s impact on Meursault was so incisive.
” I nod, keeping my eyes glued to my paper.
I’m working overtime not to look at the Doom Scroll over her head, but the light is right there, casting a neon glow over my red A+.
“Thanks,” I mumble, staring so hard at my essay the words start to blur together.
“You know …” She leans down to my level. I can smell her drugstore perfume and morning coffee. “I was thinking of starting a book club. For the more … active readers in the school. What do you think?”
She’s waiting for me to respond. I can hear her breathing, can feel the cotton blend of her long skirt touching my ankle. I have no choice but to look up.
“That sounds … nice.” I squeeze the words out like the last bit of toothpaste stuck in the tube.
“Wonderful,” she says, standing back up. “I’ll email you about it after the weekend.”
71:51:22
No she won’t. Not unless her cell plan has below-dirt service.
Ms. Jegstrup makes her way back to the whiteboard and grabs a red dry-erase marker that barely has any ink left in it.
The marker squeaks across the board, her letters a sprawling faded pinkish color.
WALT WHITMAN. She turns around and claps her hands together, like she genuinely can’t believe her luck that she gets to rehash this dead white guy’s words to a bunch of bored teenagers.
“We’re going to be taking a sharp left turn from the absurdism in Camus’s work to the transcendental realism of Whitman’s. For this semester’s project, I’d like you all to pair up and—”
“Ooooh!” Emma lets out a squeal and she and Sophia wiggle their fingers at each other. It’s so over the top. Like, we get it. You’re two teenage girl besties!!!
“Another Choy and Aldis collaboration. I can’t wait to see what you two cook up together,” Ms. Jegstrup says.
Their projects are always derivative and subpar and I’m like 77 percent positive that they used AI for their presentation earlier this year, but Ms. Jegstrup isn’t being sarcastic.
She actually believes in all of us. Like some after-school special.
She even offered to help Noah study for his SAT retake, and that was clearly a lost cause. But not to Ms. Jegstrup.
71:48:56
I wonder if we’ll actually have to finish this poetry assignment.
If she didn’t outline her expectations in her syllabus, whatever sub has to take over for the rest of the year isn’t going to give a shit.
They pay subs like fifteen dollars an hour, so I bet we end up spending the last few months of school watching YouTube videos on poetry while the sub scrolls Insta.
Ms. Jegstrup leans back on her desk and tries to sit on the end of it, like a caricature of a hip teacher.
It’s pretty cringe, but also kind of endearing.
She’s always trying so hard. She scoots back slightly too far and knocks into her coffee mug.
A little trail of beige coffee spills onto her desk.
She smiles a sheepish grin. “Whoopsie daisy.”
Oh, whoopsie daisy.
She keeps talking and I see her mouth moving, but it’s like her words are dying somewhere in the empty space between her desk and mine.
I take big gulps of air, but they don’t fill up my lungs.
I try to breathe as quietly as I can, but I can already feel people looking at me.
The pen shakes in my hand. I cannot afford to do this right now.
Not again. I can’t let the memory of what happened eleven months ago keep dragging me under.
Oh, whoopsie daisy.
I need to push it away. I need to—
I shove my chair out from my desk, making this horrible dragging sound on the linoleum.
My heart pounds in my ears. The pink light over Ms. Jegstrup’s head is so bright I swear it’s giving off heat, making my lower back sweat.
I’m going to throw up. I dart out of the classroom, mumbling “Restroom” to Ms. Jegstrup, who doesn’t have time to respond before I shove the door open and dart into the deserted hall, gasping for air.