The Hand on the Wall (Truly Devious, #3)

by Maureen Johnson

She had a notebook closely clutched to her chest in a way that suggested that whatever was in it was precious and probably against some rules. His painter’s eye and his deviant soul told him the girl was the one to watch of this pair.

The thing was, she had not come here to talk about her feelings. Some people were fine with that—they could open up in front of anyone and pour out their business. Stevie would rather eat bees than share her tender inner being with anyone else—she didn’t even want to share it with herself.

Anxiety crawled under her skin all the time, like some alien creature that might burst through at any moment.

The room was starting to throb a bit, the edges of things jumping out in her vision. There was a panic attack just under the surface, and it would arrive quickly.

Even Bonnie and Clyde hit the end of the road down there in Louisiana, when the cops ambushed and filled their Ford Deluxe with bullets until it was more hole than car. Bonnie and Clyde got it. They were poets, Eddie said, and they wrote with bullets.

“Hey,” Stevie said. “Sorry.” “Never say sorry as a greeting,” the girl replied. This was a good point.

“I’m Bath,” the girl said, stepping back. “Bath?” “Bathsheba. Everyone calls me Bath. Sit. Sit!” This was weird, because when Stevie first met Ellie, Ellie got into the bath with all her clothes on to dye her outfit pink, probably for this very cabaret. The word bath would always remind Stevie of Ellie.

Ellie’s art was participatory,” she said. “She never worked with fear. Her art was consent. Her art was welcoming. She wouldn’t put something up in your space, especially if she thought it would scare you or mock you. It wasn’t her.”

Tonight, the clouds were rolling in, so there were only a few visible stars; there was nothing between Stevie and oblivion as she walked

She had to do what was necessary. Much like Rose and Jack at the end of the movie Titanic. The door was not a great raft, but when your choices are a door or the deep, cold ocean—you take the door. (Stevie’s other big interest, outside of crime, was disaster, so she had seen Titanic many times. It was clear to her that there was plenty of room on that door for two people. Jack was murdered.)

Dottie stored her tin there—her collection of the wonderful things she had found. She tucked them away and stashed the tin back into its space. She would return the photos at some point, she decided. Soon. Maybe before the end of school. There would always be time.

In Francis’ POV.

“But what I’m asking is, when do you think Gatsby really died—when the bullet went in, or at some other point in the story?”

“I don’t know how to tell where it all starts or stops. It’s like a loop.”

“A loop,” Dr. Quinn repeated. “Something going around in circles. Something that moves back as it tries to move ahead. Something that returns to the past to find the future.” “Exactly,” Stevie blurted out. “You have to make sense of the past to figure out the present, and the future.”

Stevie had no concept at all of what Dr. Quinn was saying, but sometimes, quite by accident, you find yourself vibrating on someone else’s frequency. You can follow the sense of the thing, if not the literal meaning. Sometimes, this is more important and more informative.

Think about this passage, from right before the shot, as his killer approaches: ‘He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about . . . like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees.’”

There was something sunny about him, maybe the light sandiness of his hair, or his smatter of freckles. When he saw Stevie he smiled, taking up his crutch in his left arm and coming into the common room.

Stevie had never put these Stevies together to assemble a portrait of herself—her choices had not been failures. They had been choices. It was all one Stevie, and that Stevie was worthwhile.

It had been like magnetism. It could honestly not be explained. But once Stevie was around David, something in her became wobbly. The lines and edges blurred.

Anxiety meets passion & lust.

“I don’t think anything is an accident anymore. Even I’m not that fatalistic. I do think it’s weird how someone or something hates this building in particular. It feels like we’re living in a parable.”

From Nate’s POV.

“A bit of a white feather,” she said, holding it up. “A lipstick tube. A shiny clip. This little enamel box that looks like a shoe. A piece of torn cloth. Photos. And a poem. Someone collected these things back in 1936 and hid them. It’s junk. But that’s what clues are. Clues are junk. They’re things that fly off the car when it gets into an accident. Murder is messy, and you have to use garbage to figure out what’s going on. Somehow this shit takes us all the way to now, and these accidents with carbon dioxide and fire and people getting trapped. This school isn’t cursed. There’s no such thing. Unless money is a curse.”

They made her aware that there were echoey hallways inside herself that she had not yet explored, that the world was big, and that objects changed upon examination.

Perhaps Ellingham was never meant to be. Perhaps it was always designed as a place that had to be abandoned because of death and danger.

Every contact leaves a trace.

Neptune was slowly being buried in his fountain, consumed by another form of water, which had slipped out of his control. The snow muffled everything. That was maybe the strangest part. Stevie realized that even though it was quiet up here, there was always a low, gentle current of noise—trees rustling in the wind, creaking wood, animals. Tonight, nothing but the operatic whistle of the wind. Their voices were flattened by the thick coating all around them, making each word stand out.

Why were humans wired like this? Why were we built with a current that could short out our powers of reason and judgment at any time? Why were we filled with chemicals that made us stupid? How could you feel so excited and enraged and like you were being pierced with a thousand emotional needles in the brain all at the same time?

See, devious malcontents spawn devious malcontents. The evil eat their own.

But you can’t stay in the hall forever. That’s not what halls are for.

She dumped two packages into a mug and looked at the pile of chocolate dust she intended to consume. Was this supposed to make up for something, this dust? Was it supposed to repair whatever in her that had ripped in two? That was a lot to ask of a mug of cocoa dust.

Something passed across his face as he said the word. His gaze turned away from her and went up and over, which, according to the books Stevie had read about profiling, meant someone was remembering.