There is nothing to do and Mr. Verver is in with Evie and I know I should go home, but there's a funny and hollow clang in me, and I just start wandering the hospital corridors, dragging my bike lock along the walls, gazing mournfully at all the fluorescence and disease.

It's so odd when it happens, the man looking at me as I make my way down yet another long hallway flapping with posted greeting cards tacked to bulletin boards.

Leaning on the nurses' station counter, it's like he's waiting for me.

I wonder if I'm in trouble somehow, so I slow down and when I see a bank of worn pastel chairs I slip into one, like I'm there for a reason.

That's when the man starts walking toward me and I feel a ripple of panic until I see it's Dr. Aiken, with a white coat on and everything.

I remember his calm voice through the wall from the night before, how it soothed me. There's something calm about him, or something in him that calms me. For all his chaos, his stumbling through bushes and sliding on our kitchen floor, there's something that seems still about him. Comfortable.

"Lizzie," he says. "I thought you might be here."

"You work here?" I say, because I thought he had an office, that he was that kind of doctor.

"I work here too, yes."

"Oh," I say, and I see he has new gla.s.ses, with pencil-thin wire frames, like the ones my mother used to pick out for my dad. "I'm here because of Evie."

"Yes," he says, with care. "She's going to be fine."

"What happened to her?" I say, my voice going high, like I might cry. I can't believe how it sounds. "What did hea what is shea"

There are too many words and none seems right, none seems to contain it all.

"She's going to be okay," he says. "Don't worry."

And he turns quickly, and looks up at the clock.

"I think they'll release her later today," he says, and he's still looking at the clock. I think he's nervous to look at me. I think he doesn't know what to say to me. It strikes me too that, for any number of reasons, he feels sorry for me.

My mother drives me home, my bike in the trunk. She's wide awake now, not like earlier, and is filled with scoldings, but how worried could she have been? Where else would I have gone?

"I saw your boyfriend," I say.

"My boyfriend," she repeats, eyes on the road.

I wait and wait, but that's all she says, like she's stuck on the word and she's trying to unstick it.

The phone is ringing when we walk in the house. It's Tara Leary, and I know she's ready to swap information. She says I have to meet her and Kelli at Joannie's house. They're already there and she knows everything.

"I don't think so," I say, though of course I want to know. But I don't want to know from Tara. I don't want to hear any of it from Tara's candy-twist mouth.

"Go on," my mother says, slumping down at the kitchen table. "Go relax a little. Be with your friends."

She insists on driving me over, even though it's only six blocks.

"Call me when you're done," she says. "Have fun."

I wonder if she knows anything at all.

Did you hear?" Tara says, filled with gritty energy. She can barely contain herself. We're bundled tight on the big sofa in the den, with cold cans of orange pop we drink from straws. "He dumped her on the roadside."

"She escaped," I say. "She got away. She jumped from the car."

"Like h.e.l.l she did," Tara says. "The waitress at Dawn Donuts saw the car in the parking lot. They sat there for ten minutes before Evie got out. Then he peeled off like a bank robber."

"No," I say, shaking my head. "Why would he just leave her there, after everything?"

I feel my head go back to the l.u.s.trous places of the first few days after Evie disappeared. Those days when the heaviness and beauty of the love first hit me square. A love like that, like Mr. Shaw's for Evie, a love so big it took him over, it swallowed them both whole.

"Because he was done with her, Lizzie," Joannie says, her voice fast and impatient. "He was done with her, and that was that. He'd used her up."

"I don't think so," I say. "It doesn't just stop."

All three of them look at me, their summer tans perfectly matched. They look at me and they think they know everything in the world.

"What'd you think," Joannie says, "he wanted to make her his child bride?"

"Romeo and Juliet," Kelli pipes up.

"Do you want to hear the rest or not?" Tara says, nearly jumping in her spot.

I know what's coming. I know because Tara's lips have a shine on them, her body nearly rocking.

It's the part I've been waiting for with all kinds of dread and fervor: "They gave her a pelvic," Tara says, leaning back against the sofa cushion, watching our faces.

Kelli squirms a little.

"They did all these tests," Tara says, and it's like she's reading a report. "For gonorrhea, syphilis, herpes, and pregnancy. I bet even AIDS."

Like on the poster on the wall in Health cla.s.s. The one with the big red letters, tall and menacing: ANYONE CAN GET AIDS. PROTECT YOURSELF.

I picture Evie on a white sheet, a set of probes, like some steel claw, poised between her legs. I start to feel sick.

Tara takes a long sip from her pop, then says, "She's clean."

Leaning against the wall, Joannie seems to slump a little.

"But, confidentially, girlies," Tara says, her mouth twisting over her straw, "he did it. He did it all."

"What did he do?" I ask, my jaw aching with it.

"He tore her in two," she says, with a knowing tilt of her head that makes me want to smack her.

"Tore hera," Kelli says, her voice tiny, her mouth hanging open. "Tore hera"

"Probably did it to her five times a day," Tara says. "Ripped her all up down there."

She leans backward and jiggles her fingers in front of her hips. I feel my skin go to tingly ice.

"But she's okay," I say, wondering how Tara could know all this. Could she?

Tara rolls her eyes. "How okay could she be? He ruined her."

When she says it, it sounds old-fashioned, like something from an old book, one of those big hardcover ones my grandma would read with blooming roses and silvery script on the cover, or a black-and-white movie where all the women speak in high, elegant voices and the piano music sweeps up every time a scene ends.

But it also sounds true. It sounds true.

Evie's in the hospital two days. Much longer than they'd first said.

My mother says it's probably to deal with "emotional consequences," but time seems to inch.

I'm not supposed to leave the house, and no one seems to know what the rules are. Should parents be afraid of Mr. Shaw, on the loose? Is there something to be afraid of? The second day, my mother makes Ted take me to his job, and I sit in the air-conditioned clubhouse, watching him cut tree branches in the hot sun.

We have lunch together in the staff cafeteria, peeling plastic wrap from gluey tuna sandwiches.

I can't eat anything, but Ted eats both sandwiches, a carton of milk, and two bananas.

I ask him why he thinks Evie's still in the hospital.

He shrugs, then stretches his golden arms wide. They are thatched with little twig cuts, like those pictures of saints. It makes me think of something.

"She's probably getting sewn up," he says, eyes wandering past me, watching the girls in the pool, on the other side of the gla.s.s. They all have string bikinis this summer, with beads on the ta.s.sels. They click-click when they walk.

He's watching them, but all I can think of is Evie and a long needle, like with Nurse Stang. But down there. Down there.

"Sewn up," I say, barely a whisper.

"Yeah," Ted says, eyes back on me. He picks up a piece of plastic wrap, still slick with mayonnaise, and stretches it taut.

"Hold it tight," he says.

I reach my hand out and stretch the plastic, pinched between my fingers.

"It's like this," he says, and he pokes his finger through the plastic. A vicious hole clean through.

"So she's probably getting all healed up," he says, pulling small clots of plastic from his finger. "And then she'll be fine."

But they're all wrong, aren't they? It couldn't be like that. Because I know. Because Dusty said it too, even if she can't understand it.

Mr. Shaw waited, hoped, dreamed his way into Evie's night-lit room and he couldn't have done all that just to hurt her, but instead to take all the hurt in the world away.

At the window night after night, Evie's hand pressed against the screen, eyes on the pear tree, glowing greenly in the dark. Seeing him there.

Evie felt Mr. Shaw's love, and what girl wouldn't eventually sink into that love, its dreamy promise? He, a man three times her age who's seen the world and known things and knows most that she is the most special girl of all? She is everything and he would tear down his life for her. He would tear it down because just one downward glance from her would heal him, save him. She has that power. What girl wouldn't want that power?

It's seven o'clock at night and the Ververs are finally home. Mr. Verver calls my mother and says if I'd like to come see Evie, he'd appreciate it.

My mother makes me wait while she bakes a batch of brownies from a mix that's been sitting on top of the refrigerator since Halloween.

I carry them in the heavy gla.s.s ca.s.serole dish. Mrs. Verver answers the front door, holding it open for me with her foot.

"Hi, Lizzie," she says, her voice a sc.r.a.pe.

It's so unusual to see her, and I can't think of a thing to say.

"Hi," I sputter, handing her the dish.

She takes it in her bony fingers, and we both look down at the brownies, crackled on top like a peeling ceiling.

"How isa," I say, and then it just goes away.

My eyes drift to the staircase behind her, that furred blue carpet I know so well. Two doors down to Evie's room.

When I turn back to Mrs. Verver, she's already halfway down the hall to the kitchen.

We're grateful for you, I think I hear her say, her voice half swallowed by the quiet of the house.

I place my foot on the bottom step. The house is so still. I hear Mrs. Verver drop the ca.s.serole dish on the counter with a clunk.

I wonder where Mr. Verver is, and I bet he's with the police again.

I take a breath, then creep up the steps.

All the doors are closed and I stand in front of Evie's.

I stand there, my foot slipping from my flip-flop, my toes kneading the carpet. I stand there and I stand there and I stand there, my heart like a cannon. I feel it shaking the walls of the house. I feel it might tear the whole house down.

I knock.

"Come in," a voice says, and, my G.o.d, it's like a thousand other times, and it's like no other time.

This is the part that can't be imagined. If I pause at all, I won't be able to do it, the moment too large, the largest of my life.

I open the door.

I open the door, and as I do, all kinds of hectic pictures flash through my head, and I somehow expect to see a scene like those from the center pages of one of those true-crime books at the drugstore. I expect to see Evie splayed there, b.l.o.o.d.y sheets and thermometers and sanitary napkins and cotton b.a.l.l.s and the stench of girl-ruin in the air.

But I open the door, and all I see is the tidy room I know so well, the soccer mobile swaying in the breeze, the bed made tightly, hospital corners, the swing-arm lamp craned over the desk.

And Evie.

No longer the specter, the haunted vision.

Evie, leaning over her desk, pencil in hand, pink eraser top bouncing as she writes.

If it weren't for the strangeness of the hair, those glaring wheat-colored tufts yanked into a high ponytail, it would be like nothing had happened at all.