Ultraviolet Read Online Free PDF Page A

with the urge to escape. But my classmates moved just as quickly, jostling and chattering and crowding the door, and before I knew it I was jammed up against the new girl, who looked at me with eyes cold as a glacier lake.
    “Why do you keep staring at me?” she demanded.
    “I’m not,” I said, but the words came out all prickly, like baby porcupines. The shrilling in my ears was louder than ever. I backed away and bumped hard into one of the desks. Orange bloomed across my vision, but through it I could still see the angry puzzlement on the new girl’s face. She whirled and stalked out.
    “Is there a problem?” asked Ms. Pocalujko from behind me.
    The Noise was fading—no, it was gone. I let out my breath. “No,” I said.
    “You seemed very distracted this morning,” my teacher said. “I hope you don’t plan to make a habit of staring at your fellow students instead of doing your work.”
    Humiliation washed over me. I’d always been a good student, or at least a hardworking one: it was one of the easier ways to keep my mother happy. But how was I going to pass any of my subjects this year, if I had to listen to that noise drilling through my head?
    “Sorry,” I said. “I’ll try to do better.” Then as Ms. Pocalujko’s frown softened, I mustered the courage to ask, “That new girl, the one I bumped into . . . what’s her name?”
    “Victoria Beaugrand,” said my teacher. “But if you’re curious about her, then maybe you should try talking to her. Outside of class.”
    I forced a smile. “Thanks. I’ll do that.”
    But I never did
.
    Back in the present, I slid off the edge of the bed and leaned my head back against the mattress, dizzy with the intensity of my recollection. I’d always had a good memory, but this. . . . I hadn’t been remembering that day so much as reliving it. I could still hear the Noise shrilling in the back of my brain, and it
hurt
.
    But there’d been nothing in that memory to tell me why I’d disintegrated Tori. It was going to take time and persistence to figure out what had happened, and I could only hope that I wouldn’t hurt anybody else in the meantime. Because if I lost control of myself again, with that much power inside . . . who was going to stop me?
    I would have called Constable Deckard, if I’d thought it would help. I would have told him everything. But I had no evidence to back up my story, no way of convincing him to believe the unbelievable. In the first few delirious, pain-filled hours after Tori’s death, I’d confessed to killing her any number of times. I’d told my mother, the police, the doctors at St. Luke’s. But they’d all thought I was out of my mind, and who could blame them?
    Although . . . Constable Deckard seemed to think that I knew
something
about the Tori Beaugrand case. He probably knew I’d been the last person to see her before she disappeared; he might even suspect that I’d killed her. But with no body and no weapon, no reason yet to believe that Tori might not still be alive, he couldn’t prove I’d been responsible for her death any more than I could.
    Or at least I hoped he couldn’t. I didn’t want to go to jail; just the thought of it made goosebumps break out all over my skin. But once the police finished their investigation, I was afraid that I might end up there anyway. They’d swabbed my hands when they arrested me, and taken my grandmother’s ring for testing—if they found the blood was Tori’s, wouldn’t that be enough to charge me with assault, at the very least?
    If only I knew someone I could talk to. Someone who would not only listen to my story but believe it, and help me decide what to do. But that was too much to ask of anyone, even my father or my best friend Melissa. Unless they’d seen Tori disintegrate for themselves, they’d never be able to accept that I was telling the truth.
    Her body contorted, her eyes wide with shock and horror
—
    “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I’m so