I scream. Like, Emma's freshly buffed beakers should be shattering like a wine glass in an opera singers hands because what the fuck.

The door swings open, flooding light onto the floor in a thick shaft, sharp shadows chopping it into defined lines. It doesn't bleed all the way to me. It doesn't dare intrude on the mess I've made. 

"Delaney?" Emma calls, "are you okay?"

A flashlight beam pans over the room, then lands on me, shining right into my eyes.

"Oh my God," Mr. Dennison gasps.

"What happened?" Emma adds.

I must look like Ms. Isaakov's curse victim, squinting and massacred.

"I slipped. On glass." I don't mention the smirking reflection or the bunsen burners snuffing out all at once. A visit to a doctor is already coming. I don't need Mr. Dennison lining me up for a meeting with a psychiatrist too.

My hands find the counter, gripping it hard as I shuffling toward them. I will not slip. My feet won't fly out from under me. I stand up a little straighter, trying to retain some dignity as Emma rushes over to help me and immediately smudges blood and snake juice all over her dainty cream-colored sweater.

"I'm fine." I try to brush her off, but my legs are shaking too much. It's better to let her pull my arm over her shoulder than it is to wobble myself off solid footing. Today is already the most humiliating day in my life without face planting again.

Emma is warm. She radiates it and that's the thing that tips me off to the fact that I am freezing. The room's gone cold, like it was a stiff breeze blew out all my science pseudo-candles. Wind through the closed windows. 

I shiver and I swear Emma tugs my arm tighter around her shoulders.

"We're going to the hospital," Mr. Dennison says.

No shit. I want to say it, but my tongue has kind of turned to cotton in my mouth. It's a real shame, because I'm pretty sure I could get away with swearing in front of a teacher right now.

This is how I wind up in the back of Mr. Dennison's Buick, Emma's sweater wrapped around me because I'm probably in shock. Emma thinks I'm in shock, at least. Mr. Dennison seems less concerned. They're both a little right.

I mean, I'm not dying, but that smirk keeps ghosting into my vision, superimposed over my blank stare view of Mr. Dennison's headrest. The way my eyes are probably glazing over right now gives Emma plenty of reasons to apply TV trauma victim logic to the situation.

In the afternoon outdoor light, it's obvious that my cuts are mostly shallow. Only one in my leg keeps bleeding forever, red sludge slowly oozing out of me until Emma compulsively wipes it off with a wet cloth that was warm, but is now unwelcomingly cool against my skin.

Goddamn snake jar glass sliced right through my good ripped jeans.

"What are you doing this weekend?" Emma asks, swiping up my leg blood yet again, the cold cloth sending shivers up my body.

I give her a look. Is this a shot? Clearly I'm not hanging out with my boyfriend like I had originally planned. After this fiasco, I won't be surprised if I'm put on house arrest for my own safety. 

"Why do you care?" I ask.

Emma's cheeks flush pink under her even tan.

"I'm just trying to keep you talking."

Oh. I shrink. This is somehow worse than small talk for the sake of small talk. It doesn't even mean anything.

"Why didn't you say so?" I say, in the tone of somebody who absolutely isn't a little hurt by that. "I would have launched into my super villain monologue."

Truly, I don't really want to talk about anything that's happened in the last twelve hours. I shut my eyes tight like squeezing them closed will ooze out the brain matter containing the days events. Like slowly rolling the end of the toothpaste tube forward.

"Delaney," Emma taps my face with her fingernail. My. Face.

"Chill out, Malibu Barbie. I'm not dying," I say, eyes still closed, "I'm just repressing a few memories."

"But we're here," Emma says.

My eyes snap open.

The mismatched three of us stumble from car to emergency room. Mr. Dennison's head swivels around, looking for faces I know he won't find. Mom's on her beat right now and a few scratches aren't enough to pull a cop off work and Dad's in the next town over working the construction of the new mega mall. It'll be hours before either of them make it to the hospital. Sorry, Mr. D. You're stuck with me.

We walk into the triage waiting room, the nurse behind the desk weary and in need of a good under eye cream. This is going to be the longest night of my life if the waiting room circus is any indication: some guy literally has an arrow sticking out of his shoulder and a woman in a bathrobe is sporting a left foot the size of a watermelon.

"Just take a seat for a minute," Mr. Dennison instructs, more to Emma than to me. There's sweat visibly beading over his forehead. Looks like his English class isn't getting their essays back tomorrow.

Emma sits obediently, but I sway on my feet. When I don't sit, Emma stands back up. She actually has a shape now that her sweater is draped around me and not her. It's a good shape. It's a '60s mod fashion kind of shape, like Emma could probably pull off anything Twiggy wore and bring it back into style. You'd never know under all the cardigans, though.

"I'm just going to the bathroom." I roll my eyes hard to convince her I don't need company. I can't leave her any room to insist. I might take her up on that and I can't. I might lose it.

With Mr. Dennison's back turned, explaining haltingly the strange circumstances of my lacerations, I slink off to the bathrooms.

I've never spent so much time in Emma Conroy's presence and I've managed to repeatedly insult her, dropped a jar of snake, and then decided to roll around in it. After ten minutes jammed next to me in a car while I reek of snake and morgue, I deserve everything Emma probably thinks of me.

Perfect Emma, who volunteers because she is genuinely a good person and not just because she's prepping for college applications a whole year early. 

I wave my hands in front of the motion sensor faucet and try to duck as much of my head under it as I can, soaking the chemical smell out of my hair. It's rank. Emma's just too polite to say so.

I squeeze the water out of it, my hands stinging from the little micro cuts in my hands, but it flushes out the blood and fermelda-alco-acid-whatever. My pride hurts worse.

In a gross, swamp siren impersonation of a mermaid hair flip, I toss my hair back and look into the mirror.

My stomach curdles like maybe on top of rolling around in dead animal preservatives, I drank a little of it, too.

There's nothing there. There is no reflection.

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. I do the sign of the cross over my head like I'm back in Sunday school, but what else is there to do? I full-on consider saying the Rosary just in case it'll help. 

"Delaney?" Emma calls, much too close.

Oh, God. She can't see this. Or not see this. The proper linguistics are a little lost on me. If the whole school could latch onto a rumor about Ms. Isaakov practicing voodoo on students, I can just as easily become a vampire by reputation. Pasty Irish skin? Check. Limp black hair? Check. No reflection? I guess so!

I paw at my neck, feeling for some sign of teeth marks just in case. There's nothing there. There's not even a hickey, since Jesse has probably been too busy giving those to Lena in his spare time.

"Are you okay?" Emma's voice is even closer and I lunge away from the mirror before she can jump to monstrosity-type conclusions about me. She said herself she believed in Ms. Isaakov hocking the blood of students.

"I'm fine!" I say, too defensively. "Just freshening up." I come around the corner and run straight into Emma, grabbing onto her for stability.

My hand grips her arm and Emma instinctively steadies me. I can't meet her eyes. If I do, it'll be a lot harder to pretend my heart isn't trying to set the land speed record. My face is hot, flushed. Obviously because of the blood loss and shock or whatever. It's not anything else.

"Watch where you're going..." I mutter, half-heartedly, straightening up and avoiding Emma's eye like she has an optically-transmitted disease.

Maybe I can convince the doctors to just paste me back together with butterfly bandages to leave me sick scars that'll be badass enough to make up for all these feelings sloshing together in my stomach. Jesse has me upside down, scrambling to replace the stabbing betrayal pains with literally anything else.

But are break-up hallucinations a thing? I really hate the idea that Jesse was a big enough deal to me to make my reflection full-on disappear. 

What the hell happened in that science lab?