Safe House

by Jenny Carroll

  I assured her that he had been. "It was so sweet," I went on. "I mean, you could tell. He really, really loved her. He feels so bad."

  Ruth still looked shocked. "Mark Leskowski. Crying. Who would have thought it?"

  "I know. So how did the rest of the memorial service go?"

  Ruth described it as she drove us home. Apparently, after the interpretive dance, there'd been a long lecture from a grief counselor the school had hired to help us through this trying time, followed by a moment of silent reflection in which we were all to remember what we had loved about Amber. Then the cheerleaders announced that, directly after school, they were heading back up to Pike's Quarry, to throw flowers into the water as a tribute to Amber. Anyone whose heart had ever been touched by Amber was invited to come along to watch.

  "Yeah," Ruth said. "Anyone whose heart was ever touched by Amber was invited. You know what that means."

  "Right," I said. "In Crowd Only. You're not going, right?"

  "Are you kidding me? Perhaps I didn't make it clear. This particular soiree is being hosted by the Ernie Pyle High School varsity cheerleading squad. In other words, 'fat girls, stay home.'"

  I blinked at her, a little taken aback at the vehemence in her tone.

  "Ruth," I said. "You're not—"

  "Once a fat girl," Ruth said, "always a fat girl. In their eyes, anyway."

  "But how you look is not important," I said. "It's what's inside that—"

  "Spare me," Ruth said. "Besides, I have chair auditions tomorrow. I have to practice."

  I eyed her. Ruth was hard to figure out sometimes. She was so supremely confident about some things—academic stuff, and not chasing boys—but so insecure about others. She really was one of those enigmas wrapped in a mystery people are always talking about. Especially since the same way Ruth claimed cheerleaders felt about fat girls, she felt about Grits.

  "I mean, I'm sorry she's dead and all," Ruth went on, "but I highly doubt they'd ever hold an all-school memorial service for you or me, you know, if either of us happened to croak."

  "Well," I said. "She did die kind of tragically."

  Ruth said a bad word as she turned down Lumley Lane. "Please. She was a cheerleader, all right? Doesn't that about say it all? They don't hold all-school assemblies in the memory of dead cellists or flutists. Just cheerleaders. Hey." Pulling into my driveway, Ruth gaped at me. "Wait a minute. We drove right by Pike's Creek Road, and you didn't say a word. What gives? Don't tell me Mark Leskowski's big baby-blues have replaced the memory of the Jerk's."

  "Mark's eyes," I said, with some annoyance, "happen to be brown. And Rob is not a jerk. And I happen to think you're right. Chasing Rob is not the way to get him."

  "Uh-huh." Ruth shook her head. "Skip mentioned he gave you and Claire a lift from the bus stop this morning. You talked him into stopping for crullers, didn't you?"

  "I didn't talk him into doing anything," I said indignantly. "He stopped of his own volition."

  "Oh, please." Ruth rolled her eyes. "Well? Did you see him?"

  "Did I see who?" I asked, stalling for time.

  "You know who. The Jerk."

  I sighed. "I saw him."

  "And?"

  "And what? I saw him. He didn't see me. End of story."

  "God." Ruth laughed. "You are a piece of work. Hey. What's that?"

  I looked down at myself, since that's where she was pointing. "What's what?"

  "That. That red spot on your shoe."

  I lifted my foot, examining a minuscule drop of red on my beige espadrille.

  "Oh," I said. "That's just some of Karen Sue Hankey's blood."

  "Her blood?" Ruth looked flabbergasted. "Oh, my God. What did you do to her?"

  "Punched her in the face," I said, still feeling a little smug at the memory. "You should have seen it, Ruth. It was beautiful."

  "Beautiful?" Ruth banged her head against the steering wheel a few times. "Oh, God. And you were doing so well."

  I couldn't understand her dismay.

  "Ruth," I said. "She fully deserved it."

  "That's no excuse," Ruth said, raising her head. "There's only one justification for hitting someone, Jess, and that's if they try to hit you first, and you swing back in self-defense. You can't just go around hitting people all the time, just because you don't like what they say to you. You're going to get into serious trouble."

  "I am not," I said. "Not this time. I totally got caught, and Mr. Goodhart didn't even say anything. He just told me to go home."

  "Yeah," Ruth said. "Because there was a suspected murderer in his office! He was probably just a little distracted."

  "Mark Leskowski," I said, "is not a murderer. What's more, he thoroughly supported my breaking Karen Sue's face. He says she's a wannabe."

  "Oh, God," Ruth said. "Why was I cursed with such a screwed-up best friend?"

  Since I had just been thinking the same nice thing about her, I did not take offense.

  "Let's practice together," I said, "at nine. Okay?" Since we live next door to one another, we frequently open our living room windows and play at the same time, giving the neighborhood a free concert, while also getting in some valuable practice time.

  "Okay," Ruth said. "But if you think you can just pop Karen Sue Hankey in the face and never hear about it again, you're the one with another think coming, girlfriend."

  I laughed as I hurried up the steps to my house. As if! Karen Sue would probably be so afraid of me from now on, I'd never have to put up with her noxious taunting again. As an added bonus, she probably wasn't going to play so well during her chair audition on Thursday, on account of her swollen nose.

  It was with these delicious thoughts that I slipped into the house. I had set only one foot on the stairs leading up to my room when my mother's voice, not sounding too pleased, reached me from the kitchen.

  Meekly, I made my way to the back of the house.

  "Hi, Mom," I said when I saw her at the kitchen table. To my surprise, my dad was there, too.

  But my dad never got home before six on a Tuesday.

  "Hey, Dad," I said, noting that neither one of them looked particularly happy. Then my heart started to thump uncomfortably.

  "What's the matter?" I asked quickly. "Is Douglas—"

  "Douglas," my mother said, her voice so hard it was like ice, "is fine."

  "Oh." I looked at the two of them. "It isn't—"

  "Michael," my mother said, in that same hard voice, "is also fine."

  Relief coursed through me. Well, if it wasn't Douglas, and it wasn't Mike, it couldn't be too bad. Maybe it was even something good. You know, something my parents would think was bad, but I might think was good. Like Great-aunt Rose having dropped dead from a heart attack, for instance.

  "So," I said, preparing to look sad. "What's up?"

  "We got a call a little while ago," my father said, looking grim.

  "You'll never guess who it was," said my mother.

  "I give up," I said, thinking, Wow, Great-aunt Rose really is dead. "Who was it?"

  "Mrs. Hankey," my mother said. "Karen Sue's mother."

  Oops.

  C H A P T E R

  7

  Busted.

  I was so busted.

  But you know, I really don't think they had any right to be so mad, seeing as how I was defending the family honor and all.

  And what a whiny baby, that Karen Sue, ratting me out to her mother. Of course, in Karen Sue's version of the events leading up to my punching her in the face, she hadn't said any of the things we both know she'd really said. In Karen Sue's version of how it all happened, I was trying to sneak out of assembly, and she tried to stop me—for my own good, of course, and because my leaving early was besmirching Amber Mackey's memory—and I hit her for her efforts.

  The whole part about how my denying my psychic powers was what making Douglas sick? Yeah, Karen Sue left that part out.

  Oh, and the part about how Douglas doesn't attend church or pray often enou
gh? Yeah, left that part out, too.

  My mom didn't believe me when I told her about that part. See, Karen Sue has my mom snowed, just like she's got her own mother snowed. All my mom sees when she looks at Karen Sue is the daughter she always wished she had. You know, the sweet compliant daughter who enters her homemade cookies in the county fair bake-off every year, and puts her hair in curlers at night so the ends will flip just the right way in the morning. My mom never counted on having a daughter like me, who is saving up for a Harley and has her hair cut as short as she possibly can so she won't have to mess with it.

  And oh, yeah, who gets into fights all the time, and is in love with a guy who is on probation.

  My poor mom.

  My dad believed me. The part about what Karen Sue said and all. My mom, like I said before, didn't.

  I heard them arguing about it after I was banished to my room, to Think About What I Had Done. I was also supposed to think about how I was going to pay back Karen Sue's medical bill (two hundred and forty nine dollars for a trip to the emergency room. She didn't even have to get stitches). Mrs. Hankey was also threatening to sue me for the mental anguish I'd inflicted on her daughter. Karen Sue's mental anguish, according to her mother, was worth about five thousand dollars. I didn't have five thousand dollars. I only had about a thousand dollars left in my bank account, after my Michigan City outlet store shopping spree.

  I was supposed to sit in my room and think about how I was going to raise another four thousand, two hundred and forty-nine dollars.

  Instead, I went into Douglas's room to see what he was doing.

  "Hey, loser," I started to say as I barged in, as is my tradition where Douglas is concerned. "Guess what happened to me to—"

  Only I didn't finish, because Douglas wasn't there.

  Yeah, that's right. He wasn't in his room. About eight million comic books were lying around his bed, but no Douglas.

  Which was kind of weird. Because Douglas, ever since he got sent home from State College for trying to kill himself, never went anywhere. Seriously. He just sat in his room, reading.

  Oh, sure, sometimes Dad forced him to go to one of the restaurants and bus tables or whatever, but except for that and when he was at his shrink's office, Douglas was always in his room.

  Always.

  Maybe, I decided, he'd run out of comic books and gone downtown to get more. That made sense. Because the few times he had strayed from his room in the past six months, that's where he'd gone.

  It was no fun sitting in my room, thinking about what I'd done. For one thing, I didn't think what I'd done was so bad. For another, it was August, so it was still pretty nice out, for late afternoon. I sat in the dormer window and gazed down at the street. My room is on the third floor of our house—in the attic, actually, which is the former servants' quarters. Our house is the oldest one on Lumley Lane, built around the turn of the century. The twentieth century. The city even came and put a plaque on it (the house, I mean), saying it was a historic landmark.

  From the third floor dormer windows—my bedroom windows—you could see all up and down Lumley Lane. For once there was no white van parked across the street, monitoring my activities. That's because Special Agents Johnson and Smith were back at the school with Mark Leskowski.

  Poor Mark. I had no way of knowing how he must be feeling—I mean, if Rob ever turned up dead, God only knew what I'd do, and we'd never even gone out. Well, for more than like five minutes, anyway. And if I got blamed for having done it—you know, killing him—I'd flip out for true.

  Still, it looked as if Mark was everyone's lead suspect. His parents had, as Ruth had predicted, hired Mr. Abramowitz as their son's attorney—not that he'd been officially charged with the murder, but it certainly looked as if he would be.

  The way I found this out was, my parents yelled up the stairs to me that they were going next door to consult with Ruth's dad about Karen Sue's case against me. Mr. Abramowitz had apparently just got home from a consult he'd been doing over at Ernie Pyle. What else could he have been consulting about over there? The new mascot uniform?

  "There's some leftover ziti in the fridge," my mom hollered up the stairs to me. "Heat it up if you get hungry. Did you hear that, Douglas?"

  Which was when I realized my mom didn't know Douglas was gone.

  "I'll tell him," I called to her. Which wasn't a lie. I would tell him. When he got home.

  You wouldn't think it was a big deal, a twenty-year-old guy going out for a while. But really, for Douglas, it was. A big deal, I mean. Mom was totally spastic about him, thinking he was like this delicate flower that would wilt at the slightest exposure to the elements.

  Which was such a joke, really, because Douglas was no flower. He was just, you know, figuring things out. Like the rest of us.

  Only he was being a little more cautious than the rest of us.

  "And don't you," my mother yelled up the stairs, "even think about going anywhere, Jessica. When your father and I get home, the three of us are going to sit down for a nice long chat."

  Well. That certainly didn't sound like Dad had convinced her I'd been telling the truth about what Karen Sue had said. Yet, anyway.

  From my dormer window, I watched them leave. They crossed our front lawn, then cut through the hedge that separated our property from the Abramowitzes', even though they were always telling me to take the long way, or the hedge would suffer permanent root damage. Whatever. I got up from the window and went downstairs to see what was up with the ziti.

  I had just opened the fridge when someone turned the crank to our doorbell. Because our house is so old, it has this antique doorbell with a handle you have to turn, not a button you push.

  "Coming," I called, wondering who it could be. Ruth would never ring the doorbell. She'd just walk right in. And everyone else we knew would call first before coming over.

  When I got into the foyer, I saw what definitely appeared to be a masculine shape behind the lace curtain that covered the window in the front door. It looked to be about the right size and shape for Rob.

  My heart, ridiculously, skipped a beat, even though I knew perfectly well Rob would never just walk up to my front door and ring the bell. Not since I told him how much it would freak out my mom if she ever found out I liked a guy who a) wasn't college-bound and b) had spent time in the Big House.

  Maybe, I thought, for one panic-stricken moment, Rob did see me in the back of Skip's Trans Am, and he was coming over to ask me if I was completely out of my mind, going around, spying on him like that.

  But when I flung open the door, I saw that it wasn't Rob at all. My heart didn't stop its crazy gymnastics, though.

  Because instead of Rob Wilkins standing on my front porch, it was Mark Leskowski.

  "Hey," he said when he saw me. His smile was nervous and shy and wonderful, all at the same time. "Whew. I'm glad it was you. You know. Who answered the door. All of a sudden I was like, 'Whoa, what if her dad answers.' But it's you."

  I just stood there and stared. You would have, too, if you'd opened up your front door and found your school's star quarterback standing there, smiling shyly.

  "Um," Mark said, when I didn't say anything right away. "Can I, um, talk to you? Just for a few minutes?"

  I looked behind me. There was no one in the house, of course. Looking behind me had been pure reflex.

  The thing was, even though I'd never had a boy come over to my house to visit me before, I was pretty sure my parents wouldn't like it if I invited him in when they weren't home.

  Mark must have realized what I was thinking, since he said, "Oh, I don't have to come in. We could sit out here, if you want."

  I shook my head. I was still feeling a little dazed. It is not every day you open up your door and see a guy like Mark Leskowski standing on your porch.

  I guess it was on account of this dazed feeling that I opened up my mouth and blurted, "Why aren't you at the memorial service?"

  Mark didn't seem offended by my
bluntness, however. He looked down at his feet and murmured, "I couldn't. I mean, the one today at school was bad enough. But to go back there, where it happened … I just couldn't."

  Oh, God. My heart lurched for him. The guy was clearly hurting.

  "The only time since all of this started that I've felt even semi-human was when I was talking to you," Mark said, lifting his gaze to meet mine. "I was hoping we could . . . you know. Talk some more. If you haven't eaten, I was thinking maybe we could go grab something. To eat, I mean. Nothing fancy or anything. Maybe just pizza."

  Pizza. Mark Leskowski wanted to take me out for pizza.

  I said, "Sure," and closed the front door behind me. "Pizza's fine."

  Yeah, I know, okay? I know my mother said not to leave the house. I know I was being punished for trying to deviate Karen Sue Hankey's septum.

  But look, Mark needed me, all right? You could see the need right there in his face.

  And seriously, who else was he going to turn to? Who else but me had ever been in anything like the kind of trouble he was in? I mean, I knew what it was like to be hunted, like an animal, by the so-called authorities. I knew what it was like to have everyone, everyone in the whole world against you.

  And yeah, okay, no one had ever suspected me of committing murder. But hadn't everyone at school been going around blaming me for Amber's death? Wasn't that almost the same thing?

  So I went with him. I got into his car—a black BMW. It so totally figured—and we drove downtown, and no, I never once thought, Gee, I hope he doesn't drive out into the woods and try to kill me.

  This is because, for one thing, I didn't believe Mark Leskowski was capable of killing anyone, on account of his being so sensitive and all. And for another thing, it was broad daylight. No one tries to kill someone else in broad daylight.

  Furthermore, even though I am only five foot tall, I have bested bigger guys than Mark Leskowski. As Douglas is fond of pointing out, I feel no compunction whatsoever against fighting dirty if I have to.

  Can I just tell you that the world looks different from the inside of a BMW? Or maybe it is just that it looks different from the inside of Mark Leskowski's BMW. His BMW has tinted windows, so everything looks kind of … better from inside his car.