by Holly Cupala
“Wow,” said a loud, familiar voice. “You look even worse than you sound.”
I jerked in surprise, and Lexi jerked, too, snuffing and letting out a tiny mew. “Shhhh,” I whispered in her ear and held her tighter, hoping she wouldn’t be able to sense my heart racing. Her fist, the size of a cherry tomato, clutched my finger.
“Essence. What are you doing here?” I wouldn’t have recognized her if it weren’t for the voice, because she looked amazing, an echo of the face I used to know as well as my own sister’s. Like the star she was becoming.
“I came because I heard the baby died.”
“What?”
“That’s what Delaney told everyone. She saw you pass out in a pool of blood and saved your life by calling nine-one-one.”
And I suddenly felt like a sci-fi character, sucked back into the vortex of time and space and landing squarely back into my old life. “She would say that.”
“You’re not friends anymore?” She was such a good actor now, I almost missed the sarcasm.
“No,” I said. “We’re not friends anymore.” I waited for the smirk, but it didn’t come.
“Well, then you’ll probably be happy to know she and Kamran are no longer an item. They broke up right after the Winter Ball.”
“They did?” Lexi nestled further into my skin and raised her face toward me. Kamran’s features echoed there—in the shape of her cheekbones, her head, her brow. “What happened?”
“He’s not a complete jerk, apparently—he dumped Delaney after he saw her flip out on you at the dance. Then she transferred to Roosevelt.”
On to reinvent herself again.
“That’s what Kamran’s telling everybody?”
“No. But that’s what he told me. Right after you kicked him out of the hospital.”
I couldn’t believe she’d taken time out of her celebrity schedule to tell me all of this. Kamran and Essence were talking. Delaney was out of the picture. “I didn’t kick him out,” I said, not wanting to meet her eyes. At least half of the messages on my phone were from him, even though I never listened. “Well, not exactly.”
“Geez, what is it about your family that nobody ever wants to tell the truth about anything?” She rummaged in her bag, pulling out a tiny pink knit hat with three butterflies embroidered on the front. “Here,” she said, tossing it to me. “This is for the baby. I was supposed to tell you it’s from me, but I’m sick of lying for everyone. It’s from your mom. She’s the one who told me you were here.”
I dropped the hat into my lap. “So you’re her messenger now. Of course you are.”
“Oh, get over yourself, Rand. She saw the baby in the nursery and was worried about her head getting cold. So if you decide to get all huffy because it’s from her, then whatever. It’s a hat, not a pitchfork. And your mom isn’t the devil. She cares a lot more about you than you give her credit for.”
“And you know this because you’ve become her new best friend? Right after you stole my part in the montage?”
Essence’s eyes narrowed. “Are you serious? I thought you never wanted to be on your mom’s main stage again! You’ve been telling me that for how long now?”
I didn’t say anything. She threw up her hands in exasperation.
“You don’t get what you want, and you’re not happy. You get what you want, and you’re still not happy. You wouldn’t even be happy if Xanda was still alive.” The words stung more than if she had slapped me in the face. “You’d still be having problems with your mom, with or without your sister.”
The baby in my arms was crying now, the cord between us severed but not entirely lost. I held her tightly, shushing her back into a state of peace. “That’s enough! Enough.”
“Sorry, I wasn’t trying to upset you or the baby. But lately, or at least back when we were still friends, all I ever did was upset you. So I guess it’s probably better we’re not friends anymore.”
“Don’t say that, Essence.”
“Why not?”
She was giving me a chance to apologize. For humiliating her in front of everyone at Milo’s party. For choosing Delaney. For resenting when her life got better without me. For coveting the approval my mom gave her so readily now.
If I didn’t, she would walk out that door and both of our lives would go on as they had, with regret scraping away at the edges of my heart even as I went on in my life with Lexi.
If I did, maybe the friendship we had wouldn’t be lost. Nik would say it was a step of faith. Not knowing what the future would hold, but hoping somehow, somewhere, there was a plan for things to work out.
“Because…because I’m sorry.” The tears came, and I didn’t even bother trying to stop them. They came so easily, now that Lexi was born. “I’m sorry for everything. I don’t want to not be friends anymore, Essence.”
“That’s a double negative. And a split infinitive.” A half-smile pulled at her cheek. “But if that’s your grammatically deficient excuse for an apology, then I will consider it.”
I don’t know why I thought she wouldn’t. Essence had always cut me a lot of slack. Or maybe she knew I just wasn’t used to blaming myself. It ran in the family.
“That doesn’t mean you don’t have to do some groveling. I realize you were under the spell of the Dazzling Delaney Pratt—”
“You mean the Despicable Delaney Pratt?”
“—the Depraved, Dreadful, Dangerous Delaney Pratt…but that doesn’t mean you’re off the hook.” Her face went completely somber. “You were pretty mean to me this year.”
I nodded. It was the truth.
“You made fun of me. You ditched me. You humiliated me. Then you blamed me for something I didn’t even do. And you resented me for getting the stupid part you didn’t even want.”
Even worse, I had walked the path of Xanda’s life alone, without the friend I needed most. I couldn’t say anything to that.
“So I guess we’ll have to see what happens. I don’t know if I can trust you anymore.”
I didn’t know if I could trust myself.
“You should go home, Rand. Believe it or not, your mom misses you.”
“Yeah, like she misses Xanda.”
Essence gave me a penetrating look. “Maybe you should give her a chance. Things have changed…you should talk to her.”
I wasn’t so sure she would think so if I told her about my trip with Andre. Lexi made a snuffly sound, the signal she would want food soon. “But anyway,” she continued, “I was hoping you’d let me see your baby. What’s her name?”
If there was anyone in the world who would understand the connection, it was Essence. I fingered the safety-pin necklace around my neck and took a deep breath.
Then I told Xanda’s story for the first time.
Forty-two
“Hey, what are you doing here?” a voice roared in my ear, dragging me up through a thousand layers of sleep. “I thought I told you not to hang around!”
The person in my face was huge. Angry. Spewing spit and breath that stank of old garlic. Steely eyes penetrated me like needles.
The security guard.
He wasn’t supposed to be here. He had chased me out of a bed in the Gastroenterology wing, two floors down. Didn’t he? Wasn’t this Oncology? Didn’t I have a few more days before I needed to find a new waiting room?
“Where’s your patient I.D.? Who are you here to see?” He stood over me like a bulldog while I sat up, my heart pumping with adrenaline.
“I’m a patient,” I stammered. “I was a patient. I mean…” I rummaged through my satchel.
He would let his guard down any second.
Fight or flight?
I wasn’t even sure which I would choose until I found myself dashing over the other side of the bench and heading for the nearest stairwell, shaking off the sleep and clutching my satchel to my chest.
What floor was this again?
Footsteps thudded behind me in the corridor, empty in the early morning fluorescence.
I glanced behind me to see my lead. He was heavy and muscular, like a wrestler, thud thud thudding in his boots. The sound echoed in the halls.
The door to the stairwell gave way under my weight. Something grabbed my First Washington Credit Union T-shirt—once gold, now a hazy yellow-gray—but it was only the handle, hooked around the hem.
Thud, thud, thud. “Hey, you come back here!”
Then the click of the door behind me muffled his voice.
I flew down the stairs two, three at a time, leaping to the bottom and struggling to direct my momentum to the next flight. He was in the stairwell, calling for backup on his walkie-talkie. Teen, possible runaway. Headed down the south stairs.
I hadn’t run for months, but it came back to me in an instant. I was fast, faster than a middle-aged cop who’d eaten too many garlic bagels in the hospital cafeteria. I kept circling down, down the stairs, metal and gray and echoing my precise coordinates. I had to get out of here before someone caught me on the other end.
I burst out into an unfamiliar hallway, narrow and lined with rows of gray lockers, broken only by the occasional classroom door. The lights were low, the area deserted on a Sunday morning. I tried a few of the doors. Locked.
“Hey, stop right there!” The guard tripped, dropping his walkie-talkie. He went back for it, as well as for the battery that had skittered across the floor, buying me a few more seconds.
I nearly careened into an emergency shower in the hall, just in case I accidentally set myself on fire with hospital chemicals. My lungs were already on fire.
Past the elevator shaft, I found a second set of stairs and kept on running—through the corridors, winding and coiling like a serpent’s tail into the very depths of the hospital. I stopped, tucking myself into an alcove, and listened.
Nothing.
I didn’t know where I was, except I had reached the end of the line. Gigantic double doors barred my entrance with a sign, NO UNAUTHORIZED ENTRY in red and white, and a smaller sign reading, WARNING: FORMALDEHYDE IRRITANT AND POTENTIAL CANCER HAZARD.
I’d been here before, though something was off. The sign I’d seen before had a corner curled up from below, revealing a silver edge. Slowly, with my back in the alcove, I slid down the wall until I was the height of a twelve-year-old girl, crouching on the ground. The words loomed over me like they were ten feet tall.
And the corner, I realized with a chill. The corner curled up on the bottom edge, sharp and shiny as a razor. Exactly like the one I’d seen before, the night Xanda died.
Voices echoed down the hall—the security guard and someone else. “Maybe she went down this way.” A grunt. Footsteps, coming my way. Which door was this?
There was no time to decide.
I tried the handle, slipped through, and closed the door with an airy thud.
The formaldehyde hit my nose first, bringing everything flooding back.
My eyes stung from the chemical, from the bright lights in this mostly metal room, lined with identical square drawers. The skin on my arms pricked with the cold, underscored by an electric hum. It was like the NICU, but vast and hollow, with a row of tables for full-sized people instead of babies.
One of the tables had a lumpy blue sheet, carefully laid out. Over a person.
A dead person.
A woman person, whose pale hair flowed out from under the sheet and dangled prettily off the edge. Her feet peeked out the other end, nails painted a jagged black, a tiny star tattoo twinkling on her toe. Like she was just sleeping, after a long party.
I would have cried out, but I could only gasp, and not even a full gasp, because the realization all but sucked the air out of me. A scream could summon the living and the dead.
Memory blurred into reality, like the razor’s edge of the sign outside.
Everything was slipping out of my control.
I had to get out of here.
Footsteps pounded up to the other side of the door. “Think she went in here?” a new voice said—the other guard. Across the room, another exit sign signaled a stairwell, but there was no time. As the latch turned, I dove into a recessed corner.
Click. Swoosh. The guard poked his head into the room as I folded myself further.
“Nope, nobody in here,” he called to the other guard. “Did you check the other corridor?” The door closed with an airy thud.
“I’ll keep looking,” said the other guard. “I hope she doesn’t show up in here one of these days.” Steps and voices faded away.
I slipped through another door and somehow found my way back to the NICU, as if Lexi had a homing beacon to draw me to her. When I reached the desk, Shelley sat there, waiting for me with a paper bag.
“I brought you a dress, just in case you wanted to go to church with me today. I know Lexi is going to be discharged in a few days, but I thought you might like to get outside.”
“Church?” She had to be joking. I had just been to the depths of hell itself.
“Honey, are you all right? You look like you could faint dead away.”
“Yeah,” I mumbled, not meeting her eyes. “I’m fine.” I had to be as pale as the body I’d seen. I put my hand over my nose, trying to wipe away the smell clinging to me like a shadow.
“Because if you—”
“Wait,” I pleaded. “I have to ask you something. When Lexi can leave…when we can leave, can we live with you?”
Shelley’s face transformed from smiling to something else, something I didn’t want to see.
“We could ride to work together,” I continued. “We could…eat curried egg-salad sandwiches together. I could take care of DaShawn when I’m not working—I still have the bank job, right?” I talked faster and faster as the adrenaline worked its way out of my system in a fevered rush.
She shook her head sadly.
The rush flooded into panic. “But why not? Things have been so great here! You could love Lexi, too. And you’re like—well, not really like my mom anymore, you’d be more like a big sister. It would be like—”
“Rand. No.”
Panic turned to tears, and I found I was running out of words. “But…why? Don’t you care about us?”
Shelley sighed heavily. “Yes, I do. That’s why you can’t live with me. Even though it would be wonderful, and I would get to love Lexi, and DaShawn would be thrilled. But you would still be running away.”
Damn it, why did I trust her? I could see my future crumbling, cracking open, and the floodwaters swallowing me up. “You’re not listening,” I accused.
“I have listened to every word you ever said, and even things you haven’t said. You’ve been holing up here in the hospital for months now, feeling sorry for yourself and trying to make a future out of your past. You can’t find yourself in other people, Rand. You can only be yourself. And you have someone right here in front of you who needs your whole heart, not just a piece of it while you’re off looking for something else. A lot of people around you love you and want to love that baby, if you’d give them a chance. You’ve got to stop. You need to go home.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Home?
No, I wasn’t going back there. And if my parents wanted to love Lexi, good. They could feel what it felt like to love someone and lose them. Maybe then they could take a good, hard look at themselves and see what they had done. And then they could be sorry. So, so sorry.
“Fine,” I said, wishing I could say the hundred other angry words backed up like a simmering volcano. “Well, you should go to church. Confess, or whatever it is you do there. I’ve gotta go see Lexi now.”
“We pray,” she said quietly. “And we try to learn how to forgive.”
When she was gone, I checked in with the nurses and grabbed my satchel. Nobody would be home on a Sunday morning. They would be off at church, praying for the sinners and hating the sin. I could hop a bus, run inside, and be gone before they said their last Amen.
Because as soon as Lexi was strong enough, we were out of here.
<
br /> Forty-three
After Xanda stormed out on Christmas Eve with Andre in tow and her skirt still crackling in the fire, Mom patted her forehead. “I’m so glad that’s over for the year. Mandy, get your things together so we can head to the church.” As if it was all so…normal. I scrambled to get my boots and coat. Dad rolled his eyes and tossed a wad of wrapping paper into the fire, obliterating the skirt forever.
I felt like a defector, going with my parents after Xanda left, wearing the safety-pin necklace I gave her and not much else. She had squealed when she opened the little package from me. Delicately, she lifted the safety-pin chain out and held it up to the light.
“Look, Andre!” He draped across the couch like it was his personal chaise. I knew Mom was angry at his cigarette smell, soaking into the fabric. We would hear about it later, even though she was glad that for once, Andre and Xanda were at our house instead of going God knows where and doing God knows what. He nodded. A nod of approval. “Rand made it for me. To go with my dress.” A giggle hiccupped on that last word. The sly smile spread across his face. I wished with all my heart that smile had been for me.
After they left, the memory of his smile lingered, so when I went onstage for the closing performance, I wasn’t thinking of my mom’s shouting or the skirt Xanda threw in the fire. I was thinking of his smile and nod of approval. I floated past the monstrous audience, all eyes pinning me to the sets my dad designed. I was only the girl in the white dress, lit up like an angel, or a white bird soaring out of the church and into the seat between my sister and Andre, where we would all fly away together.