“Hey!” Kylie cried in protest, picking a piece of cucumber from her salad and getting ready to use it as a projectile.
Dom put a hand over hers and nodded toward a lunch monitor who had taken notice of them. Kylie arched an eyebrow and popped the cucumber into her mouth.
“Next time, woman. This food fight ain’t over.”
Jared touched Rose’s hand under the table. He caressed her hand. “You think maybe Dom’s right?”
“Probably,” Rose admitted. She looked at Dom and Kylie. “You’re both pretty perceptive with that stuff. I mean, the logic is obviously pretty…”
“Logical?” Kylie suggested.
Rose chuckled. “Yes, Kylie. The logic is logical. I’m still a basket case. I should just be happy that I’m happy and not worry so much.”
They moved on to other subjects, but when Dom and Kylie started teasing each other again, Jared nudged her.
“You going to finish that?” he asked, nodding at her tray.
“No. Do you want it?”
He smiled. “No. I kind of have a surprise for you.”
“Really? What is it?”
Jared picked up his tray and stood. “Come with me and I’ll show you.”
“Oookay.” Rose had no interest in her lunch anyway, so she grabbed her own tray and got up.
“Where’re you guys headed?” Kylie asked. “Lunch period’s not over for, like, fifteen minutes.”
“Apparently Jared’s got something to show me,” Rose said, nodding toward Jared, who had already headed off toward the tray return window.
Kylie grinned and waggled her eyebrows. “I’ll bet he does.”
“I so knew you were going to say that!” Dom said, giving her a conspiratorial nudge.
Rose rolled her eyes theatrically and left the two of them there, giggling. When she caught up with Jared and dumped her tray, she shot him an inquisitive look, but he pretended not to notice and gave a theatrical bow, ushering her ahead of him. They threaded through the cafeteria tables and went up the steps, but once they were in the corridor, she nudged him.
“So, where are we headed?”
“Surprise,” he reminded her.
As they started up the stairs a sudden turmoil filled her. She hoped that he hadn’t gotten her a gift because she certainly hadn’t thought of giving him anything, and gifts were supposed to be reciprocated. Or maybe that was only when the gifts were for a particular occasion, like Christmas or Valentine’s Day or an anniversary of some sort. Yes, that seemed right. Still, receiving a gift would be sort of awkward. They were behaving like girlfriend and boyfriend but they hadn’t discussed what it was they meant to each other. Every new day brought surprises for her. It was all virgin territory.
She smiled to herself at the irony.
“What are you grinning at?” Jared asked.
“Nothing.” No way was she about to answer that question. “You.”
“Why me?”
“You’re funny.”
“Funny strange or funny ha-ha?”
Rose arched an eyebrow. “A little of both, I think.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“I like the combination,” she assured him.
At the second-floor landing, Jared held the door open for her and then followed her into the corridor, turning right and heading toward the chem lab.
“I’m glad,” he said.
“What? You couldn’t tell I liked you?”
He opened the door of the chem lab. She tensed for a second before realizing that the room was empty and dark. Heavy shades kept most of the daylight out in a lame attempt to replicate actual laboratory conditions. Rose had not realized that the lab was empty during their lunch period, but given the roguish look on Jared’s face, he had known perfectly well what to expect.
“Okay,” she said as she followed him into the lab. “What’s the big—”
With a kiss, he silenced her. A momentary rush of panic filled her, fear that they would be caught, but the feel of his arms around her, his body pressed against hers, washed that fear away. Jared shouldered the door closed, never breaking the kiss, and she surrendered to the heat rising between them.
Filled with a profound yearning, she pushed her fingers through his hair, and when his hands began to search her body, exploring all her curves, she shivered. In the back of her mind a tiny warning bell began to ring, but she ignored it.
Jared broke off the kiss, laid his forehead against hers, and gazed into her eyes.
“Surprise,” he whispered.
“We are in so much trouble if we get caught in here,” she said, which weren’t the words she had wanted at all. But she didn’t dare say the things that were on her mind, tell him how she felt, and how good she felt pressed against him.
He smiled. “This is worth detention. Hell, it’s worth prison.”
This time she kissed him, abandoning any hesitation. But as his hands began to roam again and he lifted her skirt and she felt his fingers on the bare skin of her thighs, she forced herself to stop. Tearing herself away, she smoothed her skirt. In the near darkness she could still make out his worried expression and answered it with a grin.
“I’m sorry, but I can’t,” she said. “No matter how much I may want to.”
Jared smiled. “I know. I got carried away. I shouldn’t have… it’s just you do something to me. I can’t explain it. You make me feel like I’m somewhere else, like I’m drunk or lost. It’s like when I’m reading, and I’m totally transported to another world.”
“Kissing me is like reading a book?” she teased.
He shook his head. “That’s not what I… I’m saying it all wrong.”
Heart pounding, face flushed, lips tingling from his kiss, she reached for the door and rested her hand on the knob.
“You’re saying it perfectly right.”
He kissed her again. “You make me crazy,” he said, a little breathless.
“Yeah? Well, maybe you should actually take me on a date, then.”
“Would your aunts go for that?”
“Not a chance,” Rose said. “But what makes you think I’d tell them?”
The bell rang to end the period before Jared could reply. Rose smiled and opened the door a few inches, looking out into the corridor. Already she could hear doors opening and a cascade of voices as students poured out of classrooms, but the only other door within sight in this leg of the hall had not yet opened.
“Talk later,” she said, and gave him a tiny wave before she darted into the hall.
A moment later the other door opened and a few steps later she was lost in the midst of the between-classes traffic, thinking of Jared’s smile. Thinking of his hands.
“Rose,” she whispered to herself. “What the hell are you doing?”
But she could not stop smiling.
•
The chem lab was on the opposite end of the school from her locker. By the time she had switched out the books from her morning classes to those she needed for the afternoon, the traffic in the corridors had thinned and she knew she only had a few minutes to make it up to the third floor for her religion class.
She hurried past classrooms and lockers, shifting her backpack to a more comfortable position, her thoughts awhirl with facts she’d memorized for her imminent religion test. Yet she found herself having trouble figuring out what they all meant, how they fit together. Her head was still in the rush of those minutes in the chem lab with Jared and she couldn’t seem to focus. Somehow she managed to be worried about the test even though she still wore the smile he had put on her face.
Rose walked toward the stairs, the hall mostly cleared out now. On her right, the door to a maintenance closet stood half open, a girl standing in the half-open door as though searching for something within. As she passed by, she realized the girl was Courtney.
Don’t look, she thought, telling herself that and silently willing Courtney to obey as well. Don’t start anything.
But just when R
ose thought she would reach the stairs without incident, Courtney saw her.
“Rose. C’mere a minute.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Seriously. Sima sent me up to get a mop but I don’t see it anywhere,” she said, glancing over her shoulder. “I hate you, too, but just friggin’ look, okay?”
Rose hesitated. Sima was the school’s maintenance man, a fiftysomething Russian who treated the students like they were all his nieces and nephews. She wouldn’t have done anything to help Courtney, but she didn’t want to spite Sima because of it.
“Fine,” she said, walking over. “How can you not see a mop, though? Seriously. It’s either there or it’s not.”
As she approached, Courtney stepped back a little, but Rose still had to go around her. A small chain hung down from the lightbulb overhead but Courtney hadn’t turned it on. As Rose started to suggest she do just that, she saw the grin on Courtney’s face and her stomach gave a sick twist.
“What—” she began.
Something moved in the closet, a crouched figure springing to its feet from the darkness. Courtney clapped a hand over Rose’s mouth as the figure from the closet grabbed her by the arms and hauled her inside. Rose tried to scream but it came out a muffled groan. She tried to shake them both off, slamming Courtney against the door, which swung open far enough to splash light on her other attacker—Eric, Courtney’s boyfriend. He wore an awful, leering grin.
“Stop screwing around!” Courtney hissed at him, alarm flaring in her eyes.
Eric yanked Rose away from Courtney’s grasp, spun her around, and shoved her into the closet. She crashed into the shelves, knocking plastic bottles of cleaner fluid and a package of lightbulbs to the floor. Tools clanked off their hooks and hit the ground. The wind knocked out of her, Rose couldn’t scream. She tried to push away from the shelves, reaching for the door.
Courtney slammed it shut, closing Rose into the dark closet.
She heard them laughing and their footfalls as they ran off. As she caught her breath, shaking with fury and irrational embarrassment, she searched with her hands for the doorknob. Before she even turned it, she knew it would be locked, but finding it so stoked her anger.
Rose banged on the door with both fists.
“Hey! Is anyone out there? Hello! Let me out!” she called.
Out in the corridor the bell rang to begin the next class period, and her heart sank. Hatred roiled inside of her. She hated the way it made her feel but could not help embracing it as she imagined her religion teacher, Mr. Yerardi, noticing her absence. Courtney and Eric had planned their prank well, but it had gone even better for them than they could ever have anticipated. She would probably already have been late for class, but since they had caught her so close to the bell, unless she got very lucky and Sima needed something in this closet or someone passed by on the way to the bathroom during class, she would be here until the next changeover between periods.
She was going to miss the test.
Again she hammered on the door, screaming to be set free.
“I don’t know why you’re being so contrary,” Aunt Fay said, shaking her head in frustration.
Rose sat astride the chair by her desk, reversed so she could cross her arms atop it and rest her chin on them. She regarded her aunts tiredly, attempting to separate her anger from earlier in the day from her frustration with these women who professed to love her.
“I’m not trying to be difficult,” Rose said.
“You’re succeeding without trying, then,” Aunt Fay replied, turning her back and looking out the bedroom window at the night-darkened street below.
Aunt Suzette stood just inside the room, face slathered with some kind of skin cream and wrapped in a bathrobe covered with faded images of frolicking teddy bears. As she played with the frayed ends of the robe’s sash she looked more than a little like a sad clown in a circus show.
“You know I make this just for you,” Aunt Suzette said, gesturing at the teacup she had set on the nightstand beside the bed. “The herbal remedy takes time to prepare.”
Rose sighed. “And I appreciate that, Auntie. I do. But it’s no secret that it isn’t the best-tasting tea in the world. You told me I needed to keep drinking it because it would help relax my mind, leave me open for my memories to come back. But it’s been a couple of months now and it hasn’t helped at all. I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but I really don’t want it.”
Aunt Fay spun from the window and glared at her. “You really can be an ungrateful brat.”
“Fay!” Aunt Suzette cried.
“No, Suzette,” Aunt Fay said. “I won’t be silenced. If she’s old enough to give us such heartache, and thinks she’s old enough to make up her own mind about things, to think she knows best, well, then she’s old enough for me to talk to her like an adult.”
Rose sat up, lifting her chin off of her arms. “Go on.”
The two women exchanged a worried look, but Rose welcomed Aunt Fay’s reaction. She had to assert herself if she was ever going to break free of the chains of their old-world traditions and fears.
“You weren’t like this before…” Aunt Fay began, but seemed to falter.
“Before the coma?” Rose prodded.
“Yes,” Aunt Fay agreed. “You were always willful, but not like this. You never doubted that we loved you or that we wanted what was best for you.”
Rose sighed and buried her face in her hands for a few seconds, wanting to scream. When she looked up, she found them both watching her expectantly, faces full of concern and even hurt.
“I don’t doubt that now, either. I know you mean well. And I’m not trying to hurt you. Without the two of you, I’d have been lost when I woke up. I’d have been no one. Nothing. I’ll never be able to thank you for the love you’ve given me. And I know that I can always rely on your wisdom, and trust that you want what’s best for me. But you have to understand that what you think is best might not always be what’s best. This is a perfect example. The tea hasn’t helped at all—”
“You don’t know that!” Aunt Suzette said, growing cross now.
Rose threw up her hands. “I haven’t gotten my memory back, have I? No. Which means instead of being some herbal remedy, it’s just a meaningless ritual. I know you both believe in this stuff”—she gestured toward the symbols hanging in front of her window—“but I don’t.”
“For heaven’s sake, Rose,” Aunt Fay snapped, “it’s just a cup of tea.”
“Exactly! Just a cup of nasty, bitter tea. Who wants that?”
Her aunts stared at her, then at each other. But the silent standoff lasted only a moment.
“I could probably make it sweeter. Some honey would do nicely,” Aunt Suzette suggested.
Rose sighed.
“Listen,” Aunt Fay said, crossing from the window to sit on the edge of Rose’s bed, breaking down the invisible barriers between them. “You don’t understand us. Sometimes we don’t understand you. This is the way it’s been between generations since the beginning of time. But don’t fight us just because you feel like fighting, Rose. I know you can compromise.”
Two beeps sounded. Rose glanced at her cell phone, which sat on the nightstand next to the teacup. Probably Jared, and she did not want her aunts to ask about that. On top of that she was tired and she still had a few problems in her math homework to finish.
“What did you have in mind?” she asked.
“It’s been two months already,” Aunt Fay said, glancing at her sister. “Tomorrow Aunt Suzette will work on making the recipe taste better. If she can do that, indulge us for another month—”
“Fay,” Aunt Suzette said warily.
But Aunt Fay held up a hand to forestall any argument and kept her focus on Rose.
“If you haven’t gotten any of your memory back a month from now, and you still hate the taste, then we won’t trouble you about the tea again.”
Rose arched an eyebrow. “You promise?”
�
��We do,” Aunt Fay said.
The long day had left her weary. Mr. Yerardi was going to let her take a makeup test after school on Monday—the soonest he could fit it into his schedule—and she hadn’t gotten into trouble for missing class, but neither had Courtney and Eric gotten into trouble, even though Rose might have been in there for much longer, or even overnight, if a couple of freshman boys hadn’t heard her shouting. Courtney and Eric had denied any part in her getting locked in Sima’s maintenance closet and claimed that Rose just wanted to make them look bad, that she had a grudge against Courtney. There was nothing to prove either side of the story, so the most that Sister Anna had been able to do was instruct the two girls to steer clear of each other when not in homeroom.
Now Rose just wanted to text Jared back, finish her math, and go to bed. She regretted having picked this fight with her aunts tonight.
“Fine,” she said. “But what about tonight?”
“Tonight you drink your nasty tea,” Aunt Fay said, teasing her with a smile.
“That’s not very nice,” Aunt Suzette pouted.
“It really isn’t very good,” Aunt Fay said.
“The taste has never been the point,” Aunt Suzette argued. “It’s medicinal.”
“But you’ll work on the flavor anyway,” Aunt Fay said.
“I said I would!”
Aunt Fay looked at Rose, who realized it was her move. Just wanting to be alone now, she stood and went to the nightstand, picked up the teacup, and drank from it. Her aunts watched her with an air of approval.
“Excellent,” Aunt Fay said, getting up. “It’s a deal, then.”
Rose forced herself to smile in spite of the bitterness of the tea. “Deal.”
“Deal,” Aunt Suzette agreed, moping slightly.
“We’ll see you in the morning, then,” Aunt Fay said. “Good night, Rose.”
They all said their good nights and the two women shuffled out at last. Rose let them see her take another sip and didn’t try to hide her grimace this time. She closed the door and glanced around the room, spotting the spider plant hanging from a hook in the corner. With a quick look at the door, she went to the planter and dumped the rest of the tea into it.
When Rose Wakes Page 14