Drain You

by Beth Bloom

  “Don’t turn off the car,” I said, putting my hand over Whit’s on the gearshift. “Keep it running. I’ll be ten minutes, tops.”

  He shook his head, shut off the engine, got out of the car, and started walking down the long, narrow drive. I almost tripped over myself sprinting to catch up.

  “What the hell?” I grabbed his jersey and yanked backward. “Stay in the car.”

  He spun around and glared at me, his face stern but scared. “No way.”

  “Seriously,” I whispered, shaking. “Just stay in the car.”

  “You’re not going in alone.”

  “Someone has to keep the car running.”

  “They’re going to be asleep. They have to be.”

  I started to argue more, but Whit silenced me in a crushing bear hug. James had never held me like this. Maybe no one had. He shoved his face in my hair. I could smell his hot coffee breath on my cheek. For one moment it was the only thing in the world.

  “Listen,” he said. “If you see Libby, you’re going to lose it. I have to be there.”

  I didn’t have a choice. I could only trust him.

  I nodded. He let me go.

  “We’re going to grab her and bail, that’s it. That’s all.” He stared at me, inches from my face.

  I nodded more. Whit’s lips began to slowly open, like they would for a kiss, but he spoke instead. “Okay, Quinn?”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay.”

  Then he turned, and we silently walked the rest of the way to the guesthouse’s front door. Then Whit’s hand was on the doorknob.

  I closed my eyes.

  James.

  I love you.

  Then Whit turned the knob. There was a tiny click sound and it opened. Stupid, trusting, supernatural Spaders.

  He gently pushed the door inward, and we peeked inside. There was dead silence except for the dull drone of the refrigerator. Everything was the same: the same couch, the same kitchen countertop, the same heavy curtains pulled tightly shut. And with the curtains shut, it was cool and way dark. Whit left the door open and we stepped inside, trying not to make a sound.

  I stood by the door and looked around. Whit tiptoed toward the main set of curtains and slowly pushed the thick drapes to the outermost edges of the windows. Blinding sunshine poured in. I reached over and fingered the heavy, multilayered fabric of the curtain. It felt like the stuff they used in Vegas hotel rooms so you can’t ever tell what time it is. But you could tell now. It was bright as hell.

  This was going to work.

  Suddenly Whit froze. “Where is she?” he whispered.

  I shrugged. My eyes drifted to the lone long, dark hallway.

  Whit followed my eyes, counted two closed doors and one open bathroom door, then collapsed into a chair, his hands rubbing his face.

  I looked down the hallway again. She was in bed with Stiles. Duh, my God, I hadn’t even considered that. I felt my whole soul fall away. I sank to the carpet.

  Whit snuck over to me and grabbed my shoulders, scream-whispering, “Why didn’t you tell me that she’d probably be in bed with him?”

  I went limp. I went empty.

  “Damn it, Quinn. Damn it.” There was dread in his voice.

  He got up and went into the kitchen. I heard him opening some drawers. Seconds later he was back in front of me, holding a butcher’s knife. This was getting too slasher.

  “What are you doing?” I said, trying not to understand why Stiles and Sanders had kitchen utensils when they didn’t eat.

  “I’m going into their room.”

  “Whit, you can’t.”

  “Shut up and get under the window.”

  “What?”

  “Get. Under. The window.” He pointed to where the sunshine was flooding in. “Now. In the light.” He started to wrench me to my feet.

  “Okay. Okay, okay, okay.” I crawled in front of the window and let the light wash over my body. Lying on my side, I pushed my knees into my eyes hard, until I could see spots and stars rushing through blackness.

  With my head buried in the carpet, I could hear Whit’s footsteps carefully padding down the hall. I counted seventeen steps, then nothing.

  Then I heard his feet stalking back my way and felt his hands on my shoulders.

  “It’s locked, we’re leaving.”

  I couldn’t move.

  “Quinn, get up! The door is locked. We have to go.”

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

  He said nothing.

  I said, “I’m sorry” twice more. I stared down at the floor, at perfect peach carpet, at nothing. At failure. I moved to stand.

  And there was a sudden, small creak. But it wasn’t from me. It was from away. From down the hall.

  Whit went rigid, his hand tensing on the knife. The creak creaked longer, the sound of a door. Opening.

  “What,” Whit started to whisper. He leaned to peek down the hallway. I snuck in behind him, hugging up against his back. We craned our necks into the path of the hall.

  Libby, in faded green cotton underwear and a holey Nine Inch Nails shirt I’d lent her weeks ago, was shuffling into the hallway, out of the cool darkness. She looked wan, anemic, barely there, a photocopy of a ghost.

  I saw her like that for a single frozen moment: It was my best T-shirt, on my best friend.

  Whit dropped the knife and whisked down the hall and scooped her up into his arms and mouthed, Go, go, go, go, go, go at me as he speed-walked back across the living room and out the front door. He and Libby were in the front yard before I could even get my legs to move, but once they did, they ran. I slammed the door, leapt down the four steps onto the grass, and raced for the car.

  We had Libby, we had her.

  Outside it was hot and sunny and normal, and I kissed the dashboard of the Camry as Whit sped out of the canyons and down toward the highway.

  Every few minutes I turned around and checked for vital signs in the backseat. Libby’s pulse was a crawl. I could only feel it beat about three times a minute. If I hadn’t already seen her physically moving in the hallway, I might’ve thought there was a chance she was actually dead. Our triumph wasn’t pure. Things were too twisted, too dark. No call for confetti.

  Whit tried to act confident. “She’ll be okay,” he said several times.

  I nodded. I wanted to believe him.

  “Where is it again?” he asked once we were on the 10 heading east.

  “Joshua Tree. Lynn knows we’re coming.”

  Earlier this morning, sometime between my second panic attack and third Diet Coke, I’d dug up the number for Stella Block’s sister. Libby and I had visited her a couple of times together in junior high. She’d retreated to the desert about seven years ago to read chakras, live on sprouted food, and believe in the oneness of whatever. When I called, she acted like she remembered me, sort of. I told her Libby was in a bad way. That was all Aunt Lynn needed to hear.

  I looked back at Libby again, dead asleep or just dead, her long legs folded up under her in an uncomfortable position. Whit caught a glimpse of her splayed out in his rearview mirror and patted me on the lap. He was, at that moment, the closest friend I had in the world.

  “I brought one of Naomi’s dresses,” Whit said, pointing to the back. “It’s under the seat in a bag.”

  I rested my head on his shoulder. “Thanks, Whit.” I meant it so much.

  “Sure.”

  “How did you know she’d be, like, half-naked?”

  “I didn’t. I thought she’d be covered in blood.” He forced a small laugh, but it didn’t fly. “Sorry.”

  I turned around and looked at Libby some more. The Downward Spiral shirt she had on was bunched up around her waist, exposing her underwear. Her skin looked waxy and sort of translucent. I could see the thin veins running up her thighs. Her bracelets were gone. I tried to remember the color of Libby’s eyes. Brown or something.

  “I’m not an expert on this stuff, you know,” Whit said. “He a
nd I don’t really talk about this kind of thing.”

  “What do you guys talk about?”

  “I don’t know. How to deal with my parents.” He half laughed. “School. Girls. Whatever.”

  “What does he know about girls?”

  “Not much.” Whit looked over at me and smiled. “Don’t worry, I do most of the talking.”

  Obviously. I reached back into the CD case and grabbed the one with hearts and stickers and junk all over it. The cover read LOVE SONGS FOR WHITLEY, in handwriting sweeter than soda. I held up the plastic case as evidence and arched my eyebrows. “What do you know about girls?”

  “A little.”

  I frowned.

  “Too little.”

  “Yeah, right. You’ve got two high school chicks in your Camry right now, you must know something.”

  “Normally I’d say that doesn’t count for much, but since you’re both wearing only T-shirts and underwear, I’ll take the points.”

  “Good call.” I high-fived him.

  Cool beans, Libby would’ve said.

  I stuck my head out the window and let the highway wind blow my hair in a billion directions. Ugh, smog. I pulled my head back in and rolled up the window.

  “So…how’s Naomi?” I’d been wondering, why not ask?

  Whit shrugged. “Naomi’s…Naomi.”

  “Right…”

  “I just mean she’s the same as before.”

  “Before what? Before she met me?”

  “I suppose there are only two ways to divide history: that which came before Quinn, and that which came after.”

  “Works for me,” I said, mussing up Whit’s hair till he pushed my hand away. “But, like, what was her deal?” I bit at my thumbnail. “Before everything.”

  “Like another brother, kind of. Tough and smart. And she was sweet, too, in her own way.”

  I muttered, “That’s news,” but Whit ignored it, staring ahead into the highway.

  “Losing James was worse on her than it was on me.”

  “You two are still close, though.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t really think she likes me that much anymore. And I know she doesn’t like James.” He gave a weak smile, pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Naomi used to always want things to be so perfect. Even when stuff was normal, I never thought of us as a perfect family or anything, but I think she did.”

  “Naomi’s still perfect.”

  “She’d be stoked to hear you think so.” He laughed a short ha sound, and after that there was nothing but the steady muted hum of transportation.

  A few miles later I reinspected the mix CD. “Should I pop this dude in?” I shook the jewel case, made it do a little dance on the dash.

  “What’s playing now?” He pretended to strain his ears to hear through the silence in the car. “I love this song.”

  “Sorry”—I read the name on the spine with only the faintest, tiniest, barely noticeable hint of jealousy—“Courtney, but the Joni Mitchell concert is over. Time to go home.” I shoved the CD in between my seat and the door. “Whoops.”

  “Don’t be jealous,” he said. “You can make me a mix too if you want.” When he said it, he sounded like Milkshake Whit.

  “Yay.” I missed Milkshake Whit. It already seemed like forever ago.

  We passed on through San Bernardino, heading deeper into the desert. It was already six thirty. The 10 East stretched out into the horizon. Traffic was brutal but it didn’t matter; we had all the time in the universe. And more crucial: We had Libby.

  “So what happened at Brown?”

  “Do you like long stories as much as Courtney does?”

  “I like them better.”

  Whit relaxed in his seat. “It’s not that dramatic. I was a creative writing major. Mainly plays.”

  “Were you a good writer?”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “To the story, or in general?”

  “Doesn’t matter in general. If I’m a good writer, I’ll just write. School’s useless. I’m more interested in life.”

  “Ah, don’t tell me.” I held up my hand like a stop sign. “You’ve been to Europe.”

  “That was funny. You’re pretty funny.”

  “I try.”

  “Well…I studied abroad one semester, but that’s not what I’m saying.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “The thing that no one ever tells you, the thing my parents never told me, is that you don’t need to go to college. If I want to write, I need life experiences, not chemistry, not Rocks for Jocks. Not math I’m never going to use.” He shook his head, convinced. “It’s pointless. I realized that. Brown wasn’t for me. So I bailed.”

  It sounded like a speech he’d given many times. Or like a speech he was preparing himself to give. I was buying it, but I was no Brown candidate.

  “What are your plays about then?”

  “I don’t know.” He laughed. “Divorce, class struggle, death and dying, the truth.”

  “The truth is depressing.”

  “Dude, Quinn, you have no idea.”

  The sun was starting to slant in the sky, the temperature dropping, the rocks and desert shrubs were turning that shadowy lavender mystical color. I loved L.A. highways. I loved Southern California. My lingering fear faded, giving way to a gentle sense of accomplishment. Maybe not a job well done, but at least a job done. We saved Libby; it really had happened. We’d be at Lynn’s soon.

  “Well, what about you?” Whit asked. “What do you want to do?”

  “When, now? Or in…life?”

  “Yeah.”

  I hadn’t actually thought about it much since I was eight, so I gave him the old stock response: “Either be a bride or a mermaid.”

  “Shoot for the stars. How about a mer-bride?”

  “Libby’s going to be a hologram.” I sighed, remembering her own eight-year-old life quest.

  “Whoa, sick.”

  “I know.”

  “Oh, damn, I forgot the pizza! Our victory slice!”

  I put my hand over my stomach. The idea of pizza, even the smell of it, was not cool beans.

  “I’m not hungry.” I leaned back and let dusk begin to settle down over our universe. “Like, at all.”

  “Whit, I’m starving.” Twenty minutes later, waking up groggily from a car nap, deep in the empty desert, hunger pangs came on like a beast. A giant honey-mustard pretzel beast. “And I need a Big Gulp.”

  “Tall order.”

  “Rest stop,” I said in a monotone. “Seven-Eleven,” I said like a zombie.

  “You were a lot less demanding when you were drooling.”

  “You wish. How’s Libby?” I turned back to look at her. No significant change.

  “She’s a party animal. Apparently she danced her pants off.”

  Whit’s charms were working. I felt okay. Libby was with us and we were miles away from evil guesthouses. The early evening air was cool. Big Gulps and things flavored cool ranch were in my immediate future.

  Whit steered the Camry off the freeway and into a gas station. After he’d parked the car, we both turned around and stared at the body in the backseat. To a Video Journeys customer I’d describe this part of the movie as Weekend at Bernie’s meets that passed-out chick in License to Drive meets, um, vampires.

  “I guess I should put that dress on her.”

  “Yeah, probably.”

  Whit got out of the car, leaving Libby and me alone together for the first time since we’d kidnapped her. She hadn’t said a word or made a single sound or even opened her eyes for hours. It was hard to remember she was alive.

  I scooted back to the seat next to Libby, propping her into an upright position. She slumped forward limply. Predictable.

  I grabbed the soft flower-print dress from under the seat, placed it at Libby’s feet, pulled it up her long legs to her lap, and then worked my best gym-class locker-room magic. I got her arms through the T-shirt sleeves and into t
he dress straps without a topless moment. Then I slipped the NIN shirt off her head and, voilà, she was presentable. If you were nearsighted.

  At least she was fully clothed. Minus shoes.

  I was out of breath. I opened my door and walked around to her side.

  “Come on, Libby. Time to get up.” She stayed like a rock. “They have Cherry Coke Slurpees.” I leaned there against the open car door, staring down at the sad mess in Naomi’s sweet cotton dress.

  “I bought one of every gross thing,” Whit said from behind me. I felt his hand on my shoulder. It was warm and sticky on my skin. His other hand held three plastic bags full of crap and a drink caddy crowded with two massive sodas.

  “Look at her, Whit.”

  “She’ll be fine.”

  “No, I mean look at her. She’s still so beautiful.” She was. Stupid girl was gorgeous.

  I tried to smooth down Libby’s bed-head hair. I put some of my ChapStick on her lips and one of my chains around her neck. What else could I give her? My high-tops? My Big Gulp? Everything I had, which was seriously, literally, nothing?

  “I’m going to cry, okay?” But tears were already starting to drip-drop down my cheeks. Then I drip-dropped to the ground. Everything went blurry. I could dimly make out cars pulling in for gas, a family waiting in line for the bathroom, bugs swarming around a parking lot lamppost.

  For the second time today Whit hugged me deeply, trying to crush the grief out of my bones with his tender strength.

  “I know Libby’s your best friend,” he said.

  I shook my head. “She’s not really that good a friend actually, but whatever.”

  “Is that how you really feel?”

  I shrugged.

  “Well, I’m sorry, but I don’t get that at all.”

  “Libby can be her worst around me. We love each other.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Who says love has to be even? Who says Libby doesn’t give me certain things I can’t give her?”

  “I don’t know her.”

  “Yeah.” I rolled my eyes. This conversation sucked.

  “How can that kind of friendship make you happy?”