Damage Done

by Amanda Panitch

  “Kind of,” Michael said. He chopped garlic and onion so fast his hand was practically a blur.

  “Kind of?” I asked. “I can barely see your hand move.”

  He scooped everything up on the blade of his knife and tossed it in the pan, which sizzled and spat. Tiny drops of oil hit his arms, but he didn’t flinch. “I was super into the Food Network when I was little,” he said. “All my parents made were casseroles. I kind of took over out of necessity.”

  I nodded gravely, then realized I was just nodding to his back. “Casserole Overload is a very serious illness,” I said.

  “Indeed.” He cracked the eggs so deftly and surely against the counter he was like an…I don’t know, an egg ninja. “Symptoms include getting fat, high blood pressure, and an irreversible blandness of personality.” He shot me a look I couldn’t quite read. “Fortunately, I saved myself that much.”

  So he was a little conceited. We’d fit well together, considering I’d been spending the past few minutes wondering if it would be too obvious to run upstairs and change out of my sweats. Yes, I decided, it would be too obvious to go change. Plus then there was the chance of running into my mother, and Mother’s Knowledge of Boys in the House was an even more deadly condition than Casserole Overload—symptoms included immediate evacuation of the premises.

  “Too bad the fat already set in,” I kidded.

  He turned, his eyebrows raised in mock hurt. He clapped a hand to his chest. “Right here, Black,” he said. “That hit me right here.”

  I shook my head sadly. “Right in the high blood pressure,” I said. I wiped a smear of egg off my cheek. “Now, now, Señor Silverman. That was not very gentlemanly.”

  The omelet might have been the most delicious thing I’d ever eaten, and I wasn’t shy about telling him so. And showing him so—all conversation ceased as I wolfed down my entire omelet and then half of his. “You weren’t hungry, were you?” I asked. I shifted in my seat; my waistline felt a full size bigger than it had this morning. Look who was experiencing symptoms of Casserole Overload now.

  “I’m just glad you liked it,” Michael said. “So are you sure you’re okay? Because you don’t look okay.”

  “I’m fine,” I said emphatically. “Besides, how would you know whether I look okay or not? Before yesterday we’d only talked, like, once.”

  His smile was wide and warm. “Four times,” he said. “And a half, if you count the time we were paired up to talk about tacos. I counted.”

  Blood rushed to my cheeks. “Oh.”

  “Yeah.” He leaned toward me. Our faces were no more than a foot apart; I could feel the garlicky heat of his breath on my cheek. “I will need you to take back that comment about the fat—”

  The front door opened. “Lucy,” my father’s voice boomed.

  My own voice jumped an octave. “Hi, Dad!”

  His footsteps thudded through the entryway. “Your mother called me earlier. She was very upset.” Of course she’d called my dad. It wasn’t like she would ever dare to talk to me herself. “She said you told her you think someone is—” His voice died as he entered the kitchen and saw Michael. “You have a guest,” he said. His words were stiff. “Who’s this?”

  I patted Michael on the arm and stood. “This is my friend Michael,” I said. “He was just leaving.”

  Michael glanced over his shoulder. “I don’t want to leave you with the dishes,” he said. He stuck out his hand. “It’s nice to meet you, Mr. Black.”

  “You too,” my father said. He didn’t stick out his own hand, and I knew he wasn’t going to; as the realization dawned over Michael’s face, his own hand fell back to his side. “Shall I show you to the door?”

  “The dishes,” Michael said. “I was going to wash them. I don’t want to leave you with the—”

  “It’s fine,” my father and I said at once. I coughed to cover up the annoyance in his tone.

  “I actually kind of like doing the dishes,” I said. “It’s…fun?”

  “Okay.” I couldn’t read Michael’s face. “If you’re okay, Lucy, then I’ll go.”

  “I’m okay.” Lines settled into his face: creases in his forehead, indentations at the corners of his mouth. Worry. He was worried. “Really, I’m okay! I’ll see you tomorrow at school.”

  “Count on it.” He glanced at my father, then away, then gave an awkward shrug-wave and headed out, his hands back in his pockets. My heart twinged to see him go, but I’d see him tomorrow. Spence was a more immediate concern.

  My father waited until the door closed to speak. “Your mother told me you said you thought someone was following you and that it has something to do with…” He paused and swallowed hard. “Ryan.” His suit was too small, I noticed; his shoulders were straining at the seams of his jacket. “Do you really think this is true? That the psychiatrist is following you?”

  “Psychologist,” I said. “And yes. I saw him. Three times.”

  My father shook his head. “Nobody is following you, Lucy.” He emphasized my new name. “Don’t start trouble. We’ve had enough trouble for a lifetime.”

  “But I saw—”

  “And this is the last we’re going to speak of this. Do you understand?” He talked over me, and my voice trailed off into nothing. “If you think you’re seeing someone from our old life, we’ll have to call Dr. Ferro.”

  “No.” Dr. Ferro was the only person in Sunny Vale who knew who we really were. My parents had brought me to her soon after the move. I’d talked myself out after eight months and convinced my parents I didn’t need to go back. Talking to her wasn’t going to bring my brother back, or change what had happened in the band room. “Don’t call Dr. Ferro.”

  After I did the dishes under my father’s watchful eye, I escaped upstairs, closing my bedroom door against the sound of my mother’s scrubbing. My father’s mention of Dr. Ferro had brought back some old memories I’d rather not unearth. It wasn’t that she didn’t help me. She did. I always left her sessions feeling physically lighter, as if she were actually a plastic surgeon. It was more that she’d gotten me to say too much.

  She was the only person who knew that, at the time of the shooting, exactly zero of the eleven kids in that band room had been my friend.

  My dead boyfriend—ex-boyfriend? Does someone automatically become an ex when he dies, or will he technically be my boyfriend until we’re both dead?—Evan Wilde was a football player. Aside from my brother and my best friend, it was his name that probably saw the most coverage. The news couldn’t resist the whole “small-town football hero tragically cut down before his prime playing years” thing.

  I know that sounds cavalier. I’m sorry. It’s just that, at this point, I was so done with tragedy. If I had to feel heavy and sad and bow my head every single time any of the victims crossed my mind, I would probably have to follow them into the ground.

  Evan and I were star-crossed lovers: a tall, strong football player and a band geek. Once he asked me to climb on his hands, and then he lifted me over his head; I was so nervous I fell off and hit my head on a fence post. (There might have been tequila involved.) He let me wear his varsity jacket, which smelled like boy sweat and dirt and grass, totally different from my brother’s, until he was done and wanted nothing more to do with me. I gave it back. We didn’t officially break up, though. That was the afternoon he died.

  And that’s all I have to say about him.

  —

  Word of my spaz attack at Crazy Elliot’s had clearly gotten around school by the time Alane and I pulled in the next day. I could tell from her shifty eyes and the way she flexed her hands the whole ride, like she really wanted to give me a pat on the shoulder, that something wasn’t quite right. I didn’t receive confirmation, though, until I saw all the stares in the parking lot. As soon as I stepped out of the truck, whispers rushed over me in a cool wave.

  “I see everyone knows what happened,” I said.

  Apparently that was all Alane needed to set herself off;
she turned to me and wrapped me in a hug so tight it might as well have been a straitjacket. “I didn’t tell anyone,” she said into my shoulder. “I don’t think Michael would, either. It was probably Ella.”

  Ella, or the tens of other kids who were there that day. Whatever. As long as it didn’t progress beyond stares and whispers, I could do this. I’d done much worse. I lifted my chin. “Just don’t tell that weird story where rats ate my toes, okay?”

  Her body sagged in relief. “Okay. I won’t.”

  It only took one period for Michael to catch up with me. Well, it wasn’t so much catching up with me as it was sitting down at his desk in Spanish. “You okay?” he asked.

  “Fine,” I said, and racked my brain for something witty and fun to say next. Maybe I could make a joke about rats. No, enough with the rats.

  Before I thought of something clever enough, he had turned to the guy to his other side, another swimmer, and they were talking about butterfly times. The glow inside me flared into something ferocious and then dimmed, like a candle caught in the wind, and I tapped the girl in front of me on her shoulder. She turned, her eyebrow raised, and then I realized I didn’t know her name. “Hey…there,” I said.

  She blinked at me. “Hi.”

  “I really like your earrings,” I said. I didn’t. They were hideous and they had feathers on them, two things that are never mutually exclusive.

  A smile crept across her face. “Thanks,” she said, touching one so that it spun gently in the air. “I made them.”

  Out of dirty bird feathers? They probably had disease crawling all over them. “Oh,” I said dubiously. “That’s cool.”

  She leaned back, resting her elbow on the edge of my desk. Oh, good. Now there would be disease crawling all over my desk, too. “I have a bird feeder in my backyard,” she said. “And the birds shed all the time, and I figured I might as well do something with the feathers, right? So I—”

  Señor Goldfarb clapped his hands at the front of the room. “¡Silencio, por favor!” he shouted, and then continued in Spanish. “Let’s go over the homework. We’ll start with number one. Ava?”

  The girl in front of me—Ava—began to speak, her feather earrings wobbling with every rolled r and nasal n. I settled back in my chair, relieved our conversation was over.

  Something hit me on the arm. I turned, scowling, to see Michael grinning at me. My eyes traced the movement of his to the floor, where there lay a crumpled ball of paper. Once Ava was done speaking and Señor Goldfarb’s attention had shifted to the other side of the room, I leaned over and scooped it up.

  Those earrings are hideous. You have terrible taste.

  I balled the note back up and threw it at him. It bounced off his chest. He let out a muffled squawk that he managed to turn into a cough. He unrolled the paper, smoothed the crinkles out, and scribbled something else before brushing it back onto the floor. I leaned over to pick it up before he sat back up, and our fingers brushed each other’s. Sparks danced up my arm and straight into my stomach, where they bloomed into something warm and soft. I glanced over at him; he had pressed his lips together hard, clearly trying not to laugh.

  He reminded me so very much of my brother. Not the side of him that other people saw—the one that killed eleven people and made me wish I were dead—but the side of him that listened to me cry when I had a nightmare and told me I was beautiful after one of the drummers made fun of my hair. The side of him I missed.

  I smoothed Michael’s note, which was already beginning to fray at the creases, out onto my desk. And you immediately turn to violence. Nice job. The bloom in my stomach turned to ice. I couldn’t breathe. I darted another glance over at him. He was still smiling. He wouldn’t be smiling if he knew what violence really was.

  I went back to the note. You can’t deny your terrible taste. Because you were talking to Ava about her earrings when you could have been talking to the handsome guy next to you.

  I started breathing again. It was just a joke. It was just a joke, stupid Lucy. I scribbled quickly, Who? Señor Goldfarb? and sent it sailing back. I couldn’t hold back a snicker as his eyes widened and he clapped a hand to his chest, his head falling forward in mock pain.

  “Señor Silverman.” Goldfarb’s beady eyes fixed on Michael. Michael sat up, adjusting himself in his chair. “Is there a problem?”

  “I just thought I was having a heart attack,” Michael said seriously. Someone behind us tittered. “False alarm, though.”

  Goldfarb pursed his lips. “Have your heart attack after class, por favor,” he said. “Now answer número tres?”

  It wasn’t long before I felt the sting of the paper ball, and I glanced over to see Michael grinning at me again. Heaving a heavy sigh, I picked apart the note. Dinner again tonight? My house. We never got to eat that ice cream. Or finish our talk.

  I caught his eye and shook my head. Quickly, so he wouldn’t see how hot my cheeks were getting. Band practice, I mouthed.

  He shrugged with one shoulder, smooth and easy, like a big cat’s loping stride. I have swimming, he mouthed back. After practice.

  A few paper cuts later, we established that he’d be driving me and that he would not, under any circumstances, be making anything with fish or anything Asian. But how could you not like sushi? was his plaintive reply.

  I turned away and raised my hand. It was only after Señor Goldfarb called on me that I realized I had no idea what question he’d even asked.

  —

  I found myself in band practice before I really had a chance to think about what I’d gotten myself into. With Michael, obviously. I didn’t know whether I liked him because of him, or whether I liked him because he reminded me of my brother. And that was a problem.

  When the Vanns became the Blacks, the elder Blacks were shocked when I told them Lucy wanted to do band. Julia had done band for years and played almost every instrument there was: she was best at anything with a reed, the clarinets and saxes and oboes, but she could buzz some scales out of the tricky brass instruments and their traitorously simple-looking valves, and even once or twice got a sound out of a flute. But Julia had also been in the band room, shaking behind a music stand, when everybody died. The Blacks assumed that being in any band room, no matter how different from the one she’d left behind, would be traumatizing.

  Well, as usual, they were wrong. I couldn’t be any more traumatized than I already was. If anything, the band room was a sanctuary. Sure, it had music stands identical to the one I’d hid behind. But it also had music, complicated music that took all my focus to stay on top of. It didn’t give me time to think about anything else.

  We finished with a resounding crescendo, and I shook my head vigorously, trying to shake off my music daze; whenever I finished a practice, I found afterward that I could barely remember what had happened during. So it wasn’t until then that I noticed Michael propped against the wall, his head cocked and his eyes closed. I snuck up next to him and bumped him with my clarinet case. “Did we bore you that badly?”

  His eyes flew open. “I was listening,” he said indignantly. “Trying to hear your…um…”

  I quirked an eyebrow. “This is a clarinet.”

  “Exactly. The clarinet is my favorite instrument,” he said. The smell of chlorine came off him in nose-searing waves, and his hair stuck up in peaks. “I’m thinking of taking it up.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “No, I’m not,” he agreed. “I would just mangle it anyway. Much wiser to leave it in your capable hands. Though I can carry it for you now, if you want.”

  “So gentlemanly,” I said, handing it over. He took my case and held it against him like it was something precious. Which it was.

  “Ready to head out?”

  I could feel the other band girls’ eyes scraping against my back. Guys like Michael generally stayed far away from our wing. Yes, I was ready to go. Before long, my back would be pink and raw. “I just have to run and tell Alane I don’t need her to dri
ve me home,” I said. “She’s finishing up show choir.”

  As Michael and I walked together to the chorus room, which was right next to the student parking lot, the fumes of chlorine clouded around me like fog. It, like everything else lately, made me think of my brother.

  Like Michael, my brother had been a swimmer. He hadn’t been the best swimmer on the team. He hadn’t been the worst swimmer on the team. But he threw himself into it and he worked out and he practiced until he finned through the water, leaving nothing in his wake but a rush of bubbles.

  Ryan got into swimming shortly after I got into band, when we were thirteen. He started out in band with me, lugging around a trumpet case to all our practices, setting up his stand next to me in my bedroom (never his) so that we could play together. But it never captured him the way it captured me. I could lose myself in the streams of notes and hear, instinctively, if one went wrong. He could squawk and blare and honk, and it all sounded the same to him.

  Still, he kept at it, because we had band period together. One day after practice he lingered by my seat, tossing his case from hand to hand in a way that made my heart jump into my throat. “There’s a meeting after school today. For anyone who’s interested in doing swimming this winter,” he said.

  I blinked. “Okay?” I was about as interested in doing swimming as I was in committing seppuku.

  My brother shifted on his feet. His trumpet made another dangerous journey up and down. “I really want to do it. Are you going to do it with me?”

  Even though, as I’d said, I really didn’t want to, my first instinct was to say yes. We did everything together.