“You’re my new hero.” Jordan bunched up my clothes and passed them over the seat as a still-scowling Chandi sidled up to Brooks and slid under an arm he didn’t offer to put around her shoulders. She laced her fingers through his to hold it in place.
“Walk me to my car?” she asked him while staring straight at me.
Brooks handed me my bag back.
“So?” I asked.
“I concede victory. Text me your address.”
We switched phones to add our numbers to each other’s call list.
“Is Sunday okay?” he asked. “I have to be at Five Points tomorrow morning, and I’m not sure how long I’ll be there.”
“Thanks,” I said with as much cheer as I could force into the word. As soon as I reached the door, Chandi lit into him. Too bad there was no way to stay and watch. School was officially over for the day; I had somewhere more important to be.
Just the same, it was nice to know it didn’t take much to trouble the waters of Brooks’ calm existence.
“Marry me.” Dex fell in step with me outside the theater doors. “Marry me. Or date me. Or whatever other arrangement will get me another look at your, um …”
His attention dropped from my face to my chest.
“Unmentionables?”
“Yes. Pretty unmentionables, and maybe matching other unmentionables.”
Dex was such a drain. And he was totally blocking all my attempts with Brooks. Their brains must have been cross-wired.
“You don’t have to beg.”
“Really?” His eyes lit up, and I’m not entirely sure I didn’t see drool.
“Sure. Walmart. Women’s underwear aisle. I usually shop off the end cap.”
“You’re trying to kill me, aren’t you?” he asked. “It’s a game, right? See how long it takes for the new girl to drive one of the rich kids completely insane.”
“Ah, but you said you weren’t a rich kid.”
“A minor technicality. You can’t disqualify me for that.”
“It’s no fun driving someone crazy if they’re already over the line.”
“She thinks I’m crazy,” he lamented to a random piece of yard art. I think it was probably a rabbit at some point, but it hadn’t held up as well as the fountain on the front drive. “Tell her, Cottontail. Tell her I’m perfectly sane.”
“You didn’t actually expect the marriage proposal to work, did you?”
“It could have.…”
We turned onto the main walk and headed for the front of the school. After the day’s horrible, trig-contaminated start, and all the assumptions I’d had about what I’d be walking into when I entered Lowry, it was nice to find someone normal, even if he did turn out to be one of the devil’s friends.
“Okay, the line sucked, but it’s all I could think of. It’s not my fault—all those purple hearts scrambled my brain. And what’s the deal with you and Brooks?”
“You saw how lost I was this morning. He’s going to help me catch up with what I missed in trig.”
“I could do that.”
“I don’t think I’m quite pathetic enough to need two tutors.”
“Maybe, but Brooks may not be in any shape to run numbers for a while.”
Under one of the trees, Brooks stood beside the open door of a silver BMW as though he was getting in. Unfortunately, Chandi had followed him from the theater and was still going strong. Dex waved, which only ratcheted the fit up another notch.
It was one of those moments where I was happy that telepaths don’t exist. No need to share the mental touchdown dance playing out in my head. Dex wasn’t the only one going on an unmentionable-free streak.
“If he falls through, let me know, okay?” Dex dropped the goofy edge from his voice and ran off.
8
Leaving Lowry felt surreal, I guess.
I’d accomplished my one concrete goal—locating Brooks—but had no idea what to do next. I’d charged in without any real plan to speak of.… Maybe I thought I’d fail, so there was no point in planning. I don’t know. Evil was supposed to be an abstract, yet in meeting Brooks, I’d managed to find proof of its existence.
A low rumble of commotion and whispers drew my attention to the line of waiting cars in the pickup area. It was the same as this morning, a monochromatic stretch of neutral colors but the standout this time was my ride home, sitting just outside the security guard’s stand. I left through the “walk-in” gate (another ivy-covered iron monster, which locked behind me, lest someone unauthorized sneak through on foot) and approached the passenger’s side.
“Hey, Tabs,” I said.
Tabitha Guthrie had been my best friend since we’d conspired to dig a hole large enough to trap Kyle Smith on the playground. He was a year older and had been picking on a friend of ours during recess. We’d seen the “dig-a-pit” thing on TV with tigers and figured if it could hold one of those, it could hold Kyle. He was nowhere near as smart as your average tiger.
Of course, we got bored after about ten minutes, so instead of tossing Kyle into a tiger pit, we jumped on him and did as much damage as a couple of five-year-old girls armed with toys were able. Kyle never picked on our friend again, and maintained an irrational fear of My Little Pony well into junior high.
Even after the forced march to Oregon, Tabs was the first one I’d thought of to help with my deconstruction-of-Brooks-Walden scenario. With me on the other side of the continent, she was Claire’s cousin by proxy, and had reacted to her hospitalization about as well as I had—mainly because she took Claire’s condition as a personal defeat. It was a crazy idea; none of this was her fault.
Tabs had known Claire since she was little, but she couldn’t read Claire like me. She was a friend, not family, and Claire wouldn’t have told her about Brooks even if Tabs had known to ask. But knowing that didn’t help her guilt. I had to talk her out of looking up every B. Walden in the county and chasing them down with Grimace, her purple beast of a car. My way meant he suffered longer; hers meant forensic evidence on her bumper.
“You look like a cupcake,” she snarled.
“Nice to see you, too.”
Tabs stood against Grimace wearing a T-shirt that declared “I’m the evil twin” in a bloody red font. Baggy black pants set low on her hips were pulled lower by the weight of steel studs on her belt. She had her arms crossed and was glaring at anyone who dared make eye contact.
Ninth Street let out at three-fifteen, which gave her just enough time to make it to Lowry and become the center of attention before I made it out the door. (Yes, I was pretending I didn’t know she’d skipped last period to make it with time to spare.)
“A cupcake with frosting and extra sprinkles.”
“Shut up.”
“Security is watching me.”
“They’re laying bets on whether or not you’ll burst into flame if the clouds break.”
“They wouldn’t let me in without the code. And they took my picture.”
“You won’t show up.”
She flipped me off as she circled to the driver’s side.
“Get in before all this sunshine fades my interior.”
Tabs gunned the engine, which, considering most of the parents’ cars were hybrids, actually sounded like an engine, and drew the attention of the few who weren’t already looking as she spun us into the line of exiting cars.
“Subtle.” Perhaps I should have picked someone more inconspicuous to be my ride home.…
“Oops.” Tabs grinned, and the green stud below her bottom lip bobbed up. “I’ve got real clothes in the back if you want to shed the secret identity, Lois Lane.”
“Lois Lane didn’t have a secret identity,” I said.
“No, but you tend to maim anyone who calls you Diana, so Wonder Woman was off the list. How’d it go?”
“Not bad.”
I crawled over the seat into the back and found the paper sack of “real” clothes—jeans and a T-shirt made to look like faded lace.
&n
bsp; The tint on Grimace’s rear windows was jet black, meaning you could pretty much do anything you wanted back there and no one could see unless they wanted to press their face against the glass. And the way Tabs drives … no one’s that suicidal.
“Not bad as in you found the guy who trashed Cuckoo, or not bad as in you’ve already been brainwashed, like this place, and can get out and walk the rest of the way in your underwear?”
“The first one,” I said, wriggling into the jeans. It had been so long since I’d worn a skirt, I’d forgotten how weird it felt not to have anything on my legs.
“Good. I’d hate to think I wasted the gas driving over here. Which one is he?”
We’d stopped while the line bottlenecked at a red light before allowing us to turn onto the main road from the private one that belonged to the school. Our position placed Brooks and Chandi’s sparring match squarely in the rearview mirror.
“Dark hair, blue blazer,” I said.
“Maybe a bit more vague would help.”
“Student parking, silver Beemer, getting gnawed on by the model behaving badly.”
Tabs reached up and adjusted her rearview mirror. In it, Chandi’s gestures and flailing grew more erratic the longer she ranted, until Brooks grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her.
Watching Chandi fall apart, then crumble, was disgusting.
“Nice,” Tabs said.
“It wasn’t that hard. He’s easy enough to approach, and has a girlfriend with a short temper.”
“No wonder the Cuckoo bird fell for him—he’s hot.”
“Stop it,” I ordered as I climbed back into the front seat. “There will be no lusting after evil incarnate.”
“That’s not fair.” Tabs slipped into the most annoying mock-whine you could imagine. “You know I’ve had a crush on you since fifth grade.”
“I’m not evil, I’m committed.”
“Yes, you very well could be.”
“Shut up.”
“Fine. I’ll keep my fantasies in my head. Brucey wanted me to ask you if he can have the uniform when you’re done with it.”
Not likely. I planned on giving it a Viking funeral in Uncle Paul’s pool.
“You told Brucey? Are you crazy?”
When you’re keeping secrets, a self-professed anarchist who believes password-protected files are the seeds of a totalitarian regime is not the guy you tell said secrets to.
“He knows the cover story. Oh—and he hates you a little for picking this place over Ninth Street. But he says he’ll be fine.”
“Why does he want Claire’s uniform?”
“He needs another prep school costume for his film project. Apparently yours is more authentic than the ones he made himself.”
The line started moving again.
“I am not using my cousin’s uniform to do porn, Tabs.”
“He doesn’t want you, just the skirt.”
“When I’m done, he’s welcome to the ashes.”
“When you’re done, it’ll be in an evidence locker as property of the state.”
“I don’t plan on getting caught.”
“We’re going to end up on one of those ‘ripped from the headlines’ shows, aren’t we?”
“You wanted in.”
“Remind me to block your cell when we get to the hospital.”
9
Trinity didn’t really look like a hospital on the bottom floor, more like a hotel lobby, with squishy couches and coffee tables covered with magazines; it even smelled like potpourri. If it weren’t for the wall-mounted television that doubled as a call system for families waiting for people in surgery, it would have almost been comfortable.
The main hall was carpeted green, with flower-covered rugs every five feet or so. Paintings lined the wall on one side, with visuals for the twenty-third psalm in the spaces between.
Tabs and I paused between the multicultural group hug for “Goodness and Mercy” and the watercolor painting of a country church labeled the “The House of the Lord” and waited for the elevator. Claire was considered in serious condition but no longer ICU material, so we had to go to the fourth floor. The doctors weren’t planning to move her to the psych ward on five until she was awake and lucid enough to speak to a counselor, though they told Aunt Helen and Uncle Paul to be prepared for her not remembering much. With any luck, they’d be right, and the amnesia would wipe Brooks away, too.
The elevator opened into the ninety-first psalm. I wasn’t sure where the other sixty-odd psalms went, but they hadn’t made an appearance anywhere in the hospital that I’d seen, and I had pretty much committed the entire floor plan to memory.
“Which way?” Tabs asked
“End of the right hall.”
Technically, Claire’s room was number 419. Unofficially, the staff called it the Angel Room, because instead of a window at the bend in the hall, there was a huge painting of a fiery man with wings standing guard outside her door. Uncle Paul, who knows these kinds of things, said it was a painting of St. Michael, who knocked Satan out of heaven. I took that as a good sign. Mitch, as I called him, certainly looked like he was capable of protecting a fifteen-year-old kid. If he’d already defeated the devil once, maybe he could do it again.
“Hey, Mitch.” I slapped the painting’s frame with my open palm on the way into the infection-fighting icebox that was Claire’s room.
I hated the cold, but not the air conditioner. It doesn’t matter if you’re in a tiny two-room apartment, or a mansion, or a hospital on death watch, the scent coming off an air conditioner is the same; there’s something comforting in the continuity of that. I leaned against the window that couldn’t open in Claire’s room, with the heat through the glass warming my back and the arctic air from the AC flowing down from the vent above my head, and let the smell convince me that everything was okay. That the chill that stole the last bit of natural warmth from my body was nothing but a side effect of the thermostat being set too low.
“She looks better,” Tabs said in the way people do when they really mean “is she even breathing.”
In that moment, I knew I’d be forever grateful to her for making me change clothes in the car. It was hard enough not to throw up in jeans and a T-shirt; if I’d walked into that room wearing Claire’s uniform, the nurses would have seen the Lowry School’s lunch menu firsthand.
Claire didn’t look better; she looked pale. And Claire never looked pale. She was never inside long enough for “pale” to apply. This was a sick color, pasty—the shade reserved for someone who didn’t have enough blood in her body.
Tabs drifted away to one of the chairs in the room and began the traditional search for reading material that always happens inside a hospital. (If you’ve never seen a teenage girl with four facial piercings, another seven in her ears, black and purple hair, and combat boots paired with spiked jewelry flipping through a DIY mag dedicated to making animal-shaped snack foods, you don’t know what weird looks like.)
I took one of Claire’s cold, gauze-wrapped hands and bent over her bed.
“I found him, Cuckoo,” I said. “Feel free to thrash me for getting into your business, but I had to. I’ll make this better.”
Tabs snorted from her seat across the room; she tried to cover the sound by holding up her magazine and pointing to a picture of a chocolate cat with licorice whiskers. “They put pudding in it,” she said.
“I think rich people must be obsessed with windows, because Lowry has them in every room, even the principal’s office.”
“Now I want pudding,” Tabs announced behind me. That was her way of telling me that if I could hear her, she could hear me, and she didn’t want to eavesdrop.
“Don’t be mad at me for using your clothes,” I told Claire. “I didn’t so much as spill a soda on them or drop ketchup at lunch. I was careful.… Well, there may be grass splotches on your socks, but we’ll just call it an even trade for all the times you stretched out my stuff with your insanely mature figure, okay?”
Though if she’d wanted to wake up right there and argue the point, I wouldn’t have minded.
According to the doctors, that’s what we were waiting on. The waking-up part, not the yelling. Claire hadn’t done enough damage with her razor to actually kill herself. When she cut her wrists, she did it like they show on TV—a side-to-side slash over the blue line. It only took a few stitches to close, and she barely nicked the vein at all. Anyone who really wants to end it knows that won’t work.
Sometimes it’s tempting.
At least, it used to be. If I cut myself now, everyone would blame Claire for it. They’d say I got the idea from her, that I was so upset I didn’t know what I was doing. But if anyone hadn’t known what she was doing, it was Claire. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have been barefoot, and she wouldn’t have slipped when her blood pressure crashed. She wouldn’t have bounced her head off the sink, then the tile, hard enough to crack her skull.
When Uncle Paul called and told Dad that Claire was in the hospital with a subarachnoid hemorrhage, I asked him if it was a brown recluse, because they get into the houses around here and hide in the corners. I thought she had a spider bite.
“They keep giving me your stuff at school; it’s weird. All the papers and forms they gave me to get signed say ‘Claire Reed’ on them, like we’re interchangeable or something. Don’t worry, I’m not going all changeling on you. I don’t want your life.”
Truthfully, I wouldn’t have minded a time-share on it sometimes, but I didn’t want it all to myself. I wanted my Cuckoo back.
“I’m going to steal pudding. I can’t plot with low blood sugar,” Tabs blurted.
In her head, I’m sure that sounded better than “I’m going to escape awkwardly while you talk to the vegetable.” She darted out the door before I could agree or argue or even ask her to remember that I hated chocolate.
With Tabs out of the way, I went to the table and upended my school bag.
“I brought you some cherry lip gloss. They said your lips could get all cracked being in here so long, and they don’t have any good stuff.” I uncapped the tube and held it close to her nose. “Smell familiar?”
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