“Trust me, it’ll be useful, but not until Monday. For now, your guy’s got an interview with a college representative on Wednesday.”
“He’s not my guy,” I growled. (Literally. I felt the rumble in my rib cage.)
“No, your guy is the hot one who practically lives in my backyard.”
“Stop trying to set me up with your cousin, Tabs. I’ve been telling you no since he set the front yard on fire and called it a valentine.”
“I’m not talking about Greg,” Tabs said. “And it was a Valentine. It was shaped like a heart. I’m talking about your man of many names from the mall.”
“Dex?”
“I figured out why he looked so familiar—he lives half a block over from me, right on the other side of the Massey/Peete dividing line. Three houses closer and he’d have been in middle school with us. I could hop the back fence and spy on his room.”
“You didn’t.”
“Of course not,” she said. “He’s got curtains. I could sneak you in the back door if you want, though. He actually hid a key under the mat. Who does that?”
“Step away from the stove, Tabs. You’ve inhaled too many fumes.”
The oven timer dinged and she pounced before the cupcakes had a chance to overheat by even a second. If they tasted like they smelled when she opened the oven, this plan had a real chance of success. The whole kitchen filled with the scent of warm chocolate, without a single note of anything extra.
“Speaking of changing the subject,” Brucey broke in without bothering to look up. “Are we back on track? Yes? Good. As I was saying, our maniac in the making has an interview on Wednesday, and another on Friday. I’m thinking we send each a note and switch days so he shows up at the wrong one.”
One of those “very” things that defines Brucey is also his ability to be very annoying. It doesn’t help that he’s usually right.
“Better idea—leave his calendar alone. Email them both and say something’s come up and could they please reschedule for Monday afternoon. With a big shot like Brooks’ dad paying the bill for whatever college he signs on to, they’ll do it. They’ll think he blew them off, not to mention ruining whatever they moved off their schedule to clear the time slot. His dad should love that.”
“Nice.”
And Brucey was off again, clacking keys in whatever zone he entered when there was a computer screen in front of his face.
“The idea that you might someday be responsible for the well-being of your own children is terrifying. Really, it is,” Tabs said.
“Like knowing how to make ‘special’ cupcakes makes you mommy material.”
“Meanwhile: boys don’t make passes at girls who kick asses.” She jabbed a trout at me.
Brucey quotes movies; Tabs generally sticks to things she’s read on T-shirts and bumper stickers.
I would have done more than stick my tongue out at her, but my phone picked that moment to ring with the tone I’d assigned to Uncle Paul and Aunt Helen.
“Pick it up,” Tabs mouthed as she fanned her cupcakes with her fish hands.
Brucey was sitting up straight; he shut his computer so he could watch. Everyone knew that tone by heart now.
There was nothing so simple or difficult as answering that ring. Over the course of my stay, the phone had become both my nemesis and my lifeline; it made me so nervous I didn’t even want to handle it unless it rang. Uncle Paul would only call if he wasn’t in Claire’s room, because cell phones weren’t allowed up there. And if he’d left the room to call, then something had happened he thought I needed to know. Whatever news waited on the other side of the Talk button was either very good or very bad, and I didn’t trust my luck or my karma.
I let the phone ring again, staring at the photo of my aunt’s and uncle’s smiling faces that popped up on-screen with the tone, and took a deep breath before answering. Every possible piece of news had already passed through my imagination anyway. Worst-case scenario, he was only repeating something I’d already told myself.
“Hello?”
The block of ice that had been growing in my stomach started to thaw as I listened to my uncle’s voice. My cheeks grew hot until I knew they were turning red, and I felt the sting in my eyes that meant they were likely heading that way, too.
“Okay, bye,” I said, and hung up the phone. I laid it on the table, daring it to ring again.
“What?” Tabs asked, cringing against what I suppose my reaction made her think was bad news, but it wasn’t. I was so jumbled up and turned around inside that I’d responded with tears instead of a smile.
“They say she’s showing signs of moving toward consciousness.” I parroted back my uncle’s words just as he’d said them, barely believing they were possible. While my luck was on a downward slide, Claire’s was holding steady. “One of her monitors is picking up increased brain activity.… They think Claire’s got a chance of waking up.”
All the tears I’d stopped crying when I first read Claire’s diary rushed to my eyes at once, and I was hit from both sides by sets of arms in black sleeves. Tabs’ fish mitts crossed under my chin, while Brucey had us both surrounded.
It wasn’t until that exact second that I realized that in my head and my heart, I’d already seen her as dead. I’d written her recovery off as impossible, and I was trying to make up for her not being there anymore, because I couldn’t convince myself she would be. I was avenging a death that might not happen.
But now, there was a real shot of her opening her eyes and her mouth and telling people what I was trying to force Brooks to confess. If we were lucky, maybe she’d snap out of it in time to see his future go down in flames as hers pulled out of them. It could even speed her recovery if I was able to tell her there was one fewer obstacle waiting for her outside the hospital. All I had to do was hang on a little longer.
20
The rest of the weekend crawled by between calls to Oregon to give my parents updates on Claire, even though most of the time it was just me saying “Nothing’s changed” or “They’re still waiting to see what happens.” I should probably say to give my dad updates, because despite my mother’s continuing to fill my in-box with messages I didn’t open, she never once answered the phone at home. She also never asked to talk to me when I was on with Dad and she was in the room—speaking loud enough that I could hear her.
While Uncle Paul barely spent enough time at the house to make sure I hadn’t somehow knocked it down, Brucey, Tabs, and I finalized our plans with a to-do list full of problematic emails and a possible means of reaching Brooks that didn’t involve destroying the Veyron. One last trip to the hospital to assure Claire that everything was going well, and I set out for school Monday morning with a real smile and a plastic-wrapped chocolate cat cupcake. (I had to confiscate the recipe magazine for Tabs’ own good. We were nearing the point of sprinkles and/or glitter, and that was a step too far, even in the name of righteous vengeance.)
Reality had settled firmly into a new normal. When I pulled through Lowry’s security gate, no one snuck looks at me while pretending to read things on their clipboard. No one showed the annoyed, glazed suspicion that questioned whether I’d pulled off the highway to ask for directions. That was the kind of thing reserved for used-to-be public school girls being dropped off in their father’s circa 1976 Ford pickup or being picked up by an overpierced and undertanned Goth whose attitude counted as a visible accessory. I was just another bleach-blond Lowry girl in a nice car. The only reason I even rated a blip on the guards’ radar was because one of them had to step out of the guardhouse to stick a permit on my windshield.
But on the inside … on the inside I was still me, and I was far more confused than I should have been.
No matter how many pep talks I gave myself, that annoying seed of … I don’t even know what to call it. Maybe compassion, maybe understanding, or maybe it was the first hint that I was falling off that ledge Tabs kept warning me about, but it was the same feeling that had manifested
when I was sitting next to Brooks in his garage hiding from raindrops. I actually felt bad about what I was planning, and that was a feeling I couldn’t tolerate. It made me want to toss the cupcake in the nearest garbage can and tell Brooks he needed to contact those two college recruiters before he missed them both and had no way to escape his dad.
I pulled my Mustang into an empty spot near the fence and slammed the door, hoping if I chipped the paint it would generate enough anger to pull me through the homestretch. But that idea didn’t last five seconds past my feet hitting the asphalt.
“Dinah!”
I knew the voice without turning around, and honestly, that was my first impulse. I wanted to spin right there in the middle of the parking lot and smile at Dex when he called my name. (And for a girl who usually has to make a conscious decision to turn her lips up, that’s a weird feeling.) I wanted to walk to the building with him the same way we’d covered most of the school my first day, but I couldn’t. I had to be upset with him for not sticking around to defend his best friend at the mall. Which meant that at the same moment I was reminding myself to loathe Brooks’ very existence, I had to pretend to be completely on his side.
If this lasted much longer, I was going to have to ask Brucey if Dr. Useless would give us a group discount; I’d be needing the couch next to his.
“You’re mad at me,” Dex said. His tone turned my stomach. I couldn’t face him; I could picture the puppy eyes just fine while looking at my feet. Full frontal exposure would have melted me on the spot.
“And here I thought psychic powers only existed in comic books,” I said, gritting my teeth in an attempt at sincere sarcasm.
I sped up, but his legs were long enough to catch me before I got out of range.
“I didn’t mean—”
“To run away and leave Brooks to rot?” My face felt exactly the way it does when my mother accuses me of being inhospitable, so I hoped that was how it looked. “People don’t do that—not to their friends.”
Instead of taking the hint that I didn’t want to speak to him, Dex dug his heels in.
“How long did it take them to let him go?”
“That’s not the point.”
“How long?”
“We left the mall ten minutes later,” I said, and I’ll admit it stung when he flinched on the “we.”
“I told you—Teflon.”
“His dad didn’t do it, I did. All Mr. Nonstick did for his son was not believe he was innocent.”
“You gave them our real names?”
Dex stopped walking, so I did the same. “I didn’t have to, but I should have. What you did was practically identity theft.”
The anger was coming back, stoked by an argument that was turning more real than I’d intended. For some reason, the topic shift from Brooks’ involvement to Dex’s was making me mad. It was like he didn’t even understand that what he’d done could have gotten someone innocent into real trouble, or he knew but didn’t care.
“It’s not that big a deal. Brooks understands.”
“Well, I don’t.”
There should have been a brilliant, scathing remark attached to that, but I couldn’t come up with one. Instead, I settled for my best Claire-flounce, flipped my hair in his direction when I turned away, and stalked toward the building alone. Halfway across the lot, I stomped down hard on a rock that nearly punctured the bottom of my shoe and had to limp the rest of the way.
I’d always heard revenge was simple and came with its own built-in clarity so long as you maintained focus, but how was I supposed to do that? I was in pain, and physically ill from the mental stress of keeping all the different versions of myself in their proper places. My neatly ordered world was turning into a muddy Rorschach blot. Everything was a mess, and I couldn’t do anything to clean it up while I was living the lie of Lowry Dinah. I also couldn’t stop being her without abandoning the whole reason I was at Lowry in the first place.
“Look, I’m sorry, okay?” Dex made up the space between us in two quick strides. He didn’t even ask me about the limp. “Maybe I shouldn’t have run out like I did, but I can’t afford to have any spots on my record. Not if I’m going to make it into a real school after graduation.”
“There was no reason to lie,” I said, shaking my shoe to dislodge the rock. “And from what I hear, you’re smart enough to get into any school you want.”
“You really think it matters?” I was no longer the angry one in the argument. Dex’s words came out bitter and sharp, as though he were spitting them out so he didn’t have to taste them. “Anything, even a shadow of a doubt, can torpedo a scholarship when you’re competing against a few thousand others for the same four handouts. I can’t risk it—and the girl I met last Friday would have understood why. I don’t have someone waiting to hand me shiny new cars or fancy phones to make up the gap.”
He jerked his head toward my parking space.
“You expect me to apologize for getting a late birthday present from my aunt and uncle?”
Annoyance was no longer an act. This was real, itchy-wool-on-a-sunburn irritation.
“I don’t have aunts or uncles to bail me out like that. Or to make phone calls when I can’t get in somewhere on my own.”
“So I call you on your being an ass, and that means I don’t deserve to be here? I guess you aren’t the guy you were last Friday, either.”
This Dex, who acted like my having family with means was betrayal incarnate, wasn’t the same Dex I’d met before. This Dex I kind of hated. And if this was the Dex Abigail-not-Abby knew, then it was no wonder she said to avoid him.
He slipped directly into my path, blocking me from the front steps and forcing everyone else who was trying to climb them to split around us. I could hear them whispering, taking quick looks over their shoulders as they passed. Even though I knew this wasn’t my fault, embarrassment made me want to end it, just to stop them. I was beginning to understand how Claire’s fears of humiliation started, and I didn’t even care that much about this place.
No one likes to be stared at; the longer it goes on, the smaller and weaker you feel. You’d rather vanish completely than endure it a second longer.
“No! I didn’t mean that,” Dex faltered. “I didn’t mean … I’m really blowing this, aren’t I?”
The puppy-dog look was less cute, and a lot less effective, the second time. He was no longer “Dex, the guy I find interesting,” but rather an unpleasant intrusion I couldn’t abide.
“Not ‘are blowing.’ ‘Have blown.’ Get out of my way.”
I stepped sideways and into the flow of others headed into the building, but he blocked me again.
“I said move, Dex.”
“I didn’t mean to start a fight or anything. The car threw me. You look—”
“What? Like one of them instead of one of us? You should really talk to someone about this whole persecution complex you’ve got going. Someone other than me.”
“I’m serious, Dinah!” He grabbed my arm hard enough that I actually yelped, causing my opposite hand to curl into a reflexive fist. I still don’t know if it was the fist or knowing that he’d hurt me that made him let go. “And I’m trying to apologize. For real.”
“You need to practice your technique.” I rotated my arm, wondering if I’d have bruises under my blazer later in the day.
“I know. I suck at this, but maybe I can make it up to you?”
“Not interested.”
I managed to back him up far enough that it bought me a step.
“Just hear me out. You know the fairgrounds, right?”
“Bleaching my hair had no effect on my mental capacity, thank you very much. I was raised here—yes, I know the fairgrounds.”
More by reputation than experience. We’d only gone once, when I was in fourth grade and I won a set of tickets. Even then it was an all-out fight to get Mom to okay the trip; she swore that going out to a place with so many people was an invitation to be mugged or have our car
vandalized. Dad said we’d go without her if she was so scared. When she realized he was serious and that we were leaving, she changed her mind. My prize became four hours of her complaints streaming over everything that would have made the place enjoyable.
“I got a seasonal job there for the run of the carnival, and I thought maybe you’d drop by.”
“And I thought you’d take the hint when I didn’t show up Saturday. Carnivals aren’t high on my to-do list.” I forced him backward, up another step. “Between here and the hospital, I don’t have a lot of time, and what I do have is—”
“Just one night, you have to have that much time, right? Not even the whole night—two hours. One. I’d even—”
“She said no, Dexter.” Jordan-from-homeroom came up the stairs behind me, with Chandi right behind her. Tiny as she was, Jordan’s temper made up for the lack of body mass. When she was close enough, she shoved Dex backward by the shoulder, spinning him just enough that I could squeeze around and get past him. “It’s a small word, it shouldn’t be that difficult for you to understand.”
He scowled.
“I wasn’t talking to you.”
“So you aren’t entirely stupid,” Chandi said. “But you are hard of hearing. You asked, she answered. That’s the point where you shut your mouth and walk away.”
“Aren’t you more into playing damsel in distress than rescuing one?”
The two of them faced off while the last arrivals of the morning craned their necks to watch. Jordan stood with her arms crossed and her feet planted in the stance of someone used to bracing for a fight, and while Dex didn’t alter his usual laid-back posture, there was a strain on his face I’d never seen there before. Being outnumbered wasn’t his position of choice.
“I think you need a stronger bottle of Nair, Cookie,” he said, leaning in close, as though he’d noticed something on her face. “Looks like you’ve got a bit of a beard coming through.”
The corner of his mouth rose, baiting with a taunt that only made sense to the two of them. Chandi lunged and probably would have tackled him straight to the ground if Jordan and I hadn’t grabbed her.
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