Premeditated

by Mcquein, Josin L.

  “That was quite the presentation you gave,” he said.

  “Thanks.” I gripped the strap of my book bag with both hands, twisting the leather.

  “Did you write it yourself, or was it something you’d heard before? Something you’d read, maybe?”

  “I didn’t cheat.”

  “I’m sorry, that’s not what I was implying, Dinah. It was just … very convincing. One doesn’t usually get that level of commitment or emotional depth with a high school homework assignment.”

  “Mr. Cavanaugh, I swear I didn’t copy it from anywhere.”

  “You didn’t read it off cards, either.”

  “I thought we were supposed to memorize it.”

  “Is that what you did?”

  I shifted my weight from one foot to the other. I couldn’t look him in the eye.

  “I’d like to see the original you wrote.”

  “I didn’t bring it,” I said quickly. “I mean … I didn’t need it, so I left it at home.”

  “I see.” Mr. Cavanaugh sighed, as though he were very tired. “Should I stop asking questions now, or do you want to keep lying to me?”

  “I’m not ly—”

  “I know it has to be hard being the new kid in any school, and it’s worse at one like this. Especially when it’s not the sort of place you’re used to and you’ve got a rough situation at home. And I know that sometimes the easiest way to handle things is to pretend you’re someone you’re not. But that kind of stress can really get to a person after a while.”

  “It was weird here—at first. But I’ve got friends now. Abigail and Brooks—”

  Did I just count Claire’s personal demon as my friend? Going undercover sucks.

  “Did you know acting used to be thought of as the career of thieves and reprobates?” he asked. It seemed like a random question, but I shook my head and answered it anyway. “The goal of this class is to give people the skills to convince strangers that they are other than their true selves. I’ve done this for fifteen years, and I’m pretty good at spotting those who like to play, those with talent, and those who are the real deal. What you did on that stage today, the words you said, those were not lies. What I want to know is if they were your truth or someone else’s.”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “If you need to talk to someone, we have counselors here.”

  “I have friends to talk to,” I said. There wasn’t a counselor alive I’d tell half the things Tabs knew about me.

  “Sometimes friends aren’t enough,” he said. “And if I think something’s wrong with one of my students, I have to take my suspicions to the headmistress, and she’ll have to inform your guardians.”

  “Mr. Cavanaugh, I don’t hurt myself.” I tugged both my uniform sleeves up to the elbows to expose the skin underneath—including the tiny cluster of black stars tattooed on one wrist. “No scars, see?”

  He looked genuinely shocked.

  “I guess I’ll have to add a ‘plus’ to the A you earned,” he said. “It was an exceptional recitation.”

  “Thanks.” I pushed my sleeves back down. “So you won’t say anything?”

  “I might mention that we have a gifted student in class, should the occasion arise, but so long as any mentions of bloodletting remain fictional, I don’t see any reason to bring them up.”

  “I actually meant the ink.”

  “Tattoos are only against the rules if they’re visible. Yours aren’t. Though I wasn’t aware that Oregon allowed sixteen-year-olds to obtain them.”

  “Isn’t Oregon out of your jurisdiction?”

  “Yes, I believe it is,” he said with a laugh. He shoved the last of his books into his portable classroom crate and locked the lid. “Good afternoon, Dinah. I hope you realize that if things stay … complicated … there are people willing to help you sort out the hard stuff.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Cavanaugh,” I said, but it didn’t matter how well-meaning he was. There was no teacher or counselor equipped to handle what I was going through. Some things are too hard, even for a school founded on diamonds and a girl whose crazy mother wanted to name her after them.

  22

  It wasn’t difficult to convince Brooks to come to my house after school. He really didn’t want to go home, and between the video he was afraid someone would mention and the fight with Chandi, he didn’t want to see any of his friends. I was also fairly certain he was trying to keep an eye on me. (Of course, that could have been the paranoia talking. When you start stalking someone, you get this nasty side effect of feeling imaginary eyes on your back everywhere you go.)

  I let us in the gate, raided the fridge for drinks and more of Tabs’ masterpieces, and we were set—so long as I didn’t let him look around the house, where he might notice the photos of Claire or see Tabs lurking about to put the next phase of Brooks’ downfall into action. He didn’t even blink when I led him out back.

  “You have a tree house,” he said.

  “More like a tree floor with two walls you shouldn’t lean on unless you feel like base jumping without a parachute.”

  “I’ll be sure to remember that.”

  I bypassed the wooden planks nailed into the tree and headed to the other side.

  “We’re not using the ladder?”

  “No.”

  “If your uncle had an elevator installed in his tree, then I may have to start hating him a little.”

  “Ladders and elevators are for mere mortals. If you want to get into my clubhouse, you have to know how to fly.”

  “Is this going to involve broomsticks? Because then I’ll have to hate you, too.” He grinned, adding something about owing Chandi twenty bucks in a voice I’m sure he thought was too quiet for me to hear.

  “Careful there,” I warned. “People who imply I’m a witch are more than twice as likely to end up in a biology lab dissection tray with a tack pin through their liver.”

  Brooks laughed. I was finally getting to the point where I could anticipate his reactions and control where things went from step to step. The trust bought by Brucey’s moment of klepto-brilliance at the mall was paying off in the form of Brooks’ dropping the walls that had surrounded him during our first few conversations (not to mention the lockdown that came when his dad was nearby).

  I showed him how to use my “elevator”—nothing more than a long rope—to pull himself into the tree by looping the end around his shoe and hoisting upward through the pulley at the top.

  “This is seriously cool.” He stepped onto the tree house’s floor and unhooked the loop from his shoe, wearing the kind of smile on his face that I’d forgotten how to put on my own. My muscles couldn’t make the gesture anymore.

  “Dad rigged it up to move boards and supplies up here while he and Uncle Paul were building it. We never took it down.”

  “I always wanted a tree house when I was a kid, but my dad didn’t think up a tree was an appropriate place for me to spend my time.”

  He settled into a green bean bag chair Claire had thrown in the corner.

  “I wanted one, too, but our yard didn’t have any branches wide enough to support one. When my uncle bought this place and it looked like I might actually get to stay, Dad got it into his head that he needed to make good on the promise he’d made me when I was little, so he started building what he called ‘The Tree Palace.’ Sort of a stamp he could leave behind while he was across the country.”

  “Why didn’t he finish it?”

  “Mom saw it before he was done, which clued her in to the fact that I might not be going with them into her state of delusion.” That, and she couldn’t stand the fact that I was getting the playhouse she never had.… “She started screaming about how I was going to fall off and break my neck, which led to an all-out fight with her accusing him of not loving me or her or anything else.… It kind of killed the momentum.”

  It was also the first fight I can ever remember hearing my dad shout in. I found Dad under the tree the next day, just
standing there with his neck craned up, staring at it. He’d been so happy the day before, talking about what color I wanted him to paint it and making jokes about having a dish put on top so we could have a TV up there, or adding a tower so I could grow my hair long like Rapunzel until it reached the ground. After the fight, it was all gone. Joy had become a chore, and real happiness a distant memory.

  I told Dad not to worry about it, that it didn’t matter. I was too old for a tree house, really, and that knowing he’d wanted to build it was enough.

  It didn’t help like I’d hoped it would. Dad didn’t say anything to me, but he went back in the tree, braced up the walls he’d set, and packed his tools away, mumbling about letting Claire use it since she was younger. He never mentioned it again.

  “Claire and I tried to finish it ourselves, but—”

  “You’re more ground squirrel than tree squirrel?”

  “We hoisted the bean bags up here and found some old rug scraps to make the patchwork carpet. She dragged the rails off her toddler bed out of storage so we could fix a third and fourth wall to keep anyone who came up from falling out, but it wasn’t the same. I don’t even know if she ever used it.”

  He reached for the tub of cupcakes I’d brought with us and peeled the wrapper off one.

  “Your friend is a great cook. Not what I expected from a girl with a nose ring and pierced eyebrows.”

  “You noticed that, huh?”

  “She’s kind of hard to miss. So’s the sticky-fingered string bean.”

  “Brucey,” I corrected. I was allowed to make jokes about his habits and appearance; Tabs was allowed. Brooks definitely wasn’t.

  “Right—the overprotective not-brother,” he said. “You don’t exactly match.”

  “We used to.”

  In what felt like a lifetime and another reality ago.

  “You mean when you looked like your old profile pic?”

  “I felt like making a few changes,” I said.

  “You don’t owe anyone an explanation. I was just curious.”

  I picked at the wrapper around my uneaten cupcake so I had something to focus on.

  “You don’t like yours?” Brooks asked—I wasn’t the only one getting better at directing the conversation.

  “I don’t really like chocolate,” I said. “I only eat them so it won’t hurt her feelings.”

  “More for me.” He grinned. Brooks snatched up another one and shoved the whole thing in his mouth. Getting him to eat enough of Tabs’ special recipe for it to show on a drug test wasn’t going to be hard at all. I tossed him a bottle of water so he could wash the frosting off his teeth. He climbed out of his bean bag and took a peek over the nearest edge.

  “You know, if I had something like this, I think I’d live in it, even without the roof. There’s no chance of suffocating up here.”

  I nodded and joined him at the edge.

  “Climb out of real life and get above all the problems on the ground,” I said.

  School tomorrow? How could I go to school if I was in a tree?

  Parent drama? They’d have to climb high enough to make me care, and Mom wouldn’t go that far. Her voice would simply blend with the rest of the noise down below.

  Hospitals? No hospitals in a tree.

  If I was in a tree, then I couldn’t possibly get on a plane back to Oregon.

  “Let me live in the clouds, eating nothing but chocolate cupcakes,” Brooks said.

  “Until you eat so many you weigh four hundred pounds and break the branch.”

  He scowled. “You’ve found the flaw in my brilliant scheme to escape reality forever. For that, you get frosted.”

  He plucked the last cupcake out of the tub and took a swipe at my nose, leaving a blob of goo on the end. My eyes crossed in, focused on the smudge, so he grew blurry in the background, and when I let them relax again, he was smiling, holding the cupcake like he was considering a second strike.

  “You’re out of ammo,” he baited. I turned my attention to the tub, but it was, of course, empty.

  “Not really,” I said, snatching up a can of soda.

  “You wouldn’t.…”

  I shook the can and poised my finger on the pull tab.

  “Now, Dinah … you wouldn’t really spray me, would you?”

  “I’m not hearing any convincing reasons not to.”

  “Um … this is my school uniform?”

  Brooks backed as far away as the cramped floor plan of the tree house would allow.

  “That’s why God invented dry cleaners,” I said, shaking the can again. “If they can handle puke, soda’s no problem.”

  He raised his hands protectively.

  “I’m too cute to drench?”

  “Your negotiation skills need some serious improvements.”

  “Can I play on your sympathies and claim it might get in my eyes, therefore blinding me for life or at least two minutes?”

  “There’s more water; I can dump it on your head after and rinse them out.”

  “Nice girls don’t attack people with soft drinks?”

  “Sorry, I’m not that nice.”

  “Hey … what’s that?”

  He tried the lamest trick possible, and I’m the idiot who fell for it. True, I had my reasons—number one being that I was afraid he’d seen Tabs; it didn’t even occur to me that he was creating a diversion.

  I turned my head and he made a run for the rope elevator.

  With my nemesis escaping, I pulled the tab and the can lurched in my hand, leaving Brooks dripping cherry soda onto the floor.

  “Now you’ve done it,” he said.

  I had to dodge the cupcake when he pitched it toward me—another diversion, which he used to reach my soda stash and start shaking a can of his own.

  “Don’t you—”

  The “dare” was drowned by an explosion of soda hitting me square in the face. We both dove for the last unopened can and chased it when it rolled off toward the ledge and finally over, denying anyone the last shot.

  “I guess that makes us even,” Brooks said. “Can we declare a cease fire?”

  During the scramble, we ended up on the floor. I rolled off my stomach, pushing away from the edge of the tree house where I’d landed. Brooks did the same, at almost the same time, and we stopped, facing each other.

  Impossible or not, the air between and around us grew thick and heavy, hovering over our heads and pressing down. We were too close to each other, so close I wanted to believe it was only some kind of static from his clothes or mine that made my arms and legs prickle. I wanted to believe it was the rush of adrenaline from laughter and fighting over soda cans that made my breathing hitch. I wanted to believe no other explanation was possible.

  Brooks became the bottle labeled “Drink Me,” altering the reality I accepted as true.

  Gravity or inertia or any scientific phenomena other than the impossibility of attraction took over. I’d have taken the easy out of a small earthquake or a heavy wind if it meant explaining how his mouth ended up on mine. But there was no explanation and no excuse. Everything from time to the rotation of the earth itself stopped dead, and the shock made my arms and legs useless. The only thing moving was my stomach as it somersaulted through my abdomen.

  He tasted like sugar frosting, sweet and sticky, the kind of thing you know you shouldn’t enjoy but can’t help yourself. That taste mixed with the cherry soda still on my own face, creating a permanent paradox in my brain. Better sense told me Brooks was evil, but my senses—taste and smell, even the feel of his damp hair in my hands, redefined things to make me think he was something I wanted more of. I was a diabetic, and Brooks was the super-sweet thing that was going to kill me someday.

  If his phone hadn’t picked that exact moment to signal an incoming call, someday would have been right then and there. We pulled apart awkwardly while Brooks attempted (and failed) to retrieve his phone from its pocket without moving.

  “I got it,” I said. I used the
back of my other hand to wipe my mouth, excusing it with a mumbled “frosting” as I pulled myself up to sit.

  “Sorry.”

  Brooks actually blushed when he took the phone from me. Our hands touched, causing another spark that put my stomach back to its original place. My heart was going so fast and loud, I was expecting to stroke out any second.

  I had kissed him.

  No …

  He had kissed me.

  No …

  What difference did it make? We’d kissed. My lips had touched the lips of the guy who had put Claire in the hospital. Lips that had kissed Claire, and told her things to make her giggle and dream; lips that had shut tight, refusing to acknowledge her existence.

  The cherry soda I had no choice but to smell with every breath turned rancid. All that heat and electricity I’d felt before settled in my face until I could imagine it blistering from the inside, disfiguring me so everyone would know what I’d done. I deserved to wear my shame in public.

  My hands, now fists, had clenched so tight I’d forced all the blood out of them. I wanted to put them around Brooks’ neck and squeeze until his skin turned just as white and lifeless; then I’d do the same to myself. I’d betrayed Claire; traitors were supposed to be executed.

  An angry rant came from Brooks’ phone, muffled, as it was on the other side of his head, but there was no question the person calling was shouting.

  “What are you talking about?” Brooks asked. “Slow down. Dad, no. Calm down. Someone’s made a mistake, my interview wasn’t scheduled for today. Neither of them were. No! I have them on my calendar. Wednesday and Friday. No, I didn’t email them. No! Dad, I swear, I wouldn’t do that. Dad. Dad. Dad!” Brooks dropped the hand with his phone into his lap. “He hung up.”

  The choke hold he’d put on my thoughts broke, and I allowed myself to breathe again. It didn’t matter that I’d slipped off my goal—Brucey’s emails to the college recruiters had done their job. There was another black mark on Brooks’ spotless record, and my mistake (aka the kiss) hadn’t ruined anything other than my desire to eat cupcakes or drink cherry soda for the foreseeable future.