Premeditated

by Mcquein, Josin L.

  I trudged back to my car and slammed the door. Tabs slammed hers a second later, so we were both sitting in my front seat, arms crossed, scowling at the road like the next exit sign was to blame for all of this. Arguments we weren’t actually having grew in my head (I won all of them—home court advantage). I glared at Tabs, Tabs glared at me, and we got absolutely nowhere.

  She was right. I was fried.

  “I’m sorry,” she spat, finally breaking our mutual ignore-a-thon.

  “Shhh.”

  “You don’t shush someone who’s apologizing!”

  “Shhh!”

  “Fine! I’ll walk home!” She opened her door and got out.

  “Shut up and listen.” I cocked my head to the side toward the faint sound of something familiar.

  “Is that—” Tabs got quiet.

  “Uncle Paul’s ringtone! Where’s my phone? Do you see it?”

  The argument was forgotten on the spot. We shoveled through everything that had spilled out of my bag, checking between the seats and under them, searching for the phone, which was already on its third ring. When it hit four, it would go to voice mail, and if Uncle Paul had left Claire’s room to call me again, I didn’t want to get whatever news he had to share by checking messages that would no doubt include a dozen or more angry rants from my mother.

  “Got it!” Tabs wriggled the phone out from where it had wedged between her seat and the console and tossed it to me. She started clicking her fingernails against her teeth.

  “Hello?” I said carefully. “Are you there?”

  Uncle Paul’s voice came through, speaking quickly, and probably all in one breath. When he was done, I didn’t even remember to press End to hang up.

  25

  “She woke up!” I screamed it so loud into the phone that I probably busted my dad’s eardrum.

  When Uncle Paul called to say Claire had opened her eyes—actually focused her eyes and looked at him and Aunt Helen—my voice went up two octaves and got three times louder. I must have taken my hands off the wheel at some point, too, because Tabs had sretched across the center line and grabbed it.

  “Dinah!” she shouted as she leaned out of her seat belt. “Can you maybe find a way to tell your dad about Claire that doesn’t land us in the room next to hers?”

  She squeaked as the Mustang drifted a little too close to the next lane. In my ear, Dad was firing questions about Claire and traffic at the same time.

  “I’ve got the wheel, Dad,” I said. “Both hands, I swear. I was just excited.”

  “Then pull over and be excited on the shoulder,” he scolded.

  “Sorry, Dad—I’ve switched it to hands-free.” Hands-free meaning I shoved the phone at Tabs and she held it against my ear while I steered the car. “We can talk now.”

  “Tabitha, are her hands on the wheel?” he shouted. I’m not sure if he was afraid Tabs couldn’t hear him or if his own hearing was still off from my announcement.

  “Yes, Mr. Powell,” Tabs said.

  “Are you lying?”

  “No, Mr. Powell.”

  “Good,” Dad said, satisfied. “Are you girls headed to the hospital?”

  “We were, but the doctors won’t let more than two people in at a time, so I can’t see her yet. Claire only opened her eyes for a minute or so, and she’s really confused about what’s going on and where she is, but she knew her name and recognized Aunt Helen. They said things are—and I quote—‘cautiously optimistic.’ Aunt Helen and Uncle Paul want to be there when she wakes up again to see if she can tell them anything about what happened the night she fell. Unless they call, I’m not going over there until tomorrow.”

  “Let me know how things go, D. I’ll look into getting a flight back there as soon as she’s up and around.”

  “Dad … does this mean I have to come back to Oregon now? Mom said I could only stay until Claire got better, and she’s already bugging me about coming home, but I don’t want to leave yet. I haven’t even gotten to talk to Claire, and I don’t know how long she’ll be in the hospital.”

  If the doctors really did decide to move Claire up to the psych ward, then she wouldn’t get visitors for at least a couple of days while the counselors tried to get her to talk to them. They might let one of her parents in, but not me. After all the time I’d spent waiting to see Claire and hear her actually say something beyond the words I assigned her voice in my head, I couldn’t leave before I got to see her.

  “I wish you’d told me your mother was giving you a hard time, D,” Dad said.

  “She always gives me a hard time.”

  “But this time, I know why—I’ve been talking to Helen. She said having you around was her life preserver. It reminded her there was some light in the world.”

  “When did you talk to Aunt Helen?”

  She never left the hospital, and Dad hadn’t been alone with her while he was there.

  “There’s not a lot for her to do while she sits in that room with Claire, so she’s been trying to work out a way for you to stay there.”

  Tabs cleared her throat, the way she does when she thinks she’s hearing something she shouldn’t. I took the phone from her and switched it to the ear nearest the door.

  “Aunt Helen didn’t say anything,” I said.

  That was very nearly a literal statement. I hadn’t heard my aunt say a single word since the first night I went to the hospital.

  “She didn’t want to get your hopes up if things didn’t go well.”

  “Did they? Go well, I mean?”

  “Dinah, you’re sixteen. I think you’re old enough to decide where you want to live, and if that’s back there with your friends, then so be it. You have my permission.”

  “But, Mom—”

  “You’re old enough to be emancipated, and if your mother wants to push it, Helen said she and Paul would get it done, then rent you a room in their house for a dollar a year until you graduate to satisfy the court conditions.”

  I tried very hard not to bounce up and down in my seat—which would have done nothing for an image that had already disintegrated by degrees since I bleached my hair out. I was getting to stay with Aunt Helen and Uncle Paul and Claire; I wasn’t a placeholder anymore.

  Tabs smacked me on the arm and mouthed “What?” Apparently I wasn’t doing that great a job of not bouncing.

  “I don’t have to go back to Oregon—ever,” I said, for Tabs’ benefit, before she made me do something that would have Dad asking if both my hands were on the wheel again.

  Now I had a bouncing buddy.

  “Helen said she’d speak to the school as soon as I spoke to you. You’re welcome to stay at Lowry if you like.”

  Do I like Lowry?

  That was a question I never thought I’d have to ask myself. The answer should have been a simple, slam-dunk no. Lowry was just supposed to be the backdrop for my personal tragedy—not real beyond the context. But Dad’s words that first day of school had become closer to reality than I was comfortable with. The people at Lowry weren’t strangers anymore.

  Abigail-not-Abby and Dex were a couple of people I was going to miss. But it still wasn’t me. Not really.

  “I don’t think you need to go that far,” I told Dad. “Claire’s welcome to keep Private School Land all to herself when she’s back home.”

  I wanted to go back where I belonged—Ninth Street, where sleep was an elective, Tabs and Brucey wouldn’t be weekend faces, and trig was actually trig. Besides, Dex lived in the same neighborhood, so going to Ninth Street wouldn’t cost me everything.

  “We’ll work it out when I come back to town, okay?” Dad said. “You don’t have to make any decisions tonight. Go do something fun—consider that my last parental order before you become a legal adult. I’m sure you can use the break.”

  “Thanks, Dad. I’ll call you when I know something.”

  I clicked the phone off and threw it onto the dashboard.

  “So?” Tabs asked.

  “So
, I don’t have to go back to Oregon.”

  “And you don’t have to stay in the kingdom of knee socks and headbands?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Yes!” Tabs pulled her elbows in close to her stomach and beat her feet against the floor mats. “You realize what this means.”

  “The world is going back on its axis and I may actually graduate before I’m twenty-five?”

  “Bzzt. I’m sorry, the answer we’re looking for is: ‘The Cuckoo bird’s on the mend and you’re staying here for good—so there’s no reason to go back to Paul’s house and mope.’ ”

  “I do not mope!”

  She made the buzzer sound again.

  “You are in desperate need of reality augmentation.”

  “Sounds painful.”

  “Only if you argue with us.”

  “Us? Who’s us?”

  “Us,” she said, pointing her finger at my chest and then back at her own. “Me and you, that makes ‘us,’ which is a short hop from ‘we.’ And we need to celebrate.”

  “Who else is included in this ‘us’ that you’re trying far too hard not to name?”

  “Come on, Dinah—come with me. I haven’t been to a real carnival since we were in elementary school. Mom was always afraid I’d touch something dirty and catch Ebola or the plague.”

  “Carnival?”

  “Yes. I want to go and I want you to come with me. Ride something, eat everything in sight, walk around in a daze—I don’t care, so long as there’s no mention of psycho-boys or the Cuckoo bird.”

  She was whining. Tabs never whines without a reason, but there was no point in asking her what the reason was until she was ready to share. All I needed to know was that she was up to something and it involved getting me to the fairgrounds.

  “Wouldn’t you rather help me burn my Lowry uniform? Uncle Paul can buy Claire a new one before she comes home.”

  “Come with me, distract yourself, and maybe by the time we’re done, Claire will be conversational and they’ll let you and your uncle switch out visitation so you can see her.”

  Whining backed up by dirty tricks and playing on my weaknesses. Whatever this was, it was big, and when Tabs dealt in big secrets, strange and unforeseen disasters usually lurked nearby. But with the promise of a new dawn to destroy what had been a very long and dark night, I wasn’t all that worried about it. Maybe we’d gorge on junk food and I’d throw up purple cotton candy for two days, or maybe I’d get stuck at the top of the zero-gravity drop for an hour.

  Right then, I could have handled anything.

  26

  I had expected to hate the carnival. It was noisy and dirty and full of too many people, but my mood was indestructible. Tabs and I hit the midway hard and fast, stuffing ourselves and downing enough soda to power a small country with the sugar rush.

  For once, I wasn’t putting everything into terms of “this should be Claire and not me.” Pretty soon, it could be Claire, and it would be.

  There were still the therapy sessions to deal with what she’d been through, but that was a good thing. Claire awake and talking meant she could tell her own story. All I had to do was convince her to talk to her parents—and the police—and things would work themselves out. If she didn’t want to talk, she could at least print out all those letters she’d never sent me; they’d do it for her. All of the edges of my soul that grief had worn sharp were softening.

  “Where to now?” I asked. I had been following Tabs around the midway, happy to let her decide the whats and wheres for a while. It never occurred to me that she might have been herding me somewhere without my notice.

  “How about there?” she asked, pointing to a large red and yellow stand painted to look like a popcorn bag.

  “How are you hungry?” I asked. “You’ve eaten three hot dogs and more of my nachos than me.”

  “We’re not going there for me, we’re going there for you.”

  She tugged me in the direction she thought we needed to go. When we were about ten yards off, I recognized a familiar dark-haired boy sitting at one of the picnic tables out front.

  “Oh … gee … would you look at that. What are the odds we’d run into him here?” Tabs asked as Dex stood up and walked toward us.

  “You set me up,” I said, and stopped walking.

  “I do not know what you are speaking about, silly friend of mine. This is not at all a setup, nor did I text this person to let him know when and where to expect you. This is a totally random occurrence of me randomly bringing you to a specific location, where a specific guy, who is gorgeous, happens to be waiting for you, specifically.”

  She got behind me and shoved.

  “You planned this, traitor.”

  “I am not understanding your distrustful tone, dear BFF. It’s nigh onto mocking, in fact.”

  “Tabs, I’m serious.”

  “Yeah, and that’s the problem.” She stopped pushing, and dropped the kung fu movie dub-in voice. “You’re always serious lately. You need to have fun. There’s a cute guy—now go have fun.”

  “You all right?” Dex asked.

  “Here,” Tabs said. “The package is delivered. Now I must go in search of lemonade and maybe escape through the front gate before clowns are involved and I’m forced to resort to self-protective violence.”

  “You can’t leave me here,” I said. “You don’t even have your car.”

  “I’m taking yours.” She jingled the keys that ten seconds earlier had been in my pocket. “You can thank Brucey for the pickpocket lessons tomorrow.”

  Tabs ran off, leaving me once again contemplating bodily harm against another human being.

  “Should I say hi or run for my life?” Dex asked. “Because the look on your face right now is making me think it’s the second one, and I want a head start.”

  “You did this on purpose.”

  “Is that a bad thing?”

  “Not really,” I sighed.

  I couldn’t be mad at him for plotting against me with Tabs—he was pathetically cute in his carnie costume; the vest looked like a piece of peppermint candy. I was a bit confused as to when Tabs had had time to squeeze another conspiracy into her schedule, though.

  “Being yourself today?” I asked. The electric blue piece of plastic pinned to his vest read “Jackson.”

  He shrugged.

  “Sometimes there’s no benefit to being someone else.”

  “I don’t know. I think you’d look great with a few of Abigail’s curls.…”

  He frowned.

  “I haven’t had curls since I was three, and we’re all better off not revisiting that dark period in history.”

  “Nope, sorry. It’s in my head now. Nothing you can do about it, Curly Top. Ohh, were they blond, too? I bet you were one of those boys with little blond ringlets around your face like a baby angel.”

  “Better than being born with a pointed tail,” he said. “Did you get the pitchfork afterward, or was it part of the package?”

  “Ha. Ha. Ha,” I deadpanned. Even with Claire on the mend, I was in no mood to be called a little devil. Someone else already had that category locked up. “I’m faster than I look. I can still catch Tabs before she makes it to the exit if you don’t want me around.”

  “Truce?”

  “Terms?”

  “You cease discussing my preschool appearance and I stop comparing you to creatures with cloven hooves.”

  “Deal,” I said.

  “Come on. You’ve never really seen this place until you see it with someone who has backstage access.”

  Carnivals are made for cheese—the kind you can drown your nachos in, and the kind that says the midway is that weird combination of lame and fun that’s only acceptable at a fair or circus when things aren’t supposed to be exactly normal. While Dex dragged me through the crowd, we passed kids pigging out on ice cream and grannies waiting to ride things that couldn’t possibly have been compatible with their heart medications. One little girl wi
th a glittered butterfly painted on her face had a firm grip on the fingers of a thirty-something-year-old man in an expensive suit who was sporting a butterfly of his own across both eyes like a mask.

  Everything evened out at a place like this; classes dissolved. Everyone was subject to the rule of priority by order of appearance … except us. There was an unwritten understanding among those who worked at the carnival grounds that they took care of their own, and part of that meant their own never waited in line.

  Over the groans and protests of those waiting in the queue with tickets clutched in their hands, Dex and I were allowed to enter through the exits and bypass the lines completely. Even with all the things Uncle Paul had been able to buy since his business took off, none of it was quite the same as being ushered through and around scores of people as though “special” were branded on our backs. It was its own kind of power rush, and just plain cool.

  Dex gave the man we ousted from his spot as “next” an unapologetic grin as we took the open seat offered by the zero-gravity drop’s operator. The safety bar came down and we were off, rocketing into the air and watching the crowds shrink to the size of ants below us. At the top, a brief jolt of panic shot into my stomach when I remembered my earlier worries of getting stuck at the top, but it was quickly replaced by the sensation of free-fall. The ride worked flawlessly, bobbing up and down to pause at different heights while our legs hung free over the edge of the seat.

  “You okay?” Dex asked after we landed.

  “That was … interesting,” I said. All the junk food I’d eaten earlier was reassigning itself space in my digestive system, but thankfully nothing decided to make another appearance.

  “I love this thing,” he said. “Want to go again?”

  “I think once is enough.”

  Those waiting in line visibly relaxed with the knowledge that we weren’t going to make their wait even longer.

  “It’s not that scary,” he said.

  “No, but nachos only taste good going down—coming back up, they’re a nightmare.”

  “Okay, so we’ll come back later,” he said, then opened the gate to let us out of the ride’s fence. “I was afraid you were one of those people with an irrational fear of carnival rides or something.”