Premeditated

by Mcquein, Josin L.

  “Is it cold in here?”

  I was freezing. My legs shook so bad they were bouncing up and down off my toes against the floorboard.

  “I think you’re in shock,” Brooks said. “Keep talking.”

  “She woke up.” A fire started in my cheeks, making a stark and unpleasant contrast to the chill everywhere else. “She was fine.… They said she was getting better.”

  “Something changed?”

  We’d hit that point where one person realizes the other is going to pieces so they try and keeping them talking to stay conscious and sane. I just let it happen. Words spilled out of my mouth in a newly formed nervous tic that required me to answer any question asked.

  “He said her heart stopped. They shocked her, but she’s fifteen. A heart’s supposed to last for like seventy or eighty years.”

  Unless it’s broken …

  I turned to look at Brooks, as though he should have been able to answer me, but he didn’t. He kept his eyes on the road, except for an occasional darting glance in my direction.

  “Do you want me to roll the window down?” he asked.

  “What?”

  Yes, it was a simple question, and I should have been able to comprehend the basic mechanics of operating a window, but windows didn’t have anything to do with Claire or her sudden lack of fight; therefore, windows made no sense in my world.

  “Should I call my dad?” My phone was still in my hands, which were now in my lap. I kept turning it over and over. “I should, right? That’s what you do, isn’t it?”

  “You’re really pale,” he said. “Do you need some air? I can roll the window down.”

  He went ahead and did it without waiting for my answer. The tiny motor buzzed in my door and the draft sucked my hair out the window to fly wild. It slashed right across my face, and I barely noticed the change in scenery.

  I navigated the hospital by memory. All those tiny details I’d found comforting before turned mocking in the dark, when there was no one to sit in the chairs or watch the TVs or read the magazines. Everything was turned off except the auxiliary lights. The green rugs looked cheap, and the art had all the appeal of a ten-cent garage sale bargain. In the elevator, I started to push the button for the fourth floor before a random burst of clarity told me Claire would be back in the ICU. They’d taken her out of the angel room and away from Mitch. How was he supposed to watch over her if she was on a different floor?

  It took five seconds for the car to lift us to the second floor; I squeezed out of the elevator before the doors had even opened all the way.

  I didn’t have to ask which room Claire was in, because I could already see Aunt Helen through the glass partition where they hadn’t pulled the curtain completely shut.… She’d lost it. Uncle Paul was trying to hold her still, but she was screaming. She beat against his arms with her fists and tried to pry them away from her waist. Her feet were pulled up off the ground, but that didn’t help, either; she looked like she’d lost her mind.

  The nurses waved me over as I rounded their station, having recognized me from before. They all had the same somber mask in place, the kind people use to hide deep emotion. I’d never seen anything so terrifying. I couldn’t get a decent grasp of what was happening in Claire’s room—every space not filled with a curtain was blocked by the back of someone in maroon scrubs or a white doctor’s coat. The second they stopped trying to block Aunt Helen from the part of the room where Claire’s bed was hidden, Uncle Paul let go of her and she charged into the knot of people there.

  Most of the time, when you hear that someone’s fighting for their life in the hospital, it doesn’t look as impressive as it sounds. They’re lying in a bed while nurses either man the station in the hall or answer call buttons. Doctors do their rounds, and very little changes. But right then, fighting was an understatement. Everyone in that room was playing tug-of-war with death, using Claire as the rope.

  The closer I came, I started picking out specific sounds. I had expected to hear Aunt Helen saying actual words, even cursing, the way she was flailing about, but it was just noise. Choked sobs and muffled gurgles. I raised my hand and knocked on the glass; I still don’t know how Uncle Paul heard me over everything else that was happening. He slipped out of the room, and I knew it was bad, because he didn’t even try to hug me.

  “Dinah—”

  “Have they fixed it yet?” I asked. “They’re fixing it, right?”

  Of course they were; they had to be. Doctors fixed things. That was their job.

  “Dinah,” Uncle Paul said.

  “I want to talk to Claire.”

  “Dinah, honey, Claire’s—”

  “No … she’s better.”

  He was not calling me “honey.” Honey was the name reserved for bad news and dogs that got hit by cars while playing in the street.

  “She opened her eyes because she was getting better,” I insisted. “She’s going to see a counselor and tell him what upset her, and then she’ll come home and laugh at me because I look so different from the last time she saw me. I’ll still be here … Dad said I can stay.”

  “The doctors call it an end-of-life rally—”

  “No.”

  Nothing qualified by “end-of-life” was supposed to be anywhere near my Cuckoo. Not anymore.

  “It happens sometimes. She gave it all she had, but it was more than she could—”

  “No! She’s just tired from being in the hospital. Uncle Paul, let me talk to Claire. I’ll tell her to listen to the doctors, to not stress herself out so bad and take it slower. She’ll listen to me. She always listens to me.”

  “She’s gone, honey. Her body hasn’t shut off yet, but Claire’s gone. There’s nothing on the brain scan. As soon as they finish the last test to make sure and turn off the machines—”

  “No! You’re wrong.”

  I dodged around Uncle Paul, into the room, just in time to catch Aunt Helen being pulled back from kissing Claire’s forehead. The doctor nodded to a nurse who had her hand poised over the control panel of a piece of clunky equipment, and for the first time all the noises stopped. The pings went silent and the LEDs quit blinking. I held it together until the doctor tugged the sheet up toward the top of Claire’s head.

  “Time of death—”

  “What are you doing?” I demanded, grabbing his arm. “Don’t. She won’t be able to breathe under there.”

  Aunt Helen wrapped her arms around my whole body with more strength than a woman her size who had barely eaten or slept in days should have possessed. My arm ended up pinned under hers while she cried into the top of my head, allowing the doctor to finish his declaration for the official record.

  Your brain goes strange places at times like that. Aunt Helen was nearly snapping me in half, and I was overcome with the need to call my dad, because as far as I knew, he was still researching flights from Oregon so he could see Claire when she came home. But she wasn’t going to come home. She was never going to sleep in the bed she hadn’t made; she wasn’t going to get to see me with my blond hair, or make me give her a picture of myself in her Lowry uniform. She was going into the basement—into the freezer.

  Claire hated the cold, and she hated the dark, and they were going to take her out of the ICU’s bright lights and shove her into a drawer without her clothes. She’d hate that.

  And the whole time I was thinking about it, Aunt Helen was still hugging me like I was the only thing that existed in the room anymore, and if she let go I’d disappear, too.

  It was too much. There wasn’t enough air in the room for all of us; it was too hot and too quiet without the machines. Aunt Helen’s heart beat close to my ear with a rabbit-quick pulse, and every shaking breath wheezed down through her chest as though she were suffocating in slow motion.

  I twisted loose and ran for the open space of the hall, then kept going past the nurses’ desk, back toward the elevators. I even punched the call button, but I couldn’t make myself get inside. Sliding metal do
ors closing me into a box were too much like the freezer drawers in the morgue.

  The only other way outside was to use the stairs, so I turned to see if I could find the access door to the stairwell, and ended up crashing straight into the guy I’d forgotten was even there.

  “I’m sorry,” Brooks said.

  “What?” This was not the time for him to choose to apologize.

  “About your cousin … I’m sorry. I know it doesn’t help, but it’s what people say, and I didn’t want to stand here and not say something.”

  “Who are you?”

  Uncle Paul had followed my retreat, probably to make sure I didn’t go off and do something stupid. Considering his daughter had just died because of a delayed reaction to slashing her wrists, it wasn’t a ridiculous precaution.

  “Brooks Walden,” he said. “I go to school with Dinah. We were at the carnival when she got the call, and her friend had sort of left her stranded, so I drove her over. I’m sorry about your daughter, sir.”

  “Thank you,” Uncle Paul said automatically. Brooks nodded in return, out of words and apologies.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Reed?” A woman with a clipboard and an understanding face appeared behind Uncle Paul. “I’m sorry, but I need to know who to call to handle the preparations for Claire.”

  Preparations. They had to prepare her body for a funeral. I was going to have to go to Claire’s funeral.

  “I don’t know,” Uncle Paul said, more lost now than numb. “We have a parish priest, but I don’t know anything about funeral homes or—”

  His voice cracked; he coughed a sob into his fist.

  “If you come with me, I can put you in touch with someone.”

  She’d likely given this speech a hundred times to strangers in deserted hallways who were going home with one fewer member of their family than they’d arrived with. Every word she said was precise and polished, but she seemed genuine enough. Uncle Paul nodded and she walked away, leaving him to come whenever he was ready.

  “Would you stay with her, please?” Uncle Paul asked Brooks. How could he know he was leaving me to Claire’s killer?

  “Sure.”

  They were talking about me like I wasn’t there or had gone deaf. My ears worked fine; it was the rest of me that wasn’t behaving the way it should.

  “Do you want to sit down?” Brooks asked. “There’s a lounge at the end of the hall if—”

  “I know,” I snapped. “I’ve spent enough time there already—and I don’t need your help.”

  “I could get some coffee or something. The caffeine might take the edge off. When my—”

  “No.” I cut him off. I was in no mood to hear about his losses and his mourning. Crying over a parent was nothing compared to having a fifteen-year-old girl’s killer offer to get me coffee while her body cooled off down the hall. “I’m going outside for some air.”

  I found the exit door, shoved my weight against the release bar, and rode my own momentum into the stairwell, hoping Brooks wasn’t stupid enough to follow me.

  He was, of course. I heard his feet on the stairs behind me, knew they’d be right there all the way to the parking lot or however far I chose to go. The only thing that kept me from ignoring the exit to go into the basement was knowing the morgue was down there.

  Outside, there was no more air than there had been in that cramped ICU cubicle; I exited in a vacuum of my own misery. It pulled harder against my self-control the longer I stayed within reach of Brooks without lashing out.

  “Do you want me to take you home?” he asked. I wanted to beat him to death with his own words; the false compassion grated against my temper like sandpaper until it was raw and bleeding.

  “Leave,” I said. Losing it in the parking lot would only make things worse for Aunt Helen and Uncle Paul. I couldn’t deal with Brooks there.

  “What?”

  “Leave! Go away! Leave me alone!”

  “Dinah, I know how—”

  “Finish that sentence and I will shove it back down your throat one word at a time. Get in your car and drive away before I decide to do it anyway.”

  “Look, it sucks. I know that. You’re going to be stuck in the middle of a crowd of people, and you may not even know half of them, but they’ll act like they’ve known you for years. They’ll say meaningless words so often you won’t be able to remember what face goes with what voice when the swirl stops because they’re all alike. I’ve been there—with my mom.”

  I dodged the hand he tried to lay on my arm.

  “Don’t touch me.”

  “You’ve been building up to this moment from the day you got here. I don’t know if this was the end you expected, or if you thought she’d come home, but your whole life has revolved around the girl in that hospital bed … I get it. But Claire—”

  “Don’t you dare say her name,” I snarled.

  “It doesn’t work, you know,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Pretending you can put it off. As lame as it sounds, sometimes it really does help to talk about it, and now or later you’re going to want to. If you find yourself without an ear on the other side of the conversation, my number’s still in your phone.”

  “Don’t lose sleep waiting for my ringtone,” I said. “You’ve already done enough.”

  “Fine,” he said. Brooks unlocked his car and climbed in. “But I’m here if you change your mind.”

  The Beemer’s engine fired up, humming loud in the otherwise still lot. He pulled out onto the main road and vanished.

  Experience told me I had maybe three days before Claire’s funeral. That meant I had less than two to bury Brooks first.

  30

  It was after midnight when Uncle Paul finally forced me and Aunt Helen into the Land Rover and drove us home. No one spoke, and luckily for me no one had enough spare brain cells to dedicate to things like asking why I looked like such a mess. We got out of the car in the dark and still didn’t speak. We went into the house and split apart, everyone going somewhere different.

  Uncle Paul headed for his office; Aunt Helen made for the stairs. I know she wanted to go to Claire’s room, but she couldn’t raise her foot high enough to climb; I sat in the kitchen until she gave up. She ran toward the master bedroom with her head in her hands. That meant I had the whole top floor to myself, so there was plenty of room to pace. I needed it. I had to burn off some anger before I started breaking things like my mom would have.

  The clock was striking one when I caught my reflection in some sort of decorative wall hanging Aunt Helen had in the upstairs hall. It wasn’t as smooth as a regular mirror, and most of my features were smudged, but what I could see were tearstained cheeks, running makeup, and blond hair that fell past the mangled collar of my shirt. I’d completely forgotten about Dex and what had happened at the carnival.

  I wiped my hand across my face to stop the tears, and the bruises on my knuckles glared back at me.

  My mind filled with the sudden image of Brooks’ face at the other end of my fist, but no matter how much I knew I wanted to hurt him like that, I couldn’t. All I’d done from the moment I began planning was prove how much of a coward I really was. If I’d been brave enough, I would have marched into the headmistress’s office that first day, shut the door, and told her everything. If I hadn’t been a completely useless lump, I’d have told Brooks’ father that day in his office and let him handle his son. I’d have told my dad or Uncle Paul, given them Claire’s diary, and let them call the police.

  I wasn’t some vigilante out to make Brooks sorry for murdering my cousin; I was a stupid little girl playing princess in a mansion with nice clothes and my very own dream car. It was no wonder someone like Dex thought I was a doll he could play with.

  But I could fix it.

  I could, the real me, not the reflection of Claire stuck in that mirror.

  I flew down the hall to my room, dragged the bag I’d never unpacked from under the bed, and hauled it to Claire’s bathroom.
I rummaged her desk for a pair of scissors and stood in front of the sink where she’d made her last stand. Holding my breath, I said goodbye to the girl in the mirror. No one would ever see her again.

  After Tabs abandoned me at the fairgrounds, she’d brought the Mustang home and left it so she could pick up Grimace; the keys were still in the ignition. And despite the total absence of sleep, and the insistences from Uncle Paul and Aunt Helen that I not go to school the next day, I was out of the house before they were awake. All the Lowry guards looked at was the car; they never even noticed me.

  I walked up the steps as though nothing had changed, and ignored every look and whisper as I made my way to class. For the first time, Dex wasn’t glued to Brooks’ side. I saw him with Hayden Leung just inside the room, watched the shock register on their faces and everyone else’s, and didn’t react when Dex leaned over and said: “Careful, man. This is the part where she locks the doors and makes the walls bleed.”

  Hayden didn’t laugh or respond. He acted like Dex was contagious, heading for his seat rather than lurking at the door.

  I took my own seat, not bothering to look for Brooks at the back of the room. I’d see him well enough later.

  The morning ticked down to a cadence only I could hear; my pulse realigned itself to match, falling into the lockstep of a military march. The steady rhythm was the only thing keeping me calm in the last moments before I planned to make my final move.

  I was going to do it.

  As soon as class started and everyone was listening, I was going to walk up to the front of the room, introduce them to my real self, and tell them all the reason I was there. Then I’d leave Claire’s books and papers where I dropped them, along with her blazer on the back of my chair, walk out of the building, and drive home, forgetting all about Lowry and everyone in it.

  But nothing ever went the way it did in my head.

  As if I needed further proof that I’d been elected Fate’s whipping child, Mr. Tarrelton entered class as the last bell rang and the first person he noticed was me. It wasn’t a surprise—I looked so different, with the short black hair and my newly replaced piercings, but I was hoping for at least a couple seconds’ worth of shock value to buy me my opening. Instead, I got the angry teacher face.