“That bad?” Jared asks.
Charlie shrugs.
Gah, what I wouldn’t give for a toothbrush. Or a bathroom.
We grabbed our coats on the way out of the party, so in the pocket I have car keys, cell phone, my ID, and a few bucks in cash. But that’s it. No hairbrush even.
“Jackpot!” Jared tosses a box of cheese crackers at Charlie.
There’s a rustling sound as Charlie burrows into the box. He comes up with a big handful of crackers and starts shoving them in.
In the glare of morning, he looks like a strung-out raccoon.
I must not look much better. I’m pretty sure my hair smells vaguely of beer.
“Oooh, even better!” Jared pulls a box with leftover pizza from the mini-fridge. He sets it out on a big metal footlocker that serves as a coffee table. “The breakfast of champions!” he declares as he and Charlie plop down on the sofa and dig in.
Jared holds out the box to me. “There’s a piece here with your name on it,” he offers, mid-chew.
“Not unless you want some puke to go with that,” I say.
“Yeah, pass.” He pulls back the pizza box and sets it on his lap.
“I guess I should thank you guys,” I say.
They look up at me, confused.
“You know,” I say, “for stepping in. For not letting Todd—”
“That guy’s an ass,” Jared says.
“Well, anyway,” I say, “I appreciate you doing that for me.”
“I would have done it for anyone.” Charlie has a grim look, and I’m not sure if he’s mad at me or Todd. Or life. “I can’t stand guys like that. They think they can do whatever they want.”
Or Kyle, now that I think of it. Maybe that’s who Charlie is mad at.
Charlie is taller than Kyle. Stronger than him, I’d bet. He could probably take Kyle in a fight. It must kill him that he wasn’t there to stop what happened to Jamie.
“So that’s how you spend your weekends—fighting crime?” And really, I am curious. Is this a regular thing?
“No.” He shakes his head. “I spend my weekends… There’s nothing special about how I spend my weekends.”
Jared picks up the last two pieces of pizza and folds them over to make a kind of pizza sandwich. “We should head on,” he says. “I know Motor is good with us being here, but his old lady is a piece of work. And she might come sniffing around. You up to driving?” he asks me.
I nod.
“Think I could catch a ride with you?” Jared asks.
“Sure.” I jingle the keys in my pocket.
“You’re not looking too solid,” Charlie says.
“Just need some air,” I say.
We creak open the door, creep through the yard and down the street. Sunday is mostly quiet. A middle-aged couple on bikes passes by. A woman walks her dog.
When we reach his car, Charlie digs in his pockets, rifles around, comes up empty. “Hell. I left my keys at the party.”
We look a few houses down, toward the Graybills’. There’s a minivan in the driveway. “No way am I going in there.” He lets out a puff of breath. “I’ll text Matt, ask him to bring them to school on Monday.”
“I’ll give you a ride,” I say. “My car’s just at the other end of the street.”
As the three of us walk out together, making our way down the tree-lined block of the upscale neighborhood, Jared hums. It takes a second before I place the tune.
“Over the Rainbow.”
And yeah, I do feel a bit like Dorothy, as if I just fell from the sky.
Jared could be the Scarecrow when he lost half his stuffing.
Charlie might make a rugged, slightly dented Tin Man.
And the road, bathed in the bland light of midmorning, curves away, toward a glowing, green world.
What Was
The Tin Woodman, as it turns out, is too long-legged for my little Pony, and his knees stick up in a flamingo-esque angle in the passenger seat.
“Here,” I say, twisting down to reach the lever below the seat, my face way too close to his knees. I pull the handle up, feeling the blush rise in my face. “Scooch back.”
“Ahhhh,” he exhales as his legs straighten a bit. “Thanks.”
“You got enough room back there?” I ask Jared, as I scoot my seat up.
“It’ll do,” he says, though I’m sure he’s just being nice.
The cell phone in my jacket pocket vibrates and I check my messages. Three from Lindsey—two earlier and one just now.
Sorry abot taking off. Oy! Robet!
Get home ok? Call em.
Where are you?????
Hey! In car. Talk soon. I want details!
“Are your parents worried?” Charlie asks as I pocket my phone.
I shake my head. “They think I was at Lindsey’s,” I say.
A blotch of blood is crusted on his chin, and his bruises are starting to ripen into plums. His face looks like fruit salad. Menacing fruit salad.
I realize I’m openly staring at him, and I shift my eyes away from his face. Starting the car, I tell myself I absolutely should not be staring at Charlie. I maybe had a crush on him once upon a time, but that was so long ago I hardly think of that little girl as being me. We were total kids—the new girl and the boy in the red baseball cap. I didn’t even have breasts.
I drop off Jared first. He gives directions from the back seat that land me in an alleyway behind a small apartment complex. Maybe twelve units, each with its own little cement patio on the back.
I hop out and lean the driver’s seat forward as he detangles himself from the back seat. “Later, gators!” he says, taking off.
Charlie’s next. I know where he lives, but I let him direct me there anyway. A few blocks down is his house, white with black shutters, and right beside it, Jamie’s.
I wonder how he stands that. Every day, just to get to his car, he has to walk by an entire world full of her.
Full of what was her.
It’s a miracle he’s kept it together. Sometimes I can’t, and I wasn’t even that close to Jamie. I mean, what I knew about her, I liked. You’d have to be an a-hole not to like her. She was, as I’ve mentioned, exceedingly sweet.
It’s so unfair. Here I am, my own mean self, while she’s in the ground.
Here Kyle is. Here Charlie is. Here’s Lindsey. Taylor. Blair. Here’s Kyle’s grandma. And Todd Firebaugh. And Jamie’s mom and dad and brother with the bloody tissue paper near his ear. Here’s the judge and the cops and the jury. Here’s the silver-haired lady in the neon-green beret, with Jamie’s kiss still on her cheek.
Here we all are walking around and sometimes smiling and getting drunk and dancing and fighting and kissing stupid boys and dyeing our hair purple. Some of us might go to college or get married or grow old or die peacefully in our sleep.
It’s wrong.
But how can living be wrong?
For a while I thought everyone else had some secret knowledge. Like they’d all taken the class. A Survival Guide for Survivors.
On the dashboard, my solar-powered daisy in its plastic flowerpot dances and waves.
“This is you, right?” I ask, keeping my eyes on the road.
“Yeah.”
When I pull over, he opens his car door but doesn’t get out. I want to say something else. Too many somethings. Thanks for fighting Todd. And fighting is stupid. And that bruise under your eye looks like a small South American country. And I’ve thought about your poem. And I remember you with that goofy dog when we were kids. And do you think about Jamie all the time, like every minute of every day? Do you think about Kyle?
But what comes out is, “Do you run?”
He glances at me from the corners of his eyes. “Is that a trick question?”
“No.” I laugh, nervous. “I just meant, I run sometimes. You know, on that greenway down by the river.”
“Yeah,” he says, scratching behind his ear. He shrugs. “Maybe I’ll see you down there sometime?�
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“Maybe.”
He hops out of the car and crosses the lawn. When he nears the door, I start to wave, but Charlie goes in without glancing back. I take one more look at the glossy black door, then pull away.
No Place Like Home
I sneak upstairs for a quick shower, then trail wet footprints to my room. I’m dizzy from the steam, and the top of my head still aches from where I crashed it into Todd’s face. Wrapped in a towel, I topple like a downed redwood onto my bed. My eyes tug closed. Just for a minute, I tell myself, but the swell of fatigue is overwhelming. I want to text Lindsey—find out what happened with that jerk Robert Leuger, but my phone is in my coat pocket, a million miles away. It would require standing and walking. Or at least dramatic stretching. I consider sending an FU text to Todd Firebaugh, but I don’t have his number.
The last thoughts I have before I slump into sleep are about the scent of brown sugar and the dampness of my hair.
“You’ve come for me?” A voice, soft as air, seeps from a doorway. A girl’s voice, but not a young girl. She could be my age. It could be my voice.
I don’t answer. And then I am on a beach, strolling toward the water. The surf rises and settles, a yellowish brown, clogged with the long hair of the drowned.
At the edge, water laps my feet, and there’s the voice again. “You’ve come?”
I don’t want to look. I want to keep moving forward, but there is no forward, only ocean. So I turn around, as if it’s my duty. I crack my knuckles to prepare myself for what I am going to see, and yes, I’m not surprised to find her there.
Jamie.
Maybe five feet away, floating above ground like in a painting of Jesus.
She isn’t the way I thought she’d be, the way Kyle left her, crumpled and bloodied. Instead, she is… perfect. The shiny-new-penny version of herself.
She wears a long blue dress, her hair curled and gleaming. Even her eyebrows have a tidy look—as if they’ve each been brushed one hundred strokes. Her cheeks are rounder and redder than they were when she was alive, and she doesn’t limp when she moves. Midair, she glides.
I try to smile at her. I try to say, “I’m sorry.” But I’m stuck.
Instead, she speaks. “There’s so much air here. I’d forgotten.” She looks up, awed. “So much sky.
“We have other things. Bridges and benches. Squirrels. Oh, we have cupcakes.” She lets out a happy sigh. “They’re prettier than yours. Like every wish you had as a girl—everything you ever dreamed—squeezed into a single perfectly iced cupcake.”
She glides closer, and the brightness in her cheeks dims. “When I bit into it, though”—she makes a grimace—“it tasted stale—like sawdust.” Then her face lightens again with a serene, philosophical smile. “Some things just aren’t meant to be.”
“I’m sorry,” I say—finally getting my words out. But now it’s wrong, too. Because it seems like I’m apologizing about her bad cupcake. “I’m sorry,” I say again, hoping she understands me.
Hoping she can forgive me for having all this sky.
Opera
The kitchen table is scattered with mixing bowls, flour dust, random wooden spoons, a spilled box of raisins, the shredding of carrots, upturned bottles of spice, and smears of goo. My mother is nowhere to be found, but a platter mounded with gorgeous brown muffins sits on the counter by the sink.
Patting my stomach, which feels emptier than usual, I snag a muffin and retreat to the den.
The house feels empty, too. No sign of parents. The clock on the mantel reads a quarter after five. I’ve been asleep up in my room all day, and I feel achy from being in bed too long.
I should catch up on homework. Or go run. Or call Lindsey.
But what I do is I sprawl out on the couch and channel-surf my way to a Bugs Bunny marathon.
I am watching Elmer Fudd, decked out with a magic Viking helmet, sing a love song to the cross-dressing Bugs Bunny, when my mother comes in.
“There’s my girl,” she says, perching on the end of the couch. She squeezes my calf. “You and Lindsey must have been up all night. You were sacked out.”
“I guess I’m hitting a growth spurt,” I say, though we both know I’m pretty much done growing. “Where were you guys?”
“We brought Chinese. General Tso’s.” She smiles, knowing it’s my favorite. I watch her as she tugs a hair tie from her wrist and pulls her long brown hair back into a ponytail. A slice of late-afternoon light shines through the window and lands on her profile in the space between her eye and ear. She is beautiful, with full lips and rich brown eyes that look mysterious even to me. My dad said I could be her twin when she was my age, but I don’t see it. I’ve always felt dull next to all her color.
“Oh, hey,” she says, her smile fading. She shifts her body so she’s facing me full-on. But then she doesn’t say anything more—just searches my face like she’s trying to find the X on a treasure map.
After a second, I ask, “Hey what?”
She blinks, then looks back at the screen, where a bunch of women wrapped in white towels talk about their armpits. “Nothing. Did you have a good time last night? What did you guys do?”
“Listened to music. Talked.” Both true, though not exactly the truth. I consider telling her about Todd Firebaugh and Charlie and Jared, but what would be the point? She’d never let me out of the house again.
“Lindsey’s a good nut,” Mom says. “I’m glad you have her for a friend.”
My mom gnaws at her lower lip, a sure sign she’s holding something back.
“What were you going to say?” I ask. “Tell me.”
“Oh, it’s just—” She’s staring now at the TV, but her face has gone blank, like she wouldn’t notice if the women dropped their towels and started pole-dancing. “Your father got a call on Friday. From the Commonwealth’s Attorney’s office. They want to talk with you. About Kyle Paxson.”
“What?” I sit up. “But why?”
“You know, that text he sent you.”
“But he’s guilty. He said so. He sat up there in front of everyone and said he did that to Jamie.”
“I know, jelly bean, but they still have to build their case.”
“What do you mean? I thought it was over.”
“It’s not. They have to decide…” My mom picks up the remote and fiddles with the battery compartment, snapping it out and back in place, out and back in place. “They have to decide his punishment. Whether or not he gets the death penalty.”
Oh, right. That. When they caught Kyle, the police knew it was him right away. It wasn’t some big mystery, like you see on TV. He told them he did it, and I thought he’d be locked away, end of story. But that’s too simple for the American justice system.
“They’re going to have the sentencing hearing in a few months. They want to talk to you and Lindsey and the others.”
“But we’ve already talked to them.”
“You talked to the police,” she says, tucking a hunk of hair behind my ear. “These are the lawyers. They want to talk with you, and then maybe you’ll have to testify in court.”
“No way.” I lie back down on the couch, feeling a thin layer of unreality seep between me and everything else.
My mom squeezes my calf again, but this time she keeps her hand there.
“Is he going to be there?” I ask. “Kyle?”
She rubs my shin. “I think so.”
I pull my leg away, curling up on my side. She reaches out, pats my foot, and says, “If you want to talk, your dad and I are here.”
She perches there a minute in silence. Then she leaves, and I hear the clank of plates as she sets the table for General Tso’s.
Happy
Monday morning, I haul myself out of bed.
I’m not sure if Lindsey will be getting a ride with Robert so I text her.
Need a ride to school?
Yes!
When I pull into the parking lot for her apartment building, I text her that
I’m here and wait. The apartment building is that small, old-fashioned brick type that has a single entrance with a hall and stairway leading to eight little units—four up, four down. The street is old, quiet, and, except the apartments, stocked with small, practical houses that look like they haven’t been touched since the 1950s. The only thing that might qualify as cutesy is the pink flamingo somebody stuck near a mailbox a decade ago.
After a few minutes Lindsey bounds out her door, wearing a cropped jean jacket over a tight neon-orange T-shirt dress that reads MORE ISSUES THAN VOGUE in sparkly black letters. Long black socks and orange high-heeled boots complete what I can only think must be her bid for Hot Witch of the Year.
I wonder if she knows yet about us needing to testify, but I doubt it because she’s all bubbly when she climbs in the car. “Hello, darling,” she drawls, leaning in quick as a jackrabbit to give me a playful peck on the cheek.
“Hey!” I say. “You look… um… That dress is… bright?”
She sticks out her chest. “Makes my breasts look awesome, n’est-ce pas?”
“Um, yeah,” I say. “Plus, it’s so… modest. You know, modest… like when people don’t go around talking about how awesome their breasts are?”
“Tried it. Hated it.” She laughs.
I give a weak smile and stare at the steering wheel.
“Hey, you okay?” she asks.
So I tell her about what happened after she left the party—about Todd and the fight.
“That ass-wipe,” she growls. “That absolute prick.”
I nod and start driving.
“So, what happened with you Saturday?” I ask once we hit Main Street, trying to make my voice light. “You and Robert… Did you guys—?”
“Oh my God, he is so—I swear, I’m marrying him. He doesn’t know it yet, but he and I are totally going to—”
“You can’t be serious.”
“What?” she asks, clueless.
“Gah, Lindsey, are you hearing yourself? That’s…” The idea of Lindsey settling down forever in some picket-fenced love shack and baking pies pretty much strips any semblance of tact from my tongue. “That’s some bat crap.”
How She Died, How I Lived Page 6